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20071776 Club

Atlantis clears the pad with the heaviest station payload the shuttle has ever flown

Sturckow's seven-member crew carries the S3/S4 truss and a pair of solar arrays to an ISS starved for power to grow.

By June 2007, the International Space Station had been under construction for nearly a decade, and power was the limiting factor on how large it could grow. Atlantis lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center on June 8, 2007, carrying the S3/S4 truss segment and a pair of new solar arrays — the heaviest station payload the shuttle had ever flown. Commander Rick Sturckow's seven-member crew installed the truss, repaired a torn thermal blanket on Atlantis's own hull, helped wrestle a stubborn solar array into its housing, and handed off a crewmember before landing at Edwards Air Force Base on June 22 — a day late, after Florida weather scrubbed two landing attempts…

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More from June 8
1789

Madison rises in the House with a list of amendments; rivals are still calling for a second convention

Drawing on more than two hundred proposals from state ratifying conventions, he moves to revise the Constitution before its opponents can dismantle it.
1906

Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act; no proclamation needed from Congress to seal off federal land

For decades, pot hunters have stripped pottery and bones from Chaco Canyon and across the Southwest. The president can now designate national monuments alone, by proclamation.
1861

Tennessee votes to leave the Union; the eleventh state is also the last

Middle Tennessee swings from 51 percent against secession in February to 88 percent in favor today, providing the decisive margin, though East Tennessee refuses to accept the result.
17761776 Club
A local farmer leads the 2,000-man column off the road as British reinforcements land behind them, cutting off any retreat north.
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More from Modern America
2001

Apple shows a white box the size of a deck of cards: 1,000 songs in your pocket

Steve Jobs introduces a 6.5-ounce music player built around a 5 GB hard drive hidden inside a Cupertino auditorium.
2007

Discovery lifts off with Pamela Melroy in command, only the second woman to lead a shuttle crew

The mission carries a new station module and a piece of ice too small, NASA says, to worry about.
2000

Shepherd, Krikalev and Gidzenko dock at the space station and float inside

Their Soyuz reaches the aft port of the Zvezda module at 09:21 UTC; ninety minutes later the hatch opens on a station that has never had a resident crew.
2020

Unemployment hits 14.7 percent; 20 million jobs vanish in seven weeks

The April rate is the highest since the Great Depression, as pandemic shutdowns bring entire industries to a halt.
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