An Important Birthday

On April 13, 1970 Wende Lynn Walker was born in Galveston, Texas.  Her birth caused shock waves reaching toward the moon.

Apollo 13, with astronauts James Lovell Jr., John Swigert Jr. and Fred Haise Jr. aboard, was on its way to the moon to perform the third lunar landing in a planned series of seven when, about 56 hours into the mission, an oxygen tank blew up, knocking out the command module’s electricity, light and water supply. “Hey, Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” Lovell told mission control, adding that some kind of gas was escaping outside the spacecraft. It was oxygen, and the mission quickly shifted from landing on the moon to getting the astronauts back alive. At the time, Apollo 13 was roughly 200,000 miles from Earth.

The crew moved into the lunar module to escape the decreasing air pressure in the service module, then prepared to make the necessary swing around the moon in order to boomerang back to Earth. Debris from the explosion had knocked out the navigation system, so the crew used the sun to guide the crippled craft home. It took nearly four agonizing days after the explosion before they splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean.

Bestselling Children’s Authors in the World

Ash notes that "based on total sales of their entire output", the following authors "have produced titles that have been bestsellers - especially those in numerous translations - over a long period."

• René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
  "René Goscinny (1926-77) and Albert Uderzo (b. 1927) created the comic strip character Astérix the Gaul in 1959. They produced 30 books with total sales of some 250,000,000 copies."
• Hergé
  "Georges Rémi (1907-83), the Belgian author-illustrator who wrote under the pen name Hergé, created the comic strip character Tintin in 1929. Tintin appeared in book form from 1948 onward. He achieved worldwide popularity, and the books have been translated into about 45 languages and dialects. Total sales are believed to be at least 160,000,000."
• Enid Blyton
  "With sales of her Noddy books exceeding 60,000,000 copies, and with more than 700 children’s books to her name (UNESCO calculated that there were 974 translations of her works in the 1960s alone), total sales of her works are believed to be over 100,000,000, making her the best-selling English-language author of the 20th century."
• Dr. Seuss
  "His books in the U.S. Top 10 alone total about 30,000,000 copies: to this must be added those titles that have sold fewer than 5,000,000 in the U.S. and all foreign editions of his books, suggesting total sales of more than 100,000,000."
• Beatrix Potter
  "The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) was one of a series of books, the cumulative total sales of which probably exceed 50,000,000."
• Lewis Carroll
  "Total world sales of all editions of Carroll’s two classic children’s books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, are incalculable. However, just these two books probably place Lewis Carroll amon