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Pioneer Uncrewed Spaceflight

Pioneer 10 launched

Pioneer 10NASA launches Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft sent to study the huge planet Jupiter at close range. Its Atlas-Centaur booster gives it a good head start, propelling it to over 32,000 miles per hour en route to Jupiter, the fastest man-made object in history at this point. Pioneer 10 is also the first man-made vehicle to traverse the asteroid belt, with instruments detecting fewer large particles than anticipated. It will reach Jupiter in late 1973.

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Categories
Crewed Spaceflight Space Shuttle

Solid rocket boosters picked for shuttle

Shuttle on a Saturn VAfter a five-month design study focusing on alternatives to a winged (and manned) reusable first stage bosoter for the upcoming Space Shuttle, NASA settles on a configuration consisting of two solid rocket boosters strapped to the shuttle’s external fuel tank. Among the alternatives considered was the possibility of restarting production of the Saturn V rockets that launched Apollo and Skylab missions, with the shuttle and its fuel tank separating from the Saturn V’s first stage at high altitude (though in this configuration, a failure of the shuttle’s main engines would prove to be catastrophic). The SRB/tank configuration is expected to shave half a billion dollars off of the shuttle’s development costs.

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Television

Ghost Story: The New House

Ghost StoryNBC airs the pilot episode of the supernatural anthology series Ghost Story, produced by 1960s horror movie mogul William Castle and starring Sebastian Cabot. Jeanette Nolan and Sam Jaffe guest star in a script by Richard Matheson (Twilight Zone, The Omega Man). The pilot gets enough attention for production to be greenlit on a series to premiere in the fall of 1972. (This series will be retitled Circle Of Fear in 1973.)

More about Ghost Story and Circle Of Fear in the LogBook
Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

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Television

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: Satisfaction Guaranteed

Night GalleryNBC airs the 29th episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, an anthology series of original short plays and short story adaptations hosted by Serling himself. Victor Buono (Batman) guest stars in the second season closer, and the first instance of a Night Gallery episode telling a single story in a half-hour time slot, which will become the show’s new format in its third season.

More about Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in the LogBook

Categories
Apollo Crewed Spaceflight

Apollo 16

Apollo 16NASA launches the Apollo 16 mission to the moon, lasting 11 days total. Astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke descend to the lunar surface in the lander Orion, while Ken Mattingly pilots the command/service module Casper in orbit. Again, a lunar rover is tucked into one side of the lunar module, allowing Young and Duke to reach distances of 16 miles from their landing site. They spend a total of 20 hours walking on the moon’s surface, collecting over 200 pounds of soil and rock samples from the Descartes highlands region.

This mission is dramatized in the Original Wives’ Club episode of HBO’s 1998 series From The Earth To The Moon.

Categories
Science & Technology Weather & Climate

Tornado Intercept Project

Weather BulletinStudents and seasoned weather researchers at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma embark on the Tornado Intercept Project (TIP), a concerted effort to gather film footage of developing or active tornadoes in an effort to study wind and debris patterns. Though believed by some to be of limited scientific value, TIP is the beginning of “storm chasing” and yields major breakthroughs in scientific understanding of the formation of tornadoes just one year later.

Categories
Television

Escape Into Night: Episode 1

Escape Into NightITV premieres the first episode of Escape Into Night, adapted by Ruth Boswell from the Catherine Storr novel Marianne Dreams. Though originally shown in color, the color master tapes are lost over time, and the series survives only in black & white recordings originally made to sell to foreign markets. It is these recordings that will eventually get a DVD release in the 21st century.

This series is not yet fully chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

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Television

Escape Into Night: Episode 2

Escape Into NightITV broadcasts the second episode of Escape Into Night, adapted by Ruth Boswell from the Catherine Storr novel Marianne Dreams. Though originally shown in color, the color master tapes are lost over time, and the series survives only in black & white recordings.

This series is not yet fully chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Categories
Television

Escape Into Night: Episode 3

Escape Into NightITV broadcasts the third episode of Escape Into Night, adapted by Ruth Boswell from the Catherine Storr novel Marianne Dreams. Originally shown in color, the color master tapes are lost over time, and the series survives only in black & white recordings.

This series is not yet fully chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.