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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5 August 1930 Neil Armstrong (NASA) US. Just over 55 years ago as I write this (on 21 July 2024), Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins are still in space after the historic and iconic Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, on 20 July 1969 at 20:17 UTC. Aldrin and Armstrong return to Columbia (the Command Module) where Collins has been orbiting, after spending 21 hours on the Moon’s surface.

The moon landing was the climax of a ‘space race’ that had started 8 years earlier with President John F Kennedy’s address to Congress in 1961, where he declared:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade [1960s] is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

All that was needed was the safe return, which ocurred on 24 July 1969.

On July 23, the last night before splashdown, the three astronauts made a television broadcast in which Armstrong concluded:

“The responsibility for this flight lies first with history and with the giants of science who have preceded this effort; next with the American people, who have, through their will, indicated their desire; next with four administrations and their Congresses, for implementing that will; and then, with the agency and industry teams that built our spacecraft, the Saturn, the Columbia, the Eagle, and the little EMU, the spacesuit and backpack that was our small spacecraft out on the lunar surface. We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those craft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11.”

Neil Armstrong, 5 August 1930 – 25 August 2012, a true hero, who will be remembered as one of humanities greats.

Buzz Aldrin by Neil Armstrong

Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buzz_Aldrin_by_Neil_Armstrong.jpg

Other versions of this famous photo have the edges cropped. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, stands on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module, Eagle, during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, mission commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the lunar module to explore the Sea of Tranquility, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit with the Command and Service Module, Columbia.
This is the actual photograph as exposed on the moon by Armstrong. He held the camera slightly rotated so that the camera frame did not include the top of Aldrin’s portable life support system (“backpack”). A communications antenna mounted on top of the backpack is also cut off in this picture. When the image was released to the public, it was rotated clockwise to restore the astronaut to vertical for a more harmonious composition, and a black area was added above his head to recreate the missing black lunar “sky”. The edited version is the one most commonly reproduced and known to the public, but the original version, above, is the authentic exposure. A  full explanation with illustrations can be seen at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.

If you zoom in, you can see Armstrong reflected in the faceplate of Aldrin’s helmet.

Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neil_Armstrong_-_Apollo_11_(39988776173).jpg

5 August 1941 Leonid Kizim (RKA) Ukraine. Supercluster.com is great. But, in this circumstance, I will trust the date of birth for him in Wikipedia (5 August 1941) and not supercluster.com (19 May 2041). The wrong date, month, year, decade and millennium!

6 August 1950 Winston E. Scott (NASA) US. Scott served as a mission specialist on STS-72 in 1996 and STS-87 in 1997, logging over 24 days in space, including three spacewalks in excess of 19 hours. Often known by his nickname of “Win”, he was also a Naval Aviator and initially flew helicopters and later transitioned to fighter aircraft.

6 August 1962 Gregory Chamitoff (NASA) Canada. Chamitoff has been to space twice, spending 6 months aboard the ISS across Expedition 17 and 18 in 2008, and another 15 days as part of STS-134 in 2011. STS-134 was the last of Space Shuttle Endeavour which delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and completed the US Orbital Segment.

7 August 1956 Kent Rominger (NASA) US. Rominger holds the Space Shuttle Orbiter flight time record with 1610 hours.

7 August 1962 José Hernández (NASA) US. In 2023, a film entitled A Million Miles Away, starring Michael Peña was released and was about Hernández’s NASA career. The film was based on Hernández’s 2012 autobiography, “Reaching for the Stars: The Inspiring Story of a Migrant Farmworker Turned Astronaut.”

Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reaching-Stars-Inspiring-Farmworker-Astronaut/dp/1455522805.

Hernández’s story highlights the challenges of becoming an astronaut and is similar to Clayton Anderson’s efforts, who was rejected 14 times before finally being selected in 1998.

8 August 1940 Dennis Tito (1st Space Tourist) US. The first, hopefully of millions in the future, space tourist to fund his own trip. He spent nearly eight days in orbit as a crew member of ISS EP-1, a visiting mission to the International Space Station. This mission was launched by the spacecraft Soyuz TM-32, and was landed by Soyuz TM-31.

8 August 1948 Svetlana Savitskaya (RKA) Russia. Savitskaya flew aboard Soyuz T-7 in 1982, becoming the second woman in space. On her 1984 Soyuz T-12 mission she became the first woman to fly to space twice, and the first woman to perform a spacewalk.

9 August 1971 Roman Romanenko (RKA) Russia.

11 August 1961 Frederick Sturckow (NASA) US. Sturckow is a veteran of four Space Shuttle missions, and he left NASA in 2013 to become a pilot for Virgin Galactic.

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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