TV broadcast of the moon landing in 1969

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Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon
Buzz Aldrin stepping onto the moon

The television broadcast of the moon landing in 1969 was a media event that was watched on television by an estimated 500 to 600 million people worldwide. 50 percent of all television channels were connected. With the live broadcast on television on 20./21. July, when the lunar module Eagle of Apollo 11 on the moon landing and Neil Armstrong walked the first man on the moon, were broken at this time in the western world many attendance records and set up in many countries Records for the longest live broadcast.

camera

The camera mounted upside down on the Eagle lunar module at Apollo 11
The camera on the lunar surface at Apollo 11

In 1964, Westinghouse Electric Corporation was commissioned by NASA to design and build a television camera that would work on the moon at temperatures between minus 230 degrees Celsius and plus 120 degrees Celsius. After five years, Stanley Lebar led a team of 75 technicians and engineers and over 300 manufacturers. The result was a black and white camera that was tested on Apollo 9 in Earth orbit and that then broadcast Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon.

The Westinghouse Apollo Lunar Television Camera had the following specifications:

  • Resolution: 250 lines (at 10 frames per second) / 500 lines (at 0.625 frames per second)
  • Black-and-white
  • Bandwidth: 4 Hz to 500 kHz
  • Transmission: FM signal via cable
  • Size: 280mm × 150mm × 76mm
  • Weight: 3.29 kg
  • Power requirement: 6.25 watts
  • Lenses: Four interchangeable lenses: "Tele", "Wide Angle", "Moon Day" and "Moon Night"

The camera was attached to the lunar module in an externally accessible equipment compartment to the right of the ladder. When Armstrong got out, he opened its cover with a cable, Aldrin switched on the camera from inside the lunar module so that it could be transmitted how the two astronauts descended one after the other down the ladder of the lunar module. For reasons of space, the camera was mounted upside down inside the compartment so that the image had to be rotated on the ground. After the two astronauts were on the lunar surface, Armstrong placed the device on a tripod about 10 m away so that further activities could be recorded.

The TV camera stayed on the moon. More cameras on board returned to Earth.

Signal transmission

The camera was connected to the lunar module by a 30 m long cable. The television signal was telemetry mixed data, biomedical data and the radiotelephone and an S-band - parabolic antenna transmitted with 66 cm diameter at the top of the Lunar Module directly to earth. The transmission frequency was 2282.5 MHz.

Receiving stations

Originally, a break of several hours was planned between landing and disembarking, but this was canceled at the request of the astronauts. When Aldrin switched on the television camera and the television signal was sent to earth, three stations were receiving: Goldstone in California, and Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek in Australia.

TV broadcast of the moon landing 1969 (USA)
Goldstone
Goldstone
Location of Goldstone in the USA

Goldstone

35 ° 25 '36 "  N , 116 ° 53' 24"  W.

The receiving station in Goldstone had a parabolic antenna with a diameter of 64 m in use. After the telemetry data had been filtered out of the received signal, the TV signal was converted into the American NTSC standard . For this purpose, the original signal was sent to a black and white monitor at 10 images per second and 250 lines per image. An NTSC camera recorded each image six times, generating the usual 525 lines and 60 fields per second. That signal was transmitted to Houston. While the camera was still attached to the lunar module, the television images were upside down. The polarity of the deflection coils in the monitor could be reversed using a switch, so that the image was rotated by 180 °.

TV broadcast of the moon landing 1969 (Australia)
Parkes
Parkes
Location of Parkes in Australia

Parkes Observatory

33 ° 0 ′ 0 ″  S , 148 ° 15 ′ 44 ″  E

The Parkes radio telescope had a parabolic antenna with a diameter of 64 m, which could only be tilted by 60 ° to the vertical. Since the exit had been brought forward, at first it looked as if the mirror could not receive the signals because the moon was not high enough above the horizon. The preparations of the astronauts dragged on, however, so that at the beginning of the transmission, reception was possible via a side lobe of the antenna, which was tilted to the stop. However, violent gusts of wind at speeds of up to 110 km / h caused problems, which shook the mirror that was placed against the stop. The wind load was about ten times the permissible. After a few minutes the wind decreased and the moon was so high that the antenna gain could be fully used. The signal was forwarded from Parkes without conversion or filtering via radio link to Sydney, also to Honeysuckle Creek, where the telemetry data should be forwarded. The adversities of the broadcast from Parkes are amusingly retold in the Australian feature film The Dish .

