NASA Day of Remembrance ~ January 23, 2025

Each year on the 4th Thursday in January, NASA remembers the crew who perished in the Apollo 1 fire (1967), and the space shuttle crews who died, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003.

This is the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida from one of our earlier visits.

The names of the Apollo 1 astronauts.

Grissom and Chaffee are buried in Arlington National Cemetery (White is at Westpoint) and we paid our respects at their graves last year.

More on Roger B. Chaffee here.

More on Gus Grissom here. 

We also found the memorials/graves of the shuttle crews in Arlington.

The Challenger

Their names on the Kennedy Space Center Space Mirror Memorial:

The Columbia

Their names on the Space Mirror Memorial:

The Space Mirror is part of the larger Astronauts Memorial where these can be found.

We found a small memorial to these astronauts who died so tragically at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio.

More on Armstrong here.

Rest in peace and ad astra per aspera 💔

  

Martin Luther King, Jr. ~ January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Martin Luther King, Jr. sites visited:

The Lorraine Motel where MLK was assassinated is now the National Civil Rights Museum, 450 Mulberry Street in Memphis. We visited in 2016. The museum makes you relive the tragedy of 1968 but also honors the brave and courageous, short life that Martin Luther King, Jr., lived.

The boarding house from which James Earl Ray fired the fatal shot was made part of the museum.

For more of his history, this is an excellent book based on Martin's writings.

In 2024, we visited Washington D.C. and walked to the Martin Luther King, Jr, Memorial in West Potomac Park. Completed in 2011, it stands 30 feet tall and is inscribed "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."

Views from across the bay.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

 RIP Martin 💗

"The end of non-violent action is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community."