Carl Sagan was born November 9, 1934.

Carl Sagan was born November 9, 1934 and passed away on December 20, 1996.

Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, microbiologist, author, science popularize, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. His contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of Venus. However, he is best known for his contributions to the scientific research of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages that were sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them.

He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. Sagan is known for many of his popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain and Pale Blue Dot, and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 different countries. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.

Sagan always advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Dragons of Eden, and, regarding Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After suffering from myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62 on December 20, 1996.

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Michael Collins was born October 31, 1930.

Michael Collins, Major General, USAF, Ret. is an American former astronaut and test pilot. Selected as part of the third group of fourteen astronauts in 1963, he flew into space twice. His first spaceflight was on Gemini 10, in which he and Command Pilot John Young performed two rendezvous with different spacecraft and Collins undertook two EVAs. His second spaceflight was as the Command Module Pilot for Apollo 11. While he stayed in orbit around the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left in the Lunar Module to make the first manned landing on its surface. He is one of 24 people to have flown to the Moon.
Collins was the fourth person, and third American, to perform an EVA; and is the first person to have performed more than one EVA.
Prior to becoming an astronaut, he attended the United States Military Academy, and from there he joined the United States Air Force and flew F-86s at Chambley-Bussieres Air Base, France. He was accepted to the U.S. Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1960. He unsuccessfully applied for the second astronaut group, but was accepted for the third group.
After retiring from NASA in 1970 he took a job in the Department of State as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. A year later he became the director of the National Air and Space Museum. He held this position until 1978 when he stepped down to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1980 he took the job as Vice President of LTV Aerospace. He resigned in 1985 to start his own business.

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Robert Goddard was born October 5, 1882.

Robert Goddard was born October 5, 1882 and passed away on August 10, 1945.

Robert Hutchings Goddard was an American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket, which he successfully launched on March 16, 1926. Goddard and his team launched 34 rockets between 1926 and 1941, achieving altitudes as high as 2.6 km (1.6 mi) and speeds as high as 885 km/h (550 mph).

Goddard’s work as both theorist and engineer anticipated many of the developments that were to make spaceflight possible. He has been called the man who ushered in the Space Age. Two of Goddard’s 214 patented inventions — a multi-stage rocket (1914), and a liquid-fuel rocket (1914) — were important milestones toward spaceflight. His 1919 monograph A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is considered one of the classic texts of 20th-century rocket science. Goddard successfully applied three-axis control, gyroscopes and steerable thrust to rockets, to effectively control their flight.

Although his work in the field was revolutionary, Goddard received very little public support for his research and development work. The press sometimes ridiculed his theories of spaceflight. As a result, he became protective of his privacy and his work. Years after his death, at the dawn of the Space Age, he came to be recognized as the founding father of modern rocketry. He not only recognized the potential of rockets for atmospheric research, ballistic missiles and space travel but was the first to scientifically study, design and construct the rockets needed to implement those ideas.

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John Glenn was born July 18, 1921.

John Glenn was born July 18, 1921 and passed away on December 8, 2016.

John Herschel Glenn, Jr., (Col, USMC, Ret.), was a former aviator, engineer, astronaut, and United States senator. He was selected as one of the “Mercury Seven” group of military test pilots selected in 1959 by NASA to become America’s first astronauts and fly the Project Mercury spacecraft. On February 20, 1962, Glenn flew the Friendship 7 mission and became the first American to orbit the Earth and the fifth person in space, after cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov and the sub-orbital flights of Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. Glenn is the earliest-born American to go to orbit, and the second earliest-born man overall after Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy. Glenn received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, and was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990. With the death of Scott Carpenter on October 10, 2013, Glenn became the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven.

Glenn resigned from NASA on January 16, 1964, and the next day announced plans to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio; however, a bathroom fall which resulted in a concussion caused him to withdraw from the race in March. He retired from the Marine Corps on January 1, 1965. A member of the Democratic Party, he finally won election to the Senate in 1974 and served through January 3, 1999. With the death of Edward Brooke on January 3, 2015, Glenn became the oldest living former United States Senator.

On October 29, 1998, while still a sitting senator, he became the oldest person to fly in space, and the only one to fly in both the Mercury and Space Shuttle programs, when at age 77, he flew as a Payload Specialist on Discovery mission STS-95. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

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Peter Dinklage was born June 11, 1969.

Peter Hayden Dinklage is an American actor. Since his breakout role in The Station Agent (2003), he starred in many films, such as Elf (2003), Find Me Guilty (2006), Underdog (2007), the British film Death at a Funeral (2007) with its American remake of the same name (2010), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), A Little Bit of Heaven (2011), Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), Knights of Badassdom (2013), and as Bolivar Trask in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). He also voices Ghost in the video game Destiny (2014).

Since 2011, Dinklage has played Tyrion Lannister in the HBO series Game of Thrones, earning him international attention and acclaim. He won an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award for Supporting Actor in 2011, as well as consecutive Primetime Emmy nominations for the role from 2012 to 2014.

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Sally Ride was born May 26, 1951.

Sally Ride was born May 26, 1951 and passed away on July 23, 2012.

Sally Kristen Ride was an American physicist and astronaut. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978 and became the first American woman in space in 1983. She remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space, having done so at the age of 32. After flying twice on the Orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987. She worked for two years at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, the only person to participate on both. Ride died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012.

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Rod Roddenberry was born February 5, 1974.

Eugene Wesley “Rod” Roddenberry Jr. is the only son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and his second wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. He has two sisters, Darleen Roddenberry and Dawn Roddenberry, both from Gene Roddenberry’s first marriage to Eileen Anita Rexroat. He has a wife, Heidi, and a son named Zale.
Roddenberry is the chief executive officer at Roddenberry Entertainment, a company through which he is producing the newest Star Trek series Star Trek: Discovery.
Roddenberry acted as executive producer and narrator of Trek Nation, a Star Trek documentary released in late 2011.
He discussed his father Gene during an appearance in The Captains of The Final Frontier, a 2010 Star Trek documentary made for American television.
Roddenberry acted as a consultant for and advocate for, and promoter of the fan-made Star Trek: New Voyages series.
Roddenberry was interviewed and introduced the Gene Roddenberry: Up Close And Personal video documentary release from 2006.
He wrote an episode of the science fiction series called Earth: Final Conflict, which was a project conceived by Gene Roddenberry in the 1970s and produced by Majel Barrett Roddenberry in Toronto starting in 1997.
Roddenberry has also been involved with a large number of real-world science endeavors including The Ansari X-Prize, NASA, JPL, The Planetary Society, The Roddenberry Dive Team, and the Kennedy Space Center.

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