TV broadcast of the moon landing 1969 (Australia)
Honeysuckle Creek
Honeysuckle Creek
Location of Honeysuckle Creek in Australia

Honeysuckle Creek

35 ° 35 ′ 1 ″  S , 148 ° 58 ′ 36 ″  E

The Honeysuckle Creek antenna was only 26 m in diameter. Here, too, the received signal was converted to the NTSC standard at 60 fields per second and, if necessary, rotated by 180 °. The receiving station transmitted the TV signal to Paddington near Sydney. Originally, the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station with its 26-meter antenna was intended to receive television signals from the moon together with Parkes. However, on July 18, three days before the moon landing, a fire broke out there and damaged the equipment. Although the damage was repaired after 12 hours, NASA waived this station as a precaution and chose Honeysuckle Creek instead. Tidbinbilla was supposed to take over the radio communications with the mother ship Columbia. However, the Tidbinbilla antenna could receive both the mother ship and the lunar module without any problems. Unofficially, the television signal from the lunar surface was fed into available televisions and even an oscilloscope on the console.

Gallery receiving stations

Sydney video

The signals from the two Australian receiving stations Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek ran in the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) in Paddington in Sydney together, and from the Parkes signal nor the telemetry data is filtered out had to the TV signal in the American NTSC standard to convert.

NASA technician Charlie Goodman (callsign Sydney Video ) selected the better of the two Australian signals and sent it to Houston via the Moree satellite station and the Intelsat 3 geostationary satellite. In addition, this signal was transmitted to the Gore Hill studio of the Australian television broadcaster ABC , where it was converted to the Australian television standard with 625 lines and 50 fields per second and broadcast nationwide.

Houston

Two NTSC TV signals were available in Houston: the one from Goldstone, California, and the Australian signal selected in Sydney, which came from either Honeysuckle Creek or Parkes. From Houston, the signal was passed on to television stations around the world.

Preparation for the television stations

Images from all three receiving stations were used during the two and a half hour transmission from the moon. When evaluating the images, the sources can be easily distinguished due to errors in the conversion. In Goldstone images, a small white spot appears in the middle of the image. Parkes images show a white spot near the right edge, Honeysuckle Creek images have no visible spot.

The first images during the broadcast came from Goldstone. They had forgotten to turn the switch to rotate the picture and had to be reminded by Houston. The images were highly contrasted, possibly caused by the use of a band filter. While the technicians tried to improve the image quality, the image was briefly inverted in brightness and appeared as a negative. In later summaries, this part was corrected, which means that the white spot that only appeared in the conversion appears as a black spot in these parts.

In the first few minutes there were several switches back and forth between Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek, whereby both stations only provided a mediocre image: Goldstone had high contrast, Honeysuckle had higher noise due to the smaller antenna. About 9 minutes after the start of the broadcast, Armstrong was already on the lunar surface at that time, the image from Parkes was switched to, which had a much better quality. Parkes remained on the air worldwide until the end of the broadcast.

The TV signal only contained video information, no sound. The separately transmitted audio channel was always taken over by Goldstone.

reporting

The first steps on the moon were broadcast live to many countries. In America it was Sunday evening, July 20th (9:54 p.m. in Houston), in Europe it was Monday, July 21st, in the middle of the night (3:54 a.m. in Central Europe), in Australia it was Monday noon (12:54 p.m. in Sydney).

Australia

Since two of the three ground stations were in Australia , Australian television was not dependent on a connection to Houston, but could use one of the two Australian signals. Since the satellite was no longer broadcast, television viewers in eastern Australia saw the images about 0.3 seconds earlier than viewers in the USA.

