Wednesday · November 11, 2026

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The events of October 27 · Read the full edition → · More from October 27 →

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A giant, untested rocket lifts off Pad 34; engineers gave it a 75 percent chance

SA-1 carried no crew and no real upper stages, only a plan to find out if the booster would hold together.

By the fall of 1961, the United States had orbited a satellite but still had nothing close to the power needed to reach the Moon. On October 27, NASA launched SA-1, the first Saturn I rocket, from Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral, carrying dummy upper stages instead of a working payload. The booster's eight engines fired for the full flight apart from a brief early cutoff, pushing the vehicle to 136.5 kilometers before it fell into the Atlantic 345.7 kilometers downrange…

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More from October 27

One officer says no, and a Soviet sub's nuclear torpedo stays in its tube

Depth-charged and nearly out of air near Cuba, B-59's crew thought the war had already started.

William Penn steps ashore at Philadelphia, a city that exists only on paper

He had landed at New Castle days earlier; now he comes to the ground he has already named for brotherly love.

A train leaves City Hall underground, and New York gets its subway

Mayor George McClellan takes the controls himself for the ceremonial run before paying riders board that evening for a nickel.

Two Soviet generals in Havana order the shot that kills Major Rudolf Anderson on his sixth mission over the island.

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More from Cold War America

Apollo 7 lifts off from Cape Kennedy; America flies astronauts again

Twenty-one months after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts on the pad, a Saturn IB carries three more into orbit.

Sullivan steps outside Challenger; first American woman to walk in space

Over the next three and a half hours she and David Leestma pumped hydrazine into a mock satellite to prove orbiting spacecraft could be refueled.

A thread-like shape appears under the electron microscope in Atlanta

CDC virologists Fred Murphy and Alyne Harrison get the first clear image of the virus killing hundreds in Sudan and Zaire.

A U-2 camera finds Soviet missiles ninety miles from Florida

The film still has to be developed and read before Washington even knows what it has.

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