January 31 – Ham, a 37-pound male chimpanzee, is rocketed into space in a test of the Project Mercury capsule designed to carry U.S.astronauts into space. As a result, the chimpanzee became the first Hominidae in space.[1]
April 15 – R. N. Schwartz and Charles Hard Townes publish "Interstellar and Interplanetary Communication by Optical Masers" in Nature, providing a basis for Optical SETI.
May 19 – Venera program: Venera 1 becomes the first manmade object to fly-by another planet by passing Venus (however the probe had lost contact with Earth a month earlier and does not send back any data).
May 25 – Apollo program: President Kennedy announces before a special joint session of Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the Moon" before the end of the decade.
James L. Buie patents transistor-coupled transistor logic, later known as transistor-to-transistor logic circuitry (TTL), used in integrated circuits.[19]
^Lee, J. A. N. (2013). "Computer Pioneers". James L. Buie. IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved 2015-11-14. While working for TRW, Inc., Los Angeles, in the early 1960s, Buie developed and patented TTL circuitry, which became the dominant IC technology in the 1970s and early 1980s.