In Australia at that time there was no nationwide radio relay network, so that the west of the country could not receive any live transmissions from other parts of the country. The fact that the moon landing was broadcast in Western Australia was thanks to a short-term action:

The Carnarvon station was used by NASA to receive telemetry data from the lunar module and to send it to Houston via the geostationary satellite Intelsat 3. For this purpose, an antenna 13 meters in size was aimed at the satellite. This satellite also carried the TV signals sent from Sydney to Houston, as well as the signal sent from Houston. At that time, geostationary satellites did not have any special coverage areas , so programs could be received anywhere where there was a line of sight to the satellite. Thus, both the Australian and the international version of the television images could be received in Carnarvon.

In order to feed the images into the television network of Western Australia, however, a line to Perth, 900 km away, was necessary. Although a coaxial cable had recently been laid for a future television station in Carnarvon, all amplifiers along the route had to be reversed because the signal was now not sent from Perth to Carnarvon, but in the opposite direction. Two technicians began this work on July 16 and finished it on Sunday, July 20, the day before landing.

The transmission from the satellite station to the telephone exchange, the end point of the coaxial cable, took place via a radio link of 5 km. There the signal was shared. A line led into a theater, where a US-compatible television set was placed on the stage so that viewers could watch the broadcast with binoculars. This was the first television broadcast that could be received locally. The other line went to Perth, where the American NTSC signal was converted into the Australian television standard and fed into the Western Australian television network.

United States

The three major US television stations ABC , CBS and NBC broadcast 31 hours without interruption.

CBS moderated as anchor Walter Cronkite , news anchor at CBS News , and as co-anchor Walter Schirra . Cronkite went down in US TV history with his moderation, but later criticized himself for not having found the right journalistic words during the moon landing.

Federal Republic of Germany

ARD and ZDF

In the Federal Republic of Germany was at the ARD the WDR lead responsibility for the transfer. Even at the beginning of the flights to the moon, an "Apollo special studio" was set up in Cologne, in which there was an outdoor model of the lunar module on a 1:10 scale and lots of visual material. For the moon landing, a hobbyist was invited, who had also modeled the innards and equipment in original size. It was possible to demonstrate what goes on on the moon, such as getting out in a space suit with a life support backpack. Almost the entire television program was canceled in the area and broadcast for 28 hours. A compilation was broadcast several times, most recently on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the landing.

Günter Siefarth translated and commented on the live broadcast from Houston together with Hans Heine, Anatol Johansen and Lothar Loewe . From there, the correspondent Werner Büdeler was connected. The satellite technology, which was newer at the time, was used here, which enabled live switching from overseas for the first time. During the broadcast, the Russian probe Luna 15 , which was operating in the vicinity, was discussed again and again, and which ultimately crashed on the moon during an attempt to land one day later.

Viewers had the opportunity to ask questions by telephone and teletype. For this purpose, a team of eight experts had been invited to the studio, who, under the moderation of Ernst von Khuon, answered these questions. The team consisted of:

The ZDF special was moderated by Heinrich Schiemann . Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words on July 21, 1969 at 3:56 a.m. German time. Many German citizens also followed the landing on the radio.

“A new phase in space travel had begun; with her television celebrated its great triumph. America’s television technicians first, of course. But the performance of the two German programs was appropriate to their commitment. A mammoth program was running, excellently prepared for the ARD by Dr. Günter Siefarth, for ZDF by Heinrich Schiemann. "

- HH Brachvogel : HÖR ZU No. 31/1969 , p. 10

US forces in Germany

TV broadcast of the moon landing in 1969 (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Thunder Mountain
Thunder Mountain
Ramstein
Ramstein
Spangdahlem
Spangdahlem
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Three US Air Force TV stations were supplied by the Donnersberg station

The US Air Force had its own television network in Germany, Air Force Television (AFTV), but no satellite station, so that a live takeover of a US program was not possible. The idea was to use the picture of the German broadcasters and to take over the English commentary via shortwave from the USA, but this would not have been qualitatively satisfactory.

