Explore 2 March

Concorde 001 lifts off from Toulouse on its first flight, 2 March 1969.

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André Cros · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.

Concorde flies for the first time

At 3.38 in the afternoon on 2 March 1969 the Anglo-French supersonic airliner Concorde 001 took off from Toulouse with the test pilot André Turcat at the controls. The first flight lasted 29 minutes and never went faster than about 480 kilometres an hour; Turcat called it a trip around the runway.

The same aircraft broke the sound barrier that October and reached twice the speed of sound in November 1970. Airline services began in 1976 and ran until 2003. The prototype is now at the Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget.

The Soyuz 28 mission patch, with the flags of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

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Soviet space program · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

The first space traveller from neither superpower

On 2 March 1978 Vladimír Remek, a Czechoslovak air force pilot, was launched on Soyuz 28 with the Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Gubarev. He was the first person to go into space who was neither Soviet nor American.

The pair docked with the Salyut 6 space station and returned on 10 March after almost eight days. Remek flew under the Soviet Interkosmos programme for allied countries, and decades later became a member of the European Parliament.

Pioneer 10 lifts off from Cape Kennedy on the night of 2 March 1972.

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Launch_of_Pioneer_10.jpg: NASA Ames Resarch Center (NASA-ARC) derivative work: Nova13 (talk) · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Pioneer 10 sets off for Jupiter

On the evening of 2 March 1972 an Atlas-Centaur rocket launched NASA’s Pioneer 10 from Cape Kennedy. It was the fastest object yet sent from Earth and passed the Moon’s orbit in about 11 hours.

Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt and the first to fly past Jupiter, in December 1973. It then headed out of the solar system, carrying a plaque with a picture of a man and a woman and a map showing where it came from.

A publicity poster for King Kong, 1933.

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Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

King Kong opens in New York

King Kong opened in New York on 2 March 1933, showing at both Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy. More than 50,000 people saw it on the first day.

Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO, the story of a giant ape carried off to Manhattan owed its magic to Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion models, animated a frame at a time. It became one of the most famous films ever made.

Adwa Victory Day celebrations in Hosanna, Ethiopia, 2 March 2025.

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Samuel-girm · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.

Adwa Victory Day in Ethiopia

Ethiopia keeps a public holiday on 2 March, Yekatit 23 in the Ethiopian calendar, to celebrate the defeat of the Italian army at Adwa in 1896, with parades and gatherings across the country. Western histories usually date the battle itself to 1 March.