Yes, it's being done to death: The 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. It's great to see science in the headlines again, but with so much coverage, there's a lot of repetition.
Then I found this clip: It actually bubbled up not from the lunar landing coverage per se, but in clips of iconic newsman Walter Cronkite's career. This one is of CBS' coverage of the lunar landing, which Cronkite anchored.
There was no live, from-the-moon video coverage of the actual descent and landing itself; all NASA (and we) had were data and voice radio feeds. The films you've seen of the actual touchdown (shot looking straight down from the lander) were literally *films* that had to be brought back to earth, processed, and released much later, weeks after the astronauts were safely home. There was live video from the moon some hours later, when the actual moonwalk began. But there was no live video at all of the descent and actual landing.
The largest TV audience ever assembled for a single event was watching, and CBS wanted to attract a giant share: They invested major money in a real-time simulation of the descent and landing to provide artificial visuals.
It was utterly state of the art commercial television; nothing like it had been done before. It was also one of the first major uses of live character-generation; where text is electronically superimposed on a separate TV image.
It's impressive. Yes, some of it looks a little cheesy by today's standards, but the gestalt of the simulation holds up pretty well even 40 years on, and that tells you how advanced it was for its day.
The core of the simulation is a filmed studio set piece with miniatures (models) and superimposed graphics. In some vertical, looking-down shots, an animation of the lander's exhaust plume is superimposed over an accurate scale-model image of the intended flight path over the lunar surface. In exterior shots (an impossible real-world vantage point), a model lander shooting real flame creeps across a giant lunar set. In closeups, even the starry background moves realistically.
Laid over that, text is double-exposed and/or character-generated atop the set pieces, showing altitude, speed, etc.
The simulation works well right up to the end. The real landing took longer than planned when the astronauts had to avoid some boulders at the last moment. They continued flying, manually and off-plan, to a flatter spot. But the pre-filmed simulation follows the planned schedule to the second, touching down exactly at the planned time, so it shows the miniature lander solidly on the moon for a brief time while the actual lander was still looking for a good spot to touch down.
But aside from that, the simulation was about as good as commercial TV could do in those days: The proof is that it's still engaging even 40 years later.
The live commentary is from Cronkite and Wally Schirra (the only one of the original 7 astronauts to fly in all three seminal programs: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo).
You'll see flashier simulations everywhere today, but this original is still well worth watching. Take a look!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_sWmD6NvMY
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