On July 21, 2011, NASA’s space shuttle program completed
its final, and 135th, mission, when the shuttle Atlantis landed
at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

TIM MAGUIRE

Carlos Humberto Santana Barragán is 78 years old today.

In 2023, Rolling Stone named him the 11th greatest guitarist
of all time. He has won 10 Grammy Awards and three Latin
Grammy Awards, and was inducted along with his namesake
band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.     

After more than a decade in space, Pioneer 10, the world’s
first outer-planetary probe, left the outer limits of the known
solar system by crossing the orbit of Neptune, the system’s
then farthest planet.

The following day, it radioed back its first scientific data on
interstellar space.

CAMILLE BOHANNON

On June 3, 1965, 120 miles above the Earth, Major Edward H.
White II opened the hatch of the Gemini 4 and stepped out of
the capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to walk
in space.

White had been preceded as a space walker, by Soviet
cosmonaut Aleksei A. Leonov, who on March 18, 1965,
was the first man ever to walk in space.

Astronaut Ed White was the first American to walk in space.

Ellen Ochoa is an American engineer, former astronaut and
former director of the Johnson Space Center. In 1993, Ochoa
became the first Latina woman to go to space when she served
on a nine-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Ochoa became director of the center upon the retirement of
the previous director, Michael Coats, on December 31, 2012.