Tag: space

James Webb, Vannevar Bush, and Basic Research in Space

On By Danny RobbIn History, History of Exploration, History of Science, Science Policy, Space ExplorationLeave a comment

In November 1962, NASA administrator James Webb wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy after a contentious meeting about the Apollo program. In that meeting, they had litigated the overall goal of the US space program, and arrived at a sort of agreement in principle. They both wanted the United States to achieve “preeminence in space.” What exactly that meant, however, was still up in the air. But there was one aspect of “preeminence” that Webb was quite convinced of, and he reiterated it in his followup letter to the President:

“To be preeminent in space,” he wrote, “we must conduct scientific investigations on a broad front.”1

He told the president that while the US led the Soviet Union in some areas of science (geophysics, solar physics, interplanetary), there were other areas where the US was seriously behind (biosciences, lunar and planetary sciences).

In Webb’s rhetoric around science, he often discussed the idea of “basic research” in space. This terminology had gained serious traction in policy circles during the battle to create the National Science Foundation (NSF) a decade before. Despite a growing appetite for basic research in the United States, however, it remained unclear where space fit in this picture during the early 60s.

It turns out Webb had a fascinating and complex relationship with Vannevar Bush, the central figure of the NSF story and champion of basic research. They were at odds during the initial NSF battle, and had severe disagreements about space science.

But when Webb first got the administrator job at NASA, Vannevar Bush was one of the first people he reached out to for advice. Webb’s letters with Bush in these early years give us a direct look into the debate over science in space, Webb’s efforts to make space a domain for basic research, and Webb’s character as an advisor and administrator.2

Vannevar Bush as Chief of Scientific Research and Development. From Wikimedia.
James E. Webb as NASA Administrator. From NASA.

Bush v Webb in the NSF Battle

Vannevar Bush had been a key science advisor to FDR during WWII, and played an important role in applying scientific research to wartime applications. This experience convinced him that “basic research” was key to national prosperity and defense. To him, this meant scientific research that was not aimed at any practical application, but was a simple, curiosity-driven investigation of nature.

The fruits of this research were always uncertain, but that was sort of the point–the unknown was where major opportunities existed. With the support of FDR, Bush got the ball rolling on the creation of a federal agency to fund just that sort of research. But when Truman came into office, plans changed.

Bush was still in the administration at the time, and a bill establishing a Bush-style NSF was making its way through Congress in 1947. Truman ended up vetoing it, partly on the advice of one of his close advisors: James E. Webb.3

President Harry S. Truman shakes hands with Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, as Mrs. Acheson and Under Secretary of State James E. Webb, left, looks on. Mr. and Mrs. Acheson were leaving for the Big Three meeting on Western European unity in Paris. From the Truman Library.

In Truman’s administration, Bush had found himself with far less influence than he had enjoyed under FDR. Webb was director of the Bureau of the Budget at the time, and became a sort of intermediary between Bush and Truman on the subject of the NSF. They exchanged lengthy letters and held meetings on the subject, trying to bring Bush’s vision in line with Truman’s.4

Bush and Webb didn’t disagree about the need for basic scientific research. Their disagreement was fundamentally over the governance of the agency. Bush hoped for a committee of scientists that would guide the agency’s priorities, while Webb and Truman favored a single administrator. Webb argued in letters to Bush that “responsibility for the disbursement of public funds should not be actively associated with the beneficiaries of such funds,” and that the person making those decisions needed to be directly responsible to the president. Bush argued in return that an individual was much more prone to such conflicts, unless they were disconnected from science, in which case they would not be qualified to run the agency.5

Members of Congress read copies of the letters between Webb and Bush as they crafted their legislation. Eventually in 1950, the final NSF bill made it through Congress, and a compromise version of the NSF came into existence with a presidential appointment as director.

11 years later, JFK appointed Webb administrator of NASA. Not long after, Webb reached out to Vannevar Bush once again for advice. They would continue to correspond for the next several years.

Bush v Webb on Space Exploration

Bush’s attitude towards space exploration was not encouraging. He was publicly critical of the space program, and reiterated some of his issues to Webb in more detail. One of these was general distaste for the Space Race, and what it revealed about his fellow Americans. “The thing that disturbs me personally is the attitude of the American people,” Bush wrote, lamenting that the reaction to Alan Shepard’s flight “took on somewhat the form of a sporting event.”

As for space science, Bush was skeptical:

…as a nation we are putting too much emphasis on this kind of research compared with other aspects of science which are equally important or more so. We are a nation that pursues fads and which becomes overexcited at times about things that are really trivial in comparison with our truly great problems.

Vannevar Bush, Essential Writings, p 286

He also had doubts that the President was capable of receiving sound advice, given the incentive structure that was developing. Due to the “vast size of the project,” he wrote, “[n]early every man who could speak with authority on the subject has a conflict of interest.” He continued (emphasis mine):

Now do not misinterpret this to mean that the scientists of the country are all feeding at the trough, and so selfish that they would subordinate their judgement as to what is true to what is advantageous to them…The scientist or engineer in a university or a company is in a difficult quandary. He may honestly believe the program as a whole is highly fallacious. But it has been decided upon at the top level of government. It is supported by his colleagues, many of whom have enthusiasm. His organization has been urged to participate. Who is he to stand out against this powerful trend?

Bush, 289-290

He felt this doubly about the man-in-space program. To Bush, it was basically useless as far as science went, and was more the “result of blind mass enthusiasm rather than the result of calm deliberation and comparison.” Partly, this meant that if the Apollo program failed–and perhaps even if it succeeded–it could backfire terribly for the President. “The American public often fails for a long time to utterly grasp a situation,” he points out, “and, when it finally does, its reversal of attitude can be sobering or terrifying.”6

Bush also believed that the prestige game required more finesse than something based around spectacle. To explain this, he seems to make a reference to USAID, which had been established a couple years before the second letter was written (emphasis mine).

…national prestige is a far more subtle thing than this. The courageous and well-conceived way the President handled the threat of missiles in Cuba advanced our national prestige far more than a dozen trips to the moon. Having a large number of devoted Americans working unselfishly in undeveloped countries is far more impressive than mere technical excellence. We advance our prestige in many ways, but [the space program] was immature in its concept.

Bush, 288-289

Webb, for his part, developed a hybrid stance. He believed in the power of basic research in space,  but shared Bush’s understanding that the prestige game would require something more than a space program wholly subordinated to Apollo. In conveying this to the President, Webb would have to walk a tightrope.

Giving Advice to the President

Bush may have realized that his attitudes toward space exploration weren’t particularly useful to the administrator of NASA. So he spends time in the letters discussing a mutual experience and interest: being an advisor to a president. Apparently he had discussed this with Webb before, and had found a kindred spirit.

Bush believed that a presidential advisor had two important responsibilities. First was to provide the most accurate and sincere counsel possible, regardless of how the president may feel about the information they were provided. Second, to dutifully support and carry out whatever decision the President made with that information.7

Webb certainly seems to have applied this philosophy in his first years as administrator. While JFK firmly believed that Apollo was the only real path to “preeminence in space,” Webb believed that basic research in space was essential to achieving preeminence. This was likely based in part on the information he was receiving from the scientific community itself.

In private, he told JFK this very bluntly. In the 1962 meeting, their discussion gets noticeably tense when JFK insists on calling Apollo the “top priority” of the agency, and accelerating Apollo’s schedule at the cost of science.8 Webb is very clear that basic science should not be hamstringed for the sake of Apollo. His argument seems to combine some of Vannevar Bush’s rhetoric regarding basic research and the attitudes of scientists–like those he had just assembled in the 1962 Iowa Summer Study.

In his follow-up letter, Webb is very clear about the consequences of relegating science to a secondary priority. He was thinking long-term, planning for the world beyond a hypothetical Apollo victory (emphasis mine).

It is clear that a pre-eminence in space in the future is dependent upon an advanced research and technology program which harnesses the nation’s intellectual and inventive genius and directs it along selective paths…Research and technology must precede and pace these established goals or a stagnation of progress in space will inevitably result.

Webb, 7-8

Webb signed the letter: “With much respect, believe me…sincerely yours, James E. Webb”

The closing of Webb’s November letter to JFK. From the JFK Library.

In the end, Apollo did not get put on the heavily accelerated “crash” program. Existing scientific programs proceeded, though some were modified to support Apollo. In public addresses, Webb dutifully supported the priority of Apollo in the spacecraft. But both during and post-Apollo, basic research would remain a staple of NASA activity.

During this crucial period in NASA’s early history, however, it is clear that the question of “should we do science in space?” was very unsettled. It was actively debated in letters like these, in conferences, in the public square, and in the Oval Office.

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Footnotes

  1. In “Letter from James Webb to President Kennedy, 30 November 1962,” found at https://www.nasa.gov/history/JFK-Webbconv/pages/support-d.html Full transcript of the November 21st meeting, see : https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/jfk-webbconv/pages/transcript.pdf ↩︎
  2. Vannevar Bush, ed. G. Pascal Zachary, The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush (Columbia University Press, 2022), pp 285-291, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/bush11642.53 ↩︎
  3. I wrote a long-form account of the political battle surrounding the NSF for JSTOR Daily, which you can read here, and which includes free links to papers on the topic. You can read Truman’s Memorandum of Disapproval, which largely echoes Webb’s advice, at the Truman Library. ↩︎
  4. J. Merton England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945-1957 (NSF, 1982), pp 61-82 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED230414.pdf ↩︎
  5. Ibid, 71-73 ↩︎
  6. Bush, 288 ↩︎
  7. Bush, p 290 ↩︎
  8. You can listen to a recording of the meeting here: https://youtu.be/JTPcF095lJk?si=wzTj92svB9v812Ff ↩︎

The 1962 Iowa Summer Study

On By Danny RobbIn Astronomy, Geology, History, History of Exploration, History of Science, Lunar Robotics, Planetary Science, Science Policy, Space Exploration1 Comment

Author’s note: this article was originally published in The Space Review.

In June of 1962, scientists from around the United States descended on Iowa City for a summer study on science in space. Among the roster of over 200 attendees were names like Van Allen, Kuiper, Shoemaker, Spitzer, Whipple, Drake, and Sagan. They were enticed by a nice brochure, a generous honorarium, and the promise that they could shape the future of space exploration.

In one of their invitation letters, study organizer Lloyd Berkner defined the stakes. “A number of the key people in NASA will devote themselves full time to the summer study,” he wrote, “and it is clear that the outcome of the summer’s deliberations will have a far reaching influence. If we as individual scientists do not provide a major input this summer, we may miss the boat…”1

An earlier draft of that letter had ended with the question: “WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE DECISIONS WERE MADE IN THE SUMMER OF 1962?”2

An aerial map of the State University of Iowa Campus and surrounding amenities.3

Berkner was chair of the Space Science Board (SSB), a committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). NASA administrator James E. Webb had directly requested that Berkner and the SSB organize the study with NASA funding. The two-month long event would conclude with a direct report to Webb himself.

The Iowa Summer Study, as it came to be known, convened at a critical moment. A year earlier, President John F. Kennedy had established the goal of landing a man on the Moon. Then, in November 1961, an “Office of Space Sciences” appeared on NASA’s organizational chart, with mathematician Homer Newell at the head. Science’s place in NASA, and in the Apollo program, was being actively negotiated. But the agency’s relationship to the outside scientific community was uncertain, shifting, and often tense.4 

The SSB had been created in 1958, the same year as NASA, specifically to advise government agencies. Berkner approached this role with a gusto that was not always well-received.5 Early NASA officials often saw outside scientists as presumptuous regarding their potential influence. For their part, some of the scientists on the SSB had played leading roles in the rocket programs that preceded the creation of NASA, and knew that science was one of the only practical uses for rockets beyond weaponry.6 It may have been from this position that some desired, or presumed to already possess, significant input on the space program as a whole.

And while Webb and Newell were in the process of developing in-house scientific talent, they both knew that NASA would need a good working relationship with the broader scientific community. By the end of 1961, Newell noticed that many scientists in the academic community increasingly felt like outsiders, unable to influence the direction of instruments they would be expected to use.7 Meanwhile, NASA’s launch capabilities were expanding, and the Moon was now looming on the horizon.

Webb himself was highly sympathetic to the scientists and the SSB. He was a good friend of Berkner, and had even participated in a NAS summer study on transportation.8 Summer studies like these were an established practice by this point, used by both the Department of Defense and the NAS to bring experts together on specific problems or questions.9 But the scope, purpose, and timing of the Iowa Summer Study made it somewhat unique.

To Newell, Iowa was in part an opportunity to heal an essential relationship before it worsened. To Berkner, it was a chance to preserve and deepen the influence of the SSB during NASA’s formative years. To Webb, it was a way to gather information on the best way to achieve his president’s goals in space. And for the scientists, it was an opportunity to learn more about NASA, and perhaps influence the trajectory of the nation’s space program just as it got off the ground.

The Summer of ‘62

James Van Allen was a natural fit to chair the study. He was a key member of the early rocket groups, and his experiments flew on the first US satellite, Explorer I. He was also a member of the SSB. And so his home institution, the State University of Iowa, was chosen as the venue, and preparations began early in 1962. 

On the planning team’s priority list, the evaluation of NASA’s existing scientific program was item number one. But they also intended to consider “long-range scientific goals in space science” more broadly.10 SSB planners sent multiple invitations to a long list of scientists. A brochure sold the amenities of the university and the surrounding area, hoping to get busy scientists to commit to a two month program. 

An Aerial map of the State University of Iowa Campus and surrounding amenities.11

There was major competition for their attention–for example, the Navy was conducting their own space-related study and astronomer Gerard Kuiper was moving his growing Lunar and Planetary Lab into new facilities.12 Despite the challenges, they ended up with a solid list of full-time participants, and the roster expanded further because part-time participation was quite feasible. The study was broken up into working groups, and participants could show up when the relevant working group was meeting.

Eighteen working groups covered almost every aspect of space science imaginable, including astronomy, solar system atmospheres, particles and fields, and meteorological rockets and satellites. Some working groups covered topics beyond basic scientific research, considering NASA’s relationship with universities, international cooperation, and the social and economic implications of the space program. Working groups met promptly at 9 AM and continued until the end of the work day, with a break for lunch. NASA officials often kicked off the working group sessions with explanations of existing NASA programs, and direct guidance on the sort of advice they sought.

