Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was an influential French painter and lithographer, whose best-known painting is The Raft of the Medusa. Although he died young, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.

Alfred Emanuel Smith was an American politician who served four terms as Governor of New York and was the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1928.

Smith was the foremost urban leader of the Efficiency Movement in the United States and was noted for achieving a wide range of reforms as governor in the 1920s. The son of an Irish-American mother and a Civil War veteran father, he was raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge, where he resided for his entire life. Like many other New York politicians of his era, he was also linked to the notorious Tammany Hall political machine that controlled New York City's politics, although he remained personally untarnished by corruption. Smith was a strong opponent of Prohibition, which he did not think could be enforced, and viewed it as an over-extension of the government's constitutional power. He was also the first Catholic to be nominated by a major party. His candidacy mobilized Catholic votes, especially from women, who had only recently received federal suffrage.

STS-41-B was the tenth NASA Space Shuttle mission and the fourth flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It launched on February 3, 1984, and landed on February 11 after deploying two communications satellites. It was also notable for including the first untethered spacewalk.

Following STS-9, the flight numbering system for the Space Shuttle program was changed. Thus, the next flight, instead of being designated STS-11, became STS-41-B; the original successor to STS-9, STS-10, was cancelled due to payload delays.