Categories
Video Games

Jungle King

Jungle KingJapanese arcade game manufacturer Taito introduces its latest game, Jungle King, though the game will be known by that name for all of three months. A sampled “Tarzan yell” draws the legal wrath of the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, and Taito rushes to replace the loincloth-clad player character with a more covered-up, pith-helmeted explorer, retitling the game Jungle Hunt in the process.

More about Jungle King / Jungle Hunt in Phosphor Dot Fossils

Categories
Columbia Crewed Spaceflight Enterprise Space Shuttle

“The test flights are over”

President Reagan at STS-4 landingSpace Shuttle Columbia lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California, making its first-ever landing on a concrete runway. After greeting the returning astronauts and inspecting the shuttle, President Ronald Reagan – with the partially-dismantled prototype Enterprise as a backdrop – declares NASA’s Space Shuttle system fully operational, saying “the test flights are over.” Columbia Commander Ken Mattingly later reveals that there was tremendous pressure on NASA to land Columbia on Independence Day, regardless of how many mission objectives had been met, to maximize the publicity value of the President’s speech. But the quick turnaround time and almost-weekly flight schedule that NASA had publicized throughout the 1970s is already a pipe dream: post-mission the four missions flown so far prove that post-landing servicing of each orbiter takes longer than expected. Columbia won’t fly again until the first “operational” mission in November.

Categories
Movies

Tron

TronDisney’s Tron – the first movie to pay homage to the ’80s video game craze and the first movie to arrive with video game tie-ins already in the works – premieres in theaters. Starring Bruce Boxleitner and Jeff Bridges, the film establishes of the most distinctive visual idea of the decade, that of a person being “sucked into” the digital world, where glowing body armor is worn.

More about Tron in the LogBook
Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

Categories
Science & Technology Uncrewed Spaceflight Weather & Climate

Landsat 4

LandsatNASA launches Landsat 4, the fourth Landsat Earth resource observation satellite and the first to be redesigned from the ground up (previous Landsats had been based on NASA’s Nimbus satellites from the 1960s and ’70s). For the first time, Landsat data processing and distribution is handled by another government agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, which partners with NASA on all future Landsat satellites. Landsat 4 is the first Landsat to link up to NASA’s TDRS (Tracking & Data Relay Satellite) system, thus enabling real-time data transmission to Earth even when Landsat 4 isn’t passing over a ground station. Landsat 4 remains operational through the end of 1993.

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight Salyut

Salyut 6 falls to Earth

Salyut 6The Soviet Union’s Salyut 6 space station, unoccupied for over a year, re-enters Earth’s atmosphere with the Kosmos 1267 module still docked; both the station and its added module disintegrate over unpopulated ocean.