Over at Aviation Week, Jeff Manber points out that this weekend marks several key space-related anniversaries:
- Galileo’s appearance before the Vatican to defend his heretical views about the Universe
- The first human spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, celebrated in Russia as Cosmonautics Day and worldwide as Yuri’s Night
- The first space shuttle mission precisely 20 years later
There’s also a much more tragic anniversary, one that is now largely forgotten and almost universally ignored within the space community. That would be the liberation of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp on April 11-12, 1945.