September 20, 1981 (Sunday)
- For the first time, China launched three satellites into orbit, on a rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. The feat led some observers to speculate that China had gained the ability to launch multiple nuclear warheads or that it had set up an early warning system against missile attacks.
- Karen Williams, a stewardess on board World Airways Flight 32, a DC-10, was crushed to death in the airplane's service elevator during a flight from Baltimore to London.
Read more about this topic: September 1981
Famous quotes containing the word september:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)