In an era when the spacewalks of astronauts working aboard the International Space Station and Space Shuttle have become routine, it is worth remembering Edward H. White, an astronaut involved in one of the most exhilarating and one of the most tragic moments in the American space program’s history.
On June 3, 1965, astronaut Edward White became the first American to “walk” in space, during the flight of Gemini 4, in one of the most exhilarating moments of America’s early space program. As Walter Sullivan reported in the New York Times —
For 20 minutes yesterday afternoon Maj. Edward H. White 2d of the Air Force was a human satellite of the earth as he floated across North America from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0603.html#article
During the spacewalk, a spare astronaut’s thermal glove floated out of the Gemini spacecraft and is still a piece of “space debris.”
Training for the eventual lunar landing, Edward H. White died at age 36 on January 27, 1967, at Cape Canaveral in Florida, along with fellow astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom and Roger Chaffee. During a training session, their Apollo 1 spacecraft burst into fire and all three men died in the spacecraft. The three astronauts were America’s first space program casualties.
You can read more about the space program and this tragedy in Don’t Know Much About the Universe.
