December 3, 1993

December 3, 1993

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Shuttle mission STS-61 is launched, carrying astronauts Richard Covey, Kenneth Bowersox, Kathryn Thornton, Claude Nicollier, Jeffrey Hoffman, Story Musgrave, and Thomas Akers. The goal is highly ambitious: to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Solar panels, electronics, and gyroscopes are replaced, and corrective optics are applied. Everything works perfectly. It’s a resounding success. Without this Shuttle mission (or without the Shuttle program), the HST would have become useless space junk, and perhaps the end of NASA. Instead, it transforms into an opportunity for redemption and a boost for the future, demonstrating the ability to operate large and complex structures in space for extended periods. All of this paves the way for the upcoming construction of the International Space Station (ISS).

1993

1993

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Russian space program. The turning point came with the entry of the Americans, following the agreement signed by Yeltsin and Clinton in 1993. Much of the hardware would be Russian, but paid for by the Americans. Then came the private joint ventures: Lockheed and Khrunichev offered the Proton, Boeing and NPO Yuzhnoye offered the Zenit. Energomash sold the rights to the RD-180 engines for $1 billion for the American Atlas III, Khrunichev sold the Rockot to Daimler Benz, and Starsem was founded in 1996, a joint venture between TsSKB Progress, ArianSpace, the Russian Space Agency, and EADS, to launch commercial cargo with Soyuz rockets. By 2001, 87 Russian companies had entered into joint ventures with American and European firms. The Russian space program was saved and Baikonur was renewed.

October 3, 1993

October 3, 1993

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Delta Force and American Rangers intervene to capture Aidid in Mogadishu, Somalia; the operation fails, with two helicopters shot down; 19 Americans die, while Somali militia members suffer more than 1,000 deaths; Ridley Scott makes the film “BlackHawk Down” from the episode.

October 2, 1993

October 2, 1993

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Moscow, Russia. Boris Yeltsin orders the White House in Moscow, where Communist Russian parliamentarians were barricaded after the attempted coup, to be bombarded and then occupied. A dozen T-72 tanks fire twelve rounds, ten of them blanks. The besieged rebels surrender, raising the white flag. Sniper fire continues throughout the night. Ultimately, 187 people are killed and a thousand wounded. However, unofficial figures suggest a much more serious outcome.

October 1, 1993

October 1, 1993

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US President Bill Clinton reluctantly signs the decree terminating the partial construction of the SSC particle accelerator in Texas. Over 22 kilometers of tunnels have already been constructed, and $3 billion has already been spent. The tunnels will be used for other purposes, including private enterprise and scientific research. The United States thus passes the baton to European CERN, later the LHC, to continue research into high-energy particle physics.

September 21, 1993

September 21, 1993

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Moscow, Russia. Boris Yeltsin proclaims the dissolution of both the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies and announces new elections for December. It’s an illegal move, as he later acknowledges. But he says he has no choice: the alternative is the disintegration of the state, in a country with a massive nuclear arsenal.

September 19, 1993

September 19, 1993

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Erich Hartmann, a Luftwaffe ace during World War II, dies. He was the pilot with the most kills of the entire war, with 352 victories, all against the Soviets, and 825 missions with 14 emergency landings.

September 13, 1993

September 13, 1993

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In Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, in the presence of Bill Clinton, signed the peace agreement for Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza Strip and in Jericho. On August 20, in Norway, Peres, Israeli Prime Minister, and Abu Alaa, Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, had signed the first Declaration of Principles.

