Snake Bite!

Lest us Yanks get too smug about the Soviet space program, here is a compilation of rocket launches from the beginning days of the US space program. The failures are spectacular. The music to this doesn't make any sense, so I would just turn the sound down.

It concludes with a brief glimpse of Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, the first by an American in space. Yuri Gagarin beat him to it, and with several orbits. Shepard just went up, then came down in about 15 minutes. During the countdown, Shepard supposedly uttered one of my favorite of all prayers: "Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up!"




Let's not forget that the Soviets got there first, and a lot of our rocket science depended on the work of Russian scientists going back to the 19th century.