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Welcome to Gene-ology, a podcast by Roddenberry Entertainment that dives deep into the early TV writing works of Gene Roddenberry. To fans, they were the Great Bird of the Galaxy and the First Lady of Star Trek. To their friends and co-workers, Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett Roddenberry were, perhaps, slightly less mythic figures with their own very human quirks, but still beloved and admired. In this panel from the TrekTalks 5 telethon in support of the Hollywood Food Coalition, Gene and Majel are remembered by those who knew them. Podcast hosted by Earl Green & Ashley Thomas TrekTalks panel hosted by John Champion Panel guests: Fred Bronson, Denise Crosby, Ernie Over, Rod Roddenberry About Gene-ology Gene-ology explores Gene Roddenberry's early television scripts, including his lesser-known works before Star Trek using the Mission Log format popularized by Roddenberry Podcasts. We analyze the themes, writing style, and cultural impact of his scripts, and we even unearth stories from the Roddenberry archives that were never produced. Join us as we trace the roots of Gene's creative genius. In This Episode Memories of Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett Roddenberry from those who knew and worked with them Join the Conversation What did you think of this episode? Share your thoughts, theories, and favorite moments in the comments or reach out to us on social media or email us at missionlog@roddenberry.com Did you know Roddenberry Podcasts is on YouTube? Find the video versions of your favorite shows like Mission Log: Prodigy, Mission Log: The Orville, as well as exclusive content only available on YouTube. Subscribe now! https://www.youtube.com/@RoddenberryEntertainment?sub_confirmation=1 Follow us on Social Media: INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/roddenberrypodcasts BLUESKY https://bsky.app/profile/roddenberrypod.bsky.social THREADS https://www.threads.net/@roddenberrypodcasts FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/MissionLogPod Our shows are part of the Roddenberry Entertainment family. For more great shows and to learn how we live the legacy of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, follow us here: RODDENBERRY PODCASTS https://www.instagram.com/RoddenberryPodcasts RODDENBERRY ENTERTAINMENT https://www.instagram.com/RoddenberryOfficial RODDENBERRY FOUNDATION https://www.instagram.com/TheRoddenberryFoundation Support the Show For as little as $1 a month, you can gain access to our Mission Log Discord Community! There, we continue the discussion with dedicated channels and a weekly video chat with the hosts. Become a member of our Patreon today! https://www.Patreon.com/MissionLog Subscribe and Stay Tuned Be sure to subscribe to Gene-ology for more deep dives into Gene Roddenberry's early works. New episodes are released regularly as we uncover more of Gene's television legacy. – Gene-ology is produced by Roddenberry Entertainment. Executive producer Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry. Visit https://Podcasts.Roddenberry.com for more great content. Edited by Earl Green.
Disney releases Tron Ares, a sequel to both Tron and Tron Legacy, starring Jared Leto and Greta Lee, with Jeff Bridges again reprising the role of Flynn. Trent Reznor & Atticus provide the soundtrack (credited in studio publicity as Nine Inch Nails, but in the movie’s credits as themselves).
Streaming service CBS All Access debuts the fifth episode of Short Treks, a series of 15-20 minute short stories set in the Star Trek universe (in this instance, with scenes on the U.S.S. Enterprise prior to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds). Rosa Salazar (Alita: Battle Angel) and H. Jon Benjamin (Archer) guest star.
The CW airs the 34th episode of Legends Of Tomorrow, starring Caity Lotz, Brandon Routh, Franz Drameh, and Victor Garber. Arthur Darvill guest stars in the third season premiere.
Warner Bros. releases the direct-to-video animated movie Batman: Return Of The Caped Crusaders. Adam West and Burt Ward reprise their roles as Batman and Robin, with Julie Newmar returning to the role of Catwoman. This story is set within the world of West’s Batman TV series (1966-68).
The 819th episode of Doctor Who airs on BBC1 (the 120th episode since the series’ revival), starring Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman. Colin McFarlane guest stars in part two of a two-part story.
