Categories
Television

The Outer Limits: The Probe

The Outer LimitsABC airs the 49th and final episode of Leslie Stevens’ anthology series The Outer Limits. Though this ends the series’ run in the 1960s, The Outer Limits will be revived for a much longer run in the 1990s, which will include remakes of some original series episodes.

This series is not yet fully chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that. More about The Outer Limits in the LogBook and theLogBook.com Store
The Outer Limits now streaming on Amazon Prime

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Science & Technology Uncrewed Spaceflight Weather & Climate

TIROS-9

TIROSNASA and the United States Weather Bureau launch the ninth experimental TIROS weather satellite, TIROS-9. Heavier than any of the other TIROS experimental satellites, and with cameras mounted on opposite sides of the satellite’s cylindrical body to keep the Earth in view at all times. The result, in February, is the first-ever snapshot of the entire world’s weather patterns within a single day. TIROS-9 also carries other upgrades being considered for an upcoming fleet of full-time operational weather satellites, and remains in service for three and a half years.

Categories
Ranger Uncrewed Spaceflight

Ranger 8

RangerNASA launches the Ranger 8 lunar probe, built by Jet Propulsion Laboratory and intended to go directly to the moon, transmitting pictures of the surface back to Earth until it impacts the lunar surface. Ranger 8 functions flawlessly, sending pictures back to Earth until it slams into the Sea of Tranquility at high speed. Over 7,000 photos are returned, with the last complete picture transmitted prior to impact showing lunar surface features as small as five feet across.

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight Voskhod

Voskhod 2: the first spacewalk

Voskhod 2Voskhod 2 is launched by the Soviet Union, this time with only a two-man crew for a very specific mission. Cosmonauts Pavel Belyaev and Alexei Leonov orbit Earth for 28 hours, but during one orbit an airlock is extended from the side of their Voskhod capsule and Leonov squeezes through the airlock tunnel in a spacesuit, becoming the first human being to exit his spacecraft in flight. He spends 10 minutes walking in space, but this Soviet space first nearly ends badly; Leonov’s suit “inflates” as a result of pressurization, making it extremely difficult to enter the vehicle again (and nearly overexerting him in the process of getting back inside). A guidance system malfunction forces Belyaev to manually control the vehicle during reentry and descent, but Voskhod 2’s crew capsule lands over 700 miles away from Moscow in a remote wilderness in the dead of winter, and the cosmonauts wait hours for a recovery team to rescue them via helicopter.

Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

Categories
Ranger Uncrewed Spaceflight

Ranger 9

RangerNASA launches the Ranger 9 lunar probe, built by Jet Propulsion Laboratory and intended to go directly to the moon, transmitting pictures of the surface back to Earth until it impacts the lunar surface. Despite NASA scientists’ insistence that the last Ranger probe carry scientific instruments and not just cameras, Ranger 9 is outfitted with cameras only; as a tradeoff, scientists get to nominate its target on the surface, selecting the crater Alphonsus, suspected to be a site of lunar volcanism. Ranger 8 functions flawlessly, sending live video back to Earth until impacting in the crater floor, and for the first time the terminal descent of one of the Ranger probes is broadcast live on TV. This concludes the Ranger program, as NASA now needs to switch its efforts to the unmanned Surveyor lunar landers to find out if the moon’s surface can support the weight of a manned lander. The basic architecture of the Ranger spacecraft is adopted as the heart of the ongoing Mariner planetary space probe series, up to and including the Mariner Jupiter/Saturn ’77 missions (later renamed Voyager) over a decade later.