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Crewed Spaceflight International Space Station Soyuz

Soyuz TMA-2 / ISS Expedition 7

Soyuz TMA-2The seventh full-time crew of the International Space Station lifts off from Russia aboard Soyuz TMA-2, a drastic change from their original mission plan. Originally planned to be another short-term “ferry flight” to swap out the station’s Soyuz lifeboat vehicle, Soyuz became the only way to send full-time crews to the station during the post-Columbia-disaster grounding of the American shuttle fleet. Yuri Malenchenko and Ed Lu took up residence aboard the ISS for 184 days, returning in October 2003 with Spanish astronaut Pedro Duque. With the shuttle fleet landlocked, two-man ISS crews became the norm, as three-man crews relied on the greater resupply capacity of the shuttles.

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Television

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Empty Places

Buffy The Vampire SlayerThe 141st episode of Joss Whedon’s supernatural series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, airs on UPN. James Marsters and Alyson Hannigan also star. Nathan Fillion (Firefly) and Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) guest star.

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Television

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Touched

Buffy The Vampire SlayerThe 142nd episode of Joss Whedon’s supernatural series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, airs on UPN. James Marsters and Alyson Hannigan also star. Nathan Fillion (Firefly) and Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) guest star.

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Apollo Crewed Spaceflight International Space Station

Apollo rides again?

Apollo command moduleLast flown in the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, the Apollo command/service module is – briefly – given strong consideration by NASA to serve as a “lifeboat” for the crew of the International Space Station, even to the point of conducting a study about un-mothballing the surviving unused Apollo hardware sitting in museums around the world. Part of the reason for this unusual study is that NASA’s budget has run out for finding a workable solution to keeping a “lifeboat” available to station astronauts in the anticipated long gap before the Space Shuttle’s return to service. Ultimately, even the seemingly unthinkable return of Apollo is nixed, since at least a Saturn IB booster would need to be similarly refitted – at huge expense – to lift a 30-year-old Apollo capsule into space.

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Hayabusa Uncrewed Spaceflight

Hayabusa!

HayabusaJapan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), launches the unmanned Hayabusa space probe on a mission to gather material from asteroid 25143 Itokawa. Intended to reach Itokawa in two years, and then return the asteroid samples to Earth in 2010, Hayabusa will also attempt to drop a small rover on Itokawa’s surface and will test an ion engine propulsion system. The name “Hayabusa” – translating to “peregrine falcon” – is only bestowed upon the spacecraft once it reaches space; prior to that, Hayabusa is known by its engineering designation, MUSES-C. A few months after Hayabusa’s launch, ISAS itself is renamed JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency).

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Television

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: End Of Days

Buffy The Vampire SlayerThe 143rd episode of Joss Whedon’s supernatural series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, airs on UPN. James Marsters and Alyson Hannigan also star. Nathan Fillion (Firefly), David Boreanaz (Angel), and Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) guest star.

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Television

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Chosen

Buffy The Vampire SlayerThe 144th and final episode of Joss Whedon’s supernatural series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, airs on UPN. James Marsters and Alyson Hannigan also star. Nathan Fillion (Firefly), David Boreanaz (Angel), and Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) guest star in the series finale.

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Star Trek Television

Enterprise: The Expanse

EnterpriseThe 51st episode of the Star Trek prequel spinoff Enterprise premieres on UPN, ending the show’s second season with a setup for the third year, which will involve the Enterprise penetrating the territory of the Xindi, an unknown race that launched a deadly sneak attack on Earth. The show’s producers are consciously mirroring recent history, with the Xindi attack paralleling the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

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Hubble Space Telescope Science & Technology Uncrewed Spaceflight

Uranus moons Hubble

UranusAstronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discover two new moons of Uranus that eluded detection during Voyager 2’s 1986 flyby: Cupid and Mab. Both small, dark bodies that orbit closer to Uranus than any of the planet’s large satellites, Cupid and Mab raise the number of known Uranian satellites above 20. Mab’s orbit keeps it within the planet’s outermost ring, while Cupid’s orbit is only 500 miles further out than that of Belinda, one of the small moons discovered in 1986 by Voyager 2. Cupid is the tiniest of the inner moons of Uranus, roughly 11 miles in diameter.

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Music

Doctor Who: Devils’ Planets soundtrack

album coverCelebrating 40 years of Doctor Who, Doctor Who: Devils’ Planets – The Music Of Tristram Cary is released, including the complete underscores from The Daleks (1963/64), The Daleks’ Masterplan (1965/66) and The Mutants (1972); the marks the release of the earliest episodes of Doctor Who for which the complete music score still exists. The album quickly sells out and becomes a coveted collectors’ item; this is also the final Doctor Who archive music release from the BBC’s in-house label, and the last Doctor Who television soundtrack music to be released prior to the new series soundtracks.

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Galileo Uncrewed Spaceflight

Galileo’s mission ends

GalileoThe mission of the unmanned space probe Galileo ends in the clouds of the giant planet Jupiter, which it has orbited for eight years. Even as Galileo plunges toward Jupiter, it detects and reports evidence of a thin ring sharing the orbit of the small moon Amalthea, and then disintegrates as it falls into Jupiter. NASA has opted to send Galileo to its destruction, rather than risking a collision with Europa, which may harbor some of the ingredients necessary for life and might be contaminated if Galileo impacted it; Galileo’s mission was extended three times, with the vehicle lasting six years longer than anticipated in the original mission plan’s estimates, which included for the harsh radiation environment of Jupiter as a factor in expecting only a two-year mission.

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Doctor Who Television

Doctor Who returns

Doctor WhoWith its hand forced by a scoop in the London Daily Telegraph, the BBC confirms that plans are afoot to relaunch Doctor Who as a full television series for the first time since 1989. As the series has only just been commissioned, no casting decisions have been made yet, but the series is to be overseen by writer and producer Russell T. Davies, whose most high-profile project at the time is the gay-themed drama series Queer As Folk (though Davies also contributed a novel to the Doctor Who New Adventures book series in the late ’90s, and has been approached several times by Big Finish Productions to write a script for a Doctor Who audio story). Production won’t begin until sometime in 2004, with the series set to premiere in 2005. The BBC had planned to sit on the news until November 23rd, 2003 – the 40th anniversary of Doctor Who’s first broadcast.

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Crewed Spaceflight Shenzhou

Shenzhou 5

Shenzhou 5China becomes the third country to independently launch a crewed mission with the flight of Shenzhou 5, an orbital flight lasting almost 22 hours. Taikonaut Yang Liwei becomes the first Chinese citizen to leave Earth, though an American astronaut born in China had flown aboard space shuttle Challenger in 1985. Derived from Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft, Shenzhou 5 comes in for a rough landing, causing Liwei some minor injuries upon impact.

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Crewed Spaceflight International Space Station Soyuz

Soyuz TMA-3 / ISS Expedition 8

Soyuz TMA-3The eighth full-time crew of the International Space Station lifts off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Soyuz TMA-3. Alexander Kaleri and Michael Foale take up residence on the ISS for 194 days, both of them veterans of long-term stays aboard the Mir space station; arriving on the ISS with them for a ten-day stay is Spanish astronaut Pedro Duque, who returns to Earth aboard Soyuz TMA-2 with the Expedition 7 crew.