September 5, 1993

September 5, 1993

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The ISS has its origins and roots in the American-Russian understanding on space. On the American side, Reagan had funded the Freedom space station in the 1980s, but little concrete progress had been made. On the Russian side, MIR was nearing completion and there was a rush to launch the next space station, as had always been the case. MIR2 was Valentin Glushko’s latest project. Due to funding cuts, it was nicknamed “MIR1.5.” It attracted the attention of the Europeans, who, however, were outpaced by the Americans. On September 5, 1993, Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chermomyrdin signed an agreement: the US would pay $400 million for operations and access to MIR until 1997, after which Russia and the US would collaborate on the ISS, to be assembled using Space Shuttles and Protons. The period of joint management of MIR is important for: building technical compatibility between the two systems, providing the Americans with the first long-duration flights, and obtaining the funding necessary to keep MIR afloat.

August 28, 1993

August 28, 1993

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The Galileo probe passes at 2410 km from the asteroid 243 Ida and its natural satellite Dactyl; Ida will appear to be composed of a monolith shattered irregularly by the impacts

August 20, 1993

August 20, 1993

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Norway. Peres, Israeli Prime Minister, and Abu Alaa, Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, sign the Declaration of Principles. It will be followed by letters of recognition and, on September 13, 1993 in Washington, before US President Clinton, the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Autonomy, signed by Rabin and Arafat.

August 18, 1993

August 18, 1993

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The single-stage-to-orbit DC-X flies for the first time, albeit only for a few hundred meters, then makes a controlled landing. The test is led by Pete Conrad, a McDonnell Douglas executive, the third man on the Moon with Apollo 12, and an astronaut on Gemini 5, Gemini 11, and Skylab 1-2.

1993

1993

in Tags

The United States regained its leading position as a producer and exporter of integrated circuits. Japanese manufacturers’ market share fell from 90% in the late 1980s to 20% in 1998. And South Korea’s rising star, particularly Samsung, rose to prominence. South Korea became the world’s largest DRAM producer in 1998, surpassing Japan.

1993

1993

in Tags

A team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, discovers that at least one homosexuality gene is present on the human X chromosome.

July 1993

July 1993

in Tags

The Mississippi River bursts its levees near St. Louis, the worst flood in U.S. history; an event of this magnitude occurs once every 500 years (the river’s flow has increased several hundred times its average).

1993

1993

in Tags

Charles H. Benet (IBM), Gilles Branard, Clude Crepean, Richard Josza (University of Montreal), Asher Peres (Technion, Israel Inst. Of Techn.), William K. Wootters (Williams College) discover a way to use quantum mechanics to teleport a photon (i.e., its quantum state)

May 1993

May 1993

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Andrew Wiles’s first attempt to prove the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, and hence Fermat’s Last Theorem, is undermined by an inappropriate application of the Kolyvagin-Flach method.

April 1993

April 1993

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An unexpected spinoff of basic research in quantum physics: the World Wide Web. In April 1993, when there were only 600 websites in the world, CERN decided to publish the World Wide Web software, without asking for royalties or patenting anything. This decision would change the rest of the 20th century and the entire 21st century.

April 19, 1993

April 19, 1993

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Waco, Texas. The siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, ends in a massacre. After an initial assault by law enforcement, resulting in the killing, on live television, of four police officers and six besieged residents, the decision is made to attack the ranch with tear gas. David Koresh, the group’s leader, refuses to surrender. The building catches fire and is destroyed in 18 minutes. 76 people, including 28 children, lose their lives. 11 escape.

1993

1993

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Khrunichev Design Bureau (OKB-52, NPO Mashinostroeniye). This is Chelomei’s Moscow-based design bureau, which designs the Proton, Angara, Rockot, and Salyut systems. It was one of the first Russian aerospace companies to sign agreements with Western companies: Int’l Launch Services ILS was founded with Lockheed Martin in 1993, which launches with the Protons. Chelomei is Korolev’s main rival.

1993

1993

in Tags

University of Munich. Matthias Hoss and Svante Paabo publish “The Silica Extraction Method,” showing the results of the first extraction of myochondrial DNA (mDNA) from animal bones tens of thousands of years old. In this case, the bones were from Pleistocene horses dating back 25,000 years. In 1994, the DNA extraction will be repeated for mammoths as old as 50,000 years.