The active and extensive involvement of NASA officials in these sessions reinforced the notion that this study might seriously influence their planning. And in public statements near the end of the study, Webb reiterated this idea. “We are financing this study to bring the best brains in our universities and industries together here, to say what’s wise for the United States to do,” he said in a press conference in Iowa, “and we expect to follow their advice wherever we can.”  When asked what made this study different from similar ones in previous years, Webb replied that it was the timing: “You don’t any longer have to argue the United States ought to have a [space] program,” he said, “now you’ve got to address yourself specifically what should the program be, in detail.”13

After Webb received briefings in August, participants compiled their work into a massive formal report titled A Review of Space Research, containing a panoramic view of scientific disciplines in the middle of 1962.14 James Van Allen, in an August address, likened the report to “an anthology of detective stories–very good ones!” But, he pointed out, these stories remained largely incomplete.15 The question remained how much impact these stories would actually have on NASA, and Apollo was one of the biggest tests.

The Future of Apollo

The working groups most relevant to Apollo were the Working Group on Lunar and Planetary Research and the Working Group on Man as a Scientist in Space Exploration. Many NASA officials attended their sessions, including Charles Sonett from NASA’s Ames Research Center and Joseph Shea from the Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF). Sonett asked Lunar and Planetary participants to focus on specific recommendations, and gave direct feedback on proposals for pre-Apollo lunar sample return and budgetary issues.16 Shea had also made an earlier request for proposals of experiments to be run by the Apollo crew.17

The Subgroup on Scientific Undertakings for Man in Space (chaired by Gerard Kuiper and geologist Eugene Shoemaker, with Carl Sagan as secretary) took up broader questions of science in Apollo and beyond. A variety of NASA and DoD officials contributed, including Sonett and Verne Fryklund Jr., acting director of the Office of Space Sciences. In this group, Sonett distributed a draft report that his internal NASA committee on Apollo science had put together.18

This document would become known as the Sonett Report, and it had been specifically requested by the OMSF earlier in the year.19 Sonett’s committee, which included Shoemaker, had met during the Iowa Summer Study to produce this draft. The Iowa working group then made recommendations that influenced the final report.

In 1963, Fryklund sent a memo to director Robert Gilruth at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC, also present in Iowa) with guidelines on the scientific objectives for the Apollo program. In it, he outlined the Sonett report and the incorporation of the Iowa Summer Study recommendations.20 In the end this meant prioritizing generalized observation, sample collection, and deployment of monitoring equipment like seismometers. 

These recommendations seem to have influenced Apollo scientific planning in a fairly general sense. Apollo scientific planners Noel Hinners and Donald Beattie, neither of whom actually attended, both saw the discussions in Iowa as foundational for their work.21 But while these early reports may have broadly influenced mission architecture, many of their specific recommendations would not make it to actual Apollo missions.22 And one of their strongest recommendations would end up being firmly denied.

The SSB had sent out a questionnaire earlier in the year, which W.W. Kellogg summarized in Review.23 “Should a scientist (at least one) be a member of the first Apollo crew?” one question read. Kellogg’s summary of the responses included what may be the only exclamation point in the entire document: “Emphatically, ‘Yes!’”24

This was also the conclusion of both the Iowa working groups and the Sonett Report. But Shoemaker’s memory of Iowa was not a pleasant one, because he got the sense that this advice was already falling on deaf ears. In a 1988 interview, historian Ron Doel asked Shoemaker about Iowa.

“It was perfectly plain that [the MSC representatives] didn’t want scientists sticking their damn noses in any way into the whole venture,” Shoemaker recalled. “They regarded us as a huge nuisance. It was offensive.”25 In the end, a scientist would not fly on an Apollo mission until Apollo 17.

But tensions surrounding Apollo went even deeper. Some in the scientific community had already been vocal about their opposition to the Apollo program altogether. In Iowa, this conflict became more direct as NASA officials and scientists were thrown into the same rooms. Iowa Journalism professor William Porter was tasked with making observations, and in a reflection written near the end of the Study, mentions what he called “steamy sessions” that addressed the question of overall national goals.26

The summary in Review characterized these discussions as revealing “considerable confusion about the Apollo mission and its proper justifications.”27 This impression likely came both from those opposed to Apollo, and those who saw Apollo as a primarily scientific mission. NASA officials emphasized to the scientists that Apollo was primarily an engineering effort, and that science (while important) was firmly secondary.

Some scientists, for their part, “sensed what they felt was a confusion between public relations and science,” Porter wrote.28 Some scientists in Iowa expressed fear that a veneer of science was being used to legitimize the Apollo program, a scenario made worse by their perception that Apollo was drawing funds away from productive scientific projects.29

These concerns made it all the way to the Oval Office a few months later, when JFK asked Webb about the possibility of doing exactly that to expedite a lunar landing. Webb made a vigorous defense of science, with arguments echoing those presented to him in Iowa.

Webb told the President that “if I go out and say that [Apollo] is the number-one priority and that everything else must give way to it, I’m going to lose an important element of support for your program and for your administration…particularly the brainy people in the industry and in the universities who are looking at a solid base.”30 In the end, they did not move forward with concepts of a “crash” program.31

Webb was trying to both support his president’s goals and maintain a solid relationship with the scientific community–a delicate balancing act. Early in 1963, he used direct quotes from Review to justify Apollo in scientific terms during a speech in Chicago.32 Regardless of his intentions, this may have been exactly the sort of legitimization tactic that some who contributed to the report had feared.

Both Berkner and Newell also tried to smooth things over with scientists in Iowa and beyond. They emphasized that Apollo was happening regardless, so the scientists should get on board. Many accepted this to varying degrees, but tensions around Apollo would never fully disappear.

Impact and Continuing Studies

In his final address, Berkner highlighted several topics where he felt the Study had made significant contributions. In addition to lunar science and Apollo, Berkner pointed to discussions concerning the search for extraterrestrial life, investigation of the origins of life, and the sterilization of spacecraft.33

Another topic that emerged was the potential of large space telescopes. Astronomer Leo Goldberg was chair of the astronomy working group. In 1978, Goldberg told Spencer Weart that it was the SSB that connected him directly to NASA. “The big thing I remember about Iowa,” he said, “is that we learned for the first time that it was going to be possible to rendezvous and dock in space. And right away we all began to think: gee, this is how you build a big telescope in space, or a big laboratory.”34 This was exactly the sort of thing many organizers hoped would come out of these meetings.

The overall impression from both the report and observers was that in spite of any disagreements, the scientists in Iowa generally endorsed NASA’s existing programs, recognized that NASA had hired some competent people, and provided a set of detailed and actionable recommendations at a crucial juncture in the organization’s history.35

Throughout, Porter reflected, most scientists had taken their task very seriously. They had strayed, sometimes, beyond their purview, often to the annoyance of the administrators. But Porter had the impression that the scientists were very aware of how limited their influence might ultimately be, and persisted regardless.

Porter speculated about why the scientists would have approached the proceedings in this way: “…many individual scientists feel responsibile(sic), in a curious kind of way, for NASA; they feel that the society at large may hold them responsible as a group for the operations of science in space, as they feel that the society at large holds science responsible for the atomic bomb and the things that followed it.”36

The relationship between the SSB and NASA deepened in the years following Iowa. The SSB appeared by name on NASA organizational charts starting in August 1962, with a dotted line connecting it directly to the Administrator. The NAS would remain on these organizational charts until 1977.37

Van Allen would refer to A Review of Space Research as “a classical document and became the prototype for subsequent studies by the SSB.”38 The next study after Iowa took place at Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1965. There, scientists continued some conversations left off in Iowa, including discussions of the “Large Orbital Telescope.” Goldberg was present once again, and remembered the hopeful atmosphere of the Woods Hole meeting. “At the time, the future just seemed unlimited,” he said.39

NASA historian Joseph Alexander explains that after Iowa, “summer studies remained a staple of the SSB’s activities through the 1970s.”40 The 1980s saw summer studies that rivaled the Iowa study in scale, he writes, before their frequency eventually declined under budgetary pressure.

Special thanks to Hemlock Stanier, Graduate Student Lead at The University of Iowa Special Collections & Archives, who found and scanned items of interest in the James Van Allen Papers. Their work in helping me navigate and access the collection was invaluable. Thanks also to Dwayne Day for assistance and suggestions in the early stages of this project.

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Footnotes

  1. Lloyd Berkner, letter to Abelson, March 2, 1962, Box 284, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  2. RC Peavey, telegram to J A Van Allen, March 1, 1962, Box 284, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  3. Space Science Summer Study brochure, Box 285, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  4. See Homer Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science (NASA, 1980) https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19810012433  ↩︎
  5. Newell, p 212  ↩︎
  6. The Rocket Panel went by many names over the years, and had overlapping membership with various scientific advisory groups. This embryonic program also included the IGY committee. See Newell’s account of the Rocket Panel and IGY program in Beyond, pp 25–58. See also Joseph K. Alexander, Science Advice to NASA: Conflict, Consensus, Partnership, Leadership (NASA, 2017) pp 5–11. ↩︎
  7. Newell, pp 206–207 ↩︎
  8. Oral history transcript, James E. Webb, interview 1, April 29, 1969, by T.H. Baker, LBJ Presidential Library, pp 3–5 https://discoverlbj.org/item/oh-webbj-19690429-1-74-266 ↩︎
  9. For example, the USAF and the Navy had been using summer studies in the early 1950s. See Dwayne Day, Lighting Rod: A History of the Air Force Chief Scientist’s Office (USAF, 2000), p 39 ↩︎
  10. “Suggested Topics for Consideration,” January 31, 1962, Box 284, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  11. Space Science Summer Study brochure, Box 285, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  12. Kuiper to Berkner; Peavey to Kellogg, Box 284, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  13. “Space Science Press Conference,” 1962–08–23, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed April 28, 2026, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-qf8jjp77. ↩︎
  14. A Review of Space Research, National Academy of Sciences — National Research Council, (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 1962) https://doi.org/10.17226/12421 ↩︎
  15. James A. Van Allen, “Resume of Summer Study Program”, August 8, 1962, p 3, Box 287, 1962 James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  16. “Minutes of the Lunar and Planetary Research Working Group”, Jun 25, (p 1), June 29, (p 4–5), Box 289, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  17. Ibid, July 2, p. 2 ↩︎
  18. “Minutes of Meeting of Working Group on Man as a Scientist in Space Exploration,” Box 288, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  19. “Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Apollo Experiments and Training on the Scientific Aspects of the Apollo Program,” December 15, 1963. https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/documents/SonettReport.pdf  ↩︎
  20. Fryklund to Gilruth, “Scientific Guidelines for the Apollo Project,” October 8, 1963, in Exploring the Unknown, Volume VII (NASA), 2008), SP-2008–4407, p 617 ↩︎
  21. Donald Beattie, Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p xiv, https://archive.org/details/takingsciencetom0000beat; Hinners to Wright, August 18, 2010, (p 11–12), https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/hinnersnw-8-18-10.pdf?emrc=c494ad ↩︎
  22. See David Portree, “Apollo Science and Sites: The Sonett Report (1963)”, https://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2019/11/apollo-science-and-sites-sonett-report.html  ↩︎
  23. Some of the most extensive responses came from Carl Sagan, Thomas Gold, and Harold Urey; Kellogg to Nelson, “Review of Answers to Space Science Board Questions on “Scientific Program for the Apollo Mission”, July 23, 1962, Box 288, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  24. Review, Chapter 11, pp 17–19  ↩︎
  25. Eugene Shoemaker, interview by Ron Doel, session IV, September 8, 1988, transcript, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics, pp 6–7 https://repository.aip.org/node/128785; It’s somewhat unclear if Shoemaker is remembering the Iowa Summer Study specifically, or the Sonett group meetings that had convened in Iowa earlier that year. He may be conflating them, and exaggerating their attitudes, but NASA officials certainly tried to temper the expectations of scientists in the study meetings, and comments in the working group meeting minutes could be fairly interpreted as saying that scientists would likely NOT be included on early Apollo missions. ↩︎
  26. William Porter, “The Context of the Space Science Summer Study”, p 3, Box 287, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. ↩︎
  27. Review, Chapter 1, pp 21–22 ↩︎
  28. Ibid, p 3 ↩︎
  29. Newell, 208 ↩︎
  30. “Transcript of Presidential Meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House,” November 21, 1962, Prepared by Dwayne Day from John F. Kennedy Library Presdient’s Office files, NASA, p 15–18 https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/jfk-webbconv/pages/transcript.pdf 
    ↩︎
  31. For additional context and analysis, see Dwayne Day, https://www.nasa.gov/history/JFK-Webbconv/pages/backgnd.html  ↩︎
  32. James Webb, “Keynote Address — National Goals in the Space Age,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Space-Age Planning (NASA, 1963), p. 5–7; Webb acknowledged some of the scientific dissent and the recommendation for a scientist on the first Apollo crews, but largely emphasized scientific opportunities created by Apollo.  ↩︎
  33. Lloyd Berkner, “Closing Remarks,” August 9, 1962, Box 287, James A. Van Allen Papers (RG99.0142), Special Collections & Archives, University of Iowa Libraries.  ↩︎
  34. Goldberg to Weart, transcript, May 17, 1982 Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics, p 81 https://repository.aip.org/node/127942  ↩︎
  35. See Review, Porter, and Newell  ↩︎
  36. Porter, p 2  ↩︎
  37. See https://www.nasa.gov/history/historical-organizational-charts/  ↩︎
  38. See: https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1990AREPS..18….1V/0000019.000.html ↩︎
  39. Goldberg, p 84  ↩︎
  40. Alexander, 25 ↩︎
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The First Photograph of the Earth From the Moon: A Visual History

On By Danny RobbIn Astronomy, Geology, History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Mapping, Photography, Planetary Science, Robotics, Space ExplorationLeave a comment

On August 23, 1966, the team behind NASA’s Lunar Orbiter I captured the first image of Earth as seen from the Moon. You will sometimes see an updated version of this image, in fantastic resolution with all imperfections erased. It is an impressive restoration created by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) in 2008, and just one example of the amazing work done by the LOIRP. But my favorite version will always be the original, because to me the imperfections are an essential part of the image. They are artifacts of the tools used to create that image, and they tell a story of incredible ingenuity.