The Defense Communications Station in Donnersberg, 1986

Lieutenant Tom Scanlan, head of the military television studio at Spangdahlem Air Base, was a civilian broadcast technician and had already established contacts with ARD and ZDF. He learned that the Donnersberg transmitter near Kaiserslautern, acting as a directional radio converter, would transport the raw Eurovision signal. He received permission from Eurovision to pick up the signal free of charge. A mobile radio link from the Deutsche Bundespost transmitted the signal from Donnersberg to the nearby Ramstein Air Base , where it was broadcast on the AFTV television station. Also on the air were a converter from Wiesbaden Air Base and the transmitter in Spangdahlem, which was connected to the US armed forces via a new radio link. Thus the Americans could receive the special programs of ABC, NBC and CBS. This was the first time AFTV took an external television signal live.

Scanlan had acted without approval from his superiors. He had financed the rental costs for the directional radio equipment for the Bundespost through commercials for local clubs that were played during breaks in the broadcast.

German Democratic Republic

The GDR television reported live on the evening before the landing, but ended the program before the decisive events and only broadcast the test image that was customary at the time . Most GDR citizens, however, were able to watch the broadcasts on western television . Exact audience numbers are not known.

Austria

The ORF reported in a 28 hour and 28 minute live broadcast about the flight of Apollo 11 and the moon landing. The program was commented on by Peter Nidetzky , Herbert Pichler and Hugo Portisch . Ingrid Kurz and Erich Simak were on duty as interpreters. The recordings have since been deleted.

Switzerland

The 25-year-old Bruno Stanek presented the special broadcast on Swiss television with around one million viewers . The special broadcast was transferred with new material for cost reasons.

France

In France , the moon landing was broadcast in the first ORTF program . A 30-hour live broadcast was broadcast under the name Radio Terre , moderated by Michel Forgit from Houston and Jean-Claude Bourret in Paris.

Great Britain

All three British television programs (BBC1, BBC2 and ITV) reported extensively on the moon landing. For the first time in the history of British television, it was also broadcast at night.

The BBC's specials were filmed in color at Lime Grove Studios in London. They were broadcast on BBC1 in black and white and on BBC2 in color. The moderators were Cliff Michelmore , James Burke and Patrick Moore . The recordings are no longer available today.

The private broadcaster ITV deliberately separated itself from the BBC and produced a discussion and entertainment show that night with guests from science and show business. Alastair Burnet and research assistants Peter Fairley and Paul Haney hosted the 16-hour program .

New Zealand

New Zealand did not have a satellite station in 1969, so live broadcasts from other countries were not possible. In order to be able to show the moon landing on the evening news, a film was flown from Australia to New Zealand. While the astronauts were on the surface of the moon, a 40-minute film was copied in the Gore Hill studios of the Australian television company ABC. A New Zealand Air Force Canberra bomber flew him from Kingsford Smith International Airport to Wellington in 2.5 hours , where he arrived at 7 p.m. local time. Customs formalities had been kept to a minimum beforehand so that the film could be driven straight to the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC) studios , where it was broadcast on the evening news at 7:30 p.m., just 4.5 hours after Event.

Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union , the moon landing was not shown live on television, but recordings were broadcast during July 21st.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tobias Moorstedt: The Billion Prophecy. Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 28, 2011, accessed on June 1, 2013 : “The unofficial top ten TV events include the moon landing (50 percent worldwide connection), the 2006 soccer World Cup final (715 million people) or the funeral of Princess Diana (allegedly 2.5 billion people). "
  2. ↑ Camera-Lunar TV Apollo 11 NTN 511217-201 (607R962). Radiomuseum Lucerne Foundation, accessed on June 1, 2013 (English).
  3. ^ Allan Needell: The Armstrong Purse. Flown Apollo 11 Lunar Artifacts. National Air and Space Museum, February 6, 2015, accessed November 4, 2018 .
  4. ^ Colin Mackellar: How the Moonwalk was seen live in Western Australia. In: Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station. Accessed June 1, 2013 .
  5. ↑ Confused answers. In: Der Spiegel 31/1969. July 28, 1969, p. 99 , accessed June 1, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Space Pioneer Wally Schirra Dies At 84. cbsnews, July 15, 2009, accessed October 30, 2013 .
  7. ↑ The greatest TV events of all time: The moon landing in 1969. Jan Schlüter, accessed on June 1, 2013 .
  8. ↑ https://www1.wdr.de/fernsehen/wdr-dok/sendung/als-keiner-schlafen-wollte-100.html
  9. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGznJUSjd9w
  10. ↑ Long in the box. Spiegel, July 14, 1969, accessed October 30, 2013 .
  11. ↑ HH Curlew: The long night of landing on the moon. In: HÖR ZU 31/1969. P. 10 , accessed June 1, 2013 .
  12. ↑ Don Dale: Live from the Moon, Part I. January 28, 2010, accessed November 30, 2014 (English).
  13. ↑ Don Dale: Live from the Moon, Part II. January 30, 2010, accessed on November 30, 2014 (English, instead of Donnersberg von Donnersburg is mentioned in the text).
  14. ↑ Moon landing "We humans have to keep going". In: Frankfurter Allgemeine. October 11, 2011, accessed May 13, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Sven Grampp: From observing the observer of the observer - the first manned moon landing on German television on this side and beyond the Iron Curtain. (PDF) In: Repository Media Culture Research. February 16, 2016, accessed May 13, 2017 .
  16. ↑ Florian Bock (text), Roland Winkler (image research), Mario Palaschke (editing): When the moon came into the living room. In: www.orf.at. ORF - Österreichischer Rundfunk, July 16, 2019, accessed on July 20, 2019 (German).
  17. ↑ Satellite concept comes from Austria: Scientists invented it as early as 1928! News, June 16, 2004, accessed February 17, 2016 .
  18. ↑ a b c SRF: Recordings of the moon landing were deleted. In: persoenlich.com . July 21, 2019, accessed on July 22, 2019 : "Not only SRF, also ORF and BBC had deleted or transferred their historical recordings from the broadcast of the moon landing."
  19. ↑ Our man in the moon. Tagesanzeiger, July 20, 2009, accessed June 30, 2012 (with video interview).
  20. ^ SRG from 1931 to today. SRG SSR, May 21, 2012, archived from the original on May 30, 2013 ; Retrieved June 1, 2013 .
  21. ^ Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française. Radio France, accessed February 17, 2016 (French).
  22. ^ Operation “Radio Terre”, La conquète de la lune: Michel Forgit & Jean-Claude Bourret. France Culture, July 27, 2011, accessed June 1, 2013 (French).
  23. ^ PT Mathias: Apollo 11 Moon Landing Broadcasts. In: British TV History. 2005, archived from the original on September 9, 2002 ; accessed on June 30, 2012 (English).
  24. ^ PT Mathias: BBC Apollo 11 Moon Landing Coverage. In: British TV History. January 12, 2001, archived from the original on September 29, 2002 ; accessed on June 30, 2012 (English).
  25. ^ PT Mathias: ITV Moon Landing Coverage. In: British TV History. July 20, 2009, archived from the original on October 10, 2012 ; accessed on June 30, 2012 (English).
  26. ^ Colin Mackellar: The New Zealand Delayed Broadcast. In: Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station. Accessed June 1, 2013 .
  27. ↑ Bernard Gwertzman: Men on the moon: a view from Moscow: in July 1969, the United States what is poised to make history in space. But the Soviet Union had one last Cold War trick up its sleeve. April 26, 2004, accessed on July 4, 2012 (English): "Russian TV did show coverage of the moon walks by Armstrong and Aldrin at least three times on July 21."

Web links

Commons : Apollo 11  album with pictures, videos and audio files