Scott Carpenter, Mercury astronaut and the second American to orbit Earth, dies at the age of 88, having recently suffered a stroke. A decorated military pilot, Carpenter became a test pilot in 1954, and was selected as one of the seven Mercury astronauts in 1959. He became the second American astronaut to orbit Earth by coincidence, as fellow Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton had been grounded by a medical condition, bumping Carpenter up to the pilot of the fourth Mercury flight. That was his only spaceflight, as he retired from NASA in 1967.
The first episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero, premieres on the CW, starring Stephen Amell. The series has been developed for TV by Greg Berlanti, creator of past TV successes including Everwood and Eli Stone, and will lead to a string of successful series developed by Berlanti around popular DC characters, which will also lead to a successful “shared universe” of TV comics adaptations frequently referred to by fans as the Arrowverse.
The sixteenth full-time crew of the International Space Station lifts off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Soyuz TMA-11. Yuri Malenchenko and Peggy Whitson take up residence on the ISS for 196 days. Arriving with them on the ISS for a ten-day stay is Malaysian space tourist Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, who returns to Earth aboard Soyuz TMA-10 with the Expedition 15 crew. Like other “space tourists” before him, he has paid for his own Soyuz seat and mission training. When Malenchenko and Whitson return in April 2008 with South Korean astronaut Yi So-Yeon, the Soyuz suffers a dangerous malfunction, failing to jettison its service module; the result is an off-balance spacecraft that re-enters the atmosphere nose-first, exposing under-insulated portions of the vehicle to the heat of re-entry and forcing the crew to endure 10 Gs. The vehicle lands nearly 300 miles off-course and Yi So-Yeon suffers neck and spinal injuries in the landing; the head of the Russian space program doesn’t improve matters by blaming these events on an “old Russian superstition” that having more women than men in a vehicle is bad luck. NASA and Russian space engineers begin investigating the mishap, finally arriving at the more plausible explanation of a malfunctioning spacecraft.
The man who went from an unknown actor to man of steel to activist, Christopher Reeve dies at the age of 52 after falling into a coma a day earlier. He was best known to most as the star of 1978’s Superman and its three sequels, but he also distinguished himself with roles in other films such as Somewhere In Time. He was picky with his roles, turning down the lead parts in such films as The Running Man, Total Recall and American Gigolo. In 1995, he was paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse, and he took on a new role of a tireless campaigner for spinal injury research (and, more recently, stem cell research). He had recently been seen in the recurring role of the mysterious Dr. Swann in the TV series Smallville.
Dr. Maxime “Max” Faget, one of NASA’s original employees dating back to the Space Task Group, dies at the age of 83. In 1946, he joined Langley Research Center where he contributed to pilotless aircraft research and became head of the center’s performance aerodynamics division. In 1958, he designed the original Mercury space capsule as a member of NASA’s Space Task Group, charged with finding ways to help America lead in the cold-war-era space race. He was one of the chief architects of the basic mission design for the Apollo lunar program. He was responsible for designing or contributing to the design of every U.S. manned spacecraft from Mercury through the shuttle, and retired from NASA in 1981 following the second flight of the shuttle Columbia. In 1982, he was a founding member of Space Industries, a company which designed experiments which were flown aboard the shuttle. He held patents on the Mercury capsule itself, as well as the vehicle’s escape tower and “survival couch.” He is survived by four children and their families.
UPN broadcasts the eighth episode of the supernatural crime comedy series Special Unit 2, starring Michael Landes (Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman) and Alexondra Lee (Party Of Five). Mark Sheppard (Supernatural, Battlestar Galactica) guest stars.
The second episode of James Cameron & Charles H. Eglee’s cyberpunk series Dark Angel, starring Jessica Alba and Michael Weatherly, airs on Fox. John Savage guest stars.
The 81st episode of Joss Whedon’s supernatural series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, airs on the WB network. James Marsters, Anthony Stewart Head, and Alyson Hannigan also star.
