February 20 · This Day in America
At 9:47 a.m. an Atlas rocket lifts off Cape Canaveral with one man bolted into a capsule barely bigger than he is. John Glenn rides it to 17,500 miles an hour and the country holds its breath. The Soviets are ahead; this is America's answer. Three times Friendship 7 circles the planet, and Glenn watches four sunsets in a single afternoon, calling down that the view is tremendous. Then a warning light: the heat shield may be loose. Re-entry could burn him alive. Mission control improvises, leaving the retro-rockets strapped on to hold the shield in place, and the capsule comes down through a sky of fire and into the Atlantic, intact. He climbs out alive. A nation that had been losing the space race exhaled, then cheered, then poured into the streets. We could do this. We had just proven it.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1792
President Washington signs a law that does something quietly radical: it makes the mail a right, bars officials from spying on letters, and lets newspapers travel cheaply so ideas can reach a farmer as fast as a senator. A republic stretched across a continent would be held together, in part, by the postman. Information was to be the bloodstream of self-government.
Source: constitutioncenter.org