The 71st episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. This is part four of the story now collectively known as The Space Museum. Peter Craze and Jeremy Bulloch guest star.
This timeline entry leads to an entry covering this entire Doctor Who serial; there are plans to write new episodic entries in the future. You can support this effort!
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The 72nd episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. This is part one of the story now collectively known as
The second manned Gemini flight, Gemini 4, lifts off with Jim McDivitt and Ed White aboard for a four-day mission. Four hours into the flight, White becomes the first American spacewalker, controlling his movement with a handheld device with small jets allowing him to change his own orientation, though he is tethered to the Gemini capsule at all times. This is the first NASA flight overseen from the new Manned Space Center constructed in Houston, Texas, and the first to be broadcast live worldwide.
It’s not easy to reach the moon. Just a month after the failed flight of Luna 5, the Soviet Union launches the near-identical unmanned spacecraft Luna 6 to the moon. A pre-programmed mid-course correction engine burn, meant to help Luna 6 coast toward a soft landing on the lunar surface, instead overcorrects. The engine fails to acknowledge a command to stop firing, pushing Luna 6 so far off course that it misses the moon by almost 100,000 miles, dumping the vehicle in an orbit around the sun.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation airs the seventh episode of the science fiction series The Stranger, starring Ron Haddrick. This episode marks the beginning of the series’ second season.
NASA and the United States Weather Bureau launch the tenth and final experimental TIROS weather satellite, TIROS-10. Continuing to test technological upgrades for a fully-functional weather satellite fleet, TIROS-10 also provides additional coverage during hurricane seasons, and remains operational for exactly two years, at which point NASA begins a planned shutdown and phase-out of the experimental TIROS satellites in favor of the Nimbus and ESSA weather satellites.
The 78th episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. This is part one of the story now collectively known as
As part of a reorganization of agencies within the U.S. government in 1965, the country’s Weather Bureau becomes part of ESSA, the Environmental Science Services Administration, and is placed under the Department of Commerce. All weather prediction and analysis is now under the jurisdiction of ESSA, including a growing fleet of weather satellites operated jointly by ESSA and NASA. The agency will be renamed the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration in
Mariner 4 successfully passes by Mars at a distance of just over 6,000 miles, and transmits the first direct measurements of the Martian environment to Earth, along with the first pictures ever taken of another planet from a nearby spacecraft. Mariner 4’s onboard instruments detect a thin atmosphere – thin enough that any future landing attempts will need to descend on retro rockets, but thick enough that a heat shield is still necessary. These findings have a ripple effect on
The Soviet Union launches Zond 3, an unmanned spacecraft nearly identical to the failed Mars-bound space probe Zond 2, on a trajectory that will swing past the moon on its way to interplanetary space. It would make its closest flyby to the moon on July 20th, 1965, four years to the day prior to the first manned lunar landing, taking photos of the far side of the moon as it heads into deep space. Zond 3 proceeds on a trajectory toward the orbit of Mars, even though it will be too far away from the planet to study it.
Filming begins on a nearly-unprecedented second pilot episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek at the request of NBC, which saw promise (but not enough action) in The Cage. When Jeffrey Hunter declines to return to the role of Captain Christopher Pike, the character is renamed (Captain James R. Kirk) and recast (in the person of well-regarded Canadian actor William Shatner). The first edit of the new episode,
Gemini 5 lifts off on the first manned spaceflight to last over a week, breaking the previous record held by the Soviet crew of Vostok 5; the eight-day flight is crucial in proving that humans could function for the minimum amount of time that a flight to the moon and back again would take. Instead of short-lived batteries, Gemini 5 is the first American spacecraft powered by fuel cells, another important step toward longer flights to the moon. The crew consists of Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad.
The feature film
The 82nd episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. This is part one of the story now collectively known as
Toho releases
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