Below, you can see the image that was plastered across the front page of the New York Times a few days after the Lunar Orbiter teams captured it. You can probably see the vertical stripes that line the image. These exist because the picture is built from 35mm film strips laid next to each other and composited together. It was the final step of a process that started by exposing and developing 70mm aerial film onboard the spacecraft using an Eastman Kodak camera system. Here is the story of how engineers retrieved this image and others like it, and delivered them to NASA at a critical time for the agency and the country.

A closeup of the frame 102 from Lunar Orbiter I, with the stripes on the crescent Earth visible. Source: NASA (hosted at archive.org)
Frame 102, H1-H3 Source: NASA  / David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries
The medium resolution shot from frame 102. Source: NASA/LOIRP

The pictures of the Earth weren’t part of the plan, and they almost didn’t happen. The primary goal for Lunar Orbiter was to help find landing sites for Apollo, and there were particular target areas planned for imaging on Lunar Orbiter I.

Team members had discussed the possibility of photographing the Earth, and NASA officials were enthusiastic about the idea1. But they would have to convince Boeing Program Manager Robert J. Helberg to make it happen. Helberg was afraid of the risks that the operation might entail to the spacecraft, and the possibility that the required maneuvers would cause them to lose contact with Lunar Orbiter. He was worried about the company’s performance incentive if something went wrong.2 This was a reasonable concern, considering how complex and delicate the spacecraft was.

Below, you can see the camera that made it happen, and the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that carried the camera along with a handful of other scientific instruments. 

The Lunar Orbiter camera system sitting in the bottom half of the pressurized shell. Project Manager Cliff Nelson (left) stands with NASA/Langley team members Calvin Broome, Israel Taback, and Joe Mooreman.From NASA. 
The spacecraft. From NASA/Langely

The camera was originally created for a classified Air Force surveillance satellite called SAMOS. In my history of the camera system, I detailed how the camera came to be, and how it was eventually adopted by NASA.

In short, Kodak devised a system for taking medium resolution and high resolution images simultaneously on the same strip of film. This film was routed through the spacecraft, where it was pressed against Kodak’s “Bimat” film, which developed and fixed the image. A flying spot scanner shot an electron beam through the film, and variations in the density of the film resulting from the image changed the intensity of the beam. Those variations were captured by a photomultiplier on the other side of the film, where they were translated into electronic signals that were sent back to Earth for reconstruction.

The camera schematic seen in Lunar Orbiter From: NASA/Boeing
Lunar Orbiter’s readout system From: NASA/Boeing

Lunar Orbiter officials Floyd Thompson, Clifford Nelson, and Lee Scherer went to JPL to change Helberg’s mind about taking the images of Earth. “They convinced Helberg that the picture was worth the risk,” writes NASA historian Bruce Byers, “and that NASA would make compensation in the event of an unexpected mishap with the spacecraft.”3 NASA historian James Hansen also describes how “the enthusiasm of his own staff for the undertaking” played a major role in changing Helberg’s mind.4

The Lunar Orbiter team put together a plan to reorient the spacecraft for photography of Earth on orbits 16 and 27. You can see the diagrams of the position and maneuvers for these photographs below.

From: NASA/Boeing
From: NASA/Boeing

Once the images were taken, they were developed and stored on the spacecraft. The team transmitted the photographs to Earth a few days later, where they would go through the reconstruction process, a multipart procedure that started at the Deep Space Instrumentation Facilities scattered across the world. The three primary stations used for Lunar Orbiter were in Goldstone, Madrid, and Woomera.5

A diagram showing the photographic transmission and reconstruction system from the Lunar Orbiter III contractor report. From NASA. 
A map of facilities that participated in tracking and data for Lunar Orbiter. From NASA/Boeing
85-foot dish in Woomera, Australia. From NASA
DSS in Goldstone, California. From: NASA

For the most part, the plan was to perform readout of the film near the end of the mission, but the Lunar Orbiter team did have the ability to perform near-real-time imagery through “manual reassembly” of the images at the ground stations in Madrid, Spain, and Woomera, Australia. 

They used this ability primarily to check the quality of the photographs, especially near the beginning of the mission, but they also used this process to get the images of Earth back mid-flight. At 9:30 PM on August 25, the station near Madrid began to receive the first images of the Earth from the Moon. The image took 43 minutes to arrive.6 In the receiving station, the picture materialized on a kinescope tube, and was captured on 35mm film by a special camera pointing at the tube.

This was accomplished using the specialized ground reconstruction electronics (GRE), shown below.

LO team members at the GRE at one of the Deep Space Stations. From NASA/Boeing
From: NASA/Boeing
A schematic showing the inner workings of the GRE camera seen on the right side of the image above. From: NASA/Boeing

The film was then looped to reconstruct the full frame as it existed on the original 70mm film onboard the spacecraft. This reconstruction process created the stripes that make Lunar Orbiter photography so distinctive. 

Slide from University of Rochester Special Collections Library. Picture taken by the author.7
Manual photo assembly in GRE area. “The process was used for near-real-time quality assessment of Lunar Orbiter photography.” Source: NASA

On the bottom of each film strip, you can see the pre-exposed “edge data” that was used to aid in the reconstruction of each frame.

From: NASA/Boeing

Below, you can see more images of the GRE used to commit the images to the 35mm film, creating the component strips of the larger frames.

Another angle of the GRE. From this angle, you can see the lens pointed toward the kinescope tube. From NASA/US National Archives
A closeup of the lens and film setup of the GRE camera. From NASA/US National Archives

The manual reconstruction process was fairly laborious, and the plan was to use automatic reconstruction machines for the bulk of the images at the end of each mission. Reconstruction aside from the near real time imagery took place at Eastman Kodak facilities in Rochester, New York, using a reassembly printer (when possible) that transferred the full frames to 9.5 inch film.

The automatic printing process. From NASA/Boeing

The machine projected “framelets” side by side to form composite images. The famous Earth photograph is itself a combination of three images from the high resolution lens–Frame 102, H1-H3. The result is a spectacular panoramic vista, with the Earth hanging just above the Moon’s limb.

Ann Kilgore (left), mayor of Hampton, Virginia, looks at the photograph with Langley Director Floyd Thompson. Source: NASA

NASA officials and official histories considered the image an outstanding success.8 Before this, the Soviet Union was largely winning the space race. Their lunar exploration program had racked up numerous achievements: first flyby (Luna 1) and first impactor (Luna 2), first images of the lunar farside (Luna 3), first lander (Luna 9), and first orbiter (Luna 10). For the United States, the image of the Earth from the Moon was one of their first big “wins” in the space race. The fact that it was such an astounding visual certainly helped.

Left to right sit Oran Nicks, Floyd Thompson, Cliff Nelson, Isadore Recant, and standing, geologist Larry Rowan. Source: NASA (clipped from Kindle edition)

Beyond this accomplishment, the Lunar Orbiters helped comprehensively map the Moon, and achieved their primary objective of scouting for Apollo landing sites. The imagery from the first three Lunar Orbiters was so useful that scientists were able to have more control over the flight plan for the last two LO spacecraft. 

Frame 102 actually directly influenced the scientists’ decision making once they were in the drivers’ seat. For the most part, the plan was to take images from a very direct top-down perspective. But the unplanned image contained oblique angles of the lunar surface, which proved useful to scientists who were trying to grapple with lunar topography. Frame 102 directly led to plans for more oblique angle photographs on later missions.9

Despite the images of the Earth taken by Apollo a few years later, that first image of the Earth from the Moon holds a special place in the history of space exploration. Journalists and Kodak’s Colorama referred to it as “the picture of the century,” a phrase that has also been used for Lunar Orbiter II’s oblique photograph of the crater Copernicus. Hansen believes, however, that in the eyes of the Lunar Orbiter team, Frame 102 was the picture that truly deserved the title.10

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  1. Sources are somewhat unclear about whether it was NASA employees or Boeing engineers who first raised the possibility. The Lunar Orbiter I report says the idea was discussed by flight operations during early stages of the project but never put into any firm plans. It goes on to say that “the first serious thought of taking such a photo was expressed by NASA personnel.” (p 64). In James Hansen’s history of NASA Langley, he writes that “Boeing engineers realized that the Lunar Orbiter project presented a unique opportunity for photographing the earth.” and that the Lunar Orbiter project staff were “all for it.” (pp. 344-345) His source is Byers, but Byers makes no claim about the origins of the idea. Both Byers and Hansen were also writing based on separate interviews with Spacecraft Manager Israel Taback.  It seems plausible that the idea was raised during early discussion by Boeing engineers, and stuck in the heads of NASA officials, who persisted in pushing for it even though it wasn’t included in the flight plan. ↩︎
  2. Bruce Byers, Destination Moon: A History of the Lunar Orbiter Program, April 1977, NASA, pp 241-242, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770016195 ↩︎
  3. Byers, pp 241-242 ↩︎
  4. James R. Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center from Sputnik to Apollo, NASA, January 1995, pp. 344-345. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19950021264 ↩︎
  5. Most of the engineering information in this post comes directly from Lunar Orbiter contract documents. For more detail, see Lunar Orbiter I: Photographic Mission Summary, NASA/Boeing, April 1967, pp. 50-53, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112106582528; also Lunar Orbiter I: Photography, NASA/Boeing, August 1967, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19670023005 ↩︎
  6. “How the Earth Looks From the Moon,” The New York Times (New York, NY), August 26, 1966, https://www.nytimes.com/1966/08/26/archives/how-the-earth-looks-from-the-moon-first-picture-shows-cover-of.html ↩︎
  7. Lunar Orbiter slide collection, 146:13, Kodak Historical Collection, D.319, Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester ↩︎
  8. See Byers and Hansen. ↩︎
  9. Byers, p 243, and Lunar Orbiter I: Photography, p 33 ↩︎
  10. Hansen, footnote 66, pp 506. Hansen reports that he was “not able to track down the exact source of the phrase.” In most other sources I have come across, the Copernicus photo has the “picture of the century” designation. Hansen seems to have strong reasons to think that Frame 102 had the title first, and that it came from within Kodak. I will try to return to Kodak archives again soon, with this question in mind. ↩︎

Kodak’s “Pre-Invented” Lunar Orbiter Camera; or, The Fate of SAMOS Readout

On By Danny RobbIn History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Mapping, Photography, Planetary Science, Robotics, Space Exploration, Warfare1 Comment
Left: The Lunar Orbiter camera system sitting in the bottom half of the pressurized shell. Project Manager Cliff Nelson (left) stands with NASA/Langley team members Calvin Broome, Israel Taback, and Joe Mooreman. From NASA. Right: Lunar Orbiter frame 5017-M, showing artifacts from Kodak’s camera system. From NASA/LOIRP.

In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five robotic spacecraft into orbit around the Moon. Constructed for the primary purpose of finding landing sites for Apollo, the Lunar Orbiters also enabled nearly comprehensive mapping of the Moon in stunning detail. The quantity and resolution of the photographs returned by Lunar Orbiter was unprecedented, thanks to a camera system built by the Eastman Kodak company of Rochester, New York. Their imaging system involved elaborate mechanisms to expose photographic film in orbit, develop the film onboard the spacecraft, and remotely transmit images back to Earth.

In February of 1967, the Rochester Times-Union published a story about how Kodak had “pre-invented” the Lunar Orbiter camera. Kodak director of R&D Arthur Simmons told the Times-Union that “no one walked in and asked us to develop a camera and film system to take closeup photos of the moon…Kodak has, for want of a better word, a ‘library,’ of hundreds of ‘conceptual ideas’ which we don’t advertise.”1 But the story of the camera’s “pre-invention” was more interesting than Simmons let on. When Kodak joined Boeing’s bid for the Lunar Orbiter in 1963, the camera system already existed. The company had originally developed it for the Air Force in the 1950s as a part of the highly classified satellite surveillance program called Weapons System 117L (WS-117L).

The nature of WS-117L and the clandestine origins of the Lunar Orbiter camera system were vaguely known by some at the time, but the full details were only revealed to the public through declassification decades later. This article won’t linger on the detailed technical specifications of the Lunar Orbiter cameras, but will instead focus on tracing the system’s development from conception to its adoption by NASA. It is the story of some of the first attempts by the United States to remotely transmit images from space, and how those same systems were adapted for lunar exploration.

WS-117L had roots in RAND studies of satellite surveillance concepts going back to 1946, and was the first major attempt to put those ideas into practice. The United States was hoping that satellites could be used to monitor the buildup of nuclear weapons and launch sites in the Soviet Union. In 1953, RAND Report 262 laid out in full the feasibility and utility of such systems, and by 1955 the Air Force began soliciting contractors for WS-117L. Eastman Kodak created camera systems for Lockheed’s bid, and the the Air Force awarded their contract in October of 1956.2

Timeline of the Advanced Reconnaissance System, or WS-117L, from a 1958 summary. From NRO (PDF).

Originally, RAND had primarily considered using television systems.3 “Near real time” imaging was considered by some to be the ideal form of satellite surveillance, so television was a logical choice. But in a declassified history of the program, Robert Perry explains that the goal of real time imaging quickly became contested within the Air Force–it was unclear whether the technology was ready to satisfy requirements, and the alternative film recovery systems showed clear feasibility and reliability early on. Some of these efforts were spun off from WS-117L into the Discoverer-CORONA program, which sent Kodak camera systems into orbit, and returned capsules of exposed film for aerial retrieval and processing back on Earth.4 Early on, however, a near real time system was very much a part of the plan. In their bid for WS-117L, Kodak created a remote transmission system that would fly in what became known as the SAMOS program.

Television systems were still in consideration early on, but there were clear technological limitations at the time, especially when it came to resolution. Kodak’s newly formed Apparatus and Optical Division settled on a system to develop film onboard the spacecraft and “readout” the images to receiving stations on Earth. Planners envisaged five cameras for SAMOS, the first three dedicated to testing Kodak’s readout system (the others testing advanced recovery systems). The E-1 camera would primarily be a technology demonstrator, while the E-2 and E-3 would test the ability for their system to take images at more functional resolutions. All used the same basic architecture.

A diagram showing the various SAMOS camera systems and their proposed capabilities. From NRO (PDF).

