Aside from a few stand-out programs — looking at you, Star Trek — by the late 1960s, TV had already become the “vast wasteland” predicted almost a decade earlier by Newton Minnow. But for the technically inclined, the period offered no end of engaging content in the form of wall-to-wall coverage of anything and everything to do with the run-up to the Apollo moon landings. It was the best thing on TV, and even the endless press conferences beat watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island.
At the time, most of the attention landed on the manned missions, with the photogenic and courageous astronauts of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs very much in the limelight. But for our money, it was the unmanned missions where the real heroics were on display, starring the less-photogenic but arguably vastly more important engineers and scientists who made it all possible. It probably didn’t do much for the general public, but it sure inspired a generation of future scientists and engineers.
With that in mind, we were pleased to see this Surveyor 1 documentary from Retro Space HD pop up in our feed the other day. It appears to be a compilation of news coverage and documentaries about the mission, which took place in the summer of 1966 and became the first lunar lander to set down softly on the Moon’s surface. The rationale of the mission boiled down to one simple fact: we had no idea what the properties of the lunar surface were. The Surveyor program was designed to take the lay of the land, and Surveyor 1 in particular was tasked with exploring the mechanical properties of the lunar regolith, primarily to make sure that the Apollo astronauts wouldn’t be swallowed whole when they eventually made the trip President Kennedy had mandated back in 1961.
The video below really captures the spirit of these early missions, a time when there were far more unknowns than knowns, and disaster always seemed to be right around the corner. Even the launch system for Surveyor, the Atlas-Centaur booster, was a wild card, having only recently emerged from an accelerated testing program that was rife with spectacular failures. The other thing the film captures well is the spacecraft’s nail-biting descent and landing, attended not only by the short-sleeved and skinny-tied engineers but by a large number of obvious civilians, including a few lucky children. They were all there to witness history and see the first grainy but glorious pictures from the Moon, captured by a craft that seemed to have only just barely gotten there in one piece.
The film is loaded with vintage tech gems, of course, along with classic examples of the animations used at the time to illustrate the abstract concepts of spaceflight to the general public. These sequences really bring back the excitement of the time, at least for those of us whose imaginations were captured by the space program and the deeds of these nervous men and women.
NASA wants to return to the moon. They also want you to help. Turns out making a good landing on the moon is harder than you might think.
I really like the style of the various space vessels of the time.
USSR had these massive, rugged but strangly shaped probes (-which now can be considered retro-futuristic-),
while the USSA had those weak, but graceful ones.
They did it without a 555 timer.
I was 11 years old when Apollo 11 landed men on the moon. I remember vividly watching the Gemini, Ranger, and Surveyor precursor missions on TV. One particular Gemini launch was delayed repeatedly, and the TV networks stayed on the air live for hours during the delay. It was fascinating. Then, when the Apollo missions took place, it was wall to wall coverage on TV. I ate it up. My elementary school would let interested students skip classes to watch Moon walks in the AV room on TV. On Apollo 16, one of the rover missions, which greatly enhanced coverage with live mobile feeds from the rover, in the middle of a moon walk, the networks all cut away to their regularly scheduled soap operas. I was devastated. Only one more mission, the other two launch vehicles were to become museum props.
Fascinating film in so many respects. Two things I found especially interesting:
1. They called out distances in kilometers.
2. That was a fast trajectory. Faster than Apollo ever was, and much faster than current plans. Yes, I understand the reasons for abort modes, free-return trajectories, and payload capacity, but it’s still neat to see the first one being so fast to the moon.
…seem to remember that Surveyor used that dumb, stupid, incapable unsung hero of all modern integrated-circuit technologies: RTL!
Not until CMOS came along—via RCA’s COSMOS (et. al.)—was it again possible to use a gate from a logic device family to create a linear—analog— device.
I wish we still had a population that believed in doing great things like this. It would be amazing to be alive to watch mankind spread into the solar system. Today it seems like even the people who want to do good things can’t see past the ground.
It would, indeed, be amazing watching mankind spread into the solar system.
Where is/are it/they going to live ?
Simply ask Elon Musk if he plans on being—at ANY POINT—among the settlers of Mars, for which project he has grandiose—as always—plans…to say nothing about certain death in a deadly environment being totally and completely funded by your and my tax dollars.
Is the person announcing the trajectory the same whose voice was used for WWV?
Thanks for the video, enjoyed it. Here that did a automated soft landing on the moon in ’66 . Yet it isn’t ‘routine’ now with ‘newer’ supposedly better tech today. Recall recent landers tipping over, landing leg collapse, smacking the surface…
How about the Gilligan’s Island episode when the Mars probe landed in the lagoon?
Perhaps SupplyFrame would like to get involved…?
As a former Hughes Aircraft employee, I particularly enjoyed the development and test segments, the shake table being one I witnessed 20 years later. I wonder if testing the lander for stability while landing on an incline was a step Intuitive Machines skipped before lofting ‘Odysseus’ and ‘Athena’ over the last year and a half.
Luna 9 was the first: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9