NASA/JPL’s unmanned Galileo space probe buzzes Jupiter’s volcanically active moon Io, zipping directly over one of its most active volcanic regions at an altitude of only 380 miles, Galileo’s closest Io flyby to date. But this close encounter, and the fate of Galileo itself, had been in doubt just hours before the flyby: entering Jupiter’s most intense radiation environment, Galileo had entered a failsafe mode in which the spacecraft shuts down until further commands are received from Earth. Ground controllers, called in to work emergency hours on a Sunday, revive Galileo a mere two hours before its close pass by Io.
The third episode of Highlander: The Raven, starring Amanda Gracen and Paul Johannson, airs in syndication; the series is a spinoff from Highlander: The Series.
The fifth episode of Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry’s modern-day fantasy series Neverwhere airs on BBC2, starring Gary Bakewell, Laura Fraser, Hywel Bennett, and Paterson Joseph. Peter Capaldi (The Thick Of It, Doctor Who) and Tamsin Greig guest star.
The sixth episode of science fiction series Deadly Games is broadcast on UPN, starring James Calvert, Cynthia Gibb, and Chrstopher Lloyd (Taxi, Back To The Future); Leonard Nimoy serves as the series’ executive producer. Anthony Michael Hall and Kathy Ireland guest star.
The 27th episode of the supernatural crime series Forever Knight airs in syndication, starring Geraint Wyn-Davies, Catherine Disher, Nigel Bennett, and John Kapelos. Gwynyth Walsh (Star Trek: The Next Generation) guest stars.
The fourth episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman airs on ABC, starring Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher. Tracy Scoggins (Babylon 5) and Leslie Jordan guest star.
The week-long national syndication window opens for the second episode of the fantasy series Highlander, starring Adrian Paul (War Of The Worlds), Alexandra Vandernoort, and Stan Kirsch, and based on the mythology created in the 1986 movie of the same name.
A lawsuit, filed by environmental activists worried about the release of plutonium from the Galileo Jupiter probe’s radioisotope thermoelectric generators in the event of a Challenger-like disaster during launch, is dismissed by a federal judge; the President of the United States has also given permission for the launch to proceed (a requirement anytime a nuclear-fueled spacecraft is in the works). The suit, filed earlier in the year, sought an injunction to prevent Galileo from being launched. Times have changed since the last RTG-powered flight (the Voyager missions of the 1970s), and activists are concerned about a Chernobyl-style radioactive disaster, although the plutonium 238 at the heart of Galileo’s power supply (and that of other interplanetary probes that have used it) is non-weapons-grade and non-fissible. Galileo is slated to be launched in a week aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.
Paramount’s television division makes an announcement that sparks geek wars for years to come: Star Trek is coming back to television, but with a new cast and set in a different century, as Star Trek: The Next Generation. With Gene Roddenberry at the wheel once more, the new show – which will circumvent the network system completely by being sold directly to stations in syndication – will be set further in the future than the original series, with a new Enterprise and a budget of over one million dollars per episode. Paramount has decided on the risky syndication route after overtures to the three major networks provoke little enthusiasm; the new Fox network is more interested, but is unwilling to risk money on an order of more than a dozen episodes.
NBC airs the second episode of James D. Parriott’s time travel series Voyagers!, starring Jon-Erik Hexum and Meeno Peluce. Fay Hauser guest stars as Harriet Tubman.
NBC airs the fifth episode of the Marvel animated series Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends, starring the voices of Dan Gilvezan (Transformers), Kathy Garver (Family Affair), and Frank Welker (Scooby-Doo, Transformers, The Smurfs).
With its first crew having perished, prompting a far-reaching reorganization of the Soviet space program and its technology, the now-unmanned Salyut 1 space station is ordered to fire its thrusters, slowing it down to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. With no immediate prospect of a new crew to inhabit it, the first space station intended for long-term occupation by a human crew barely lasts six months in orbit.
