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Television

The Quatermess Experiment: Persons Reported Missing

The Quatermass ExperimentThe BBC airs the second episode of Nigel Kneale’s trend-setting science fiction series The Quatermass Experiment, starring Reginald Tate as Prof. Bernard Quatermass. Broadcast as a live play with minimal footage from other sources played back during air, this is one of the earliest BBC drama productions archived on film, though BBC technicians opt not to preserve any further episodes of this series.

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Uncrewed Spaceflight Viking

Viking 2 orbiter shutdown

VikingLess than two years after arriving at Mars, the “mothership” orbiter that delivered the Viking 2 lander to the red planet is permanently shut down. Having lost most of its fuel to a leak, the Viking 2 orbiter can no longer be commanded to change orbit, and is placed in a parking orbit. Without an orbiter to relay its findings to, Viking 2 continues operating on the surface of Mars for two more years, sending data directly to Earth at a lower bit rate.

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Deaths Matters of Life & Death

David Jackson, Blake’s 7 actor, dies

David Jackson as GanBritish actor and music hall performer David Jackson, best known to genre fans as Gan from Blake’s 7, dies of a heart attack at the age of 71. A veteran of the stage, film and many TV appearances (including two heavily-costumed roles in Space: 1999), he played the role of Gan for the first two seasons of Terry Nation’s space epic, only relinquishing the role when Nation decided that one of the characters needed to be killed off to lend the series some gritty reality. He was also an expert on Victorian theater and created a one-man stage show recreating the atmosphere of the Victorian music hall. He continued to appear at science fiction conventions and reunions of the Blake’s 7 cast as recently as 2004.

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Deaths Matters of Life & Death

John Saxon, actor, dies

John Saxon in Planet EarthActor John Saxon, a frequent guest star in American TV and movies from the 1960s through the ’90s (and still actively working well into the 2010s), dies at the age of 83. He began appearing in movies in his late teens in the early 1950s, but became a frequent flyer on the small screen, with guest roles in such genre fare as The Time Tunnel, The Sixth Sense, Night Gallery, The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, The Fantastic Journey, Ray Bradbury Theater, and Masters Of Horror, with movie roles in Battle Beyond The Stars and the A Nightmare On Elm Street Series. In the early ’70s, he starred in two iterations of a Gene Roddenberry series pilot, Planet Earth and Strange New World, neither of which went to series.