After two years of hammering out details and wording, President Nixon and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin sign an international agreement to share science and technology between the United States and Soviet Union, including an agreement to mount a joint space mission culminating in the docking of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit in 1975. Both nations’ space agencies begin crew selection and technical preparations for a joint venture that seemed impossible during the Cold War-fueled race to the moon.
ITV broadcasts the sixth and final 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. It is those recordings that will allow the series to resurface on DVD in the 21st century.
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BBC1 airs the 27th episode of Doomwatch, opening the show’s third season and adding new cast member Elizabeth Weaver. This episode, featuring Jonathan Pryce in a minor guest-starring role, no longer exists in the BBC’s archives.
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With planning already well underway for the Apollo-Soyuz mission which won’t take place until 
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In Santa Clara, California, Atari is formed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. The company is initially part of Bushnell’s desire to continue competing in the coin-operated game market, where he believes video games can take part of the market share from pinball, but consumer products are not far from Bushnell’s mind either: two weeks before Atari’s incorporation, he attends a Magnavox product fair and gets a first-hand look at the first home video game console.
The fourth Planet Of The Apes film, 
Space shuttle contractor North American Rockwell submits a safety study to NASA concerning safety and escape systems for the upcoming space shuttle, including a study of smaller vehicles with potential use as “lifeboats” in the event that a shuttle is unfit for return to Earth due to heat shield or other catastrophic damage. The various proposals, which include the possibility of permanently berthing an Apollo command module (another vehicle contracted to North American Rockwell) in the shuttle’s cargo bay for use as a lifeboat, are rejected by NASA due to the impact that each proposal would have on available space and weight for cargo.
En route to becoming the first human-made spacecraft to visit Jupiter, NASA’s Pioneer 10 also becomes the first human-made spacecraft to enter the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Whether or not the spacecraft will survive this crossing is indeed one of the mission’s major experiments, and is a topic of active debate between scientists with differing views of how densely populated the asteroid belt may be. The spacecraft will survive the crossing without incident.
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Originally named ERTS-1 (Earth Resource Technology Satellite), NASA’s Landsat satellite, based on the Nimbus weather satellites, is launched to begin constant observations of Earth’s land, air and oceans. Landsat 1’s tour of duty lasts just under six years, during which it discovers a previously unknown island – never before spotted from land or sea – off the northeastern Canadian coast. Landsat 1 remains in service through 
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In the broad daylight of mid-afternoon, an asteroid measuring somewhere between 10 and 50 feet in diameter plows through Earth’s atmosphere over North America, creating a long-tailed fireball across the sky. Undetected before its close pass – only 35 miles from Earth’s surface – asteroid US19720810 skips off of the atmosphere and back into space, having lost half of its mass to the frictional heating of plummeting through the atmosphere. The spectacle lasts only a couple of minutes, and US19720810 will make another pass by the Earth in 
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NASA launches the third and final Orbiting Astronomical Observatory satellite, given the nickname “Copernicus” when it successfully enters service near the 500th anniversary of the birth of the famed astronomer of the same name. OAO-3 is a joint venture between NASA and universities in the U.S. and the U.K., again focusing largely on ultraviolet observation of the sky, and it is instrumental in the discovery and study of long-period pulsars. OAO-3 will remain in service through February 1981, its successful nine-year mission lending weight to the ongoing construction and planning of NASA’s Space Telescope project, later to be known as the Hubble Space Telescope.
The British science fiction series Doctor Who is broadcast in the United States for the first time on WPHL, an independent commercial TV station in Philadelphia. WPHL is among the first American stations to have purchased a syndication package of Doctor Who episodes, starrring Jon Pertwee as the third Doctor, from BBC Enterprises by way of Time-Life Television. The package includes the series’ first two color seasons, plus the first story from the 
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