The first government contract is issued in the Apollo lunar landing program, as MIT lands the contract to develop the guidance and navigation computer at the heart of the Apollo vehicles. For its day, MIT designed one of the most robust computers that early ’60s technology could squeeze into such a small space; modern digital watches are far more powerful than that computer. The same computer system will be installed in both the command module and the lunar module.
ITV airs the 30th episode of Ace Of Wands, starring Michael MacKenzie, Petra Markham, and Roy Holder. Donald Layne-Smith guest stars as Mr. Sweet. 
The Soviet Union launches the robotic lunar lander and sample return mission, Luna 24. Touching down safely in the Mare Crisium region two weeks after its launch, Luna 24 drills a two-meter core sample of lunar soil for return to Earth in a small reentry capsule. Luna 24 is the final Soviet mission to the moon, and is the last vehicle from Earth to land on the moon in the 20th century. NASA and the Soviet space agency exchange samples of lunar soil later in 1976, since Luna 24 landed in a region unexplored by the Apollo manned landing missions.
Mere weeks before the launch of the first Voyager spacecraft, NASA swaps Voyager 2 and Voyager 1. Repeated failures have plagued the attitude and articulation control and flight data subsystems in the spacecraft designated VGR77-2, leaving mission planners with doubt about its flightworthiness. VGR77-3 thus becomes Voyager 2, and VGR77-2 undergoes repairs to correct its problems before being designated Voyager 1. The two vehicles’ thermonuclear power sources are swapped, as whichever one is Voyager 2 will require a longer-lasting power source to power all instruments for possible visits to Uranus and Neptune following the 1981 Saturn encounter. (A third vehicle, VGR77-1, is an engineering test spare which eventually goes on display at the JPL campus in Pasadena.)
ITV airs the tenth episode of P.J. Hammond’s science fiction series Sapphire & Steel, starring David McCallum and Joanna Lumley. ITV is hit by a strike of its technicians’ union after this episode airs, shutting down the entire network well into the fall. The first four episodes of the series’ second storyline are repeated beginning in October, leading up to the series resuming new episodes.
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ITV airs the 26th episode of Roald Dahl’s anthology series Tales Of The Unexpected, hosted by the author himself and adapted from his short stories. This episode opens the third season, the first season in which adaptations of Dahl’s short stories are in the minority, with more original scripts and adaptations of works by other writers.
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ITV premieres the 11th episode of the sitcom Astronauts, concerning a fictional British space station crew aboard Skylab.
James Cameron’s undersea modern-day science fiction film The Abyss premieres, starring Ed Harris (The Right Stuff), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn. The movie features some of the earliest examples of photorealistic CGI on film, but the extensive underwater photography was carried out with no small amount of risk to the cast.
The 118th episode of Stargate SG-1 airs on the Sci-Fi Channel, starring Richard Dean Anderson, Amanda Tapping, Christopher Judge, and Corin Nemec.
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8-Bit Weapon releases the album Confidential at the 2003 Classic Gaming Expo.
The 11th episode of the science fiction sitcom Hyperdrive premieres on BBC2, starring Nick Frost, Miranda Hart and Kevin Eldon.
Actor Barry Jenner, a fixture on American TV since the 1970s, dies at the age of 75. Among the many series in which he played recurring roles (among them Dallas, Knots Landing and Family Matters), genre fans remember him best for the role of Admiral Ross, to whom Captain Sisko reported in the final two seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He also appeared in such genre series as V and Starman.
theLogBook.com releases the eighth episode of the Retrogram podcast, hosted by Earl Green, covering the following shows from the week of July 10th, 1988: