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Uncrewed Spaceflight Viking

Viking 2 lands on Mars

MarsNASA’s Viking 2 lander, launched from Earth almost exactly a year earlier touches down on Martian soil in the Utopia Planitia region. One of Viking 2’s three landing legs comes down on a rock, leaving the entire lander at an eight-degree angle to the ground. Identical to Viking 1, Viking 2 has its own soil sampling arm, though its series of tests for biological reactions within the soil produce inconclusive results (including at least one “positive” test for signs of life, later attributed to inorganic chemical reactions). Viking 2 will also later confirm that water exists, at least briefly, on the surface of Mars in the form of frost.

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Video Games

Warner Communications buys Atari

AtariForking over approximately $28,000,000 for the privelege of becoming a player in the video game industry, Warner Communication buys Atari, which had previously been privately owned by Nolan Bushnell and other investors. Though Bushnell remains on Atari’s board for a time, he is eventually removed and replaced by former Burlington Textiles vice president Ray Kassar. At this point, Atari’s most recent product is Atari Video Music, a device that connects to home stereo systems and television sets, producing psychedelic patterns synchronized to music; the company is spending the latter half of 1976 not releasing video game products in an attempt to sit out terms of a legal settlement with Magnavox.

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Television

Monster Squad: Queen Bee

Monster SquadNBC premieres the first episode of Monster Squad, a live-action Saturday morning comedy series imagining Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman as a crime-fighting team led by Walter (Fred Grandy, a year before he would set sail on The Love Boat). (Though similar in concept, the series is unrelated to the late theatrical movie of the same name.)

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Crewed Spaceflight Soyuz

Soyuz 22

generic Soyuz image - no mission-specific photos availableThe Soviet Union launches Soyuz 22, a vehicle originally built as a backup for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Unusually, the vehicle does not dock at the recently-launched Salyut 5 space station, but is instead placed in an unusual orbit that happens to make it easy to monitor a major NATO exercise near Norway. Cosmonauts Valery Bykovsky and Vladimir Aksyonov remain in that orbit for nearly eight days before returning to Earth.

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Crewed Spaceflight Enterprise Space Shuttle

Enterprise leaves drydock

EnterpriseOn schedule, the Space Shuttle Enterprise is rolled out of the Rockwell International plant in Palmdale, California to much public fanfare, a ceremony including Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and most of the cast who played the crew of the Enterprise’s fictional namesake (William Shatner was conspicuously absent). The timing of the rollout, ironically, was intended to roll the test shuttle – originally named Constitution – out of the hangar on Constitution Day during the bicentennial year.

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Movies Star Trek Television

First Star Trek movie announced

Star TrekHaving tried to find a suitable script for a big-screen relaunch of Star Trek virtually since the cancellation of the television series, Paramount – riding the coattails of the much-publicized unveiling of the Space Shuttle Enterprise – issues a press release announcing that the first Trek movie is finally underway – in this case, a still-in-development script called Star Trek: Planet Of Titans, featuring a radically redesigned Enterprise concept by illustrator Ralph McQuarrie, whose other recent genre work – designs for the yet-to-be-released Star Wars – has yet to make him a household name.

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Television

Six Million Dollar Man: The Return Of Bigfoot Part 1

Six Million Dollar ManThe 58th episode of The Six Million Dollar Man is broadcast on ABC, starring Lee Majors and Richard Anderson. Lindsay Wagner, John Saxon, Sandy Duncan, Stefanie Powers, and Ted Cassidy guest star in the fourth season prmiere, whose story will be concluded on The Bionic Woman.

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Television

The Bionic Woman: The Return Of Bigfoot Part 2

The Bionic WomanThe 15th episode of The Bionic Woman, starring Lindsay Wagner and Richard Anderson, airs on ABC. Lee Majors and Martin E. Brooks appear as their characters from The Six Million Dollar Man in the second season premiere, which is also a heavily promoted crossover event, part one of which was the season premiere of The Six Million Dollar Man. John Saxon, Ted Cassidy, Sandy Duncan, and Stefanie Powers guest star.

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