1993

1993

in Tags

The number of women assaulted in the United States is 1,600 for domestic violence and 800 for sexual assault per 100,000 women per year (1.6%/year and 0.8%/year). These rates will progressively decrease to 400 and 200, respectively (0.4%/year and 0.2%/year), starting in 2014.

February 26, 1993

February 26, 1993

in Tags

An attack in the underground parking lot of one of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan; the attackers and the mastermind (whose aim was to bring down the tower) were all captured in the following years.

1993

1993

in Tags

The two Americans David Raup and Jack Sepkoski, by graphing the number of families of marine animals over millions of years, discover the 5 great mass extinctions (439, 367, 245, 208, 65 million years ago)

1993

1993

in Tags

Fossil Record 2 is published online with 7189 families of extinct animals and plants and 1083 families of extinct insects

1993

1993

in Tags

Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem, and Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA, which would become the world leader in the production of GPUs for video games, and then the world leader in GPUs for Artificial Intelligence.

1993

1993

in Tags

The Encarta encyclopedia (original code name: Gandalf), based on the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, sells 120,000 copies at $99 on CD-ROM during the Christmas holidays alone, 350,000 copies in the first year, and a million copies within two years.

1993

1993

in Tags

The fifth generation of CPUs is born: Intel Pentium Pro, PowerPC, Digital Alpha, AMD-K5 all monsters with up to tens of millions of transistors on a single chip, and clock frequencies of hundreds of MHz

1993

1993

in Tags

In a basement of the Accademia dei Lincei, a series of notebooks and scattered sheets of paper annotated by Guglielmo Marconi between 1890 and 1894 were found.

1993

1993

in Tags

The Internet is being made public: it leaves research centers and the military sector to be accessible to all.

December 4, 1992

December 4, 1992

in Tags

Bush sends US troops to Somalia. President George Bush sends 25,000 US troops to Somalia. By the end of 1992, civil war, drought, and clan warfare had plunged the Somali population into dire conditions of hunger and disease. The United Nations launched a humanitarian mission, but distribution of aid with the ongoing war proved arduous. The US agreed to support the mission by sending military aid. On June 5, 1993, militias led by Somali warlord General Mohammed Aidid massacred 24 Pakistani members of the UN peacekeeping force. The US and the UN actively sought the elusive soldier, and in August sent 400 soldiers to capture Aidid. Two months later, 18 of them were killed and 84 wounded during the ill-fated attack on the Olympia Hotel in Mogadishu. Approximately 1,000 Somalis died in the 17-hour firefight. Three days later, with Aidid still at large, newly elected President Bill Clinton ordered the US withdrawal. Bloody clan wars in Somalia continued for a long time.

1992

1992

in Tags

The journal Science published an article on the successful sequencing of DNA from a 30-million-year-old termite, embedded in fossil amber. This sparked the imagination of Hollywood writers and directors. However, it was later demonstrated that they had likely sequenced snippets of human DNA that had accidentally ended up in the sample. Extracting DNA that old is perhaps impossible, due to the multiple factors that destroy and self-destruct the delicate DNA strand, triggered at death. A few years later, however, Svante Paabo demonstrated that it is indeed possible to extract it from 50,000-year-old mitochondrial DNA (almost a thousand times younger than the 1992 hypothesis).

1992

1992

in Tags

Bill Clinton summons the nation’s top minds to discuss the economic outlook. No one mentions the internet…

October 1992

October 1992

in Tags

Moscow, Russia. CIA Director Robert Gates enters the Kremlin for the first time, hosted by Boris Yeltsin. Among other things, he brings him the video of the burial at sea of the human remains of the K-129 sailors, recovered twenty years earlier by the CIA in the North Pacific as part of Project Azorian. He also gives him the ship’s bell, still almost intact, and the precise coordinates of the site. In 1998, on the thirtieth anniversary of the disaster, Russia will award the Medal of Courage to the widows, who had previously received no compensation, recognition, or pension, as the sailors’ deaths had never been publicly acknowledged.

