engineer T.J. O'Malley pushed the button that launched American astronaut John Glenn into orbit on February 20, 1962?
the Space Shuttle mission STS-8 flew Guy Bluford (pictured), the first African-American astronaut?
the Lockheed NF-104A (pictured), equipped with a reaction control system as well as a rocket engine to supplement a jet engine, was a low-cost training vehicle for American astronauts in the 1960s?
the problem of harmful lunar or planetary dust adhering to spacesuits and being brought inside spacecraft by astronauts could be eliminated by the use of suitports (pictured), patented in 1996?
among people on stamps of Azerbaijan, featured in 1995 are eight female astronauts?
Leonid Kadeniuk, the first astronaut of the independent Ukraine, made his first space flight on NASA's space shuttle Columbia in 1997, and had been training for such a mission since 1976?
cosmonauts such as Grigori Nelyubov, dismissed from the Soviet space program, were airbrushed out of official photographs, leading to early Cold War speculation of failed missions even when the actual reasons for dismissal were sometimes mundane?
NASA astronaut Stephen Robinson has logged 497 hours in space?
British canoeist David Florence failed with an application to join the European Space Agency's astronaut training program before winning a silver medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics?
astronauts have a patch of velcro inside their helmets that acts as a nose scratcher and that the manufacturing process used to create silent velcro for the U.S. Army is a military secret?