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.
What we were looking at was the first opening of this hatch-cover while in orbit, in order to rehearse the transfer of two of the astronauts from the command module to the lunar module. That involved equalising the pressures in the two modules and folding the hatch-cover to make way for the astronauts.
The hatch cover was a brilliantly designed object, resembling two umbrellas, back to back, that could be folded from inside and separated into vacuum-tight covers for both sides. Having admired the cleverness of this feature in the press-kit drawings, I recognised the folding of the umbrella-shaped objects, even on the dim black-and-white monitor picture that I could barely see with the TV lights in my eyes.
I explained what we were seeing using this umbrella analogy – and it made sense to the TV producer and presumably to the audience. I'd fulfilled by role as the 'expert' and after that I could do no wrong: my word was gospel.
The journey continued with occasional transmission of live pictures but the real stuff was to come some three days after the launch: by firing retro rockets to slow down the spacecraft, it was successfully captured into an orbit around the moon. How and why this was done was the subject of explanations that we gave in answer to questions from the ABC compere, in the nightly time-slots reserved for The Apollo Report.
The real excitement came late one morning Australian time – prime time viewing time in the U.S. – when the lunar module was detached from the command module and fired its retro-rockets to cause it to descend and eventually land on the moon. The exact manoeuvres were described in the press kit, allowing us to give blow-by-blow descriptions of what was going on.
The really interesting question was whether the lunar lander would be buried in dust when it hit the surface – a potential disaster predicted by a theory that turned out to be erroneous. Pretty soon one could see the dust that was kicked up by the rockets that slowed down the descent and shortly thereafter we heard: "Houston, the Eagle has landed" – a historic moment that caused great excitement everywhere.
After what seemed like a very long time, they opened the exit hatch and lowered a ladder to which a TV camera was clamped. Then we saw the shadowy figure of Neil Armstrong descending and setting foot on the moon's surface.
Wow! That hardly needed any commentary. We heard him mumble, somewhat indistinctly, "That was one small step for a man - one giant leap for mankind".
"What did he say? What did he say?" 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. It didn't matter, because by then no commentary was really needed – the pictures spoke for themselves.
The Apollo Report continued nightly and showed the subsequent dramatic moments - of the astronauts' loping moon-walks and eventually the images from a cleverly positioned camera of the blast-off from the moon' surface. It was all a brilliant technological feat - seemingly even more miraculous when one could follow the 'script' of what was going on.
I think that our commentary was helpful; the TV producer certainly thought so and was eager to retain my services for the next moonshot - in a few months' time.
Apollo 12 followed in December and after its first astronaut landed he went about setting up a TV camera to show his partner descending to the surface. While doing so, all video contact was suddenly lost.
While this was going on I happened to notice a row of spots of light – reflections of the Sun in each lens surface -that one occasionally sees in photographs. Rewinding the studio videotape that was recording all this for the local evening news and looking at the last pictures frame by frame it became clear what had happened: the row of spots lined up more and more closely and in the last picture the camera was pointed directly at the Sun. That's why the camera tube burned out and all transmission was lost for the rest of the mission because, to save weight, no back-ups were carried.
The rest of the scheduled programs had to show diagrams and photographs, cribbed from the press kit and other sources and filled with fast talking in answer to questions such as: "What are the astronauts doing now?"
It was hard work, but the show had to go on. Apollo 13, another six months later was even harder, after the fateful words: "Houston, we have a problem" following the on-board explosion of a fuel cell that was nearly fatal.
The epic story of the rest of that mission was live drama of the most gripping kind – but there were no pictures and all had to be guessed and described. There was no turning around: the crippled spacecraft had to follow its course to the moon and use the Moon's gravity to turn it around, in what was christened a 'slingshot manoeuvre'.
During the better part of a whole week, the three astronauts crammed into the Lunar Module, which served as a lifeboat and had to improvise all kinds of things in order to survive. Live drama indeed and in real time, with the entire world listening in.
After that, Apollo 14 and 15, at six-monthly intervals, were an anticlimax and the world became bored with the whole thing. "Men on the Moon. So what?"
Some even thought that the whole affair was faked. A prevalent urban myth held that the whole thing was a Hollywood-produced stunt, filmed in the Arizona desert. Apart from its implausibility, the ultimate refutation was the arrays of corner-cubes left on the moon, to serve as retro-reflectors that allow the Earth–Moon distance to be accurately measured. Indeed, the project showed that the Moon is moving away from us by some seven centimetres per year.
As scientific feats, its results are interesting, but there is little that can be accomplished by sending people instead of robots. But as a feat of human ingenuity, enterprise and sheer heroism the Apollo project stands as a monument, alongside Columbus' discovery of the New World, Magellan's circumnavigation or Amundsen polar explorations.
Tony Klein is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Melbourne.