In a way, this camera system was in fact “pre-invented,” as it was mostly a clever assembly of existing technologies, many created by Kodak. The company had decades of experience in aerial photography going back to World War I. By the end of World War II, they had created advanced aerial films, compact film storage systems, and image motion compensation techniques. They had also worked on IR bomb sights and proximity sensing for the Navy, which would become useful for developing thermal control materials for the spacecraft.5

Illustrations from 1957 show a rough sketch of their plans for SAMOS readout. Kodak’s 70mm film would be exposed, processed, and stored before readout and transmission. Electronic signals received on the ground would be used to reconstruct the images.

An early diagram showing the SAMOS readout system without some of the key details. From NRO (PDF).

By 1958, planning documents started detailing two of the key technologies that ultimately made the readout system possible. One was what became known as Kodak “Bimat” film, labeled in the illustration below as “WEB.”6 This web was coated with gelatin containing the necessary processing chemicals, enabling “dry” processing. The web was pressed against the exposed film, developing and fixing the images before storage and transmission.7

Diagram from a 1959 Lockheed briefing on the SAMOS program, image is labeled September 1958. From NRO (PDF).

The origins of Bimat film are somewhat obscure in the public record. One Kodak-produced history suggests that the technology started as a laboratory investigation with amateur photography in mind, and was then applied to use in aerial photography.8 Considering the timeline, it was either a happy accident that this experiment matured just in time for WS-117L, or Kodak engineers started looking into the technique specifically in response to the challenges of film photography in space. 

A Lockheed development plan from March 1956 describes the processing system in vague terms, stating that it would “not differ significantly” from existing methodologies for “airborne rapid-processing,” and describing a notional “a roller-applicator type” system. It also lists “the handling of photographic chemicals” as one of the “major difficulties to be overcome.”9 The illustration from 1957 shows the onboard processing step without the “WEB,” a detail that only shows up in diagrams like the one above labeled 1958.10 Then, a patent for a “web processing method” was filed in August 1959 by Kodak researchers, presenting “a one-step method for substantially completely developing and fixing a photographic image…without immersion in photographic processing baths.”11 David McDowell, an engineer who joined up with Kodak in late 1956 and worked on both SAMOS and Lunar Orbiter, also remembers Bimat being developed specifically for the project. “Bimat was started as soon as we started work on E-1 and E-2,” he told me, “because we knew we had to process film in orbit.”12

The second key technology was the readout system itself, which involved collaboration with the Columbia Broadcasting System Laboratories to create a flying-spot scanner.13 It worked using what McDowell calls an “inside-out CRT,” using a cathode-ray tube that fired an electron beam through the exposed film. Variations in the density of the film changed the intensity of the beam, and those variations were recorded by a photomultiplier and translated into electronic signals that could be sent back to Earth. Teams on the ground received those signals, used equipment to translate them back into an image, and recorded that image on film. Before passing through the film, the beam reflected off a revolving drum (seen in the diagram below) for thermal management.

Diagram of the SAMOS readout system from the same Lockheed briefing. From NRO (PDF).

In October 1960, the first E-1 camera launched on an Atlas-Agena, but failed to inject into orbit. Meanwhile, officials were actively debating the wisdom of continuing the readout program. Costs were rising, engineering difficulties plagued the program, some of the technology was beginning to seem obsolete, and CORONA-like systems were looking like a better option until more advanced readout techniques could be developed. Despite these issues, there were advocates for readout, and tests continued so that any decision could be made based on tangible results.

In January 1961, the second SAMOS test launched with another E-1 camera and sailed into orbit. In Sunnyvale, California, technicians at a readout station received transmissions from the spacecraft, and the result was a photograph with a 100 foot resolution. The system had worked.14

The E-2 camera would be the next step, with more advanced aiming systems and a higher resolution. All of the rotating systems within the spacecraft created complexities when it came to achieving these objectives. One key difference between E-1 and E-2, McDowell recalls, was that E-2 used a rotating nosecone to help stabilize and aim the camera.15

A diagram of the payload section for E-2, showing the “steerable mounting” that made it distinct from E-1. From NRO (PDF).
A diagram from SAMOS planning documents showing the proposed aiming and stereo operation capabilities of the E-2. From NRO (PDF).

The first attempt to launch an E-2 ended two seconds after liftoff, when the Atlas fell immediately back to the ground and exploded. After the E-2 launch failure, readout was largely abandoned in favor of recovery programs. According to Perry, Air Force Colonel W.G. King believed that almost without exception, “everything a readout system could do a recovery system could do better.”16 Among other problems, readout systems required long lives, necessitating higher orbits that sacrificed resolution and created greater power requirements.17 Kodak engineers, including McDowell, remember one of the primary constraints being the bandwidth required to transmit the images, and the fact that they were only using a single ground station.18

No other E-2 cameras were flown, but it wasn’t the end of the story for the camera system. After the Air Force canceled further launches, E-1 and E-2 hardware was left scattered around the country, with one test model remaining in Eastman Kodak facilities in Rochester.

Perry reports that officials at NASA knew about the E-1 system and inquired about the cameras as early as April of 1961, and that the Air Force gave them permission to get details from contractors. The film readout system was similar to the method employed by the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft to return the first images of the far side of the Moon in 1959, and NASA was interested in using the E-1 for similar purposes. Perry quotes Colonel King saying that NASA officials “did [not] seem to understand much about the problems of taking pictures from a space vehicle.” He did not believe the system would be usable for lunar exploration, but the idea didn’t go away.19

At that time, the best candidate for using such a camera system would likely have been for the Surveyor program’s planned orbiter, which was encountering its own problems. NASA historian Bruce Byers writes that several factors converged that led to dropping the Surveyor orbiter in favor of a standalone project. JPL was dealing with failures of the first Ranger probes, which delayed its work on Surveyor, and the development of the Centaur upper stage planned for Surveyor was also running into trouble. 

Meanwhile, Apollo planning was underway. NASA officials decided to deprioritize orbiter data, because landing data was more helpful for hardware development, which had top priority. The orbital imagery would be primarily helpful for landing site selection, which could come later. JPL was to focus on getting Surveyor landers ready, while the Office of Space Sciences (OSS) began developing alternative plans for an orbiter.20

Oran Nicks put Lee Scherer on the job of developing a spacecraft that could fly on Agena. He originally looked into adapting Ranger or Able 5 to the task. After they handed the program off to the Langley research center, however Byers writes that Langley director Floyd Thompson opted for a competitive bid.21 But this competition may have been, if not a complete smokescreen, weighted heavily in the favor of one particular bid. Correlating the Lunar Orbiter program with the timeline presented in Vance G. Mitchell’s declassified history of NASA/DOD relations paints a fascinating picture. 

In 1962, as the Surveyor orbiter was under study, NASA Associate Administrator Robert Seamans met with DOD research official John Rubel to discuss lunar reconnaissance. Then, in May 1963, little more than a month after Langely submitted Lunar Orbiter’s Project Approval Document to Seamans, a much larger meeting took place between NASA and DOD officials. They directly discussed the use of NRO equipment for both unmanned vehicles and the Apollo program. Immediately following this meeting, NASA administrator James Webb and Seamans started working with DOD officials on how to put this into practice, and specifically on how NASA could create unclassified contracts for such arrangements. Despite reservations, Rubel’s successor, Eugene Fubini, had the NRO look into NASA’s request.22

In mid July, an agreement was drafted between NASA and the DOD giving NASA permission to use NRO equipment for “both unmanned and manned lunar reconnaissance operations,” under certain stipulations. It included the following plan of action: 

“…it will be the responsibility of the NRO to select a contractor, generally from among those engaged in the present covert reconnaissance programs, to develop equipment meeting these specifications in a secure and protected, or ‘black’, fashion. Concurrently, NASA will grant the same contractor an overt or ‘white’ reconnaissance contract which will serve as a technically plausible cover for the development of the flight hardware actually to be employed, during that length of time in which the flight hardware must be regarded as highly sensitive because of its relevance to the on-going covert reconnaissance operations.”23

Mitchell recounts one instance of very direct contact between the interested parties during this period. “On 24 July 1963,” he writes, “NASA, NRO, and CIA representatives met with Fredrick C.E. Oder, a retired Air Force colonel involved with Samos in the 1950s, and now an Eastman Kodak executive.” The group directly discussed adapting the E-1 and E-2 cameras for lunar exploration, consulting Kodak engineers who thought it would be feasible.24

On August 28, the DOD/CIA/NASA agreement was signed by James Webb and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.25 On August 30, Seamans reviewed Langley’s Request For Proposals document, and NASA released it to contractors.26 The Boeing/Kodak bid was approved by Seamans and Webb in December. “Although the available documentation does not say so,” Mitchell argues, “the NRO, by virtue of the provisions of the 28 August agreement and its knowledge of reconnaissance camera systems must have played a role in the selection process.”27

This all may help explain the fact that at least in its early stages, Lunar Orbiter was kept under tight security measures at Kodak. McDowell remembers that at the time, work on Lunar Orbiter was kept “in the same level of secrecy that the [SAMOS] projects were.” Work was extremely siloed–engineers building individual components did not always know exactly what they would be used for. McDowell says that this was a pretty standard practice for Kodak at the time, but that the fact that they were using the E-2 probably had something to do with it.28

Regardless of whether the outcome of the competition was predetermined, the Kodak system did have real advantages over the other bids for Lunar Orbiter. It promised increased flexibility, the capability of taking images simultaneously in multiple resolutions, and the ability to achieve impressively high resolutions.

Kodak’s final Lunar Orbiter camera system used a process largely identical to their E-2 cameras.29 They even seem to have borrowed some of the illustrations from SAMOS presentations for Lunar Orbiter documentation.

The Lunar Orbiter readout subsystem as shown in the Lunar Orbiter I contractor report. From NASA.

The primary modifications that Kodak engineers made were to the lenses and shutter systems. They sought to meet very strict NASA requirements regarding resolution of the images. Compared to the E-1 and E-2, which had 100-foot and 20-foot resolution respectively, NASA’s goals for Apollo planning stated a roughly 3-foot resolution (closer to the never-realized plans for the SAMOS E-3). They also moved from a single ground station to three. Kodak’s final system was capable of achieving that resolution given the right orbit.

Through Lunar Orbiter documentation, we get a closer look at the reconstruction process. Transmitted images were displayed with a kinescope and captured on 35mm film, which was sent to Rochester for reassembly. Strips of 35mm film were assembled to form a full frame, which was in turn captured on film and sent off to NASA. This meant that the images themselves traveled across several different rolls of film before finally being put to use.

A diagram showing the photographic transmission and reconstruction system from the Lunar Orbiter III contractor report. From NASA.

The photographs brought back by Lunar Orbiter played an integral role in Apollo site selection, and brought a wealth of new information to cartographers and scientists. The camera system performed admirably, although engineers did encounter a handful of difficulties over the course of the five flights. Some of these difficulties had to do with the Bimat film itself, which operated somewhat inconsistently. The film could “stick,” experience dryout, or see droplet formation, leaving artifacts on the film.30 The continuing issues with the film into 1966 and 1967 may hint at some of the specific engineering and reliability issues that contributed to the end of SAMOS readout.

The processing mechanism on Lunar Orbiter. Bimat supply was upper left, take-up upper right. The films were pressed together on the small drum in the middle. The developed film was dried and stored on the large drum below. From NASA (PDF).
A diagram showing the processing mechanism from a 1965 NASA/Langley document.
Frame 76, H3 from Lunar Orbiter V. This frame contains the landing site for Apollo 11, and displays several of the artifacts seen on Lunar Orbiter imagery. The landing site itself is nearly obscured by the line in the center, which may be a Bimat supply separation line. From NASA/LOIRP.

Because of its spin-off from Surveyor during the push for Apollo, Lunar Orbiter was arguably the very first spacecraft designed to conduct reconnaissance specifically for human spaceflight. The modification of military hardware for the purposes of exploration has a long tradition in the history of exploration, and this is a particularly fascinating example in that tradition. It is the story of a unique camera system straddling technological eras that ended up playing two very different roles in the geopolitical competition of the Cold War.

