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Tuesday 5 April 2011

1971

Tomorrow will be my fortieth birthday (6th April). A lot of has happened in Astronomy and spaceflight over the past forty years, so on the eve of my birthday lets time travel back to the year 1971 and see what was going on in the world of spaceflight and astronomy...

General:
Stephen Hawking demonstrates mathematically that the Big Bang must have come from a single point and postulated the existence of mini black holes.
It was the 400th anniversary of Johannes Kepler's death

Notable Dates:
January 31, 1971: Men were still flying to the Moon. Apollo 14 mission, with Alan Shepard Jr., Stuart A. Roosa, and Edgar D. Mitchell, was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

June 30, 1971: Tragedy! Three Russian cosmonauts Lieutenant-Colonel Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev were found dead in their Soyuz 11 space capsule after it made a perfect landing in Kazakhstan. 

April 19, 1971: The first ever space station of its kind Salyut 1 was launched by the USSR. 

July 26, 1971: Apollo 15 launched with David R Scott, Alfred M Worden and James B Irwin aboard. It was the first time the Lunar Rover was used. 

October 1971: Astrophysics - Joseph C. Hafele and Richard E. Keating took four atomic clocks aboard commercial airliners and flew twice around the world to test the theory of relativity.

28 October 1971: The last of the british built Black Arrow rocket with the satellite Prospero on board was launched from Woomera, Australia.

November 13, 1971: Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, swinging into its planned trajectory around Mars.  

Let's see what the next forty years has in store...