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Crewed Spaceflight Soyuz

Soyuz T-8

Soyuz T-8Soyuz T-8 lifts off from the Soviet Union, intended to dock with space station Salyut 7. Cosmonauts Vladimir Titov, Gennady Strekalov and Aleksandr Serebrov are due to take up residence on the station, but discover that the ejection of the nose cone of the Soyuz rocket – which protects the non-aerodynamic Soyuz vehicle during launch – has caused critical damage to the vehicle’s communication equipment. The mission is called off for safety reasons, and the crew returns to Earth after only two days.

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Computers

Aquarius

AquariusTrying to join the ranks of game companies producing home computers, Mattel Electronics licenses a low-end computer from a Hong Kong manufacturer and releases it in the United States as the Aquarius home computer. The age of Aquarius is short-lived, however, as Mattel is incurring serious losses from slowing Intellivision sales, and the Aquarius computer quickly proves to be underpowered next to even its cheapest competitors (the Mattel programmers tasked with creating games and software for it refer to it as the “system for the ’70s”).

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Categories
Science & Technology Uncrewed Spaceflight Weather & Climate

GOES-6 goes up

GOES-6NOAA’s GOES-6 Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral into a geosynchronous orbit over 135 degrees west longitude on Earth, a position which will change several times over GOES-5’s career until 1988, allowing it to monitor weather over the continental United States and Europe. GOES-5’s primary set of “eyes” will fail in 1989, leaving GOES-7 as the sole working GOES weather satellite until the mid-1990s. Even while “blind”, GOES-5 will serve as a communications relay satellite until its boost to “graveyard” orbit and shutdown in 1992.

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Video Games

Star Wars hits the arcade

Star WarsMere weeks before Return Of The Jedi arrives in theaters, Atari releases the arcade game Star Wars in the United States, in both upright (standing) and cocktail (sit-down) models, complete with almost-intelligible sample voices from the movie of the same name. Players strafe the Death Star at lightning speeds (thanks to vector graphics, which can draw faster than full-screen raster graphics) after fending off TIE fighters. The Force is with us… for 25 cents.

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Odyssey2 Video Games

Phillips halts Odyssey2/3 development

Odyssey3North American Phillips (formerly Magnavox) announces at the summer Consumer Electronics Show that it has put the Odyssey2 video game console’s slightly more advanced successor, the Odyssey3 Command Center, on hold indefinitely – just six months after unveiling it – rather than meeting its July release date. What Phillips doesn’t announce is that active game development on the Odyssey2 has also been halted; the company’s game designers are now focused on a new effort to publish games for non-Odyssey consoles under the Probe 2000 name.

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Pioneer Uncrewed Spaceflight

Pioneer 10 past Pluto

Pioneer 10NASA’s Pioneer 10 unmanned spacecraft becomes the first human-made spacecraft to pass beyond the orbit of Pluto, the outermost known planet in the solar system. (Pioneer 10 merely crosses the planet’s orbital path; Pluto itself is in a different part of its orbit, nowhere near Pioneer at the time.) Launched in 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt and observe the giant planet Jupiter at close range, blazing a trial for other outer solar system robotic exploration missions.

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Music

Electric Light Orchestra: Secret Messages

ELOElectric Light Orchestra‘s ninth album, the science fiction/time travel concept album Secret Messages, is released, featuring the single “Rock ‘n’ Roll Is King”. Originally a double album (slated to include the legendary lost song “Beatles Forever“), Secret Messages is pared down to a single LP late in production, and the resulting orphan tracks become the source of most of the group’s unreleased songs for several box sets to come.

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Challenger Crewed Spaceflight Space Shuttle

STS-7: first American woman in space

ChallengerThe second flight of Space Shuttle Challenger is a six-day mission to launch two more communications satellites (one for Canada and one for Indonesia), as well as featuring the first American woman in space (20 years behind the Soviet Union’s launch of Valentina Tereshkova). Challenger’s crew for this flight consists of Commander Robert Crippen, Pilot Frederick Hauck, and mission specialists John Fabian, Sally Ride and Norm Thagard.

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Music

Tim Finn goes solo

Tim FinnRecording solo material with elements of funk, R&B and reggae that he deemed unsuitable for the band that made him famous, Split Enz, Tim Finn releases his first solo album, Escapade. Slightly more in line with mainstream musical tastes than Split Enz’s usual quirky output, Escapade quickly makes the top ten – and goes platinum – in Australia, where it is first released.

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Video Games

Lode Runner

Lode RunnerBroderbund Software introduces the earliest versions of Doug Smith’s computer game Lode Runner to hit the market. Inspired by the obscure arcade game Space Panic, Lode Runner gives players a weapon that digs rather than directly disabling enemies. A game franchise spanning multiple platforms and decades is spawned.

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