June 3 · This Day in America
On June 3, 1965, somewhere over the Pacific near Hawaii, Ed White opens the hatch of Gemini 4 and pushes himself out into nothing. He is the first American to walk in space. There is no floor, no up, no down — just Earth turning slowly beneath his boots and a thin tether keeping him from the rest of the universe. He has a little handheld gun that fires jets of oxygen, and for a few minutes he flies. The fuel runs out. He keeps going anyway, twisting his body, pulling the cord, laughing into the radio. For twenty-three minutes a man is a small bright satellite of his own country. When Houston finally orders him back inside, he does not want to come. Few moments in the space age were ever this purely joyful.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1888
On June 3, 1888, the San Francisco Examiner prints a comic poem on its back pages, signed with a college nickname. Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" would become one of the most beloved verses in the language — the swaggering hero, the silent crowd, the called strike, the line every American somehow already knows: there is no joy in Mudville, mighty Casey has struck out. A throwaway filler poem became the country's shared elegy for hubris.
Source: blogs.loc.gov
“I'm coming back in… and it's the saddest moment of my life.”Ed White, 1965