Stargazing Guy

Follow for a weekly list of forthcoming astronaut* birthdays.

Maybe you share a birthday?!

If not, perhaps it will be you who adds your name to the list?!

If you do share a birthday, what does it mean to you?

Do you feel a connection, pride? They take to the skies (on controlled explosions) to improve the world, to explore (to travel to strange new worlds).

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1 April 1946 William Frederick Fisher (NASA) US. If his name is familiar it might because you are thinking of this wife, who was also an astronaut. Anna Lee Fisher (born:24 August 1949) was married to Bill Fisher, was the mother of two children, and in 1984, she became the first mother to fly in space.

1 April 1973 Sergei Volkov (RKA) Ukraine.

3 April 1926 Gus Grissom (NASA) US. Grissom was a member of the Mercury Seven and was the second American to fly in Space and the third man, following the USSR cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, and the first American, Alan Shepard. Both Grissom and Shepard’s flights were sub-orbital.

4 April 1964 Satoshi Furukawa (JAXA) Japan.

5 April 1949 Judith Resnik (NASA) US. Resnik was an American electrical engineer, software engineer, biomedical engineer, pilot and NASA astronaut who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on 28 January 1986.

Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Judy_Resnik_STS-41-D.jpg

View of Mission Specialist Judith Resnik sitting on the floor of the middeck. Beside her on a notebook is a note which says “Hi Dad”. Above her head on the middeck lockers are various stickers such as “Beat Army”, “Beat Navy” and “Air Force: a great way of life”. Beside her is a [sticker] which reads “I love Tom Selleck”.

Space is hard and the people who do mighty things risk their lives for science, humanity and the exploration of space.

Ad astra per aspera.

5 April 1950 Franklin Chang-Diaz (NASA) Costa Rica.

“I felt one day humans would travel to distant planets, and I wanted to be one of those travellers…I spent my afternoons imagining I had my own rocket ship. I would invite my cousins and my friends to join my crew, and we would lie on our backs inside a very large cardboard box and go through a countdown, and blast off,”  

“That was the beginning- my earliest memories of being fascinated by space.”

Franklin Chang-Diaz
Astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra

Don’t Let Boundaries Hold You Back and Think About the Future.

6 April 1957 Paolo A. Nespoli (ESA) Italy.

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Thanks to www.supercluster.com for the bios and links.

Also, thanks to www.pillownaut.com for the initial list of birthdays, and the many, many resources on the internet, especially Wikipedia and NASA.      

* = includes cosmonaut, taikonaut, parastronaut, spaceflight participant, space tourist, etc

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PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.

Remember, hope lives here.

Contact Stargazing Guy for any copyright-related requests or queries @ stargazer1@stargazingguy.co.uk