707 Barrel Roll! (1955)
In the early days of jet airliners the Boeing company’s test pilot, Tex Johnson, rolled the prototype of the 707 airliner upside down, to impress the audience and encourage them to buy this wonderfull airplane. Although this was a perfectly safe thing do do, Tex’s boss was not impressed! Here is the famous photo taken from onboard that day, looking at the world above…...
1961: Yuri Gagarin & Alan Shepard – First Men in Space
In 1961 mankind first rode rockets into space. The first man in space was Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut from the Soviet Union (Russia), orbiting the earth in a flight lasting 108 minutes. Eager to show that they too could put a man into space, the United States launched astronaut Alan Shepard shortly after Gagarin’s flight. The US was not quite ready to conduct a manned orbital flight, instead settling for a sub-orbital ballistic...
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