Year: 1964

Categories
Television

Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea: Turn Back The Clock

  • October 26, 1964

Voyage To The Bottom Of The SeaThe seventh episode of Irwin Allen’s adventure series Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea airs on ABC, starring Richard Basehart and David Hedison. Yvonne Craig (Batman) and Les Tremayne (Shazam!) guest star in an episode that reuses portions of the 1960 film The Lost World, which also featured Hedison, as a cost-cutting measure.

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Categories
Mariner Uncrewed Spaceflight

Mariner 3 goes nowhere

  • November 5, 1964

Mariner 3Though successfully launched, NASA’s Mariner 3 – one of a pair of identical robotic probes intended to become the first space probes to fly by Mars – fails to properly deploy, stranded in the nose cone of the rocket that took it into space. Unable to spread its solar panels, Mariner 3 simply never activates and is lost in space. The liftoff of its sister ship, Mariner 4, is still a few weeks away, giving engineers time to prevent the same mishap from occurring again.

Categories
Star Trek Television

Star Trek pilot filming begins

  • November 24, 1964

Star TrekAt Hollywood’s Desilu Studios, filming begins on The Cage, the unaired first attempt at a pilot episode of Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction series Star Trek. Starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike and Leonard Nimoy as the exotic-looking alien science officer Spock, filming proceeds at a brisk pace, despite numerous delays due to the show’s then-novel special effects, set and costuming requirements. Though the result is viewed enthusiastically by all involved, the completed pilot stirs little enthusiasm at the television networks. NBC thinks the series premise has promise, but that as it stands, The Cage is “too cerebral” for prime time. Ironically, exactly two years later, most of the footage from The Cage is broadcast anyway, as part of The Menagerie – a fast favorite among the viewers for whom it was deemed to be too brainy.

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Categories
Mariner Uncrewed Spaceflight

Mariner 4 to Mars

  • November 28, 1964

Mariner 4NASA attempts a second unmanned launch to Mars, successfully putting Mariner 4 on course for its nine-month cruise to the red planet. Intended to take the first-ever close-up pictures from the vicinity of another planet, Mariner 4’s main engineering objective is to simply survive the trip. The main problem encountered en route is a flaky star tracker (intended to lock onto specific stars and keep Mariner 4 in the correct orientation).

Categories
Uncrewed Spaceflight Zond

Zond 2

  • November 30, 1964

Zond 2The Soviet Union launches the unmanned space probe Zond 2, intended to conduct the first close flyby of the planet Mars. Interplanetary exploration is still in its infancy, however, and just as Zond 1 failed mere weeks away from Venus, communication is lost with Zond 2 three months prior to its planned August 1965 encounter with the red planet. A backup of this spacecraft, Zond 3, will be launched in 1965, also failing to reach Mars but instead returning photos of Earth’s moon.

Categories
Music Star Trek Television

The Sound of Star Trek

  • December 8, 1964

Star Trek musicHalfway through filming on the Star Trek pilot episode, The Cage, the attention of the show’s producers turns to the music for the pilot, and possible composers. Among the composers approached but unable to commit to Star Trek are Jerry Goldsmith (later to score 1979‘s Star Trek: The Motion Picture), John Williams (later of Star Wars and Lost In Space fame), Lalo Schifrin (Mission: Impossible), Elmer Bernstein, and Dominic Frontiere (The Outer Limits); a young composer named Alexander Courage, whose schedule is open, is considered especially promising.

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Categories
Uncrewed Spaceflight Voyager

Voyager… to Mars!

  • December 16, 1964

VoyagerFollowing up on preliminary studies assuming almost-Earthlike conditions, NASA commences work on a major robotic interplanetary landing mission called Voyager, which will use a Saturn IB rocket to send an orbiter with two landers to Mars. But NASA is doing so without much help from its usual interplanetary think-tank, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose scientists warn NASA that the latest astronomical data suggests a significantly thinner atmosphere and lower atmospheric pressure than the scenario for which NASA is designing its vehicles. As the complexity involved in creating self-guided landers with on-board laboratories increases, contractors begin to insist that only a Saturn V will do; since all Saturn V boosters are currently in reserve for Apollo lunar missions, NASA pushes the Voyager mission back into the 1970s.