September 2, 1992 – 1995

September 2, 1992 – 1995

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Many mafia inmates subjected to the harsh prison regime (pursuant to Article 41-bis of Law No. 354 of July 26, 1975) are held in the Fornelli prison on Asinara Island in Sardinia. Among those held is Totò Riina. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the head of the new organized Camorra, Raffaele Cutolo, was also held there. For exercise, small courtyards are set aside in the Fornelli prison and in the Cala d’Oliva bunker (where Riina, Cutolo, and Leoluca Bagarella were incarcerated) to ensure that inmates have no direct contact with one another. Asinara prison can be considered a sort of second Alcatraz, as only one inmate managed to escape there (on September 1, 1986) in its 112 years of operation (compared to 14 escape attempts at Alcatraz): Matteo Boe, a Sardinian kidnapper. His accomplice, Salvatore Duras, was captured, while Boe managed to escape on a rubber dinghy. This makes Asinara the prison with the fewest escapes in the world.

August 10, 1992

August 10, 1992

in Tags

The Franco-American Topex-Poseidon mission is launched; it will be incredibly fruitful in scientific terms and will last 13 years and 62,000 orbits, until January 5, 2006.

1992

1992

in Tags

Vassili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archives officer, handed over thousands of documents to the British secret service, copied one by one over 20 years of service. He would thus reveal virtually every KGB secret, including: 77 agents in the US (notably Robert Libka at the National Security Agency (NSA)) and hundreds of informants; the location of hundreds of boxes buried with explosives and devices to be used in the event of a conflict with the West (the boxes were actually found, many were rigged); the KGB’s forgeries to further the conspiracy theory surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy (in particular, the first book on the conspiracy, in 1964, was published on the orders of the KGB, and some of Oswald’s letters were falsified); Operation Pandora: attacks in New York’s ghettos to spark a race war in the US; the indirect pressure on Martin Luther King Jr. to increase the level of violence; The Simons case: a British KGB playboy agent who for several years deceived 3-4 secretaries a month; scientific-technological espionage, or the KGB’s greatest success: 70% of the Warsaw Pact’s military technology was of Western origin; the British spy Norwood, who in 1948 allowed the Russians to enrich uranium for their first atomic bomb.

1992

1992

in Tags

COBE II is launched and sees differences of 10^-5K in the background radiation from point to point: it is the signature of the quantum fluctuations that represented the seeds around which the large galaxy clusters formed.

July 30, 1992

July 30, 1992

in Tags

MIT, Boston. After five years of research, Professor David Jewitt and his graduate student, Jane Luu, discovered the first body beyond the orbit of Pluto: 1992 QB 112, which would later be named Albion. The second such object would be discovered just a few months later, and soon there would be dozens of trans-Neptunian bodies.

1992

1992

in Tags

Alexander Wolszcan and Dale Frail discover two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12; more than fifty extrasolar planets will be discovered before the end of the century.

April 29 – May 4, 1992

April 29 – May 4, 1992

in Tags

Los Angeles. A riot erupts following the acquittal of four officers involved in the brutal beating of African-American Rodney King. The city is ravaged by violence, fires, and looting for a week. African-Americans are particularly affected, especially Koreatown: a neighborhood where Asian immigrants had managed to build a modest living in just a few years, with shops, stores, and small businesses.

1992

1992

in Tags

InterPack trade fair. The first servo-driven packaging machines appear, initially with stepper motors, and in the following years with brushless motors.

April 1992

April 1992

in Tags

Bosnia and Herzegovina declares independence, begins war with Karazdic’s militias, composed mainly of and paid for by Serbia: the siege of Sarajevo begins

Easter 1992

Easter 1992

in Tags

Mario Chiesa of the Italian Socialist Party is caught red-handed. Soon, Bettino Craxi, Severino Citaristi (administrative secretary of the Christian Democrats), and many others are implicated in the Mani Pulite investigation. There will also be some dramatic consequences with the suicides of Renato Amorese, Sergio Moroni, Gabriele Cagliari, and Raul Gardini. The investigation will lead to the dissolution of the governing parties and the fall of the First Republic.

