The missile was being tested on Test Stand VII; no launch had been planned. G Harry Stine noticed that the German rocket scientists at White Sands were very reluctant to talk about the details of the failure, but finally managed to get the real story from Konrad Dannenberg:

The first A.4 missile was a hand-made job. Motor tests preceding the first flight were to be carried out in a huge, mobile test stand, which held the entire missile. However, this first A.4 never flew; it found its end in the test stand. In order to clamp the missile into the stand without attaching the thrust mounts to the missile structure, a large steel corset was built. Unfortunately, the builders of this corset did not take into account the shrinkage of the missile components when the frigid liquid oxygen was pumped aboard. The first A4 shrank, dropped out of the corset, and was a total wash-out.

Headquarters ARDC redesignated Headquarters, 1st Air Division, as Headquarters, 1st Missile Division. Headquarters, 392d Air Base Squadron, was reconstituted as Headquarters, 392d Air Base Group, at Camp Cooke, California, effective 15 April 1957. Both units were assigned to WDD.

As a result of guidance from the Secretary of Defense as to desired level of effort, the Atomic Energy Commission reduced its program on nuclear rocket propulsion to a single laboratory effort, phasing out work at the University of California Radiation Laboratory and concentrating AEC development efforts at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

An NACA report was published entitled, 'Preliminary Studies of Manned Satellites, Wingless Configuration, Non-Lifting,' by Maxime A. Faget, Benjamine Garland, and James J. Buglia. Later this document became the basic working paper for the Project Mercury development program, and was reissued as NASA Technical Note D-1254, March 1962.

Mercury Little Joe 5A (LJ-5A), the sixth in the series of Little Joe missions, was launched from Wallops Island. This flight was intended to satisfy test objectives, which were not met previously because of the failure of the spacecraft to separate from the launch vehicle during the Little Joe 5 (LJ-5) mission flown on November 8, 1960. For reference, the purpose of this test was to demonstrate primarily the structural integrity of the spacecraft and the escape system during an escape maneuver initiated at the highest dynamic pressure anticipated during an Atlas launch for orbital flight. Little Joe 5A (LJ-5A) lifted off normally, but 19 seconds later the escape tower fired prematurely, a situation closely resembling the November 1960 flight. The signal to initiate the abort maneuver was given; and the launch vehicle-adapter clamp ring was released as intended, but the spacecraft remained on the launch vehicle since the escape motor was already expended. The separation was effected by using the retrorockets, but this command was transmitted before the flight had reached its apex, where separation had been planned. Therefore, the separation was rather violent. The parachutes did deploy at about 40,000 feet, and after recovery it was found that the spacecraft had actually incurred only superficial structural damage. In fact, this spacecraft was later used for the subsequent Little Joe 5B (LJ-5B) flight test. Test objectives of the Little Joe 5A (LJ-5A) were not met.

Marshall Space Flight Center's latest schedule on the Saturn C-5 called for the first launch in the last quarter of 1965 and the first manned launch in the last quarter of 1967. If the C-5 could be man-rated on the eighth research and development flight in the second quarter of 1967, the spacecraft lead time would be substantially reduced.

First spacewalk, with a two man crew of Colonel Pavel Belyayev and Lt. Colonel Aleksey Leonov. During Voskhod 2's second orbit, Leonov stepped from the vehicle and performed mankind's first "walk in space." After 10 min of extravehicular activity, he returned safely to the spacecraft through an inflatable airlock.

This mission was originally named 'Vykhod ('Exit/Advance'). It almost ended in disaster when Leonov was unable to reenter the airlock due to stiffness of the inflated spacesuit. He had to bleed air from the suit in order to get into the airlock. After Leonov finally managed to get back into the spacecraft cabin, the primary hatch would not seal completely. The environmental control system compensated by flooding the cabin with oxygen, creating a serious fire hazard in a craft only qualified for sea level nitrogen-oxygen gas mixes (Cosmonaut Bondarenko had burned to death in a ground accident in such circumstances, preceding the Apollo 204 disaster by many years). Additional Details: here....

Atlas 104F was launched from Vandenberg AFB and placed 41 scientific experiments into orbit as part of SAMSO's Space Experiments Support Program (SESP). Solar radiation experiments. Space craft engaged in investigation of spaceflight techniques and technology (US Cat A).

Nikolayev and crew go to Sochi. Tereshkova is back from sick leave, and she goes there as well. Kamanin meets with Shonin, the topic: many bad reports he has received of Shonin's behaviour since Soyuz 6. He tells him to watch out, or he'll end up on a five-year flight suspension like Titov.

This was the worst disaster since the Nedelin Catastrophe on 24 October 1964. A commission of military officers and chief designers reviewed the incident and requested changes to equipment and procedures, especially as regarded liquid oxygen handling. Another source reports that the explosion occurred during the fuelling of the Block E upper stage, and was due to hydrogen peroxide being present in a lox line filter and a confusion between fuel and lox lines. This error had always been possible, but had never happened in the 20 years of use of the booster before the explosion. The launch pad was badly damaged and not put back into service until April 1983.

Provision of uninterrupted round the clock telephone and telegraph radiocommunication in the USSR and simultaneous transmission of colour and black-and-white USSR central television programmes to stations in the Orbita network. As of 3 September 2001 located at 8.37 deg E drifting at 0.322 deg E per day. As of 2007 Mar 11 located at 69.95E drifting at 0.520E degrees per day.

"What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong preceded by recordings of astronauts' children shouting such things as"Get up, Dad, get out of bed and get to work" and"Hi, daddy, this is your darling daughter telling you to wake up" The crew responded with"Homeward Bound" by Simon and Garfunkel.

Geostationary Meteorological Satellite; carried search and rescue package. Stationed at 140.2 deg E. Positioned in geosynchronous orbit at 160 deg E in 1995; 140 deg E in 1995-1999 As of 5 September 2001 located at 139.99 deg E drifting at 0.028 deg W per day. As of 2007 Mar 10 located at 45.88E drifting at 3.134W degrees per day.

The XM Radio satellites (using Boeing 702 buses) provided digital radio entertainment broadcast to the US. The XM-2 Rock satellite was accompanied by the XM-1 Roll spacecraft launched later in 2001. A Boeing Sea Launch Zenit-3SL took off from the Odyssey floating launch platform at 154W 0 N in the Pacific. The two-stage Zenit put the Blok DM in a suborbital trajectory with a 190 km apogee; the DM first burn went to a 180 x 990 km x 1.3 deg orbit, with the second burn delivering Rock to geostationary transfer orbit. The 4.7 tonne (with fuel), 18 kW satellite carried two transmitters (3 kW each) in the S-band to relay 100 channels of digital quality music uplinked in the X-band from one or more ground stations. It was parked over 114.9 deg-W longitude. The investors include several auto manufacturers who were to be equipping the special receivers in their models. As of 4 September 2001 located at 114.98 deg W drifting at 0.001 deg W per day. As of 2007 Mar 10 located at 115.14W drifting at 0.003W degrees per day.

Soyuz TMA-20M was launched carrying Alexey Ovchinin, Oleg Skripochka and Jeff Williams. This was the last of the 11F732A47 Soyuz TMA-M series, which were replaced by the improved Soyuz-MS variant. On Sep 6 at 2151 UTC Soyuz TMA-20M undocked from the Poisk module with Ovchinin, Skripochka and Williams. The spacecraft laded in Kazakhstan at 0113 UTC on Sep 7.