E

United States. President Nixon creates the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which will legislate the Clean Air Act (1970, 1977, 1990), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), and the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976). These are the “I” (Impose Limits) of

United States. Minuteman III missiles with triple nuclear warheads become operational.

Americans pursuing the Viet Cong invade Cambodia

Crustal drilling begins on the Kola Peninsula; the borehole, called Kola SG-3 Zapolyarny, will reach a depth of 12,262 meters in 1989, without reaching the Earth’s fluid mantle. However, it will encounter a deep layer of fractured, water-saturated rock at a depth of around 5

IBM invents the Floppy Disk

Peak US oil production (excluding Alaska)

When journalists ask Pete Conrad, from Apollo 12, what it was like to walk on the Moon, he simply replies, “Super! Really enjoyed it!”—and that’s it. The fact is, these guys were selected by NASA with very stringent criteria, to be the best pilots this

Somali government overthrown in coup

China. Mao believes a Soviet preemptive nuclear attack is imminent. He orders all his leaders to disperse across the country and puts China’s nuclear forces on high alert.

An article by chemist F.J. Donahoe on Polywater (polywater, or water II, or anomalous water) appears in the journal Nature, deeming it “the most dangerous polymer on Earth.” The story begins in the quiet Soviet town of Kostroma, where in 1962 Nikolai Fedyakin discovered, or

Italian metalworkers’ strike: the hot autumn begins

Vietnam. The Americans reach the peak of their military presence: 543,000 men. Shortly thereafter, the first US troop withdrawals begin.

First use of ARPANET, Advanced Research Project Agency, with four hosts connected together; the Internet was born. The hosts were at UC Santa Barbara, the University of Utah, UCLA, and the Stanford Research Institute.

Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Internet. Of people and things.

6:55 AM Italian time: Houston gives the go-ahead signal for the CM to initiate the Trans-Earth Injection (or as Mike Collins called it, “get us out of here – we don’t want to be a permanent Moon satellite”)

1:42 AM Italian time: The LM is separated from the CM and left to orbit the Moon until its degraded orbit causes it to crash (in all subsequent missions, however, the LM is made to collide directly with the Moon).

12:52 AM Italian time: Mike Collins opens the hatch to welcome Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard.

Contact with the Soviet Luna 15 unmanned probe is lost.

11:35 PM Italian time: The LM docks with the CM in lunar orbit.

Germany. First Social Democratic government since the end of the war.

Apollo 9: McDivitt and Schweickart venture 111 km from the Command Module for 6 hours

Apollo 9 (Saturn V SA-504): James McDivitt, David Scott, and Russell Schweickart test, in Earth orbit, the rendezvous between the Command Module Gumdrop and the Lunar Module Spider, and the spacesuit in a 38-minute spacewalk; the Saturn V is the E model. With the reentry

NASA officially creates the OPWG (Outer Planets Working Group), with the mandate to define experimental missions for the exploration of the outer Solar System. Its member is Gary Flandro, an aerospace engineer at JPL, in his early twenties. This led to the birth of the

An incredible and fortuitous coincidence of many aspects: discovery, heroism, fear, honor, prestige, charisma, politics, public relations, national interests, technology, humiliation, converge in an exceptional historical moment, to bring the Apollo Program to completion.

Gaddafi (Muammar al-Qaddafi) comes to power in Libya in a coup d’état

Saddam Hussein comes to power in Iraq in a coup

Richard Nixon at the White House

8:11 p.m., Houston time: Apollo 8 orbits the Moon, and the crew reads a verse from Genesis live on the radio: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth; and…”

Andy Grove goes to work for Intel. He will become the Director of Engineering, meaning the number 3 in the company. His original name is Andras Grof, and he grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Budapest. By the time he reached 20, he had

Intel, in California’s Silicon Valley, ushers in a corporate culture that is the antithesis of East Coast corporations: no rigid hierarchies, a casual lifestyle, Friday beer, flexible hours, employee stock options, a non-authoritarian management style, directing people without leading them, no reserved parking, cubicles for

Arthur Rock, one of the first venture capitalists, or the first in the modern sense of the term, raises the money to launch a new startup in two days. The initial signatories include Rock, Noyce, Moore, Grinnell College, Laurence-Rockwefeller, Fayez Sarofin (Rock’s Harvard classmate), Max

The Italian Navy occupied (and then dynamited) the newly formed Republic of Rose Island, with Esperanto as its official language and shops and restaurants on a 400-square-meter platform in the Adriatic. The strong suspicion is that it was a ploy to avoid paying taxes.

