Day: August 7, 1959

Explorer 6

Explorer 6NASA launches the Earth-orbiting satellite Explorer 6 atop a Thor-Able rocket, intended to study various space and upper atmospheric phenomena, as well as to take photos of Earth with an experimental camera system designed to refine engineering concepts for monitoring weather from orbit. Explorer 6 does indeed capture the first (admittedly less than ideal) photo of Earth taken from orbit, from a vantage point of 17,000 miles above Mexico in its elliptical orbit. Explorer 6 will remain in orbit for just under two years.

Zond 7

Zond 7The Soviet Union launches the Zond 7 unmanned spacecraft, an unmanned version of the Soyuz 7K-L1 space vehicle intended to take cosmonauts around the moon. Carrying no crew, this vehicle takes pictures and tests various spacecraft systems without risking human lives. Zond 7 returns to Earth using an unusual multiple-skip atmospheric re-entry profile on August 14th. If Zond 7 had been carrying a crew, this would have been the first nominal flight of the Soyuz 7K-L1 vehicle. No cosmonaut crews would reach the moon prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 20th century.

1988 Writers’ Guild strike ends

TVThe five-month-long strike of unionized Hollywood writers comes to an end, allowing numerous television series and movies to go back into pre-production. With the American television network schedule introducing new shows as early as September in many cases, the “new fall season” does not begin on time, and most series do not have new episodes on the air until the critical Nielsen TV ratings sweeps month of November.

Magellan arrives at Venus

MagellanLaunched via space shuttle in May 1989, the long-delayed Magellan space probe reaches the planet Venus after an unusually long voyage (15 months) and begins an orbital insertion maneuver. Where most missions to Venus have reached the planet in only a few months, Magellan has had to make do without the more powerful Centaur liquid-fueled booster stage, resulting in a journey of a year and three months. (The Centaur upper stage had been cancelled after the Challenger disaster because it was felt that carrying an additional liquid-fueled rocket in a shuttle cargo bay was too risky.) Magellan is placed into an elliptical orbit, completely circling Venus every three hours, where it will conduct high-resolution radar mapping of the surface at the closest point in its orbit, and transmitting the resulting data to Earth while furthest from Venus. The first phase of the mapping mission will last through 1991.

STS-85

Space ShuttleNASA launches Space Shuttle Discovery on the 86th shuttle flight, a 12-day mission to deploy a spectroscopy experiment and practice spacewalking construction techniques vital to the upcoming early missions to build the International Space Station. Aboard Discovery for her 23rd flight are Commander Curtis Brown, Pilot Kent Rominger, mission specialists Jan Davis, Robert Curbeam and Stephen Robinson, and payload specialist Bjarni Tryggvason.

Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem figure set

Doctor Who: The Sontaran Stratagem SetBritish toymaker Character Options releases a boxed set of action figures based on characters from the Doctor Who episodes The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky. These are the first Sontaran action figures since one of the last waves of Dapol action figures in the late 1990s. Read more

Jim Lovell, Apollo astronaut, dies

Jim LovellFormer test pilot, Gemini and Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell dies at the age of 97. A U.S. Navy pilot, Lovell had applied to join NASA during the agency’s initial search for the Mercury astronauts, but was sidelined from selection due to medical test results, only to be brought into the space program when new astronauts were recruited for the Gemini program. Lovell was the pilot of Gemini 7 (the first long-duration space mission, lasting two weeks), and commanded Gemini 12, the final flight of that program. On Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to orbit the moon, Lovell served as command module pilot, and was originally scheduled to command Apollo 14. A change in flight rotation moved Lovell and his crew up to Apollo 13. Faulty wiring in an oxygen tank caused an explosion in the command module, venting much of the vehicle’s oxygen supply into space and causing the cancellation of the intended third moon landing in favor of preserving resources to attempt to bring the crew home safely. After the harrowing journey, Lovell retired from NASA, and later co-wrote (with Jeffrey Kluger) the memoir Lost Moon, which was then optioned as the basis of the Ron Howard movie Apollo 13.