The booster functioned well, the cruise stage separated at 22 km and Mach 3.15. The ramjets ignited and the cruise stage flew at a sustained speed of Mach 2.8 for forty minutes over a distance of 2000 km. Then the vehicle began a turn for the return to the Cape for recovery. However it seemed the turn was not fast enough; ground control took over, and yet again the right ramjet flamed out in a ground-piloted bank. The missile was commanded into a terminal dive at sea.

The group was selected to provide astronauts for the Soyuz manned spaceflight program.. Qualifications: Military pilots, engineers, or navigators under 40 years of age; graduate of military academy or civilian university; under 170 cm tall; under 70 kg in weight..

James J. Haggerty, Jr., Space Editor for the Army-Navy-Air Force Journal and Register, called the assignment of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory to the Department of Defense 'an ominous harbinger of a reversal in trend, an indication that the military services may play a more prominent role in future space exploration at NASA's expense.... Whether you label it development platform, satellite platform, satellite or laboratory, it is clearly intended as a beginning for space station technology. It is also clearly the intent of this administration that, at least in the initial stages, space station development shall be under military rather than civil cognizance....'

Apollo Program Director Samuel C. Phillips told NASA Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight George E. Mueller that studies had been completed on the use of "direct translunar injection" (launch directly into a trajectory to the moon) as a mode of operation for lunar landing missions. The principal advantages would be potential payload increases and elimination of the S-IVB stage restart requirement. The disadvantage was that there would be no usable launch windows for about half of each year and a reduced number of windows for the remainder of the year. Phillips was confident the launch vehicle would have adequate payload capability, since Saturn V performance continued to exceed spacecraft requirements. Confidence in successful S-IVB restarts was also high. For the lunar missions, therefore, direct launch was considered as a fall-back position and the effort was concentrating on the parking orbit mode.

SA Afanasyev considered that one near term solution would be a 2 launch scheme => 2 crew:0 crew). Ryazanskiy mentions the Ye8-4 (otherwise not identified, and states, "It is necessary to rethink the N1-L3 program. The scheme can not be single launch. (LK-R + Ye8-2); 2 launch scheme with docking in lunar orbit".

Venera 6 was launched towards Venus to obtain atmospheric data. When the atmosphere of Venus was approached, a capsule weighing 405 kg was jettisoned from the main spacecraft. This capsule contained scientific instruments. During descent towards the surface of Venus, a parachute opened to slow the rate of descent. For 51 min on May 17, 1969, while the capsule was suspended from the parachute, data from the Venusian atmosphere were returned. The spacecraft also carried a medallion bearing the coat of arms of the U.S.S.R. and a bas-relief of V.I. Lenin to the night side of Venus.

Russian pilot cosmonaut 1960-1970. 1 spaceflight, 1.1 days in space. Flew to orbit on Voskhod 2 (1965). After getting progressively worse after stomach ulcer surgery, Belyayev dies in the hospital of pneumonia. Meanwhile initial planning is underway for the Soyuz 9 mission.

A NASA/Defense Department agreement provided that NASA would contract for the services of a Scout (SLV-1) launch team beginning on 1 July 1970. Under Air Force supervision, the team would launch Scout vehicles from Vandenberg AFB for both NASA and the Defense Department.

At a Manned Space Flight Management Council meeting, William C. Schneider (NASA Hq) emphasized the mounting pressures from open work at KSC and the demanding schedule for integrated systems testing during February and March. As examples he cited the following areas: February ATM system verification AM/MDA/OWS end-to-end system test SL-2 (first manned Skylab launch) vehicle roll March Stowage and crew compartment fit and function review SL-1 and SL-2 flight readiness test

Studies had been conducted to determine an end-of-mission configuration for the Orbital Workshop and for maintaining the option of an OWS revisit at some future date. MSFC assessed the special deactivation requirements for the AM, MDA, and the Workshop required to establish a satisfactory, economical configuration. JSC made an evaluation of ground support monitoring and control options. The OWS would be left in a configuration that would permit a revisit at some future date without reactivation.

Stationed at 66.0 deg E. Launch vehicle put payload into supersynchronous earth orbit with MRS trajectory option. Positioned in geosynchronous orbit at 66 deg E in 1995-1999 As of 29 August 2001 located at 66.03 deg E drifting at 0.005 deg W per day. As of 2007 Mar 10 located at 66.03E drifting at 0.002W degrees per day.

Communications satellite. Launch delayed from December 8, 2000 and January 8. The Turksat 2A (Eurasiasat 1) satellite was an Alcatel Spacebus 3000B3 with a dry mass of 1577 kg (launch mass 3535 kg) and a 37m solar panel span. The satellite was placed in a 162 x 36742 km x 2.9 deg orbit; by January 13 the perigee had been raised to 21185 km. The satellite had 36 Ku-band transponders and three antennae. The dual name was probably due to the dual ownership of the spacecraft: 75% by Turk Telecom and 25% by the manufacturer Alcatel Space Company. The 3.4 tonne, 9 kW spacecraft was to provide direct-to-home voice, video, and data transmissions to countries between central Europe and the Indian subcontinent, through its 32 "BSS- and FSS-bands" transponders, after parking over 42 deg-E longitude (replacing the aging Turksat 1C). Positioned in geosynchronous orbit at 42 deg E in 2001 As of 4 September 2001 located at 41.96 deg E drifting at 0.016 deg E per day. As of 2007 Mar 11 located at 42.03E drifting at 0.008E degrees per day.

India's Space Recovery Experiment-1 India's SRE-1 first lowered to its orbit to 485 km x 643 km on January 20. A 10-minute deorbit burn began at 03:30 GMT on January 22, with re-entry beginning at 04:07 and a successful splashdown at 04:16 GMT in the Bay of Bengal near 13.3 N / 81.4E. The capsule was successfully recovered by the Indian Navy. The capsule returned two microgravity payloads as well as proving basic technologies for any eventual Indian manned space program. It was also announced that the capsule could be used to orbit further microgravity payloads at low cost to customers.

The satellite was the twelfth in the Indian Remote Sensing satellite series and was capable of providing scene-specific spot imagery. The panchromatic camera provided imagery with a spatial resolution of better than one metre and a swath of 9.6 km. Data from the satellite was to be used for detailed mapping.

CDR Whitson and FE-2 Tani started out with the daily reading of SLEEP (Sleep-Wake Actigraphy and Light Exposure during Spaceflight) experiment data accumulated during the night, for logging and filling in questionnaire entries in the SLEEP session file on the HRF-1 laptop for downlink. Additional Details: here....

Launched into a 206 km x 353 km x 51.6 deg orbit. The 9700 kg spacecraft carried 1823 kg of internal cargo and the 494 kg CATS lidar experiment from NASA-GSFC in the trunk. Inside Dragon were two PlanetLabs Flock-1d' cubesats and the AESP-14 1U cubesat from Brazil's space agency AEB and the ITA technical institute. On January 12 Dragon was grappled by the SSRMS arm at 10:54 GMT and berthed on the Harmony module at 13:54 GMT. The cubesats were transferred internally to the Kibo module and were to be deployed from the Kibo airlock. CATS was grappled by the Dextre robot on 2015 Jan 22 and unberthed from Dragon around 07:00 GMT; it was then handed off to the JEM-RMS at around 10:30 and installed on the Kibo Exposed Facility at location EFU3 at about 14:00. The Falcon 9 first stage performed a flyback attempt to land around 360 km downrange at 78 deg W / 31 deg N. The stage made a 'hard' landing on the ASDS (Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship). The first stage was destroyed when hydraulic fluid depletion made it tip over ahd hit the deck sideways, but the incident did not cause serious damage to the ship. The ASDS has now been renamed "Just Read The Instructions" after the name of an AI spaceship in the book 'The Player of Games' by the late science fiction writer Iain M. Banks.

Dragon CRS-5 was unberthed from the ISS Harmony module on February 10 by the SSRMS arm, which released it at 19:10 GMT. The Dragon made its deorbit burn at 23:49 GMT, with trunk separation at 00:05 GMT February 11 and splashdown at about 00:44 GMT. Six of the PlanetLabs Flock-1b cubesats (Nos. 3, 4, 13, 14, 19, 20) were returned to Earth aboard CRS-5 without having been deployed, after 212 days in space.