Happy Birthday Aunt Sue!!
March 21st - on this day in 1964, the Soviet Union made another attempt to conduct the first soft landing of a spacecraft on the Moon. The launch took place from Gagarin's Start at Baikonur, using a Molniya-L rocket.
The spacecraft was the fourth in the Ye-6 series to be launched. E-6 n°6, as it was called, never reached orbit, though, due to a failure of the launch vehicle's Blok I stage. This was the fourth of eleven failures of Soviet lunar landers in a row. In January, 1966, Luna 9, the 12th lander launched, succeeded in achieving humanity's first landing of a robotic spacecraft on the Moon, preceding the U.S. Surveyor 1 lander by about 4 months.
The X-43 is the fastest jet-powered aircraft on record at approximately Mach 9.6, flying at approximately 7,000 mph at 110,000 feet in altitude and setting the current world speed record for an air-breathing vehicle.
A winged booster rocket with the X-43 placed on top, called a "stack", was drop launched from a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. After the booster rocket (a modified first stage of the Pegasus rocket) brought the stack to the target speed and altitude, it was discarded, and the X-43 flew free using its own engine, a scramjet