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Footnotes

  1. “How Kodak ‘Pre-Invented’ the Lunar Orbiter Camera (Based on an article in the Rochester Times-Union, February 3, 1967)”, 105:9, Kodak Historical Collection, D.319, Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester ↩︎
  2. “Chronology: WS 117L Background,” NRO, Declassified WS117L, SAMOS & Sentry Records, ID 953, https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/WS117L_Records/953.PD; and “Space System Development Plan: SAMOS R&D Program” 12 July, 1960, NRO, ID 608, https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/WS117L_Records/608.PDF; during the history of WS-117L, ARPA took a direct role in management for a period, and the project went through various names. This article’s primary focus is on the camera systems, and so avoids detailing these changes for simplification. The documents linked here contain detailed explanations of these changes. ↩︎
  3. “Project Feed Back Summary Report,” ed. J.E. Lipp and R.M. Salter, R-262, Volume 1, March 1, 1954 (RAND), https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R262z1.html ↩︎
  4. Robert Perry, A History of Satellite Reconnaissance Volume IIA – SAMOS, Revised October 1973, NRO, ID 304, https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/WS117L_Records/304.PDF; and   Kenneth E. Greer, “CORONA,” in CORONA: America’s First Sattelite Program, ed. Kevin C Ruffner,  pp 4-6, https://www.cia.gov/static/Corona-Between-the-Sun-and-the-Earth.pdf ↩︎
  5. David McDowell (former Kodak engineer) in discussion with the author, March 22, 2024 ↩︎
  6. This is one of the earliest references to this technology that I have been able to find. The term “Bimat” came later, and in Lunar Orbiter documents at the time, engineers have often retained the “web” terminology, referring to it as “Bimat web.” For more on how Bimat worked: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP33-02415A000500120032-7.pdf ↩︎
  7. See “Advanced Reconnaissance System Weapon System 117L,” 1 March 1958, NRO, ID 101, https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/WS117L_Records/101.PDF; This was one of the primary differences between Kodak’s readout system and Luna 3’s, which used wet processing methods. ↩︎
  8. “Kodak Contributions to Aerial Photography,” p 6, 106:6, Kodak Historical Collection, D.319, Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester ↩︎
  9. “Pied Piper Development Plan: Vol II Sub-System Plan, E. Visual Reconnaissance,” Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, 1 March, 1956, NRO, ID 502, https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/WS117L_Records/502.PDF ↩︎
  10. The date is somewhat difficult to decipher in the provided image, but is clearly 1958 on the one in this document: https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/ForAll/041723/F-2022-00223_C05142220.pdf ↩︎
  11.  Leonard W. Tregillus, Arthur A Rasch, and Edwin B Wyand, Jr, “Web Processing Method and Composition,” USPO Patent 3,179,517; https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/bd/76/21/1d361f54f0613e/US3179517.pdf ↩︎
  12. McDowell, 2024; The University of Rochester Special Collections Library is also currently processing some Kodak Research Laboratories documentation, to be opened in 2027. I am hoping that more information might be forthcoming. ↩︎
  13. This was similar in principle to Luna 3, which would have been in development around the same time or slightly after the Kodak/CBS system, despite flying sooner. The 1956 Lockheed document contains a pretty detailed description of the flying spot scanner, pretty much as it appeared in the final system. Luna 3’s scanner had definitely begun development by the middle of 1958, but preliminary work may go back to 1957 or earlier. Some of the basic principles behind the flying spot scanner go back even further to some of the earliest experiments in television. See Don P. Mitchell’s description of the Luna 3 systems: http://mentallandscape.com/L_Luna3.htm; and this account of Luna 3’s transmission system, including the use of film recovered from US spy balloons: http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/luna3/SpyBalloon.htm ↩︎
  14. Perry, pp 152-167 ↩︎
  15. David McDowell in discussion with the author, December 17, 2025. McDowell discussed the stabilization difficulties and the nosecone design in the 2024 discussion, as well. ↩︎
  16. Perry, pp 175 ↩︎
  17. Information on E-1/E-2 launches and the fate of the cameras from Perry, pp 165-177; continued investigation of readout, pp 178-196 ↩︎
  18. McDowell, 2024; also see comments in “RMSC Gambit Exhibit Press Conference”, t25:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBMtsBZJT94 ↩︎
  19. Perry, pp 168, 173 ↩︎
  20. Bruce Byers, Destination Moon: A History of the Lunar Orbiter Program, April 1977, NASA, pp  9-29, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770016195 ↩︎
  21. Byers, pp 16-29, 40 ↩︎
  22. Vance G. Mitchell, Sharing Space: The Secret Interaction Between The National Aeronautics & Space Administration & the National Reconnaissance Office, 1961-1995, NRO/CSNR, pp 12-13, https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/foia/declass/ForAll/012422/F-2019-00002_C05116216.pdf ↩︎
  23. “DOD/CIA-NASA Agreement on NASA Reconnaissance Programs,” 17 July, 1963, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP33-02415A000400060019-0.pdf ↩︎
  24.  Mitchell, p 14 ↩︎
  25. For the final draft, see: https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/UPWARD/1.%20DoD-CIA-NASA%20Agreement%20on%20NASA%27s%20Reconnaissance%20Program.PDF ↩︎
  26. Byers, pp 46-47 ↩︎
  27. Mitchell, p 15 ↩︎
  28. McDowell, 2025 ↩︎
  29. For an earlier simplified account of this transfer, and a summary of some of the technical differences, see R. Cargill Hall, “SAMOS to the Moon: The Clandestine Transfer of Reconnaissance Technology Between Federal Agencies,” NRO, https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/history/csnr/programs/docs/prog-hist-01.pdf ↩︎
  30. Lunar Orbiter documentation often details these types of imperfections, including in the contractor report for Lunar Orbiter I: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19670023005/downloads/19670023005.pdf ↩︎

The Echoes of Apollo

On By Danny RobbIn Astronomy, History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Space Exploration1 Comment

Last week, people flew around the Moon. It feels surreal to be able to type those words.

When I talk to people who witnessed the Apollo program, I like to ask them what they remember. Most were children at the time, and their answer is often some version of: “Oh, I wanted to be an astronaut.”

Some of the children who witnessed Apollo did become astronauts, while others became engineers and scientists. But the power of Apollo transcended generations, the stories and images from the missions creating new witnesses decades after Apollo 17.

There is Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch, who experienced Apollo as a poster of Earthrise on her wall–and then brought back her own spectacular imagery from the Moon. There is the director of Artemis landing and recovery, Liliana Villarreal, who experienced Apollo at a museum–and then brought astronauts home from the Moon.

They are the echoes of Apollo. They will create echoes of their own.

Earthrise from Apollo 8
Earthrise from Apollo 8. From NASA.
Earthset from Artemis. From NASA.

“Welcome to my old neighborhood.” – Jim Lovell

On the morning of their lunar flyby, the crew of Artemis II was greeted by the voice of Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell, giving them words of welcome. Lovell had passed away the year before, but had recorded this message for the crew. “So, Reid, and Victor, and Christina, and Jeremy,” he said, “and all the great teams supporting you–good luck and godspeed from all of us here on the good Earth.”

The Lovell family had also sent them an artifact from Apollo 8: Jim Lovell’s mission patch from 1968.

Lovell (right), with mission patch visible, floats next to Frank Borman on Apollo 8. From 16mm footage.
Jeremy Hansen holds up Lovell’s mission patch for the camera on Artemis II. From NASA.

As they approached the Moon, I was glued to the stream. I will always remember the Moon getting larger and larger, seeing more and more detail revealing itself on the lunar surface. Hearing them talk about the craters that mark the westward limit of what we can see from Earth, like Grimaldi, getting larger and more detailed. And slowly, the far side of the Moon becoming the dominant view from the capsule.

The Moon from Apollo 8. From NASA.
The Moon from Artemis 2. From NASA’s broadcast.

There were other types of echoes. Not ones that came from inspiration, but echoes that were more structural, part of the share nature of their missions.They were a consequence of the fact that achieving something of that magnitude entails certain values and qualities in the people involved: curiosity, kindness, and a drive to collaborate.

Some of the most memorable things from both Apollo and Artemis were the conversations between the teams on the ground and the teams at the Moon. It was connection. It was Moon joy.

In fact, some of the first words spoken on the surface of the Moon in 1969 were reports back to home: “Contact Light. Okay, engine stop…Houston…”

On Artemis II, the conversations between the Moon and Earth were fascinating to listen to. The astronauts had been trained to give vivid descriptions of what they saw: the textures, the details, the aspects that different from what they had see in photographs.

The astronauts discussed these observations amongst themselves before making calls back home, which we got to listen in on. Victor Glover gave the first of their situation reports directly from the Moon, a part of the mission that was his idea:

“…from Integrity, we have a sit-rep. The targets that are being discussed right now, it’s the farside-nearside comparison, and hearing some great discussion of browns and greens in the Aristarchus plateau, and how those disappear as you go toward the north pole, and then over to the far side, you lose the color…”

And later

“I also heard a discussion about the albedo of Grimaldi being a 10, and how many of us, when we were a little farther away, saw that as the darkest albedo, and that the bigger mare of to the west, sorry–to the east–was still dark, but maybe a 7-8. We still think that, but you are seeing color variation, albedo variation, inside of Grimaldi as well. And that even on the west side, there’s still a very dark part of it. But it is still the darkest, it is just not as uniform as it looked when we were farther away…”

Victor Glover, near the Moon. From NASA Broadcast.

And the reply from Earth, NASA scientist Kelsey Young maintained a dialogue with them in real time.

“Copy all, Victor, and you read our minds. Superlatives like ‘darkest,’ ‘biggest,’ are really helpful for us, so keep those coming.”

Kelsey Young, in Houston. From NASA Broadcast.
Victor Glover looks out the window onto the surface of the Moon. From NASA.

There were moments that captured their rapidly changing views from the capsule.

“When I went back to the window just now, the view has completely changed. Our trajectory is taking us to a new view, and I’m looking more into Vavilov, so I’ve got a nice great view into Vavilov…wow, yeah, I wish I had some more time to just sit here and describe what I’m seeing, but the terminator right now is just fantastic. It is the most rugged that I’ve seen it. From a lighting perspective, there are little islands, there are islands of terrain out there that are completely surrounded by darkness…”

Victor Glover. From NASA Broadcast.

Victor and the crew continued their collaboration with the science team. Trying to get on the same page with the team back at home, they described the position of a feature they were seeing by drawing intersecting lines from other prominent craters.

Glover at one point described the texture the astronauts saw in Hertzprung and the surrounding area.

Hertzprung Basin as seem by Artemis II. From NASA.

“Christina described it earlier, around Hertzprung, and then from Hertzprung toward Ohm, I’m sorry, toward Orientale, There appears to be a frozen, a rippling pond, but frozen, or like choppy waves, when it’s windy out, choppy water, and then it freezes instantly. That’s the texture. If you walk down there barefoot, it looks like it would be hard on your feet, like hot lava after its cooled…except for right there in the center of Hertzprung, it looks paved, like a paved road, nice and smooth.”

Victor Glover. From NASA Broadcast.

It reminded me of reports from the Apollo 8 astronauts. One of Jim Lovell’s first reports was that the texture he saw from the capsule looked like “plaster-of-paris.” And in the photographic report written by Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders, they wrote this:

“The surface of the mare materials in the southern part of the Sea of Tranquility on the approach to landing site 1 and the terminator resembled the surface of a frozen sea with a broad, but irregular, swell.”

Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders. From Analysis of Apollo 8 Photography and Visual Observations.
The Moon and Earth from the window of Apollo 8. From NASA
The Moon and Earth from the window of Artemis II. From NASA.

Christina Koch described their efforts to discuss and evaluate what they saw, along with an intense moment she experienced.

“We really enjoyed our discussion time…we sort of were able to bounce ideas off of each other and come to new conclusions.”

and then

“I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the Moon…something just drew me in suddenly to the lunar landscape, and it became real. And the truth is, the Moon really is its own body in the universe, it’s not just a poster in the sky that goes by. It is a real place. And when we have that perspective, and we compare it to our home of the Earth, it reminds us of how much we have in common…”

Christina Koch. From NASA Broadcast.

Then Victor Glover re-emphasized the value of teamwork.

“Science, Integrity…it was hard to speak, looking through the zoom, because I went straight where Christina went. And I was walking around down there on the surface, climbing and off-roading on an amazing terrain.

I also want to underscore something that she said. As we continue to explore, when we actually do go down there on the surface, I know for safety reasons that we would never send someone alone. But I just want to really emphasize how important the discussion time was. When we started to talk, we not only got better science discussion, we got better human connection. And so, doing this as a pair, we just learn and grow together, and that’s just super important, so thank you for adding that to this plan.”

From NASA Broadcast.
Victor Glover (left), makes observations of the lunar surface, while Christina Koch (right) takes pictures. From NASA.

Back on Earth, you could see the scale of the teamwork involved in making something like this happen. We got to watch the teamwork in the science room, as they talked directly with people flying around the Moon. On display were some of the best moments that come from exploration. Like the moment the science officers heard reports of impact flashes on the dark portion of the lunar surface as the passed through an eclipse.

Angela Garcia (left) and Kelsey Young (right), Artemis science officers, react to hearing reports of impact flashes from the crew.
From NASA Broadcast.
The Science Evaluation Room (SER)
“Amazing new, I literally just look over at the SER, and they were jumping up and down literally.” – Kelsey Young
Integrity watches a sunrise on the Moon. From NASA.

The teamwork involved goes far beyond the people in those rooms. Another theme that comes up in my conversations with people who witnessed Apollo: someone in their family worked on some aspect of the program. That isn’t surprising, given the sheer number of people involved in making missions like this into reality. My grandmother told me that someone in our family worked on one of the scoops used to pick up samples on the lunar surface.

Projects like these are, by necessity, massive collaborations. They may be, on some level, signals of economic and military strength that serve geopolitical purposes. But they are also much more than that. They are signals of the ability to muster the enthusiasm and effort of untold numbers of like-minded people toward a common goal. Underscoring this was the fact that Artemis II, unlike Apollo, was an international mission. The European Space Agency built the service module that carried the Orion capsule to the Moon, and one of the crew was Canadian.

The people in that capsule were connected to their friends and colleagues back on Earth through tenuous radio signals. And from their conversations, it was clear that geopolitical competition was the farthest thing from their minds. They were thinking about science, about our place in the universe, about each other, and about us.

When Christina Koch returned safely, she had a message she wanted to convey to all of us:

“Planet Earth, you are a crew.“

The Artemis II crew after their return to Earth. From NASA.

When I was in college, the United States had no way to send human beings into space. The Space Shuttle had just been canceled, and the prospect of a replacement was speculative and far off. Looking back on the Apollo program during that liminal period, I got the strange feeling that the past seemed more futuristic than the present.

I wanted to know why.

I wanted to understand how space travel began, why we lost our ability, and how we might one day get it back. This isn’t the usual sort of way that Apollo inspires a passion for space exploration. But in my own way, I am an echo of Apollo.

One of the things I realized very early is that we never really lost our ability to travel into space. In the decades after Apollo, intrepid explorers using robotic spacecraft revealed our solar system to us, in staggering image after staggering image. And in the data they collected that increased our awareness and understanding of the other worlds in our neighborhood.

I will continue to repeat, as often as people will listen, Oran Nicks‘ sentiment that there is no such thing as uncrewed space mission–only a difference in where the crew is standing to conduct them.1 I still believe in the magic of robotic space missions, and I will continue trying to get others to see that magic. Robotic space exploration is human space exploration.

But Artemis reaffirms that there is something truly special about humans sitting inside the spacecraft itself. Telepresence is not presence. Our eyes capture things that cameras cannot, and they create subjective experiences impossible by other means. And it is worth doing, in part because it inspires entire generations of people to create, and collaborate, and dare mighty things.

I look forward to the echoes of Artemis.

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  1. Full quote: “The truth is that there were no such thing as unmanned mission; it was merely a question of where man stood to conduct them.” From his book Far Travelers, pg 245 ↩︎

Exploring the Far Side of the Moon: A Visual History

On By Danny RobbIn Geology, History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Mapping, Photography, Planetary Science, Robotics5 Comments

Lunar exploration has always held a strange position in the history of exploration. For all of human history, people have been staring up at the Moon, and for centuries astronomers used telescopes to study the lunar surface. The telescopic surveying and mapping of the Moon by astronomers can (and should, I think) be considered a form of exploration. From this perspective, the Moon had been thoroughly explored far before the dawn of the Space Age. But on the other hand, because of the nature of the Moon’s orbit, the Moon also possessed some of the most mysterious and inaccessible terrain that ever taunted exploration-minded humans.