The 23rd episode of Larry Cohen’s science fiction series The Invaders, starring Roy Thinnes and produced by Quinn Martin’s QM Productions, is broadcast on ABC. Russell Johnson (Gilligan’s Island) guest stars.
The 131st episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. This is the first story to feature the Cybermen, and is the final story of William Hartnell’s tenure as the first Doctor.
The Grand Tour Outer Planets mission is proposed to NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Using a combination of the gravitational assist trajectories computed by JPL’s Michael Minovitch in 1961, Caltech/JPL grad student Gary Flandro has identified a favorable alignment of the outer planets which would allow for a single spacecraft to reach Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto within two decades. Vehicles taking advantage of this planetary alignment must lift off at very precise times during 1977 and 1978, and the alignment will not occur again for nearly 200 years. An ambitious plan is laid out for multiple flyby vehicles with atmospheric probes for every gas planet and landers for specific moons of interest, launched by Saturn V rockets. Budget realities scale this plan back: flybys will be carried out by two cheaper Mariner vehicles (later renamed Voyager), while the atmospheric and satellite probes – eventually to be renamed Galileo and Cassini – wait even longer to reach their destinations, and the Pluto flyby is scrapped until the 21st century New Horizons probe lifts off. JPL also recommends an inner solar system tryout of the gravitational assist maneuvers required, resulting in the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury.
The second episode of the British science fiction series A For Andromeda, created and written by John Elliot and astronomer Fred Hoyle, is broadcast on the BBC, starring Esmond Knight and Julie Christie. Despite being considered a seminal early British science fiction series, much of A For Andromeda, including this episode, no longer exists in the BBC’s archives.
The Soviet Union attempts the first-ever launch of an interplanetary space probe bound for the planet Mars. A failure of its rocket booster prevents it from reaching enough thrust to leave Earth orbit; it eventually falls back to Earth and breaks up while reentering the atmosphere. As with many early Soviet space missions, it is not given any meaningful designation due to the failure of the mission.
The 17th episode of the NBC western series Jefferson Drum is broadcast in the United States, starring Jeff Richards. Dan Blocker (Bonanza) guest stars. This episode is written by future Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
Disney releases Tron Ares, a sequel to both Tron and Tron Legacy, starring Jared Leto and Greta Lee, with Jeff Bridges again reprising the role of Flynn. Trent Reznor & Atticus provide the soundtrack (credited in studio publicity as Nine Inch Nails, but in the movie’s credits as themselves). 
Streaming service CBS All Access debuts the fifth episode of Short Treks, a series of 15-20 minute short stories set in the Star Trek universe (in this instance, with scenes on the U.S.S. Enterprise prior to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds). Rosa Salazar (Alita: Battle Angel) and H. Jon Benjamin (Archer) guest star. 
The CW airs the 70th episode of The Flash, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ superhero starring Grant Gustin. This is the fourth season premiere.
The CW airs the 34th episode of Legends Of Tomorrow, starring Caity Lotz, Brandon Routh, Franz Drameh, and Victor Garber. Arthur Darvill guest stars in the third season premiere.
Warner Bros. releases the direct-to-video animated movie Batman: Return Of The Caped Crusaders. Adam West and Burt Ward reprise their roles as Batman and Robin, with Julie Newmar returning to the role of Catwoman. This story is set within the world of West’s Batman TV series (1966-68). 
The 819th episode of Doctor Who airs on BBC1 (the 120th episode since the series’ revival), starring Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman. Colin McFarlane guest stars in part two of a two-part story.
Scott Carpenter, Mercury astronaut and the second American to orbit Earth, dies at the age of 88, having recently suffered a stroke. A decorated military pilot, Carpenter became a test pilot in 1954, and was selected as one of the seven Mercury astronauts in 1959. He became the second American astronaut to orbit Earth by coincidence, as fellow Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton had been grounded by a medical condition, bumping Carpenter up to the pilot of the fourth Mercury flight. That was his only spaceflight, as he retired from NASA in 1967.
