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- March 1, 1918: Roger Delgado, the original (and to many the best) Master from
Doctor Who, was born.
- March 2, 1949: Gates McFadden,
Star Trek's Dr. Beverly Crusher, was
born.
- March 2, 1995: Space shuttle Endeavour lifts off on mission number
STS-67.
- March 3, 1920: James Doohan,
Star Trek's indomitable Scotty, was born.
- March 3, 1969: The Apollo 9 mission was launched; it was the first flight of
the landing module of the lunar program, though here it was only tested in
Earth orbit.
- March 3, 1972: Pioneer 10 was launched toward its historic journey to become
the first man-made object to visit Jupiter's neighborhood, and the first to
depart the known boundaries of our solar system.
- March 4, 1994: Space shuttle Columbia lifts off on mission number
STS-62.
- March 5, 1930: Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the tiniest planet, Pluto;
he was actually looking for a much larger object to account for gravitational
disturbances in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune - a force which cannot be
explained by the presence of Pluto and is still unaccounted for.
- March 5, 1979: Voyager 1 made its closest pass of Jupiter, just within 180,000
miles of the giant planet's turbulent atmosphere. Four days later, a routine
navigational check conducted at JPL revealed the first active volcano on
another world, Jupiter's sulfur-surfaced moon of Io. Io's unstable surface,
excited by enormous electromagnetic and gravitational forces from its parent
planet and the tidal pull of neighboring moon Europa, continuously repaints
itself with molten sulfur.
- March 5, 1989: The littlest Star
Wars celebrity, Jake Lloyd (a.k.a. Episode I's Anakin Skywalker),
was born.
- March 10: Robert Llewellyn, Red
Dwarf's lovable 'droid Kryten and later a writer on the series, was born.
- March 11, 1952: Douglas Adams,
writer of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and one-time
Doctor Who story editor, was born.
- March 11, 1960: The first successful American deep space probe, Pioneer 5, was
launched into a solar orbit; it managed to return observations from over 22
million miles from Earth.
- March 11, 1997: Terry Nation,
creator of Blake's 7 and the
Daleks, died.
- March 13, 1989: Space shuttle Discovery lifts off on the 29th
shuttle mission, and the third launch since the Challenger accident.
- March 14, 1928: Frank Borman, Gemini 7 and Apollo 8 commander, was born.
- March 14, 1934: Gene Cernan, veteran of the Gemini 9, Apollo 10 and Apollo 17
missions (and commander of the latter), was born.
- March 15, 1932: Alan Bean, Apollo 12 command module pilot and commander of the
second Skylab crew, was born.
- March 16, 1966: The Gemini 8 mission was launched and returned to Earth in only
ten hours due to a potentially disastrous malfunction in the capsule's control
thrusters. The two astronauts, one of whom was a rookie named Neil Armstrong,
were not injured. The malfunction occurred just after Gemini 8 became the
first spacecraft to physically dock with another vehicle, in this case an
Agena rocket booster.
- March 17, 1930: James Irwin, Apollo 15 command module pilot, was born.
- March 17, 1936: Ken Mattingly, Apollo 16 and space shuttle astronaut, was born.
His tireless efforts to find a way to bring home the Apollo 13 mission - from
which he had been bumped for medical reasons - were critical to the safe
return of its crew.
- March 18, 1965: The historic Soviet launch of Voskhod 2 carried Alexei Leonov
to his appointment with history - he was the first human being to perform a
spacewalk.
- March 19, 1928: Patrick McGoohan, creator and star of The Prisoner, was born.
- March 20, 1939: John de Lancie, also known as Q, the gadfly of
Star Trek, was born.
- March 22, 1931: William Shatner,
Star Trek's Captain Kirk, was born.
- March 22, 1996: Space shuttle Atlantis launches en route to the
third U.S. shuttle mission to Russian space station Mir.
- March 23, 1912: German-born rocketry pioneer Wernher Von Braun was born.
- March 23, 1965: Gemini 3, the first manned launch of the Gemini program took place, with
Gus Grissom and future moon walker/shuttle commander John Young in tow - it
was Young's rookie spaceflight, and he raised NASA's ire by breaking
quarantine regs and smuggling a sandwich into orbit for Grissom.
- March 24, 1992: Space shuttle Atlantis lifts off on a mission to
study Earth's atmosphere with the Spacelab ATLAS-1 package.
- March 25, 1655: Christiaan Huygens made the first discovery of a moon of Saturn
with a simple telescope magnification of 50. The moon was Titan, which has
the thickest atmosphere of any moon in our solar system.
- March 25, 1920: Patrick Troughton, the second
Doctor Who who served from
1966 to
1969 and reappeared in special
episodes in 1973,
1983 and
1985, was born.
- March 25, 1928: Jim Lovell, Gemini 7 and Apollo 8 astronaut and commander of
the Gemini 12 and Apollo 13 missions,
was born.
- March 26, 1931: Leonard Nimoy,
Star Trek's Mr. Spock, was born.
- March 26, 1948: ELO keyboardist
Richard Tandy was born.
- March 26, 1964: Ed Wasser, Babylon 5's malevolent Mr. Morden, was
born.
- March 27, 1993: The light from a supernova in the M-81 galaxy first reached
Earth. The supernova, later designated SN1993J, is 12,000,000 light years
away.
- March 28: Chris Barrie, also known as the holographic Rimmer of Red Dwarf
fame, was born [year unknown].
- March 29, 1959: Marina Sirtis,
Star Trek's Counselor Troi, was born.
- March 29, 1968: Lucy Lawless, also known as
Xena: Warrior Princess, was
born.
- March 30, 1961: The second voice of Mystery
Science Theater 3000's Crow T. Robot, Bill Corbett, was
born.
- March 31, 1971: Ewan McGregor, who played the younger Obi-Wan
Kenobi in the second Star Wars
trilogy, was born.
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Information
originally compiled for use in LogBook: The
'Zine
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