The Moon is tidally locked, meaning that only one side of the Moon ever faces the Earth. And so for all those millennia of Moon-gazing, there was an entire half of our natural satellite that no human had ever seen before. We would only get our first look at the end of the 1950s, and it would take even longer for us to complete a full map of the Moon. Here is a visual history of how we did it, designed to guide you through the process, even if you aren’t yet familiar with any lunar features.

First, let’s look at the near side of the Moon. The dark parts are the maria, Latin for “seas.” The brighter parts are, generally, called the highlands.

Needs no introduction. From NASA

The maria provide helpful landmarks for understanding how the far side of the Moon was revealed, and I have highlighted a few helpful maria below. In red you can see the Sea of Tranquility, probably the most famous mare, since that’s where Apollo 11 landed. But the other ones I have marked will be the most helpful landmarks for this history. We will especially be tracking Grimaldi, really a crater on the western limb (edge) of the Moon with a mare floor. Over on the eastern limb, highlighted in green, is the Mare Humboldtianum. I’ve highlighted Mare Crisium in blue, since it is large and distinctive. But mainly keep your eye on Grimaldi and Humboldtianum.

ORANGE: Grimaldi Crater, RED: Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis) , BLUE: Mare Crisium, GREEN: Mare Humboldtianum

Oddly, even though the moon is tidally locked, we have been able to see small portions of the far side, due to a wobbling motion called lunar libration. You can see libration happening in the animation below. You might be able to notice that Humboldtianum actually disappears over the limb at certain times. Because of libration, we have actually been able to see more than fifty percent of the lunar surface for a long time. In the 17th century, astronomers began using telescopes to study the extent of libration, and to extend lunar maps slightly.1

File:Lunar libration with phase Oct 2007 HD.gif
Lunar Libration, from Wikimedia

William Gilbert and Galileo were some of the first astronomers to detect and measure libration, and to attempt mapping the Moon in detail.2 Over time, astronomers began depicting the effects of libration on their maps, which can be seen very well in Johannes Hevelius‘ 1647 map from his Selenographia. The slivers on the northern and southern edges of the map show which areas come in and out of view through libration, and you can see that the effect is slightly more pronounced near the poles. You might even be able to find Humboldtianum on this map.

Hevelius’ map of the Moon (1647), from Wikimedia

Hevelius was using some traditional astronomical measuring devices, but he was also using telescopes of his own construction.3

Hevelius’ Telescope, from Wikimedia
Hevelius’ rooftop observatory in Danzig/Gdansk, from Wikimedia

We also see libration depicted on the map below, made by Giovanni Battista Riccioli in collaboration with Francesco Maria Grimaldi in 1651. Riccioli’s naming scheme was one of the most influential, and our maps today retain many of his names. You can see Mare Tranquillitatus and Mare Crisium on this map, for example. You can also see that Riccioli named the crater Grimaldi after his illustrator. He also named a nearby crater after himself, and yet another in the vicinity after Hevelius. Humboldtianum, however, is named Zoroaster on Riccioli’s map.

File:Riccioli1651MoonMap.jpg
Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s map, rendered by Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1651), from Wikimedia

Below, you can see the effects of libration on the visibility of Zoroaster/Humboldtianum. It’s helpful to note the positions of Aristotle, Hercules, Atlas, and Endymion. They can help you orient yourself around the northeastern limb.

A close-up of Riccioli’s Map, showing craters from Aristotle to Mercurius. Herclus, Atlas, Endymion form a distinctive pattern. In the libration zone is a dark spot called Zoroaster.
The same area, showing that Zoroaster was renamed to Mare Humboldtianum. Note Hercules, Atlas, Endymion. Screenshot from Virtual Moon Atlas.
Zoroaster/Humboldtianum appears
Zoroaster/Humboldtianum disappears due to libration

This view was the one that astronomers had for the next several centuries. Better telescopes allowed observers to add a little more detail near the limbs, but observing features there would always prove extremely difficult. For the time being, the far side of the Moon would remain obscured. We can get a decent idea of the extent of our knowledge using John Russell’s Selenographia, an amazing lunar globe from 1797.4

John Russell’s Selenographia, a lunar globe made in 1797. All images of globe from Science Museum Group. This image is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence

On the back of the globe, you can see the blank spots on our map. You can also see clever mechanisms Russell devised to display the movement of the Moon caused by libration.

The back of Russell’s globe, showing blank space with inscriptions, and mechanisms for displaying libration.

If we take a closer look at the western limb, we can see Grimaldi clearly, with Riccioli and Hevelius nearby. We can also see that Russell has filled in a lot of the area sometimes hidden through libration to the west of that area. This is where his map became more difficult to align with real features on the lunar surface. This is partly because that area is heavily cratered, and gives us a tantalizing glimpse at one of the largest and most complex surface features on the Moon.

The western edge of Russell’s globe, with Grimaldi highlighted in orange.

If we look really closely at the western limb as libration brings more westward features into view, we see what looks like some layered mountains, interspersed with dark surfaces. Russell looks to be depicting some of these mountains, and the darker areas between them. These seemed to go unnoticed by other astronomers until the late nineteenth century, when Russell’s darker areas begin to appear on maps again. But there is another dark mare beyond those mountains, and in the early twentieth century, German astronomer Julius Franz gave it the name Mare Orientale.5

Grimaldi near the edge of the lunar limb.
Due to libration, features west of Grimaldi appear. The dark portion of Mare Orientale just peeks out.

We wouldn’t be able to get a better look at the far side of the Moon until we invented a way to send cameras there. At the dawn of the Space Age, rockets gave us the ability to do just that. In 1959, Soviet engineers created a series of robotic probes, and launched them toward the Moon. One of these managed a lunar flyby, and was named Luna 3. Engineers equipped Luna 3 with a film camera, capable of developing the exposed film, scanning the images, and transmitting them back to Earth by radio. For a fantastic look at the technology involved here, and some of the images, check out Don P. Mitchell’s website. You should also read Sven Grahn’s work on how Jodrell Bank radio observatory in England intercepted the images as they returned.

Luna 3 mockup at the Memorial Museum of Astronautics in Moscow, from Wikimedia
Luna 3 trajectory, from Wikimedia

In October of 1959, in a cramped room on the Crimean Peninsula, Russian engineers Boris Chertok, Sergei Korolev, and colleagues watched as images materialized slowly on heat-sensitive paper.6 Here is the first image we have of the far side of the Moon:

File:Luna 3 moon.jpg
The first photograph of the far side of the Moon (1959). From Wikimedia.

It is not the highest quality, but it is fairly amazing that it was possible at all in 1959, given the early state of the technology. Below, I’ve highlighted our landmark maria for reference–we’re seeing around the eastern limb. While distinct craters are hard to make out, we can easily see some new maria. The ones to the right and south of Mare Crisium are Mare Smythii and Mare Marignis (we had some glimpses of them on the eastern limb before Luna). But way out there on the right hand side of the image are two entirely new, entirely distinctive maria. The large one in the north was named Mare Moscoviense. The one in the south with the peak in the middle is the crater Tsiolkovskiy, named for the pioneering Russian rocket scientist.

ORANGE: Grimaldi crater, RED: Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis) , BLUE: Mare Crisium, GREEN: Mare Humboldtianum
GREEN: Mare Humboltianum, BLUE: Mare Crisium

Russian astronomer Yuri Naumovich Lipsky led the effort to interpret the images and begin a map of the lunar far side. His efforts led to the following maps:

First ever map of far side (1960). Compiled by N.P. Barabashov, A.A. Mikhailov and Yu. N. Lipsky. From Zdeněk Kopal’s Mapping of the Moon: Past and Present.
Schematic chart. You can probably spot Crisium and Humboldtianum. From Zdeněk Kopal’s Mapping of the Moon: Past and Present.

This globe was produced, which is a fantastic glimpse at how much of the surface Luna 3 managed to add to our map. But you can clearly see the massive blank spot, and Mare Orientale remains frustratingly in mystery.

Sternberg Moon Globe 1961, based on Luna 3 data. From Austrian National Library Globe Collection via Digital Museum of Planetary Mapping.
Sternberg Moon Globe 1961, based on Luna 3 data. From Austrian National Library Globe Collection via Digital Museum of Planetary Mapping.

It would remain that way until 1965, when Soviet engineers sent another robotic spacecraft past the Moon. Zond 3, which may have been destined for Mars, flew by the Moon equipped with another film-based system, and captured a handful of images. To see more about the technical details of Zond 3 and its flight, you should check out Andrew LePage’s website. And once again, Don P. Mitchell has an incredible collection of Soviet lunar photographs.

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Zond 2 – Zond 3 was part of the same series of spacecraft. From Wikimedia.

And, for the first time, we see Mare Orientale in its entirety:

Zond 3, Frame 3, the first full look at Mare Orientale, originally processed by Yu. N. Lipsky (1965). From Don P. Mitchell’s excellent website.

Here’s a reminder of where we are, to orient ourselves. Zond 3 is giving us a glimpse over the western limb, past Grimaldi:

ORANGE: Grimaldi crater, RED: Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis) , BLUE: Mare Crisium, GREEN: Mare Humboldtianum
Zond 3, frame 14, with orange circle added by me indicating Grimaldi. From Don P. Mitchell.
Zond 3, frame 18. From Don P. Mitchell (seriously, go check out his website).

And once again, Lipsky went to work putting all this new data on the map. You should be able to see Crisium, Humboldtianum, and Grimaldi for reference. We can now see Orientale, Muscioviense, and Tsiolkovskiy in their proper positions. But notice, there are still blank spots on the map.

Map prepared by Sternberg Astronomical institute (1967), using Zond 3 data under supervision of Lipsky. From Digital Museum of Planetary Mapping.

Then, in 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five robotic probes to the Moon: the Lunar Orbiters. The Eastman Kodak company adapted camera systems they had designed for the Air Force to the task of mapping the Moon in preparation for the Apollo program.7 The teams behind Lunar Orbiter took thousands of incredibly high resolution images of the lunar surface. The first several Lunar Orbiters were mainly used to scout out landing sites for Apollo on the near side. But even on Lunar Orbiter I, they managed to capture some images of the far side. One of them was this shot, with Tsilkovskiy sitting in the foreground of the first “Earthrise” image ever captured.

Lunar Orbiter I, frame 102m (1966). From NASA/LPI.

What made Lunar Orbiter distinct from the Soviet efforts was not only the number of images, but the level of detail that each image contained. Two lenses allowed the simultaneous capture of both medium-resolution and high resolution images, like this one showing the central peak of Tsiolkovsky and its inner walls.

Lunar Orbiter III, Frame 121h1. From NASA/LPI.

On Lunar Orbiter IV and V, scientists got the opportunity to play a more direct role in target selection. In the shot below from Lunar Orbiter IV, you can see Grimaldi, and down there near the edge, coming into full view: Mare Orientale. Just a few shot later…

Lunar Orbiter IV, frame 182m (1967). From NASA/LPI.

Mare Orientale.

Lunar Orbiter IV, frame 187m. From NASA/LPI.

Between all the Lunar Orbiters, we gained imagery of 99 percent of the lunar surface. This allowed cartographers to create a fully detailed map of the lunar far side.8

Lunar Farside Chart by the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (USAF). From NASA/LPI.

Apollo astronauts orbiting around the Moon would add to our imagery and understanding of the far side, as would more Soviet probes. Later robotic probes would fill in the few remaining gaps, which were mainly near the poles. Over those years, our knowledge and understanding of the lunar surface would only continue to grow. For centuries, the far side of the Moon had been one large blank spot on a map. Then, in less than ten years, largely due to the hard work of engineers and scientists working with robotic probes, we filled in blank spots. We have become more fully acquainted with our Moon, but we still have more to learn.

Special note for posterity:
This post was written the day before the crew of Artemis II flew around the Moon. One reason for the focus on Mare Orientale in this history is a quirk in the history of direct observation of the lunar far side by astronauts. On all the Apollo missions, their orbits and the lighting conditions never allowed them to view Mare Orientale under sunlight. The closest they got was an image of Orientale under Earthsine on Apollo 17. Tomorrow, people will see Mare Orientale in fully glory for the first time.

Mare Orientale in Earthshine on Apollo 17. From NASA/LPI.

Update 4/12/2026:
On Monday, April 6 – they did it.

“The Moon’s Great Scar,” from NASA.

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  1. There are a lot of great histories of the early mapping of the Moon, but I won’t linger long on the details in this post. One of the most definitive is Ewen Whitaker’s Mapping and Naming of the Moon. There is also a good section on the topic in Mapping of the Moon: Past and Present by Zdeněk Kopal and Carder. Much of the information in this post comes from these sources. ↩︎
  2. Stephen Pumfrey argues Gilbert was definitively first: https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2011JHA….42..193P ↩︎
  3. Janet Vertesi takes a look at where Hevelius’ instruments fit into the technological culture of the time: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40731030 ↩︎
  4. The Linda Hall Library has a digital copy of Russell’s pamphlet, in which he describes the workings of the device: https://catalog.lindahall.org/permalink/01LINDAHALL_INST/1oon2h5/alma99455413405961 ↩︎
  5. Mare Orientale means “Eastern Sea,” which is confusing, considering it is on the western limb. The name was correct at the time Franz observed it–the directions changed in 1961. Ewen Whitaker and Richard Baum have a great history of Mare Orientale, which highlights the contributions of Russell, and explains the shift in directions. ↩︎
  6. See Boris Chertok’s Rockets and People, Volume II (PDF), translated by Asif Siddiqi. 519-538 ↩︎
  7. An older version of this article stated that the camera systems were designed for the CIA, but actually the ancestral tech of the LO cameras was originally designed for the Air Force as a part of WS-117L. Kodak camera systems in WS-117L did become a part of the CIA project CORONA. But the film readout system that was incorporated into Lunar Orbiter was a part of SAMOS (PDF), a separate component of WS-117L that was not transferred to the CIA. Both USAF and CIA satellite reconnaissance systems were soon were soon bundled into the organization that became the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The author caught this mistake on a re-read. ↩︎
  8. For more on Lunar Orbiter, you can find my master’s thesis on the about page, which focuses especially on the Kodak camera systems and the role of science in Lunar Orbiter. There is also NASA’s official history by Bruce Byers, and Farouk El-Baz’s The Moon as Viewed by Lunar Orbiter. The Lunar and Planetary Institute has an amazing page hosting images from Lunar Orbiter. ↩︎

“Standing By”: Science Communication on Apollo 8

On By Danny RobbIn Astronomy, Geology, History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Photography, Planetary Science, RoboticsLeave a comment

This morning, as I sipped my coffee, I took in the view of a crescent Earth from the perspective of astronauts heading toward the Moon. It’s the first time this has been possible in over 50 years. Yesterday, as I awaited the launch of Artemis II, I watched the CBS broadcast of Apollo 8, in which Walter Cronkite guided America through the very first journey around the Moon in 1968.

