NEVER FORGET
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1976: The Shuttle Enterprise, about to embark on a continuing mission to test in-atmosphere flight, and never quite get into space. The Shuttle Enterprise's rollout ceremony with most of the main cast from Star Trek was neither the first or last collaboration between NASA and Star Trek.
The Shuttle Enterprise earned its name partly due to a fan write-in campaign, an impressive feat in the dates before the internet made coordination simpler. The prototype shuttle served as a full-scale flight-test vehicle on how to use winged craft for spaceflight.
Built without functional engines or a heat shield, the Shuttle Enterprise never went into orbit. Instead, it was the first craft in the Approach and Landing Test program, and was essential for development of the reusable shuttle program. The Shuttle Enterprise was carried high into the atmosphere by a modified Boeing 747 (the creatively-named Shuttle Carrier Aircraft). Once the Shuttle Enterprise was released, the vehicles would drift apart, taking about 1.5 seconds for the shuttle to lift and the 747 to descend. This is when the real test portion of the flights began, checking out the shuttle's aerodynamic flight control systems and subsonic handling characteristic during the free flight (without main engines, it was more of a controlled free-fall) back to Earth.
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Blast From The Past...NASA Beauty Pageants
From the 1950s to the 1970s, several NASA installations started the tradition of hosting beauty pageants and crowning space queens. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Lewis Space Center (later known as the Glenn Research Center), and the Johnson Space Center each respectively held “Miss Guided Missile” (later “Queen of Outer Space”), “Miss NASA,” and “Lunar Landing Festival Queen.” The contestants were female employees of NASA. Although the winners of these contests were smiling and posing in photographs, many women did not approve of the pageants. In fact, their disapproval was so strong that during the Lunar Landing Festival Queen contest, a group of feminists swapped the ordinary ballot with a mock ballot, which listed 45 male NASA workers who could be voted as the “King of the court” or the “Boy of the court.”
The men were shocked, security was called, and all the ballots were collected. However, mock ballot results, which portrayed caricatures of the male winners, were distributed by the zealous feminists overnight, deeply upsetting all but one male NASA worker. Other NASA installations had already ended these space beauty pageants, and shortly after this incident, the Johnson Space Center also put an end to their annual Lunar Landing Festival Queen celebration.
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1000's of Witches Imprisoned
Hundreds of women are living in poor conditions in the five camps in the north of the country after being accused of dabbling in the occult by superstitious neighbours and even their own families.
Now the British High Commissioner to Ghana, Jon Benjamin, is calling for the camps to be closed. He told a meeting in Ghana last month, “Personally, I believe in the 21st Century, it’s time to say there is no such thing as a witch and to decry the practice of using such a term to dehumanise vulnerable women.”
He added that the witch camps — each one holding around 800 women and up to 500 children — were “a form of human right abuse and must be kicked against by all and sundry so as to create a safe environment for development”.
One camp was closed down in 2014 with the help of a British charity, ActionAid, but there is resistance to closing the rest from both villagers who still fear the “witches” in their midst will harm them and the authorities who worry that women sent back to their communities will suffer violence or even death. Read more at THOUSANDS of ‘witches’ imprisoned for years in huge witchcraft prison camps in Ghana
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