Late in the evening of Jan. 31, 1958, the United States took its first step into space with the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The slender, 30-pound satellite would yield a major scientific discovery — the Van Allen radiation belts circling our planet — and ushered in six decades of U.S. space science.
from NASA https://ift.tt/2Gax0Qg