Throughout the broadcast, Cronkite regularly broke away from the action to talk to leading scientists. Viewers were taken to Jodrell Bank observatory in England, where the eminent astronomer Bernard Lovell sat with a CBS reporter, a radio telescope looming behind them. Then to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where American geologist Eugene Shoemaker sat beside a giant lunar globe, excitedly answering questions.

Left image: CBS reporter Morley Safer, left, interviews Bernard Lovell, right. Right image: Eugene Shoemaker, left, is interviewed by CBS reporter Terry Drinkwater, right

Scientists had a complex relationship with Apollo. Many scientists at the time looked at the price tag for the “man-in-space” program, and couldn’t help but imagine how many scientific robots could have been constructed and sent across the solar system with those dollars. Some were extremely vocal about this, to the frustration of NASA officials. Many scientists were concerned that science was being misused to legitimize missions that had dubious scientific value. But others agreed with NASA’s arguments that Apollo was an important part of selling a space program and enabling long-term access to space. And others still were genuinely excited about the possibility of doing field work on the Moon.

Apollo 8 in particular had limited scientific value, but science featured heavily in the broadcast nevertheless. This may have been exactly the sort of “science-washing” that worried so many scientists. But Lovell and Shoemaker had the opportunity to explain the exact limitations of Apollo 8 to the CBS audience themselves. In doing so, they highlighted the work of lunar robotics teams that preceded the Apollo missions, and explained the questions that future Apollo missions might help to answer. Missions that Apollo 8 would enable.

Below, you will find quotes from these interviews, with my quick analysis. To keep this post short(ish), I have tried to limit my descriptions to things I find most interesting or relevant. If you’re interested, I highly recommend watching the entire clips. They are a fascinating look back at science communication during our first trip around the Moon.

Note: Many thanks you to the anonymous person who uploaded all this archival footage. I’m not linking all of it in this post–in part to avoid clutter and limit length, but you can find the clips by a search (for CBS Apollo 8 footage), or find the links here: https://bsky.app/profile/inverting-vision.bsky.social/post/3mihebmpves23

Being interested in lunar robotics, I was looking to see how the robots would show up, especially Lunar Orbiter. Not long after the launch, Cronkite cut to Terry Drinkwater reporting from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, which built and operated some of the robots.

Drinkwater reports that people watching the launch at JPL are “thinking back to all that has gone on here in unmanned exploration of the Moon.” Then he takes the audience on a whirlwind tour of the Pioneer, Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. They show models of each vehicle, and images they produced, discussing how each contributed to science and Apollo planning.

An illustration of the three major lunar robots sent to the Moon by NASA. From a 1966 NASA press kit (PDF)

Later, they cut to an interview with Bernard Lovell. Lovell was director of the Jodrell Bank observatory in England, which had a fascinating role in early lunar exploration. They used their telescope to track the first robotic lunar missions, even intercepting image transmissions from Soviet lunar probes. Lovell was very straightforward about the limited scientific value of Apollo 8. “The orbiters and the landers have already given us a very great deal of scientific information about the nature of the lunar terrain and the constitution of the surface,” he said, explaining that “for a really significant addition to that knowledge, we will have to wait until the Apollo ship actually lands men on the Moon, and that really would be terribly exciting…”

When Apollo 8 arrived at the Moon, astronaut Jim Lovell began narrating what he saw from the spacecraft. He described a grey lunar surface that looked like plaster-of-paris. After their report, Cronkite brought in “Doc Shoemaker,” who sat in JPL next to a massive lunar globe, wearing his bolo tie. Shoemaker was one of the foremost of the new generation of geologists interested in taking their field work to the Moon.

Cronkite replayed Lovell’s description, inviting Shoemaker to “point to those spots on the Moon” as Lovell described them. Shoemaker silently points to the Sea of Tranquility as Lovell says that the mare “doesn’t stand out as well here as it does back on Earth.” Doc Shoemaker then points to the surrounding craters as Lovell begins talking about them. It’s really delightful, and having a human expert directly point out these features on a map adds something that animations don’t quite capture. I know that there were people watching at the time who still remember Shoemaker’s appearance, and it influenced their career direction.

“You did that one so well, you won your audition,” Cronkite says to Shoemaker. Then he starts asking Shoemaker about orbits, discussing gravitational pull and its relationship to orbital speeds. They introduce the ideas of “pericynthion”–the part of a lunar orbit passing closest to the Moon–and “apocynthion,” the point of an orbit farthest from the Moon. Cronkite mentions that the “Cynthus” part of those terms refers to an old name for the Moon. Shoemaker corrects him, claiming that those terms are actually more generalized, for the orbit of any smaller body around a larger body.

Today, the generalized terms usually used are periapsis and apoapsis. But Cynthus is an interesting Greek term. Appropriately, it was sometimes used as a name for Artemis, because the Greek goddess was by legend born on Mount Cynthus. Artemis was very much associated with Selene, goddess of the Moon. Any satellite of another body can be considered a “moon,” and the term “moon” was used that way even into the 60s, so its usage as a general term is also plausible. But Shoemaker was a geologist who was relatively new to spaceflight, so he could have been mistaken. My understanding is that these terms did in fact primarily refer to lunar orbits during Apollo, and that Cronkite was right here.

Regardless, Cronkite concedes. “Well I had one correct fact out of four there, that’s not bad, batting .250 on the apo…pericynthion.”

As the astronauts flew around the Moon, they cut back to Bernard Lovell again. This interview is particularly charming. While Lovell, a very distinguished scientist, was fairly even-keeled in earlier interviews, he is now visibly excited. Or at least, I think, as visibly excited as an old English astronomer can get.

He was apparently repeating “fantastic, utterly fantastic,” according to CBS reporter Morley Safer. Then Lovell gives his reflection:

“I must confess this is really one of the great moments…it’s very hard to believe that there are human beings actually flying around the Moon and giving this description of what they see. I don’t know if other people are like I am over this, but although as a scientist I have seen the photographs of the Moon so often, through so many telescopes, and more recently, these marvelous photographs sent back by the cameras. It still really almost bewilders me to try to understand that now at this moment we’ve been listening to a human being there giving these descriptions of what the volcanoes look like…”

There are several points at which Shoemaker talks Cronkite and the audience through things that the astronauts are seeing. At one point, they get confused by the fact that astronauts are talking about craters with names that are suspiciously familiar.

“I don’t find [those craters] on my Moon map here: Carr, Miller, Borman, Houston, Collins,” Cronkite reports. “They sound like they’re named after a bunch of people at the Houston manned space center to me, and I wonder how they do get these names, and how long they’ve been named that, and whether or not these fellas are going to name a few for the first time…”

Shoemaker was also befuddled. The astronauts were near the far side of the Moon, and he realizes what happened:

“[they] actually were just off the edge…of the globe…this is Mare Smythii, which was mentioned…a number of the craters they mentioned have no formal names yet–they’re back around the edge of this model, and cannot be seen from the Earth. They have been recorded on the unmanned Lunar Orbiter photographs, but no formal names have been attached. Since they have to have some kind of handle to be talked about, the astronauts have just given them names, and of course it’s fun to use the names that are most familiar, the names of your comrades in this kind of work. So I was a little puzzled too, I didn’t know what those names were, but it soon became apparent that these were the ones that had just been adopted for the mission.”

Mare Smythii and surrounding craters, as seen from Apollo 16. From Wikimedia.

Then he gets to describe the International Astronomical Union, and their naming processes, to the audience, bringing them into the world of space nomenclature.

He mentioned the Lunar Orbiter photographs there, which get a lot of air time. In other portions of the broadcast, they cut back to pre-recorded videos with the astronauts talking about their mission. In one, Bill Anders, the primary photographer on the mission, talks about their photographic objectives.

“The Orbiter photography was very good,” he explains, “but where the Orbiter photography was not so good, because the Orbiter was in  highly elliptical orbit…we hope to improve on that…”

Then Shoemaker talks Lunar Orbiter, holding up a far-side image. Unfortunately, the recording on Youtube cuts out here.

But my favorite part is a recording of Jim Lovell talking about their flight path, using a Lunar Orbiter photograph of the Sea of Tranquility. He describes landmarks in detail, making analogies to explain the scale to the audience, like the length of the runway at Ellington Air Force base. 

Jim Lovell holds up a Lunar Orbiter photograph

“You already talk like you’ve flown it and seen it,” the reporter interviewing him says.

“Yeah, this area has become quite familiar to me…I know it quite well,” Lovell replies.

Then Cronkite cuts in: “Jim Lovell, who ‘knows it quite well.’ He hadn’t been to it before, but such is the study and the training of these astronauts that he felt he did.”

To me it speaks to the power of the Lunar Orbiter images. I think a lot about the telepresence sometimes created by the use of remote sensing technology for exploration. While a visceral sense of telepresence was fairly limited in early lunar robotics, there are often little moments where you catch a glimmer of it. This is one of them. 

Lunar Orbiter V, Frame 52M. From LOIRP in National Archives.

I am reasonably certain that Lovell is holding a cropped and annotated annotated version of the Lunar Orbiter photograph above, taken on Lunar Orbiter V. If so, he gets some of the details wrong. For example, he mentions a “half-hidden” crater that he refers to as “Maskelyne B” off the edge of the picture. It’s really Maskelyne F, seen just to the right of the rectangular artifact in the middle of the full image. Maskelyne B is actually visible in the image he’s holding (in the upper central portion of the frame, behind the large crater, which is Maskelyne).

Honestly, I don’t fault him for making mistakes. The astronauts spent time under the guidance of scientists studying these images, but it was a pretty wild crash course. For Apollo 8, the goal was for them to be able to identify photographic targets. It was more important to visually recognize targets than to be able to accurately name them. But this was all part of the show–using science to convey a sense of exploration and to legitimize the project. The astronauts had to become something like amateur science communicators themselves.

And in fact, the Apollo 8 astronauts produced many spectacular images, like this one showing the central peak of the far side crater Tsiolkovsky:

The central peak of Tsiolkovsky from Apollo 8. From Wikimedia.

Later in the clip, they cut to Shoemaker again, who describes their flight path and some of these photographic objectives. There was real science to be done here, however limited. Science communication like this, even if it is flawed, can often serve very important ends for a community hoping to create excitement and support for their research.

Robert Jastrow, an astronomer and NASA official, also makes a couple appearances. He does a good job of explaining some of the overall scientific objectives of lunar exploration, and the findings of the robotic missions thus far. One of the biggest questions that needed answering was the age and origin of the Moon.

“The information returned by spacecraft has answered some questions in that connection,” Jastrow explains, “but raised as many as it’s answered…”

Robert Jastrow. From Wikimedia.

They talk about the scientific return of Apollo 8, and Jastrow, like Bernard Lovell, frames it as a stepping stone towards the real scientific return expected from a landing.

Jastrow then talks through some Lunar Orbiter photographs with Cronkite.  “It’s a fairly new crater,” he says, holding up an Orbiter photo, “an expert like Gene Shoemaker would have to tell us exactly how old it is…” He mentions Meteor Crater in Arizona, talking about how scientists identify the difference between new and old craters. Shoemaker had done extensive work at Meteor Crater in his attempt to understand lunar cratering.

In one appearance with Jastrow, Cronkite asks jokingly whether the Moon is made out of green cheese, teeing up Jastrow to talk about Surveyor and its findings about lunar composition. 

At the beginning of the video after this one, Jastrow and Cronkite talk about the capabilities of astronauts vs. robots. Jastrow makes the claim that a robot would be more expensive, but I think this probably relies on the assumption of a robot that could match the generalized capabilities of a human. Certainly the capabilities of robots in the 60s meant that humans had a bigger advantage over robots than nowadays–but even then, a great deal could be done with robots for a relatively low cost, which is exactly the source of much Apollo skepticism in the scientific community.

At the end, Jastrow and Cronkite talk about Mars.

Of course, this was happening in 1968, amid a great deal of turmoil across the country and the world. In a special report summarizing Apollo 8, Cronkite framed the contrast with characteristic eloquence:

“A year of trouble and turbulence, anger and assassination, is now coming to an end in incandescent triumph…”

https://www.c-span.org/clip/reel-america/user-clip-cronkite-introduction-to-apollo-8/5198544


Many scientists weren’t above seeing Apollo’s significance beyond science, as seen in some of the videos above. In the special report, they included more interviews with Bernard Lovell, Harold Urey, and Eugene Shoemaker:

https://www.c-span.org/clip/reel-america/user-clip-scientific-perspectives-on-apollo-8/5198546

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Exploration Review 6: Return to the Moon

On By Danny RobbIn NewsLeave a comment

In Exploration Review, I collect news from the last couple weeks about the exploration of remote places.

In this edition: return to the Moon, asteroid science, and tiny underwater robots.

Special Note for the few of you who currently subscribe both to my Substack and my history blog at invertingvision.com: This year, I’m going to be experimenting with a content publishing model called POSSE (Publish on Site, Syndicate Everywhere). That means you probably got two copies of this post in your inbox. Feel free to keep your subscription on your preferred platform, and unsubscribe elsewhere. You will still get all of my content.

Return to the Moon

The SLS on the Launchpad for Artemis II. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Artemis II’s rocket is back on the launchpad after undergoing repairs, and they’re hoping for an April 1 launch. People may be returning to orbit the Moon very soon. The last attempts were delayed for technical issues, and its always possible that more issues or weather will delay the next attempt. But there are several opportunities in April, so it seems likely that we will see a launch in the next month.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/nasa-roll-out-artemis-ii-moon-rocket-launch-pad-rcna264106

Artemis II will be an orbital mission, similar to Apollo 8, which sent astronauts to orbit the Moon for the first time. Apollo 8 launched at the end of 1968, which was a year of major domestic and international turmoil–the assassinations of MLK and RFK, escalation in the Vietnam war, and major protests across the world. The parallels are difficult to miss. I have seen people discussing the difficulties of getting excited for such an event in the current news environment, and writing about what a successful Artemis II launch would mean for NASA and for the US.

