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Star Trek Television

The Enterprise runs aground

Star TrekNBC announces that it is dropping Star Trek from the fall 1969 network schedule. Having taken the show’s Friday night “death slot” as a sign of things to come, Gene Roddenberry has already begun seeking greener pastures, leaving the day-to-day showrunner duties to Fred Freiberger. Roddenberry also has no plans to manipulate fan protests against the cancellation this time (as he had done in 1967 and 1968); some NBC publicity and promotions executives are surprised when the seemingly inevitable backlash fails to materialize.

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Uncrewed Spaceflight Zond

N1 Flight #1

N1The gigantic Soviet-made N1 rocket, Sergei Korolev’s answer to the American Saturn V launcher, lifts off for the first time with an unmanned Zond spacecraft intended for a lunar flyby. Barely 70 seconds after leaving the pad, the N1 explodes at an altitude of seven miles, but the Zond space probe is salvaged by its escape tower rockets. The Soviet Union is no closer to safely sending a crew of cosmonauts to the moon.

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Mariner Uncrewed Spaceflight

Mariner 6 launched

Mariner 6NASA and JPL launch the unmanned Mariner 6 space probe on a mission to Mars, where it will be joined by its yet-to-be-launched identical twin, Mariner 7. Mariner 6 will take five months to reach the red planet, with its slightly faster sister ship mere days behind it, and will fly past Mars twice as close as the planet’s previous unmanned visitors.

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Science & Technology Uncrewed Spaceflight Weather & Climate

ESSA-9

ESSAThe recently-rechristened Environmental Sciences Service Administration launches, with the help of NASA, ESSA-9, the latest in a constellation of weather satellites. ESSA-9 is the last weather satellite to carry the ESSA designation, as the government reorganizes ESSA into a new agency, NOAA, the following year. ESSA-9 remains in service until 1972.