WHAT ALL HAPPENED MAY TO NOVEMBER 1961
Find out what all happened May to November 1961

Project Mercury: Mercury-Atlas 5 Mission – Enos, a chimpanzee, is launched into space. The spacecraft orbits the Earth twice and splashes down off the coast of Puerto Rico. (29. November 1961)

Apollo program: The U.S. President John F. Kennedy announces before a special joint session of the Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the Moon" before the end of the decade. (25. May 1961)

The Soviet Union performs the first armed test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile, launching an R-13 from a Golf-class submarine. (20. October 1961)

The Dick Van Dyke Show premieres on CBS-TV in the United States. (3. October 1961)

The United States National Hurricane Research Project drops eight cylinders of silver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther. Wind speed reduces by 10%, giving rise to Project Stormfury. (16. September 1961)

East Germany closes the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin to thwart its inhabitants' attempts to escape to the West. (13. August 1961)

The Prime Minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro, proclaims Cuba a socialist nation and abolishes elections. (1. May 1961)

The Eritrean War of Independence officially begins with the shooting of the Ethiopian police by Hamid Idris Awate. (1. September 1961)

A military coup in Damascus effectively ends the United Arab Republic, the union between Egypt and Syria. (28. September 1961)

In a speech John F. Kennedy emphasizes that any attack on Berlin is an attack on NATO. (25. July 1961)

The biggest fire in Singapore history. The Bukit Ho Swee Fire (25. May 1961)

Nuclear testing: The Soviet Union detonates the hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya; at 50 megatons of yield, it is still the largest explosive device ever detonated, nuclear or otherwise. (30. October 1961)

In the Vienna summit, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sparks the Berlin Crisis by threatening to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and ending American, British and French access to East Berlin. (4. June 1961)

U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld dies in a plane crash while attempting to negotiate peace in the war-torn Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (18. September 1961)

Thirteen Italian Air Force servicemen, deployed to the Congo as a part of the UN peacekeeping force are massacred by a mob in the course of the Kindu atrocity. (11. November 1961)

Venera program: Venera 1 becomes the first man-made object to fly-by another planet by passing Venus (the probe had lost contact with Earth a month earlier and did not send back any data). (19. May 1961)

The African and Malagasy Union is founded. (12. September 1961)

Syria exits from the United Arab Republic. (29. October 1961)

American civil rights movement: The Freedom Riders bus is fire-bombed near Anniston, Alabama, and the civil rights protesters are beaten by an angry mob. (14. May 1961)

American civil rights movement: The "Freedom Riders" begin a bus trip through the South. (4. May 1961)