• Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson's (US) discovery of cosmic background radiation confirms the "Big Bang" theory.
  
   
• Early Bird, the first commercial communications satellite, is launched.

• Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford aboard Gemini VI perform the first rendezvous with another spacecraft, Gemini VII, with Frank Borman and James Lovell.

   

• Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov performs the first spacewalk (Mar. 18). Edward White II becomes the first American to walk in space (June 3).

Nobel Prizes in Science
 

Chemistry: Robert B. Woodward (US), for work in synthesizing complicated organic compounds.

Physics: Richard P. Feynman, Julian S. Schwinger (both US), and Shinichiro Tomonaga (Japan), for research in quantum electrodynamics.

Physiology or Medicine: François Jacob, André Lwolff, and Jacques Monod (all France), for study of regulatory activities in body cells.