June 29, 1973

A Big Mac cost $0.64 that summer of 1973, and the Dow Jones sat at 850 — the Watergate hearings were commanding the nation's attention as former White House aide Alexander Butterfield revealed that President Nixon had secretly recorded White House conversations, a disclosure that would reshape the course of American political history. On screens and turntables, audiences were lining up for the James Bond film "Live and Let Die" while Billy Preston's "Will It Go Round in Circles" held the top spot on the pop charts week after week. On July 28, NASA launched Skylab 3, sending astronauts Owen Garriott, Jack Lousma, and Alan Bean to the orbiting space station to conduct an ambitious series of medical and scientific experiments, marking another milestone in America's effort to establish a sustained human presence in space.