Where coming in second is better than nothing!
Svetlana Savitskaya during her EVA on July 25, 1984. This was the first EVA ever performed by a woman.
Soviet cosmonaut and aviator Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya, on August 19, 1982, became the second woman to go into space. Her mission, which was a flight to the Salyut 7 space station and back, lasted about 8 days. As part of a three-person crew, she flew to the station on the Soyuz T-7, and back from the station on the Soyuz T-5.
Savitskaya’s second spaceflight was her most well-known. During that flight, July 25, 1984, she became the first woman to conduct an EVA (extra-vehicular-activity, that is, she did a spacewalk). While floating outside of her vehicle, she conducted welding experiments where he actually cut and welded materials in 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
Sputnik 1 was successfully launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, becoming the first artificial object to reach Earth orbit. Having been launched during the Cold War era, this tiny, beeping, ball-shaped satellite caused great concern among many paranoid red-scared Americans for whom the event was not so much a great moment of scientific achievement, but rather a disconcerting development…read more
You’d think it would be easy to establish which is the world’s second-biggest lake island — a lake island being an island on a lake. For the most part, you can look at a map, figure out which bodies of water are the lakes, then look for the islands in them. Simple right? For the biggest lake island, it’s super…read more
Nagasaki was not the primary target for the nuclear attack the United States launched against Japan on the morning of August 9, 1945. It had barely even made the list of potential targets for atomic bombings. Kokura was the primary target, and Nagasaki was the secondary target should weather conditions have prevented the attack on Kokura. Conditions for the atomic…read more
