Reading 3 of 7 free1776 Club · all 7 storiesTuesday, September 29
From the desk
Start with 1988: Discovery sitting on the pad after thirty-two months of grounded fleet, delayed two hours by a fuse problem in the crew's flight suits, then rising at 11:37 a.m. to prove the redesigned booster joints would hold this time. Worth a longer look: 2008, when the House voted down the $700 billion bailout and the Dow answered with a 777-point drop, the worst single day the market had seen. Also here, a neat bookend: 1907 and 1990, eighty-three years apart, laying and finally finishing Washington National Cathedral's towers.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1988Featured · This day in history
Discovery clears the tower; NASA flies again
For thirty-two months, no American had left the ground. On September 29, 1988, Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 11:37 a.m., delayed nearly two hours by light winds and a fuse problem in two crew members' flight suits. Commander Rick Hauck led an all-veteran crew of five, the first such crew since Apollo 11, wearing pressure suits with a new bailout system NASA had not required since STS-4 in 1982. Six hours later, they deployed the TDRS-C communications satellite. The redesigned booster joints that had doomed Challenger held.
Challenger had grounded the nation's only path to orbit and forced NASA to answer, in public, whether it could be trusted with astronauts' lives again. STS-26 was that answer: redesigned booster joints, escape suits, and an all-veteran crew. The mission was built to restore confidence, not just orbit a satellite. It reset the shuttle program's risk culture for the seventeen years of flights that followed.
Did you know
QWhy did NASA give STS-26 a secret second name?
Officially, the mission carried the designation STS-26R, not the plainer STS-26 most people remember. The R existed purely for tracking data: NASA had already assigned the original STS-26 slot years earlier to a mission that flew under the confusing STS-51-F numbering (Spacelab-2), and reusing the plain number risked scrambling flight records. STS-26 was also the first mission since STS-9 in 1983 to use NASA's original sequential Space Transportation System numbering, after years of the byzantine STS-51-F style labels.
QHow badly did the shuttle's new voice-command system fail before it worked?
Discovery flew the first Voice Control Unit ever installed on a spacecraft, letting crew members steer cameras and monitors watching the Canadarm just by speaking. It nearly didn't work. During initial testing, the system recognized less than 60 percent of one crew member's commands and less than 40 percent of another's, numbers useless for a device meant to help fly a spacecraft. NASA engineers retrained the voice templates before flight and pushed recognition above 96 percent, and the system flew on future missions.
QWhat almost stopped the countdown ninety seconds before launch?
With Discovery already fueled and the crew strapped in, controllers at T-minus 90 seconds flagged a cabin air pressure reading serious enough to consider halting the countdown entirely, on top of a delay already caused by light winds and swapped fuses in two flight suits' cooling systems. Rather than scrub, the team resolved it by activating oxygen systems built into the crew's new pressure suits, the same suits designed for bailout scenarios NASA hadn't required since STS-4 in 1982. The clock kept running, and Discovery lifted off less than two minutes later.
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1789government
Congress puts a standing army under the new War Department, several hundred strong
Three months after Congress created the Department of War, the new government still had no soldiers of its own to speak of. On September 29, 1789, in New York, the temporary seat of government, Congress authorized a regular army of several hundred men under President Washington's War Department, led by Secretary Henry Knox. The department itself had started with just five people: a secretary, an assistant, and one or two clerks. It was a modest beginning for a force that soon took on frontier posts and relations with Native nations.
This vote settled a long-running argument among the Founders: whether soldiers would answer to elected civilians or to their own generals. Putting the army under Knox, a cabinet secretary accountable to Washington and Congress, put civilian control of the military into daily practice, not just into the Constitution's text.
Did you know
QWhat disaster destroyed the War Department's early paper trail?
On November 8, 1800, a fire consumed the War Department building along with its records and files. This happened just as the federal government was settling into its new home in Washington, D.C., after moving from Philadelphia that same year. The loss wiped out much of the paperwork generated during the department's first decade under Henry Knox and his successors, the enlistment rolls, correspondence, and administrative records documenting how the young army had actually been built and run. Historians studying the department's founding years have had to rely on surviving congressional records and outside correspondence to fill the gaps left by that single blaze in the capital's earliest days.
QHow did the army's regular officer corps get built out beyond the original five War Department jobs?
Through the 1790s, Congress layered on specialized appointments that had nothing to do with paperwork: a physician general and an apothecary general to handle medicine, a purveyor to manage supplies, and a chaplain to attend to the troops' religious needs, alongside the major general, quartermaster general, and judge advocate. The Bureau of Indian Affairs came later, created in 1824 by Secretary John C. Calhoun, and it stayed under the War Department's roof until 1849, when Congress handed it off to the brand-new Department of the Interior. That transfer was the first time a major War Department function was carved away entirely rather than expanded.
QWhere was the War Department physically located before Washington, D.C., existed?
From 1797 to 1800, the department ran out of Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the federal government before the move to the new capital. Once relocated, it eventually settled into a brick Georgian building at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in 1820, one of four matching structures built for the cabinet departments, with War in the northwest corner, Navy across the way, and State and Treasury on the opposite side. That building later gave way in 1888 to the ornate French Empire-style State, War, and Navy Building, now known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, standing on the very same ground.
1990military
Lockheed's stealth fighter prototype takes to the air over the Mojave
By the fall of 1990, the Air Force had spent nearly a decade searching for a jet that could outfly the Soviet Su-27 and MiG-29. On September 29, Lockheed test pilot Dave Ferguson took the YF-22 prototype, serial 87-0700, off the runway at Palmdale, California, and set it down eighteen minutes later at Edwards Air Force Base. Twin General Electric YF120 engines powered the diamond-winged jet through its first flight test, the first flight in a head-to-head competition with Northrop's rival design. The Air Force would not pick a winner for seven months.
The YF-22's flight test began the fly-off that decided America's next air superiority fighter, a program the Pentagon started because it feared Soviet jets could outclass the F-15. The prototype's success over Northrop's YF-23 set the Air Force on the path to the F-22 Raptor, the fighter that defined American air dominance for the next two decades.
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Quote of the day
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
Steve Jobs
“Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.”
William McKinley
“The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”
