Today in history: Volcanoes, Moon Men

It turns out that Monday is the anniversary of two big science events in recent history: The Apollo 10 mission to the Moon, and the eruption of Washington state's Mount St. Helens.

Apollo 10 was the dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 mission that would land on the Moon two months later (the BBC published a good history of the Apollo 10 mission here). The main mission of Apollo 10 was to prove that the Command Module (the part of the spaceship carrying the astronauts) could successfully launch and recover the Lunar Lander (which would actually touchdown on the Moon). Docking two spacecraft outside of Earth's orbit had never been accomplished before, which is why NASA opted to try everything out in Apollo 10, before attempting to land on the Moon in the Apollo 11 mission.

The BBC notes that the whole concept of using two ships - an orbiter and a lander - to reach the moon was first proposed by a Russian named Yuri Kondratyuk back in 1916. It's ironic since the US and Soviet Union were in quite a race to the Moon during the 1960s; and it was far from a sure thing that the United States would get there first.

The Soviet Union proved that it had a ship capable of sending a cosmonaut to the Moon and back in 1968 with the Zond 5 mission that carried a menagerie of animals on the voyage - the first living things to make the trip. But the Soviets trailed in developing a ship to actually land on the lunar surface. The Soviet program suffered in the mid-1960s from the loss its chief designer, Sergei Korolev, and its chief patron, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev; had they not lost these two men, it is quite possible that the Russians could have been the first to travel around the Moon at least.

Meanwhile Monday was also the anniversary of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The eruption knocked more than 1,000 feet off the top of the mountain, killed 57 people and blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest with inches of volcanic ash. I've talked with people who lived in the Northwest at the time of the eruption and they all say the ash was incredibly hard to clean up - it was so fine it got into everything, sweeping it was nearly useless since it would blow into ash clouds once a broom touched it and would then settle back down on whatever surface you just tried to clean.

That's quite a lot of history for a Monday.