this day. 36 years ago. man enters space

News from the NASA pages.

On April 12, 1961, the era of human spaceflight began when the Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth in his Vostock I spacecraft. The flight lasted 108 minutes.

Twenty years later, on the morning of April 12, 1981, two astronauts sat strapped into their seats on the flight deck of Columbia, a radically new spacecraft known as the space shuttle. more here ...

Click on the image to see the full "Hunstsville Times" story.

Sunita Williams will run Boston marathon, in space!

Williams is registered for next month's Boston Marathon, even though she'll be stuck on the international space station when the rest of the field lines up for the 111th edition of the race. So the U.S. Navy commander will run the equivalent distance on a treadmill -- 210 miles above Earth, and tethered to her track by bungee cords so she doesn't float away.

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NASA playing with marbles?

NASA scientist Bill Cooke is shooting marbles and he's playing "keepsies." But, this knowledge will help keep astronauts safe when America returns to the Moon in the next decade. some very interesting stuff on simulating meteors and their impact using fancy marble guns on carefully arranged soil terrains. More here in the NASA pages