During his victory speech in the California Democratic primary, Robert Francis Kennedy (RFK) is fatally shot by Palestinian immigrant Shiran Shiran; Robert Kennedy dies the following day in hospital.

North Atlantic Ocean. Contact is lost with the American nuclear submarine USS Scorpion. The USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was a Skipjack-class nuclear submarine of the United States Navy and the sixth of its kind. It had a crew of 99 sailors. It was found by the

North Pacific Ocean. The Soviets at Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka, lose contact with the submarine K-129.

Mexico City Olympics

The National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation (NASDAQ) is conceived

Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (book by Arthur Clarke) debuts; “I’m scared, David. Good morning, gentlemen… I am a HAL9000 computer. I went into operation at the HAL workshops in Verbania, Illinois, on January 12, 1992.”

United States. Bill Daniels conceives and founds American Television and Communications, the first cable TV company. In 1972, the company becomes a public company. Its VP of Operations is Pete Conrad, the third man on the moon with Apollo 12.

The US Surveyor 6 probe tests the technology for launching from the lunar surface on the Moon.

China. Due to bloody conflicts between rival Red Guard factions, Mao orders their dissolution and reestablishes the pre-existing provincial governments.

The Sunday Times buys Benito Mussolini’s diaries for £250,000; Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator’s son, who authenticates the diaries, is offered £3,500 to buy a sports car and renounce the rights; the diaries will turn out to be fakes, the work of a certain Amalia Panvini

Czechoslovakian scientists, funded by the Soviets, had been researching chemical weapons and drugs for years (since the Korean War). In the 1960s, LSD was tested and plans were made to use the drug in the drinking water system, before the Red Army entered a European

Washington, D.C. The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam organizes a march that attracts 100,000 people, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon.

Soviet Union. The Galaktika program is approved to determine the technologies needed for thorough exploration of the planets of the inner and outer Solar System.

Six-day war between Israel and Arab countries; Arab countries build up troops along the borders, and Israel launches a preemptive strike, occupying the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. General Moshe Dayan quickly reaches the Suez Canal; the Egyptian army is routed. Israeli losses: 679

Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov pilots Soyuz 1. The launch initially goes well. But then the capsule begins to lose its trim and spin faster and faster. On the ground, they struggle to maintain a continuous radio link. The situation goes from desperate to irreparable. From a

Luna 14 maps the MasCons in April 1968.

Astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee die in a pure oxygen fire in their spacecraft during a ground simulation during the Apollo I mission; Roger Chaffee, a US Navy pilot who had taken part in the photographic reconnaissance of Cuba in October

NASA pilot Bruce Peterson is injured (losing an eye) in a spectacular crash while testing an experimental aircraft. The accident provides the basis for the television series The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors as Colonel Steve Austin.

Austrian physicist K.J. Snatam discovers a form of samarium-based rare earth SmCo5 with exceptionally high magnetic strength. This rare earth will be used in brushless servo motors.

Venice is submerged under 3m of water.

Roger Sperry experiments with commisurotomy (separation of the corpus callosum or separation of the two cerebral hemispheres) on humans as a treatment for severe cases of epilepsy; he finds that the two hemispheres behave like two virtually independent individuals, although communication is more difficult with

Gemini XI: Conrad and Gordon: First test of a tethered system stretched between the Gemini spacecraft and the Agena rocket for three hours; the experiment was also aborted due to difficulties maintaining the system’s stability; altitude record: 1,368 km

Star Trek airs in prime time on NBC in the United States.

