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SEPTEMBER 21
* H.G. Wells, author of "War of the Worlds," born (1866). Sketch above is from H.G. Wells' famous novel showing the artist's conception of Martians. Note the absence of a space suit for the Martian. What type of Mars environment does the artist's drawing suggest?
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* First nonstop transatlantic jet flight east to west (1950).
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* Final flight of NASA/USAF X-24B; it reached a speed of 1600 km/hr (1,000 mph) and an altitude of 70,000 feet after being released from a B-52 carrier jet. * Neptune discovered (1846).
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* Jimmy Doolittle performed instrument only flight (1929).
* First robot return of a lunar sample (1970).
* Oldest (1961) Atlas rocket launched (1988).
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* Skylab 2 crew returned from 59 days in orbit. Unfortunately, experiment spider Arabella died of unknown causes during reentry (1973).
* French pilot Edmond Poillet was killed in his Savary biplane at Chartes, France as a result of a wind gust (1910).
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* NASA's final unmanned rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center (1989). (Click on "Countdown!" for a summary of NASA launch vehicles and facilities written by the Kennedy Space Center.)
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* First manned launch to be aborted; a booster exploded on Soyuz T10-1, forcing cosmonauts Titov and Strekalov to use their launch escape rocket (1983).
* Peruvian pilot Georges Chavez was killed near Domodossola, Peru in his Bleriot monoplane as a result of numbness caused by the cold (1910). ("Contact," Villard, p. 243)
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* Completion of the first airplane flight around the world (1924). Flight covers approximately 27,000 miles and takes 175 days. The air- craft are two Douglas Cruiser bi- planes of the U.S. Army Air Corps flown by Lt. Lowell Smith and Lt. Erik Nelson.
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* U.S. returned to space with launch of Shuttle Discovery STS-26 (1988).
* First international balloon race (1907).
* German sportsman Fritz von Opel flew a rocket glider powered by 16 solid propellant rockets for about 75 seconds at a speed of 95 mph (1929).
* End of the first heliocopter flight around the world which took 29 days, 3 hours, and 8 minutes (1982).
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