50 years of human spaceflight slide show

For those of you who don't know, I do a radio show 3 nights a week where each night I have the Five Freaky Facts as a feature. Just to share with you the following considering the anniversary for the week that was in it on Tuesday and Wednesday night's shows:

From Tuesday April 12th 2011 - Yuri Gagarin
5. April 12th is known as "Cosmonaut Day" in Russia and "Yuri's Night" throughout the world.
4. Gagarin attended an elementary school in Gzhatsk. He studied physics in our equivalent of 6th class.
3. He was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in then Soviet Kazakstan and after a flight of 1 hour and 48 minutes rturned to Earth.
2. Gagarin is buried in the Kremlin Wall, as befits all heroes of the Soviet Union.
1. As well as a crater named after Yuri Gararin on the Moon, the Apollo 11 astronauts took one of his medals to the Moon as a tribute to him.


From Wednesday April 13th 2011 - The Space Shuttle
5. The Shuttles main engines will burn 547 tonnes of liquid oxygen and 91 tonnes of liquid hydrogen from the external tank.
4. The hottest skin temperature on re-entry in to Earth's atmosphere reaches 1,650 degrees Celsius. The skin is made from 24,000 protective ceramic/silicon tiles.
3. Mission STS-80 launched on November 19th 1996 flown by the Columbia, holds the record for the longest shuttle mission at 17 days, 15 hours, 53 minutes and 18 seconds.
2. By not painting the external fuel tank white on the shuttle, engineers saved half a tonne in weight.
1. The shuttle goes from 17,500mph in space at re-entry to just over 200mph before landing in the space of around 20 minutes.



Seanie.