The view from the lunar module as it approached the landing site on the Moon.
Credit: Project Apollo Archive
The iconic shots of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface are so well known they can almost be recalled at will. But leading up to and after the Moon landing, the pictures from space were not so self-explanatory. Someone had to decipher NASA's images and explain what on Earth was going on, and for ABC audiences, that role fell into my lap.
The media circus around the Apollo 11 was inevitable, and television coverage was scheduled well ahead of time. But about a fortnight before the spacecraft was to be launched, the Australian TV stations suddenly realised that the live pictures from space and from the Houston Control Centre were not supported by any official commentary: each station had to supply its own.
A great scramble ensued. All the TV stations were eager to find local 'experts' from the various universities wherever they could be found. Having written some articles on space exploration during my stint as The Age science writer in previous years, while moonlighting from my regular job as a senior lecturer in physics at the University of Melbourne, I was approached by the ABC to supply commentary along with Gordon Troup, a physicist at Monash University.
Commentators around the world became instant experts on every aspect of so-called space science. NASA supplied all the media with press kits that covered everything to do with the rockets, the space capsules, the orbits and everything else – a five-centimetre-thick wad of paper that included pages and pages of numerical data and detailed drawings. The thing to do was memorise as much as possible of all this material and regurgitate it on cue.
Apollo 11 was duly launched on July 18 and the launch was just a news-item with nothing much to add, except a 'preview of coming attractions'. The spacecraft was inserted into an Earth orbit and after a few trips around the Earth to check all systems, the booster rockets were fired again to take it into a transfer orbit - a long elliptical path that led to the moon, to arrive in three days' time.
My finest hour came before the actual scheduled broadcasts: NASA Headquarters at Houston started to transmit video pictures from the spacecraft on its way to the Moon. But the sound that accompanied them was deadly boring, along the lines of "Houston, this is Apollo, do you copy?" - "Roger Apollo, this is Houston… set encabulator to zero five niner repeat zero five niner…" and so on.
The ABC producers got quite excited upon seeing these pictures and sent a taxi to take me to their studios. Without even time for make-up or briefing, they sat me down in front a monitor, turned on the blazing lights into my face, turned on the live camera and after introducing me asked: "What is it that we are looking at?"
To backtrack a little, the spacecraft consisted of the command module where the three astronauts sat during the launch and most of the journey, connected by a tunnel to the lunar-landing module. The two independent space capsules were separated by a double hatch-cover that provided a vacuum-tight seal from both sides.
Not in the press kit?
It was not mentioned in the press kit, presumably so that an element of surprise would be retained, and there was a certain amount of uncertainty about the actual text.
The late Walter Cronkite must have had the quote ahead of time in his press kit. I remember hearing Armstrong say it live, "... step for man...", but Cronkite immediately repeated it saying, "... step for a man...". It puzzled me for years why everyone changed it without comment.
Now, of course, there is the companion story with a link on this page that says software analysis of the recording has unearthed the missing a. So I guess Cronkite was right. But I'm sure he read it before hand.