The first episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero, premieres on the CW, starring Stephen Amell. The series has been developed for TV by Greg Berlanti, creator of past TV successes including Everwood and Eli Stone, and will lead to a string of successful series developed by Berlanti around popular DC characters, which will also lead to a successful “shared universe” of TV comics adaptations frequently referred to by fans as the Arrowverse.
The 50th episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures airs on CBBC, starring Elisabeth Sladen (Doctor Who). 
RealWorld Records releases the Peter Gabriel album New Blood, featuring orchestral versions of songs from Gabriel’s previously released material. 
Cartoon Network airs the third episode of the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. 
The sixteenth full-time crew of the International Space Station lifts off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Soyuz TMA-11. Yuri Malenchenko and Peggy Whitson take up residence on the ISS for 196 days. Arriving with them on the ISS for a ten-day stay is Malaysian space tourist Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, who returns to Earth aboard Soyuz TMA-10 with the Expedition 15 crew. Like other “space tourists” before him, he has paid for his own Soyuz seat and mission training. When Malenchenko and Whitson return in April 2008 with South Korean astronaut Yi So-Yeon, the Soyuz suffers a dangerous malfunction, failing to jettison its service module; the result is an off-balance spacecraft that re-enters the atmosphere nose-first, exposing under-insulated portions of the vehicle to the heat of re-entry and forcing the crew to endure 10 Gs. The vehicle lands nearly 300 miles off-course and Yi So-Yeon suffers neck and spinal injuries in the landing; the head of the Russian space program doesn’t improve matters by blaming these events on an “old Russian superstition” that having more women than men in a vehicle is bad luck. NASA and Russian space engineers begin investigating the mishap, finally arriving at the more plausible explanation of a malfunctioning spacecraft.
The second episode of BBC Radio’s adaptation of Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently novels is first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, starring Harry Enfield as Dirk. 
La-La Land Records releases a long-awaited expanded edition of David Arnold‘s soundtrack from the American-made 1998 Godzilla movie. 
The man who went from an unknown actor to man of steel to activist, Christopher Reeve dies at the age of 52 after falling into a coma a day earlier. He was best known to most as the star of 1978’s Superman and its three sequels, but he also distinguished himself with roles in other films such as Somewhere In Time. He was picky with his roles, turning down the lead parts in such films as The Running Man, Total Recall and American Gigolo. In 1995, he was paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse, and he took on a new role of a tireless campaigner for spinal injury research (and, more recently, stem cell research). He had recently been seen in the recurring role of the mysterious Dr. Swann in the TV series Smallville.
Dr. Maxime “Max” Faget, one of NASA’s original employees dating back to the Space Task Group, dies at the age of 83. In 1946, he joined Langley Research Center where he contributed to pilotless aircraft research and became head of the center’s performance aerodynamics division. In 1958, he designed the original Mercury space capsule as a member of NASA’s Space Task Group, charged with finding ways to help America lead in the cold-war-era space race. He was one of the chief architects of the basic mission design for the Apollo lunar program. He was responsible for designing or contributing to the design of every U.S. manned spacecraft from Mercury through the shuttle, and retired from NASA in 1981 following the second flight of the shuttle Columbia. In 1982, he was a founding member of Space Industries, a company which designed experiments which were flown aboard the shuttle. He held patents on the Mercury capsule itself, as well as the vehicle’s escape tower and “survival couch.” He is survived by four children and their families.
Pay cable channel Showtime premieres the 20th episode of J. Michael Straczynski’s post-apocalyptic series Jeremiah, opening the second season. Sean Astin joins the cast as enigmatic new series regular Mr. Smith. 
The third episode of the Star Trek prequel spinoff Enterprise premieres on UPN. 
UPN broadcasts the eighth episode of the supernatural crime comedy series Special Unit 2, starring Michael Landes (Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman) and Alexondra Lee (Party Of Five). Mark Sheppard (Supernatural, Battlestar Galactica) guest stars.
