February 26, 1966

1966Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Indian poet and politician (born 1883)^[†]

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, was an Indian politician, activist and writer. Savarkar developed the Hindu nationalist political ideology of Hindutva while confined at Ratnagiri in 1922. The prefix "Veer" has been given by himself, when he penned his own biography under the pseudonym Chitragupta. He was a leading figure in the Hindu Mahasabha.

1966Apollo program: Launch of AS-201, the first flight of the Saturn IB rocket.^[†]

The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, which landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969. Apollo followed Project Mercury that put the first Americans in space. It was conceived in 1960 as a three-person spacecraft during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration. Apollo was later dedicated to President John F. Kennedy's national goal for the 1960s of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" in an address to Congress on May 25, 1961. It was the third American human spaceflight program to fly, preceded by Project Gemini conceived in 1961 to extend spaceflight capability in support of Apollo.