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19771776 Club

Enterprise cut loose over the Mojave and flew free for the first time

Explosive bolts sever the shuttle from its 747 carrier, and Fred Haise and Gordon Fullerton glide it down alone.

For months, the prototype shuttle Enterprise had only ever flown bolted to the back of a modified 747. On August 12, 1977, over Edwards Air Force Base, that changed. Commander Fred Haise and pilot Gordon Fullerton rode Enterprise as the carrier aircraft nosed into a shallow dive, then explosive bolts severed the connection and the shuttle dropped free, flying a tailcone-equipped glide down to a landing under its own control. It was the first of five free flights in NASA's Approach and Landing Tests…

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More from August 12
1898

The American flag rises over ʻIolani Palace; Hawaii's sovereignty ends in a ceremony

Queen Liliʻuokalani stays away, waiting out the hour at Washington Place instead.
1945

Days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Washington tells the public how the bomb was built

Physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth's report explains the science while carefully withholding the engineering.
1990

A flat tire sends Sue Hendrickson up a cliff, and she finds a T. rex

While the rest of the crew fixed the truck, Hendrickson checked the one ridge nobody had searched yet.
18511776 Club
A straight needle and a straightened shuttle path turn a shop curiosity into a business.
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More from Cold War America
1971

The Times begins printing the Pentagon Papers; four presidents, the documents show, misled the country on Vietnam

A 7,000-page classified Defense Department study reveals the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations each obscured the true scope of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.
1961

Twelve nations' Antarctic pact takes force; military operations and nuclear tests are now banned on the continent

The agreement, signed in 1959 after Argentine marines fired on British researchers, designates everything south of 60°S as a scientific preserve open to all signatories.
1972

Nixon signs 37 words into law; no federal program may turn away a student on the basis of sex

Senator Birch Bayh's passage, buried in the Education Amendments of 1972, draws almost no public attention at the signing.
1972

Nixon tells Haldeman to use the CIA to block the FBI's Watergate inquiry

Six days after the break-in at Democratic headquarters, the Oval Office recording system captures the President invoking national security to shut down investigators.
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