Space Birthdays - Real and Science Fiction

Space birthday - Collage Greetings

Thanks to twitter and @thinkgeek I noticed that today is the birth date of Gene Roddenberry, the father of Star Trek. A short search leading to the Brainy History web site revealed somewhat of a statistical aberration - three Star Trek people and three astronauts were born on this date.
Apart from Gene Roddenberry, both Jonathan Frakes (Commander William T. Riker) and Diana Muldaur (Dr. Katherine Pulaski), both from Star Trek: The Next Generation, were born on this date.


On the NASA front, astronauts Franklin Story Musgrave (only astronaut to fly on board of all five Space Shuttles), Michael J. Massimino (shuttle astronaut, a.k.a. @astro_mike, perhaps the most active astronaut on social media, the first astronaut to tweet from space) and Charles F. Bolden Jr. (shuttle astronaut, NASA administrator since 2009) were all born on this date.
On the Russian side, Vladimir Borisovich Alekseyev was also born on that date (a Soyuz VI cosmonaut), meaning that out of the 547 astronauts (at least according to Wikipedia), four were born on August 19, about 0.73%, or about 2.7 times more than the statistical 1/365 chance of being born on a certain date (leap year excluded).


For those of you still in this world, Happy Birthday! Don't forget to look up!