OTD…Jan. 28 and STS-51L

NASA’s first space station — the Skylab orbital workshop — was launched atop a Saturn 5 rocket today, May 14, in 1973.

Veteran CBS News correspondent Bruce Hall was not on the air when the shuttle Challenger blasted off 30 years ago Thursday. It was, after all, the 25th shuttle flight, the first of 16 planned for 1986, and news agencies were backing off expensive, remote coverage of what increasingly appeared to be a routine event.

#OTD in 1994…Discovery launched to develop new techniques for monitoring Earth’s environment from space…and in 2006…Construction of the space station resumed as Atlantis delivered a power-generating truss