January 26

Space research and travel, by their very nature; require extreme care and attention to detail. While the expression a miss is as good as a mile might be appropriate in other fields, in the case of early attempts to study earth’s moon it would be better stated as a miss is as good as 22,000 miles. That is the distance by which the Ranger 3, launched on the 26th in 1962 as part of NASA’s Ranger program, missed its target – the moon.