First launching of a three-stage rocket vehicle consisting of two Nike boosters in tandem and a Deacon rocket as a third stage, and also a first launching of a rocket booster system consisting of three "peelaway" Deacons as the first stage wrapped around a fourth Deacon as a second stage, and a HPAG rocket as a third stage, by NACA Langley's PARD at Wallops Island.

Construction was proceeding on schedule at Cape Canaveral, Bermuda, Grand Canary Islands, the Woomera and Muchea Australian sites, and at the demonstration site on Wallops Island, Virginia. The survey of Guaymas in Western Mexico completed that phase of the program, but the construction was yet to be accomplished.

C. Howard Robins, Jr., and others in the MSC Advanced Spacecraft Technology Division investigated the suitability of and formulated a tentative mission flight plan for using a Gemini spacecraft to link up with an orbiting vehicle to achieve a long-duration space mission (dubbed the 'Pecan' mission). The two crewmen were to transfer to the Pecan for the duration of the mission. As with similar investigations for the application of Apollo hardware, the scheme postulated by Robins and his colleagues emphasized maximum use of existing and planned hardware, facilities, and operational techniques.

Review of progress on the L1 trainer MN-17, consisting of the SA and NO of the spacecraft It was built by the Factory Brigade headed by Darevskiy and was finished three to four weeks ago. But there is still the question of the cosmonauts conducting autonomous navigation. Tyulin and Mishin promised a solution long ago, but nothing has been delivered to date.

Mishin calls Kamanin and asks what he would think of a revised scenario for the next manned Soyuz flight. Mishin's '2+2' concept would call for four, instead of five cosmonauts, aboard two Soyuz capsules with transfer of only one cosmonaut by EVA. He gives Kamanin until 6 May to give his opinion on the change of plan. Titov is planning on selling his Volga automobile and buying a Moskovich.

In response to the Ministry of Defence's guidelines for third generation launch vehicles, the Ministry of General Machine Building issued instructions for Chelomei to study boosters meeting the military's requirements. These included Lox/Kerosene propellants in place of the toxic N2O4/UDMH favoured previously. Chelomei's competitor in the design, Glushko, was then head of NPO Energia which included Glushko's former OKB-456 engine design bureau. Therefore Chelomei was forced to propose using Kuznetsov Lox/Kerosene engines from the cancelled N1 moon program. The use of existing Proton tankage tooling for the stages and the Kuznetsov engines would allow a high-performance vehicle to be developed at minimum cost. However Chelomei was out of favour, Kuznetsov was discredited after the N1 fiasco, and Glushko was ascendant. The proposal stood no chance. Glushko's Zenit launch vehicle became the accepted solution.

Manned seven crew. Deployed Nusat; carried Spacelab 3. Payloads: Spacelab-3 experiments, habitable Spacelab and mission peculiar experiment support structure. The experiments represented a total of five different disciplines: materials processing in space, environmental observa-tions, life science, astrophysics, and technology experiments. Two getaway specials (GAS). The flight crew was split into gold and silver shifts working 12-hour days during the flight.

Completing more than six months in space, the International Space Station Expedition 8 crew, Commander Mike Foale and Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri, returned to Earth today, bringing with them European Space Agency Astronaut Andre Kuipers of the Netherlands, who had spent nine days aboard the complex conducting research. Additional Details: here....