The second episode of James Cameron & Charles H. Eglee’s cyberpunk series Dark Angel, starring Jessica Alba and Michael Weatherly, airs on Fox. John Savage guest stars.
The 81st episode of Joss Whedon’s supernatural series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, airs on the WB network. James Marsters, Anthony Stewart Head, and Alyson Hannigan also star.
NASA/JPL’s unmanned Galileo space probe buzzes Jupiter’s volcanically active moon Io, zipping directly over one of its most active volcanic regions at an altitude of only 380 miles, Galileo’s closest Io flyby to date. But this close encounter, and the fate of Galileo itself, had been in doubt just hours before the flyby: entering Jupiter’s most intense radiation environment, Galileo had entered a failsafe mode in which the spacecraft shuts down until further commands are received from Earth. Ground controllers, called in to work emergency hours on a Sunday, revive Galileo a mere two hours before its close pass by Io.
The third episode of Highlander: The Raven, starring Amanda Gracen and Paul Johannson, airs in syndication; the series is a spinoff from Highlander: The Series.
Pay cable channel Showtime premieres the 11th episode of Stargate SG-1. Tony Amendola makes the first of many appearances as Master Bra’tac. 
The fifth episode of Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry’s modern-day fantasy series Neverwhere airs on BBC2, starring Gary Bakewell, Laura Fraser, Hywel Bennett, and Paterson Joseph. Peter Capaldi (The Thick Of It, Doctor Who) and Tamsin Greig guest star.
The sixth episode of science fiction series Deadly Games is broadcast on UPN, starring James Calvert, Cynthia Gibb, and Chrstopher Lloyd (Taxi, Back To The Future); Leonard Nimoy serves as the series’ executive producer. Anthony Michael Hall and Kathy Ireland guest star.
The week-long national syndication window opens for the 48th episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. 
The week-long American syndication window opens for the second episode of Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi police series Space Precinct, produced in the UK with an international cast. Andrew Tiernan guest stars. 
The 27th episode of the supernatural crime series Forever Knight airs in syndication, starring Geraint Wyn-Davies, Catherine Disher, Nigel Bennett, and John Kapelos. Gwynyth Walsh (Star Trek: The Next Generation) guest stars.
The fourth episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman airs on ABC, starring Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher. Tracy Scoggins (Babylon 5) and Leslie Jordan guest star.
The week-long national syndication window opens for the second episode of the fantasy series Highlander, starring Adrian Paul (War Of The Worlds), Alexandra Vandernoort, and Stan Kirsch, and based on the mythology created in the 1986 movie of the same name.
A lawsuit, filed by environmental activists worried about the release of plutonium from the Galileo Jupiter probe’s radioisotope thermoelectric generators in the event of a Challenger-like disaster during launch, is dismissed by a federal judge; the President of the United States has also given permission for the launch to proceed (a requirement anytime a nuclear-fueled spacecraft is in the works). The suit, filed earlier in the year, sought an injunction to prevent Galileo from being launched. Times have changed since the last RTG-powered flight (the Voyager missions of the 1970s), and activists are concerned about a Chernobyl-style radioactive disaster, although the plutonium 238 at the heart of Galileo’s power supply (and that of other interplanetary probes that have used it) is non-weapons-grade and non-fissible. Galileo is slated to be launched in a week aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.
Warner Bros. Records releases the George Harrison compilation album The Best Of Dark Horse: 1976-1989, featuring the single “Cheer Down”. 
Paramount’s television division makes an announcement that sparks geek wars for years to come: Star Trek is coming back to television, but with a new cast and set in a different century, as Star Trek: The Next Generation. With Gene Roddenberry at the wheel once more, the new show – which will circumvent the network system completely by being sold directly to stations in syndication – will be set further in the future than the original series, with a new Enterprise and a budget of over one million dollars per episode. Paramount has decided on the risky syndication route after overtures to the three major networks provoke little enthusiasm; the new Fox network is more interested, but is unwilling to risk money on an order of more than a dozen episodes.
