Where the second biggest is still pretty darn big!
Gus Grissom became the second U.S. astronaut to reach space on July 21, 1961, when he piloted his Mercury craft, called the Liberty Bell 7, in a suborbital flight that lasted 15 minutes, 37 seconds.
Astronaut Alan Shepard became the first U.S. astronaut to reach space on May 5, 1961. Shepard was also the second person in the world to ever reach space.
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By the time astronaut James McDivitt stepped into the Apollo 9 spacecraft on March 3, 1969, he had already built a reputation as a solid and trusted American pilot and astronaut. A member of NASA’s “Second Group” of astronauts, his first trip into space came as mission commander of the Gemini IV mission in June 1965. That particular mission was…read more
Venus is the planet second-closest to the the sun in our solar system and Earth’s nearest neighbor. The cloudy rocky planet orbits the sun at an average distance of 67,238,251 mi (108,209,475 km) at a mean orbital velocity of 78,339 mph (126,074 km/h). For us Earthlings, Venus also the second-brightest object in the night sky, with the first being the…read more
When Alan Bean retired from NASA and decided to become a full-time professional fine-art artist, he had to shed his aeronautical engineering and astronaut self to allow his inner artistic vision come through to the canvas. Not an easy task for the former Apollo 12 astronaut, one of only 12 men to have walked on the surface of the moon,…read more
You’d think that if finding out the first person to do something was relatively easy, then finding the second person to do something would be just as easy, right? SilverMedals finds that this is not the case in many cases, and annoyingly so. For instance who was the second person to circumnavigate the globe? Most of us American kids learned…read more
