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Fred Ordway passed away in Huntsville, Alabama, on the morning of Tuesday July 1.

Modern launch vehicles, including the recently retired space shuttle and the earlier Saturn V that took the first humans to the Moon, are among the most complex feats of engineering in human history. In the case of the Saturn V, the vehicle was longer than a football field and comprised of some 5,600,000 separate parts, all of which had to work perfectly to enable the rocket to carry out its mission.

On July 10th, 1962 at 11:47 GMT, the world’s first transmission of a television image by satellite took place, using the Telstar satellite. 

Former Secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Greeley Abbot helped get the Space Age under way. In late September 1916, he received a letter from Robert Hutchings Goddard. Four long paragraphs later, Goddard revealed that he had been investigating rocket propulsion.

The rich collections of space artifacts at the National Air and Space Museum provide a remarkable resource for scholars who wish to understand the special place that deep space exploration has held in the imagination of not just Americans but people around the world.