NBC airs the second episode of James D. Parriott’s time travel series Voyagers!, starring Jon-Erik Hexum and Meeno Peluce. Fay Hauser guest stars as Harriet Tubman.
NBC airs the fifth episode of the Marvel animated series Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends, starring the voices of Dan Gilvezan (Transformers), Kathy Garver (Family Affair), and Frank Welker (Scooby-Doo, Transformers, The Smurfs).
The 46th episode of Star Blazers, an English rewrite and dub of the 1974 anime series Space Battleship Yamato, airs in syndication across the U.S. 
The seventh episode of the animated science fiction series Battle Of The Planets, Ace From Outer Space, airs nationwide in syndication. The series is a translation and English dub of the anime series Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman. 
CBS airs the fourth episode of the TV adaptation of Logan’s Run. 
ITV airs the fourth episode of Raven, starring Phil Daniels (Quadrophenia) and Shirley Cheriton (EastEnders). 
With its first crew having perished, prompting a far-reaching reorganization of the Soviet space program and its technology, the now-unmanned Salyut 1 space station is ordered to fire its thrusters, slowing it down to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. With no immediate prospect of a new crew to inhabit it, the first space station intended for long-term occupation by a human crew barely lasts six months in orbit.
The 23rd episode of Larry Cohen’s science fiction series The Invaders, starring Roy Thinnes and produced by Quinn Martin’s QM Productions, is broadcast on ABC. Russell Johnson (Gilligan’s Island) guest stars.
The 131st episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. This is the first story to feature the Cybermen, and is the final story of William Hartnell’s tenure as the first Doctor. 
The Grand Tour Outer Planets mission is proposed to NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Using a combination of the gravitational assist trajectories computed by JPL’s Michael Minovitch in 1961, Caltech/JPL grad student Gary Flandro has identified a favorable alignment of the outer planets which would allow for a single spacecraft to reach Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto within two decades. Vehicles taking advantage of this planetary alignment must lift off at very precise times during 1977 and 1978, and the alignment will not occur again for nearly 200 years. An ambitious plan is laid out for multiple flyby vehicles with atmospheric probes for every gas planet and landers for specific moons of interest, launched by Saturn V rockets. Budget realities scale this plan back: flybys will be carried out by two cheaper Mariner vehicles (later renamed Voyager), while the atmospheric and satellite probes – eventually to be renamed Galileo and Cassini – wait even longer to reach their destinations, and the Pluto flyby is scrapped until the 21st century New Horizons probe lifts off. JPL also recommends an inner solar system tryout of the gravitational assist maneuvers required, resulting in the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury.
ABC airs the 36th episode of Leslie Stevens’ anthology series The Outer Limits. Skip Homeier and James Doohan (Star Trek, Jason Of Star Command) star.
The second episode of the British science fiction series A For Andromeda, created and written by John Elliot and astronomer Fred Hoyle, is broadcast on the BBC, starring Esmond Knight and Julie Christie. Despite being considered a seminal early British science fiction series, much of A For Andromeda, including this episode, no longer exists in the BBC’s archives.
The Soviet Union attempts the first-ever launch of an interplanetary space probe bound for the planet Mars. A failure of its rocket booster prevents it from reaching enough thrust to leave Earth orbit; it eventually falls back to Earth and breaks up while reentering the atmosphere. As with many early Soviet space missions, it is not given any meaningful designation due to the failure of the mission.
The 17th episode of the NBC western series Jefferson Drum is broadcast in the United States, starring Jeff Richards. Dan Blocker (Bonanza) guest stars. This episode is written by future Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. 
The 30th episode of The Adventures Of Superman airs in syndication, starring George Reeves, Noel Neill, and Jack Larson. Lane Bradford guest stars.
The 51st episode of ABC’s science fiction anthology series, Tales Of Tomorrow, airs on ABC, starring Frenchot Tone.