Round-Trip Fare (Jan. 5): President Nixon signs a bill authorizing a $5.5 billion six-year program to develop a space shuttle craft that will lift off as a rocket and return to Earth as an airplane.

Bloody Sunday Redux (Jan. 30): On a day that will become known as the second "Bloody Sunday," British troops kill 13 men in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, during a Roman Catholic civil rights rally held in defiance of a government ban.

	Pong

Video Volley: Atari debuts Pong, the first commercially successful video game.

Paralyzing Shot (May 15): Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, an independent presidential candidate, is shot and critically wounded after a campaign speech in Laurel, Md. The attack leaves Wallace paralyzed from the waist down. On Aug. 4, Arthur Herman Bremer, 21, is convicted of the attack and sentenced to 63 years in prison.

Executions Get the Ax (June 29): The U.S. Supreme Court rules that capital punishment is "cruel and unusual punishment" and is unconstitutional.

	Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev (left) with President and Mrs. Nixon

Cold War Thaw (July 8): President Nixon announces a three-year trade pact between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Chess Master (Sept. 1): Bobby Fischer becomes the first American to win the international chess championship in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Olympic Terror (Sept. 5): Nine Israeli hostages, five of their Arab captors and a policeman die in gunfire at an airfield in Munich, West Germany. It ends a day of terror that began when Palestinian guerrillas killed two other members of the Israeli contingent to the Olympic Games in their quarters at the Olympic Village. The XX Olympiad is suspended for two days. It's at the same Olympics that U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz wins an unprecedented seven gold medals.

Dow Hits 1,000! (Nov. 14): The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at 1,003.16, finishing above 1,000 for the first time.

End of Life (Dec. 29): Life magazine, a pioneer in photojournalism, suspends publication.