Year: 1973

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight Skylab

Skylab 2: risky repair job

  • June 7, 1973

SkylabTwo members of Skylab‘s first three-man crew undertake a three-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to take on the most difficult and dangerous part of the repairs to the space station: freeing a jammed solar “wing” required to provide almost half of the station’s electrical power. With no handholds and only tethers keeping them anchored to the station, astronauts Pete Conrad and Joseph Kerwin have a hard time even reaching the solar panel, and are knocked loose when, after overexerting themselves trying to manually pull the panel free, it jerks open; with only their tethers keeping them attached to Skylab, it’s a potentially life-threatening situation for both. Conrad, the third man to walk on the moon, later admits that the Skylab repair spacewalk gave him much greater concern for his own survival.

Categories
Apollo Crewed Spaceflight Skylab

Skylab 2: mission accomplished

  • June 22, 1973

SkylabHaving repaired and secured the damaged Skylab over the course of three spacewalks, the space station’s first three-man crew leaves the station and returns to Earth after 28 days in space, experiencing gravity after nearly a month of zero-G.

The first Skylab crew’s stay in space sets a new record, twice as long as the previous longest American manned spaceflight, Gemini 7 in 1965.

Categories
Video Games

Space Race

  • July 16, 1973

Gotcha!Atari releases its second arcade game: the very first video racing game, Space Race. Devised to fulfill a contractual game development obligation to rival manufacturer Bally Midway, the game is released by Midway under the title Asteroid, though Atari releases its own “clone” (of its own game) under the title Space Race on this date.

More about Space Race in Phosphor Dot Fossils

Categories
Apollo Crewed Spaceflight Skylab

Skylab 3

  • July 28, 1973

Skylab 3With the first Skylab crew having salvaged the first American space station, the second crew – designated Skylab 3 – lifts off for another long-term stay in space. Alan Bean, Jack Lousma and Owen Garriott spend 59 days aboard Skylab, performing a spacewalk to conduct further repairs to their damaged space station, investigating the effects of long-duration weightlessness and space travel on the human body, and observing the sun through Skylab’s solar telescope system. A thruster leak in the Apollo command/service module forces NASA to consider a rescue mission.

Categories
Computers

Community Memory

  • August 8, 1973

Community MemoryEarly networked computing pioneers Lee Felsenstein, Efrem Lipkin and Mark Szpakowski open the first public Community Memory terminal at Leopold’s Records in Berkeley, California. With read-only access for free (and a 25-cent charge to add information to the database, which is maintained on a SDS 940 mainframe at TransAmerica Corporation and accessed via 110 baud acoustic modem), the intention is to computerize the popular push-pin-powered public notice board. Other terminals are eventually made available at various locations, but the SDS 940 proves to be inadequate, and this first iteration of the Community Memory Project will eventually be deactivated in January 1975. Some computer historians regard this as the first computer bulletin board system, although it was accessible only by being physically present at one of the provided nodes. The first dial-up BBS will not appear until 1978.

Categories
Apollo Crewed Spaceflight Skylab

Skylab rescue mission prepared

  • August 14, 1973

Skylab Rescue at KSCA thruster leak in the Skylab 3 crew’s Apollo command/service module forces NASA to consider a Skylab Rescue mission using a modified five-seater Apollo vehicle, mounted atop a Saturn IB and rolled out to the pad in readiness for the emergency flight. NASA brings in enough engineers and employees to have shifts working around the clock, seven days a week, to get the emergency mission ready for launch on September 9th. The thruster issue is later resolved, and the first-ever planned space rescue mission stands down. Astronauts Vance Brand and Don Lind are assigned to the rescue mission; both men later flew the Space Shuttle, though Brand will also fly in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The modified command/service module and Saturn rocket are retained in case a rescue is needed for the final Skylab flight, and then as an Apollo-Soyuz backup vehicle, before being retired and displayed at the Smithsonian and Kennedy Space Center.

Categories
Science & Technology

WABOT-1

  • September 5, 1973

WABOT-1At Tokyo’s Waseda University, robotics pioneer Professor Ichiro Kato and his team unveil the first full-size humanoid robot, WABOT-1. Capable of hearing and responding in speech, grasping objects, using artificial eyes to measure distances to objects, and rudimentary walking movement, WABOT-1 is the culmination of designs laid out as early as 1967 and construction and testing begun in 1970. Its creators estimate that it had the mental abilities of an 18-month-old child. (It is still intact and on display at Waseda University.)

Categories
Star Trek Television

The U.S.S. Enterprise gets a toon-up

  • September 8, 1973

Star TrekAfter years of denying that Star Trek had ever been a “kids show” like its prime-time rival Lost In Space, Gene Roddenberry agrees to NBC’s offer to restart the science fiction cult classic as an animated series, premiering on the seventh anniversary of the live-action show’s debut with the episode Beyond The Farthest Star. In the end, this series becomes the only iteration of the Star Trek franchise to win an Emmy Award for a non-technical (i.e. music, hairstyling, special effects) category.

More about Star Trek in the LogBook

Categories
Television

The Evil Touch: The Lake

  • September 16, 1973

The Evil TouchThe first episode of the horror anthology series The Evil Touch premieres on Australia’s Nine Network, hosted by Anthony Quayle (Strange Report). (The series will later appear in the U.S. and elsewhere in first-run syndication.) Robert Lansing guest stars.

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Categories
Television

The Starlost: Voyage Of Discovery

  • September 22, 1973

The StarlostAfter months of preparation and contentious saber-rattling by series creator Harlan Ellison, who demands to have his name replaced with a pseudonym after quitting the series he devised, The Starlost premieres in Canada and the United States with the episode Voyage Of Discovery, showcasing an intriguing (but ultimately under-utilized) series premise with a shockingly low-budget, shot-on-video look. It’s the first science fiction series produced in Canada with the intention of broadcast in the United States, which would become a common practice in the 21st century. It runs for only a single, truncated season, and for many years is much-maligned as “the worst TV sci-fi series ever”; Ellison’s complaints about the treatment of his own creation in the years to come does little to dispel this opinion.

More about The Starlost in the LogBook

Categories
Television

The Evil Touch: Heart To Heart

  • September 23, 1973

The Evil TouchThe second episode of the horror anthology series The Evil Touch airs on Australia’s Nine Network, hosted by Anthony Quayle (Strange Report). (The series will later appear in the U.S. and elsewhere in first-run syndication.) Mildred Natwick (Dangerous Liaisons) guest stars in an episode written by Sylvester Stallone.

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