Spring 1992

Spring 1992

in Tags

Mikhail Gorbachev visits Stanford University as a guest of George Schultz. He tells his “old friend” Schultz that the turning point that marked the end of the Cold War was the Reykjavik Summit, where for the first time, serious issues were discussed honestly and openly at the highest level. Indeed, the dialogue with Ronald Reagan must have been truly sincere for Gorbachev, accustomed to internal political battles, suspicions, and subterfuge.

1992

1992

in Tags

Russian Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin solemnly hands over to the families of the victims of flight RC135 KE007 the black box of the plane that was shot down by mistake by a Soviet fighter on September 2, 1983, off the coast of Japan with 300 people on board; officially, the black box had never been found.

1992

1992

in Tags

At a dinner, Fidel Castro reveals to his former rival Robert MacNamara that there were 162 missiles in Cuba during the missile crisis, which he knew were nuclear, that he himself had asked Khrushchev to use them and that he knew the consequences would be devastating for Cuba.

1992

1992

in Tags

The “mimivirus” was discovered in an air conditioning duct in England; it is a huge virus (about the size of a bacterium) and with genetic material that is 80% completely unknown before.

1992

1992

in Tags

The first gene therapy procedure in Europe was performed in Milan and is the first in the world to use bone marrow stem cells.

February 15, 1992

February 15, 1992

in Tags

Withdrawal of Moscow’s last (formerly Soviet) soldiers from Afghanistan following the collapse of the Najibullah regime. Cost of military operations in Afghanistan: >116 billion US$, tens of thousands of Soviet dead, 1.5 million Afghan dead.

1992

1992

in Tags

Bobby Fischer emerges from relative obscurity to play a rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia, then under UN embargo. He wins the match, a second time. To do so, he challenges his own US government, which condemns him for violating the embargo. Fischer never sets foot in the United States again.

February 11, 1992

February 11, 1992

in Tags

Kildin Island, Russia: Off the Murmansk military port, the American submarine Baton Rouge collided with the Russian submarine K-276 Kostroma. The two apparently failed to spot each other in time to avoid the collision. The American was on a covert mission to intercept Russian communications and monitor the movements of Russian submarines to determine who was truly in control of them after the fall of the USSR.

1992

1992

in Tags

For the first time, a microprocessor has achieved the computing power of the entire human race combined. It’s the Intel 486 DX, which reaches 60 MIPS. The world’s population is 5.5 billion, with a combined computing power of about 60 MIPS. In 1994, Intel’s new 70 MIPS processors leave humanity in the dust… In the second decade of the 21st century, a mid-range smartphone has 70 times the computing power of the entire world population. And there are tons of these smartphones.

February 7, 1992

February 7, 1992

in Tags

Constitution of the European Union. With the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, the nations of Western Europe finally unite for economic and political cooperation. Signed by the ministers of the European Community, the treaty calls for greater economic integration, a common foreign and security policy, and cooperation between police forces and authorities responsible for countering terrorism and immigration. The agreement also lays the foundation for the creation of a single European currency, which will be called the “euro.” By 1993, the year it entered into force, the Maastricht Treaty had been ratified by 12 nations: Great Britain, France, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

1992

1992

in Tags

The 14th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The essential requirements for economic growth are established: property rights as the foundation, the law as its safeguard, and morality as its underpinning.

1992

1992

in Tags

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has disclosed the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which for half a century used satellite data from the secret CORONA program to map Soviet nuclear and conventional capabilities. This played a crucial role in the Cold War, allowing the Americans to sit at the arms reduction negotiating table knowing they could verify the situation.