Day: July 17, 1965

Categories
Surveyor Uncrewed Spaceflight

Surveyor 4 doesn’t land on the moon

  • July 17, 1967

SurveyorFor the second time, one of NASA’s robotic Surveyor space probes fails to make it to the moon intact. Launched three days before, Surveyor 4 – which is, coincidentally, targeted to land in roughly the same area that previous lander Surveyor 2 failed to reach – is mere minutes from the lunar surface when contact is lost. There is no means of determining what has caused the failure, though the most likely hypothesis is an explosion of the solid fuel rockets intended to slow Surveyor 4’s descent prior to landing.

Categories
Apollo-Soyuz Crewed Spaceflight

Apollo-Soyuz: thawing the Cold War in orbit

  • July 17, 1975

Apollo-SoyuzThe last Apollo spacecraft to fly makes history by docking with a Soviet-launched Soyuz spacecraft in orbit, allowing the crews to visit each other and conduct joint scientific experiments. The first docking of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project is hailed as a major development in international relations as well as spaceflight, though it will be 20 years before the feat is repeated. Plans for a second Apollo-Soyuz flight the following year are scuttled due to budget concerns, and the need to commence work on converting NASA’s launch facilities for future shuttle launches rather than further Apollo launches.

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight Salyut Soyuz

Soyuz T-12

  • July 17, 1984

Soyuz T-12The Soviet Union launches Soyuz T-12 on a mission to space station Salyut 7. Cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov, Svetlana Savitskaya and Igor Volk visit the station crew and test new equipment during a three-hour spacewalk. Savitskaya becomes the first woman to fly in space twice as well as the first female spacewalker, an assignment that seems to have been devised purely for the political purpose of beating NASA to that first (the American space agency having announced in 1983 that an upcoming shuttle mission would feature a female spacewalker). Volk’s presence aboard the mission ensures that he has spaceflight experience ahead of his next mission, believed to be the first manned flight of the Soviet Buran shuttle. The Soyuz T-12 crew is in space for almost 12 days, returning to Earth on July 29th.

Categories
Franchises Television Twilight Zone

Twilight Zone: Episode 35

  • July 17, 1987

The Twilight ZoneCBS airs the 35th episode of a revival of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Jennifer Rubin and James Whitmore Jr. (Baa Baa Black Sheep) star in an episode comprised of two short stories, Song Of The Younger World and The Girl I Married. Though the series ends its run on CBS’ prime time schedule at this point, CBS spends over a year retooling the series and moving its production base to Canada to produce a further 30 episodes to air in first-run syndication, bolstering the show’s episode count and its future prospects as a syndicated show.

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Categories
Star Trek Television

Star Trek: TNG: Shades Of Gray

  • July 17, 1989

Star Trek: The Next GenerationThe week-long national syndication window opens for the 47th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Billed as “something Star Trek has never done before” in advance publicity, the second season finale is a clip show made up primarily of “memories” from older episodes – one last blow to the series from the 1988 Writers’ Guild strike. This marks the final appearance of Diana Muldaur as Dr. Katherine Pulaski, as well as the unforgiving (and apparently spine-damaging) uniforms from the first two seasons. This is also the last episode to feature Maurice Hurley as executive producer; he hands the reins over to new executive producer Michael Piller for the third season.

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