1958:
U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower requests $125 million to initiate NASA, whose creation he had authorized the day before.
Aug. 1
2002:
Designed by Scaled Composites and built by Boeing, the eventual carrier plane for the X Prize winning SpaceShipOne, White Knight makes its first flight.
Aug. 2
1955:
Leonid Sedov, a Soviet scientist, announces his country’s plan to launch the world’s first
Earth-orbiting satellite. The Soviet announcement comes three days after a similar announcement by the United States
.
Aug. 3
2004:
NASA’s Messenger spacecraft
launches toward Mercury. It
is scheduled to arrive
in early 2008, and will
be the first spacecraft since Mariner 10 in the mid-1970s to take close-up photographs of Mercury while orbiting the planet
.
Aug. 5
1965:
The first ground test of S-IC stage,
Saturn 5’s booster
,
is conducted at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