England wins the World Cup. In the first televised World Cup match, hosts England defeat Germany 4-2 at Wembley to win the final. In extra time, Geoff Hurst scored his third goal, securing his country’s first Jules Rimet Cup. England’s star Bobby Charlton was marked

Gemini X: Young and Collins: first double rendezvous, first with Agena 10 and then with Agena 8

The Saturn V’s second stage, the S-II, breaks apart during a test for the second time; this time due to sensors that had been left disconnected, causing the internal pressure to reach excessive levels; von Braun emphasizes that the design is correct; the error is

California. The 20 GeV SLAC particle accelerator is tested for the first time. It was created by thousands of researchers from Stanford University and other universities for quark research. SLAC’s electrons reach 99.9999999% of the speed of light. SLAC is the largest scientific instrument ever

After 10 consecutive failures, successes arrive: Luna 9 and 13. Luna 9, designed by Lavochkin, launches on January 31, 1966. Two days later, it reaches the Moon, its impact cushioned by its two airbags. The 100-kg capsule stops, four petals open, and four long minutes

Damascus, Arkansas. Launch Complex 374-7, consisting of 19 Titan II missiles armed with 9-ton W-53 thermonuclear warheads, was the site of a localized fire in a silo that was later extinguished. This was the most serious Titan accident until the much more serious one in

The Soviet leadership began to realize the waste of conducting two lunar space programs: Korolev’s and Chelomei’s. It was therefore decided that Chelomei’s UR-500 launcher would be combined with Korolev’s LOK lunar orbiter.

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard P. Feynman for their work on quantum electrodynamics.

Ahmavaara suggests replacing the system of real numbers with a finite field Fp, where p is an extremely large prime number, to provide a fully discrete and combinatorial picture of the physical world.

Ray Davis and Blair Munhofen take over the excavations at the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota where they intend to install a neutrino detector, with 400,000 liters of detergent as the detector (Chlorine) arriving in 10 rail cars.

Korolev completed the design of the gigantic N-1 on December 25, 1964. It was almost exactly as tall as the Saturn V, but it used only traditional fuels—liquid oxygen and kerosene—with modestly powered engines and several nozzles. It was intended first for EOR, but then

The significance of Kennedy’s speech on May 25, 1961, was initially overlooked in the USSR, which considered it rhetoric, not the mobilization of an entire nation, which it would in fact become. Until 1964, Soviet intentions were unclear. Khrushchev, well aware of the funding disparity,

San Marco 1, the first Italian and European satellite, was launched from the Wallops test range, an island in the Chesapeake Bay (Virginia, USA). A Scout was used; before Italy, only the USSR and the USA had launched satellites.

China. Lin Bao compiles the Little Red Book. Lin Bao is designated as Mao’s successor, but he dies in a mysterious plane crash while fleeing the country, apparently after attempting a coup.

Leo Szilard dies in La Jolla, California.

California. Methodist Reverend Ted McIlvenna recognizes the injustices facing gays and lesbians (more broadly LGBTQ+) and calls for a three-day dialogue between clergy and gay and lesbian activists at the White Memorial Retreat Center. The participants found the Council of Religion and Homosexuality, with activists

Zambia. Edward Makuka Nkoloso, a Zambian professor and political activist, proposes a space program that, he claims, would land several Zambian astronauts on Mars, before the Americans or the Soviets. He selects 12 male astronauts, 10 cats, and a woman, and begins training by rolling

Iran: Shah Exiles Shiite Ayatollah Khomeini

The Royal Society endorses the idea of the Earth’s crust moving.

First Voschod Missions (two men aboard)

Lockheed makes the first SR-71A BlackBird operational: spy plane; maximum speed: 3,220 km/h; maximum altitude: 30 km

Hong Kong. Fairchild’s first offshore integrated circuit factory in Hong Kong assembled 120 million devices with excellent quality in its first year of operation. Soon, Texas Instruments and Motorola would follow Fairchild’s lead in the Far East. For the part of Asia known as the

Tito was president for life. On April 7, 1963, Josip Broz, known as Marshal Tito, was appointed president for life of Yugoslavia. He ruled dictatorially, suppressing any opposition to his regime, although the Yugoslav republics were granted a certain degree of autonomy. Tito’s refusal to

A Soviet Luna mission succeeds in launching toward the Moon but misses it by 8,500 km.

Rocco Petrone was appointed assistant to Director Kurt Debus for all launch operations from Cape Canaveral. Debus wrote of Petrone: “He has tackled a multitude of major organizational, technical, and economic problems, almost always under the pressure of the limited time we have available to