Each year in late January, NASA honors those who gave their lives in the quest to explore space, including those from Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia.
It's Memorial Day weekend, and I won't be blogging over it, as I'm going to be enjoying my long weekend! (And I hope you are, too.) But I'd like to leave you with some reflections on our history of Space Exploration in this country. (This was originally posted last year.)
Wings of exploration: reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the space shuttle spaceflightinsider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spaceflightinsider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
On Saturday March 6, 2021, an 83-year-old man living in Ogden, Utah died from the effects of a fall. His name was Allan J. McDonald, and you may never have heard of him, but he did something remarkable.
Allan McDonald received a degree in chemical engineering in 1959 from Montana State University, then went to work for Morton-Thiokol, who manufactured the rockets for the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile and later, the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) used by NASA in its space shuttle.
After 26 years with the company, McDonald was on site at Cape Canaveral, Florida to oversee the solid rocket boosters that would power the shuttle Challenger on its tenth flight, which was also the twenty-fifth Space Shuttle flight.