Day: January 15, 1960

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Television

13 Demon Street: Murder In The Mirror

  • January 15, 1960

13 Demon StreetThe 12th episode of the syndicated horror anthology series 13 Demon Street airs on stations across the U.S., hosted by Lon Chaney Jr. (The Wolf Man), and created (and frequently written and directed) by Curt Siodmak.

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Television

Pathfinders To Mars: Falling Into The Sun

  • January 15, 1961

Pathfinders To MarsBritish broadcaster ABC airs the sixth episode of Pathfinders To Mars, a follow-up series to Pathfinders In Space, produced by future Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman. George Colouris and Gerald Flood (City Beneath The Sea) star; the script is written by Malcolm Hulke (Doctor Who) and Eric Paice (Star Maidens). Though the original master tape of this episode was later wiped for reuse, film recordings of all six episodes would be recovered and released on DVD in the 21st century. This concludes the Pathfinders To Mars storyline; a further (and final) follow-up, Pathfinders To Venus, will premiere in March.

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Categories
Odyssey Video Games

The ‘480 Patent

  • January 15, 1968

Ralph BaerRalph Baer files the first patent for his Television Gaming & Training Apparatus, United States patent #3,728,480. The patent is assigned to Baer’s employer, government contractor Sanders Associates, and is the first patent filed for the design of a video game. Though Baer will eventually build, and sell the design for, the first home video game, the real reward to be reaped from this patent will be licensing: every company manufacturing a video game console will have to pay Sanders and Baer for the privelege of expanding upon this basic patent, and it stands up in numerous court cases well into the 1980s as the “pioneer patent of the video game industry.”

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight Soyuz

Soyuz 5: almost another space disaster

  • January 15, 1969

Soyuz 5The Soviet Union launches a three-man crew aboard Soyuz 5, which docks in orbit with the already-launched Soyuz 4 – the first two crewed spacecraft to accomplish this feat. The Soyuz 5 crew consists of cosmonauts Boris Volynov, Alexei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov, but only Volynov makes the return journey aboard Soyuz 5, as his crewmates board Soyuz 4 via spacewalk. It’s probably just as well for them: after three days in orbit, Soyuz 5 begins its descent to Earth, but the failure of explosive bolts meant to separate the re-entry capsule from the rest of the vehicle fail. To maintain some semblence of a survivable aerodynamic profile, Volynov flies Soyuz 5 in nose-first – one of the riskiest re-entries in the history of human spaceflight, since the nose of the capsule is not covered by any heat shielding. The vehicle separates just before the stress of re-entry would have destroyed it, but then its parachutes fail to completely deploy, resulting in a punishingly jarring but non-fatal landing, hard enough to break Volynov’s teeth.

Similar malfunctions will plague a pair of Soyuz vehicles returning from the International Space Station in 2007. Soyuz 5 is the final crewed Soviet flight prior to the moon landing.

Categories
Television

The Martian Chronicles: The Expeditions

  • January 15, 1980

The Martian ChroniclesNBC airs the first installment of the lavish three-part miniseries based on Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Adapted for TV by respected SF author Richard Matheson, the miniseries has already taken an embarrassing public beating by none other than Bradbury itself, inspiring NBC to yank the heavily-publicized off of the fall 1979 schedule and burn off the miniseries in January 1980 prior to the 1980 Winter Oympics. Rock Hudson, Bernie Casey, and Robert Beatty star. The miniseries is a co-production between NBC and the BBC (who won’t air it until later in 1980).

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Television

Darkroom: Episode 7

  • January 15, 1982

DarkroomNBC airs the seventh and final episode of Darkroom, a horror anthology hosted by James Coburn. This installment includes the stories Exit Line (written by the future creators of Murder, She Wrote), Who’s There?, guest starring Grant Goodeve (Eight Is Enough), and The Rarest Of Wines.

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Categories
Magellan Uncrewed Spaceflight

Magellan: mapping Venus in stereo

  • January 15, 1992

VenusThe third phase of data gathering begins for NASA’s Magellan unmanned space probe, launched via space shuttle in 1989 and currently orbiting the heavily-clouded planet Venus. Using radar to peer through the planet’s dense clouds, Magellan has now mapped 96% of the planet’s surface, and will now spend much of the remainder of 1992 filling in details in regions it has missed, as well as re-scanning some regions of Venus stereoscopically, allowing for three-dimensional terrain reconstruction.

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Doctor Who Lost Episodes Television

Long-lost Doctor Who episode recovered

  • January 15, 2004

Doctor WhoThe BBC announces that a private collector has returned part two of the mostly-missing twelve-part Doctor Who story, The Daleks’ Master Plan, to its archives. Last seen in late 1965, the episode has been in the possession of the former chief engineer of the competing Yorkshire Television network ever since the early ’70s – when he snatched it from the BBC archives (where he was a trainee at the time) rather than destroying it as ordered. The 25-minute episode, subtitled Day Of Armageddon, is handed over to the Doctor Who Restoration Team, which oversees the preservation and restoration of past episodes for DVD release.

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Stardust Uncrewed Spaceflight

Stardust comes home

  • January 15, 2006

StardustNASA’s unmanned Stardust space probe successfully returns its samples of comet and interstellar dust to Earth. A few minutes after 5:00am Eastern time, the Stardust sample return capsule makes a soft landing in Utah, its record-setting 29,000mph return to Earth slowed by a series of parachutes. (Before Stardust’s return, the fastest vehicle to enter Earth’s atmosphere was the capsule bringing home the crew of Apollo 10 in May 1969.) It is hoped that analysis of the tiny particles captured in cakes of a special porous material called aerogel will shed some light on the origins of the solar system. The “mother ship” portion of the Stardust probe is left on a course that will put it into a permanent orbit around the sun. Stardust was launched in February 1999, and gathered its samples from the cloud of gas and dust surrounding Comet Wild-2 in January 2004, zipping through the comet’s coma at 13,000mph.