Test-tube trees, a Soviet space baby and a dead pig on the French president’s helicopter: headlines from four decades ago
A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
Soviet scientists planning the conception of a baby in space and the production of test-tube trees in the Philippines made the headlines four decades ago this week.
July 30, 1978
● Two Soviet cosmonauts walked in space for two hours and five minutes – the longest spacewalk carried out under the country’s space programme – to replace scientific equipment on the outside of the orbiting Salyut 6 space station. One of the purposes of the operation was to test a new kind of spacesuit made of semi-hard materials, Moscow radio reported. Among the items carried back to the space station by the cosmonauts were a piece of equipment for monitoring micro-meteors, cassettes containing rubber and other construction materials being tested for their durability in space conditions, and cartridges containing biological polymers from the atmosphere.
July 31, 1978
● A provincial military court in central Thailand sentenced a 17-year-old boy to 366 years and eight months in jail for killing six people – including a two-year-old girl – during a robbery. The court originally handed down a death sentence but commuted it to a jail term as the defendant was still a minor. The boy had committed the crime with four accomplices, who were still at large.
● Two Britons were plucked from a choppy sea by a trawler after they abandoned an attempt to make the first Atlantic crossing by hot air balloon. The pair splashed down just 180km short of the French coast.
August 1, 1978