Jul 19 1976
From The Space Library
President Ford proclaimed 20 July as "Space Exploration Day" to coincide with the date 7 yr ago when U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. NASA's Viking 1 lander was expected to touch down on the surface of Mars about 8 am 20 July, reported nationally on network television; transmission of the first picture from the lander should be completed before 9 am. In his proclamation, the President said, "We begin our third century with ... the most ambitious of all deep space explorations ... Wherever we reach, we will have come in peace for all mankind." In an accompanying statement to NASA employees, Administrator James C. Fletcher said "the President has in effect commended all of you who work (for) the national space agency." (Text; NASA Release 76-133; Fletcher anno, 20 July 76)
Marshall Space Flight Center announced that about 80 scientists from universities, medical facilities, and industry, serving as the Universities Space Research Association, would meet at Huntsville 26-30 July to evaluate experiments proposed for the first Spacelab mission. NASA's Space Science Steering Committee would use the evaluations in selecting experiments to be carried on Spacelab 1, scheduled for launch in the 3rd quarter of 1980. The 10 categories in which experiments were proposed were: astrophysics, upper atmosphere, space plasma, biomedicine, atmospheric observations, biology, technology/behavior, communications/navigation, drop dynamics/atmospheric cloud physics, and technology experiments. MSFC was assigned management responsibility for defining, integrating, and operating the payloads for the first 3 Spacelab missions. (MSFC Release 76-130)
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