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasas-apollo-8-moonshot-saved-1968-could-artemis-2-do-the-same-in-2026

Jared Isaacman, the new NASA administrator, has been making a lot of statements about the future of Artemis and NASA. One of the most significant changes on the horizon is the reorganization of future Artemis missions, which Jeff Foust explains fully here:

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5171/1

Artemis III would be changed to an earth-orbit rendezvous mission slated for 2027, which also mirrors the Apollo progression. It’s hard to say how likely Artemis changes are to salvage NASA’s chances at a crewed Moon landing in the near future. They don’t have a functional lander yet, which is part of the reason for the reorganization. But historically, nearly every new administration changes the plan to return to the Moon or get to Mars, and it almost always just creates more delays. The ironic thing in this instance is that the current plan came together under Trump I, kept uncharacteristic consistency into the Biden administration, and now the reorganization is happening under Trump II. Since it is not a complete rehaul of the program, however, perhaps it will turn out differently.

Isaacman has also talked about major changes to NASA’s workforce, moving contracted work back in-house. He hopes to accelerate NASA activity in some domains, including robotic Moon missions–Isaacman told Science that he wants to do a robotic “landing on the Moon every month for the next, who know, 3 years.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-administrator-talks-science-about-studying-moon-mars-and-earth

Staffing cuts at NASA and funding cuts to scientific projects have led to major uncertainty in the planetary science community. Isaacman thinks that maybe signalling demand will stimulate private launch and robotics partners to step up, enabling more missions. Companies currently contracted for CLPS might be interested in responding.

The timeline of CLPS missions. Credit: NASA

But they are all still very early in development, and Isaacman himself simply mentions “science and tech demonstration capabilities” as the possible payloads. None of this would be super encouraging to scientists looking for research opportunities. His nods toward improving the cost and timeline of non-lunar science missions were fairly vague. The people who I could see being encouraged by these remarks: investors interested in industrial uses of lunar robotics, who want the companies developing technology platforms to continue seeing growth.

Asteroid Science

Studies are continuing to come out from recent asteroid missions, including the DART mission that bumped into Dimorphos in 2022. Since then, scientists have been tracking the orbital shifts of Dimorphos and its companion Didymos, and have found a change in their orbit around the sun:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/nasas-dart-mission-shifted-the-orbits-of-two-asteroids/

A March 16 study on new analysis of asteroid Ryugu has made a splash in the news. The Japanese Hayabusa 2 spacecraft took sample from Ryugu that were returned in 2020. Scientists found organic molecules, which led to headlines indicating Ryugu, along with other asteroids, had “all the ingredients for life.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/lifes-genetic-code-requires-five-key-ingredients-the-asteroid-ryugu-has-all-of-them-a-new-study-suggests-180988367/

Elise Cutts has a great explanation of exactly how significant this finding is. Basically, we’ve been finding these sorts of molecules in space for a long time, but continuing to confirm their presence in studies like this one is certainly important. But knowing the molecules are out there is just one part of the full story:

https://www.reviewertoo.com/the-asteroid-ryugu-contains-every-letter-of-the-genetic-alphabet/

Setbacks and Success in the Cryosphere

The Ukraine war is making Arctic science more difficult. Scientists studying algal blooms in the Pacific Arctic have been unable to collaborate with Russian scientists since the war. Geopolitics has a nasty habit of getting in the way of science sometimes. Growing scientific internationalism in the late 19th century was

Donald M Anderson writes: “One of the things that makes it hard to study the distribution of these blooms and cysts is the treaty line that separates U.S. and Russian waters. Although algae doesn’t recognize national borders and the Alexandrium population clearly extends beyond our current measurements, we cannot sample west of this boundary.”

https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/a-scientific-casualty-of-the-russia-ukraine-war/

Down south, however, the Australian Antarctic Program just completed major operations in the Heard and McDonald islands, “the first campaign of its kind in 20 years.”

https://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2026/heard-island-and-mcdonald-islands-campaign-delivers-key-objectives/

Miscellanea

March 16 was the hundred-year anniversary of Robert Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/celebrating-100-years-since-goddards-breakthrough-moment-in-modern-rocketry/

The A23a iceberg, which was the largest on Earth for a while, is melting.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-20f878f1-f4af-4022-9f62-b0515b9f4b20?utm_campaign=34322705-Ocean%20Insights%202026&utm_medium=email&_hsmi

Knowable Magazine has an overview of recent developments in deep-sea mining.

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/physical-world/2026/deep-sea-mining-debate-critical-minerals

We’re seeing more cool tiny undersea-exploring robots.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/exploring-the-ocean-with-raspberry-pi-powered-marine-robots/

New Mars rover selfie:

Totally awesome new selfie captured by Percy, with the rim of Jezero Crater at her back, and her latest abrasion patches on the rock to the left.🔍 viewer.gigamacro.com/view/SuO2Osk…#Mars Mar. 11, 2026 – Sol 1797 🧪🔭Credits images: NASA/JPL-Caltech

— Daniel Pomarède (@pomarede.bsky.social) 2026-03-11T10:21:00.380Z

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Spectacle on Other Worlds

On By Danny RobbIn History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Planetary Science, Robotics, Space Exploration2 Comments

The first spacecraft from Earth to touch another world carried no people, but it did carry a unique sort of flag. Early on the morning of September 14, 1959, the Soviet space probe Luna 2 impacted the surface of the Moon. Engineers had placed stainless steel spheres aboard the spacecraft, designed to send tiny pentagonal banners across the lunar landscape. The little flags were emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, and Russian script reading: “CCCP, September, 1959.”1

A replica of the Luna 2 pennant on display in the Kansas Cosmosphere. Source: Patrick Pelletier via Wikimedia.

The spheres were made at OKB-1, the Experimental Design Bureau where engineers worked under the leadership of Sergei Korolev to create some of the first space rockets. 2 They were commonly referred to as pennants,3 and you can find more pictures of these pennants on Don P. Mitchell’s excellent website.4 Mitchell speculates that the Luna 2 pennants probably vaporized on impact. On the other hand, the New York Times reported at the time that “[the Soviet Government] said steps had been taken to prevent the destruction of the pennants by the impact.” Regardless of their survival, the pennants accomplished an important objective.

“The day after the historic impact,” historian Asif Siddiqi writes, “[Nikita] Khrushchev triumphantly gave a replica of the ball of pendants to Eisenhower. It was a potent display of the power of politics in the emerging Soviet space programme.”5 This was the point: a spectacle designed to send a message to the United States about the Soviet lead in missile development. There was some (faint) hope on the Soviet side that this spectacle would actually end the Cold War altogether.6

Luna 2’s pennants were just one in a series of such spectacles that constituted the Space Race. From Sputnik to Apollo, visible demonstrations of power replaced nuclear war. In the competition for geopolitical influence that was the Cold War, these projects signaled the strength of competing economic ideologies to worldwide spectators.7 In the 1950s and 1960s, this political impetus for spectacle led humans to explore the solar system up close for the first time. We sent robots to other worlds, and people to the Moon, because of a geopolitical competition. But is that the only reason we went?

I have been fascinated by the reasons people participated in the Space Race–especially the engineers and scientists who worked directly on missions to other celestial bodies. Certainly many of them were Cold Warriors, eager and willing to be recruited to a geopolitical signalling war. But not all of them were, and even those who happily went to nationalistic battle often had priorities that ranked higher in their own minds. In fact, these other motivations may have played a strong role in making the Space Race happen in the first place.

Luna 2 itself may be an example. Siddiqi explains that “contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not the Soviet Party leadership which advocated or called for Soviet pre-eminence in space at this early stage, but Korolev himself who was actualising his intense thirst to claim ‘firsts’ in the new arena of space exploration.” He goes on to say that Korolev was in partly motivated by competition with Wernher von Braun. “One wonders if there would indeed have been a programme at the time if it had not been for Korolev,” Siddiqi writes. The engineers had to convince the Cold Warriors that lunar flights were worth doing.8

Engineering ambitions and personal rivalry were not the only motivations for early space explorers. One of the most interesting examples I have seen comes from Oran Nicks, who was NASA’s director of Lunar and Planetary Programs in the early 1960s. Nicks was an engineer in a department of scientists, and that put him in a unique position. He was also not a Cold Warrior, at least not to the extent of many of his colleagues.

This isn’t to say the political pressures of the Space Race weren’t on his mind. In the early 60s, Nicks was working on the Ranger impact probes to the Moon, which were plagued by a series of early failures. In his book Far Travelers, Nicks recalls that Luna’s successes had made these failures particularly difficult. “Khrushchev had chided us publicly,” Nicks writes, “by quipping that their pennant had gotten lonesome waiting for an American companion.”

But when it came to making an overtly nationalistic response, Nicks took a different attitude. He recounts a disagreement that came up during work on a Mariner probe to Mars. Mariner project manager Jack James had suggested that the spacecraft should have the seal of the United States embossed on a panel, and went to the trouble of mocking it up.9 Nicks was vehemently opposed. Here’s what he wrote (emphasis mine):

His view was understandable; we were competing with the Russians in the race to the planets, and Americans could be proud that our “trademark” would be exhibited for current and future generations to see. My concern was that we might be accused of exhibitionism, something distasteful to me, for I was deadly serious about doing the mission for other reasons. The Russians had bragged about landing a pendant on the Moon, and I wanted no part in that disgusting game.

Oran Nicks, Far Travelers, p 37

Nicks and James compromised, and the seal made it onto the spacecraft. Nicks explains that he “insisted on a low-profile, no-publicity approach,” and was happy that “even after the successful flight there was very little publicity about the seal, and none at all negative.”10

Nicks doesn’t specify which Mariner, but it was likely Mariner IV (1964), shown here. Images comes from Wikimedia, but the original source link is broken. A black-and-white version of this image can be found in NASA Technical Report 32-957 on the temperature control subsystem.

So what were the “other reasons” that Nicks was deadly serious about? To Nicks, the American space program was a project of exploration, pure and simple. He had an expansive definition of the word “explorer” that was rooted in his view of history:

Exploration seems to be in our genes. As they developed the means to do it, men explored the perimeter of the Mediterranean, past the pillars of Hercules, to the sentinel islands off the continent…We tend now to think of exploration in a restricted sense-as a scientific, often geographic, expedition, an athletic activity pursued by specialists dressed in fur parkas like Shackleton’s or in solar topees like Livingston’s. The connotations are overly restrictive if they fail to allow for great tidal movements like the waves of people from Asia that periodically flowed west and south, or for the Scandanavians who crossed the Atlantic in numbers centuries before Columbus. These waves of venturesome people were of a higher order than the random movement of nomads seeking fresh forage…We must conclude that for some of the species, long and perilous passages were no real deterrent to the exploring imperative.

Oran Nicks, Far Travelers, pp 6-7

Nicks is conflating a series of explorations that all occurred for different reasons ranging from survival, to geopolitics, to science. To him, they are part of an innate impulse that all humans have in common. He is situating himself, the United States, and the Soviet Union in a grand tradition that encompasses all of human history.

He was not the only person to do this sort of thing. The space explorers of the 1960s often invoked historical analogy–in the US, this was often the narrative of the American frontier. But these analogies were often related to more specific impulses: colonization, adventure, competition, scientific investigation. Nicks’ framing of exploration as an “instinct” is somewhat distinct. He believes that exploration is something done for its own sake, out of sheer curiosity. The scientific investigations on the missions he managed were an expression of this curiosity, rather than a means to some other end.11

Chertok, in his reflections on the Soviet space program, also remembers people thinking beyond the geopolitics:

Cosmonautics did not arise simply from militarization, and its aims were more than purely propagandistic. During the first post-Sputnik year, the foundations were laid for truly scientific research in space, serving the interests of all humankind…I am not writing about this out of nostalgia for the ‘good old days,’ but because I remember well how people from the most diverse social strata felt about our space successes.

Chertok, Rockets and People, Volume II, pp 435-436

The space programs in both nations were collaborations between people with widely varying motivations. They convinced their governments that pursuing certain objectives in space also served the ends of the state. They competed with each other for funding and for influence over the long-term direction of their programs. In this context, geopolitical competition seems like less of a direct motivation for space exploration, and more of an enabling factor that unlocked resources for would-be explorers.

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  1. Siddiqi, Asif A. “First to the Moon,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol 51, pp 231-238, 1998, PDF: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ef8124031cfcf448b11db32/t/5f1c476085d7250b810190c1/1595688803275/Siddiqi+First+to+the+Moon+1998.pdf ↩︎
  2. Chertok, Boris, ed. Asif Siddiqi, Rockets and People, Volume II: Creating a Rocket Industry, NASA, 2006, pp 446-448 PDF: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/635963main_rocketspeoplevolume2-ebook.pdf?emrc=5bed7c ↩︎
  3. Are they called “pennants” or “pendants”? Contemporary newspapers, Mitchell and most other sources say pennants. Siddiqi and Chertok say pendant. Seems to come from a comparison made to ship’s pennant displays (Chertok, in unsourced quote from 447). Wikipedia says pendant is an obsolete spelling of pennant, citing the Dictionary of Vexillology. ↩︎
  4. I’m probably going to link to Mitchell and Sven Grahn a lot on this blog. They have both done amazing work on early Soviet robotics, among other topics, and their work has led me to important sources. You should check out their websites and their books. ↩︎
  5. Siddiqi, p 235-236 The image at the top of this post shows an additional replica, now sitting in the Kansas Cosmosphere. The original replica is held by the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. ↩︎
  6. Chertok, p 447 Certainly it seems like Chertok may have believed this, or believed that Soviet leaders held that hope. “Alas,” he writes, “this did not happen. It was not in our power.” ↩︎
  7. See MacDonald, Alexander, The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War, 2017, Yale University Press. Especially Chapter 4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1n2tvkx.8 ↩︎
  8. Siddiqi, pp 231-232 ↩︎
  9. Nicks, Oran, Far Travelers: The Exploring Machines, NASA, 1985, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19850024813 ↩︎
  10. Nicks, p 37 ↩︎
  11. Werner Von Braun, for example, was certainly motivated by colonization and also religious notions. Historian Catherine Newell writes about religious aspects of the American space program in her book Destined for the Stars. Historian Michael Robinson has talked about “true believers” among other types of space explorers. Russian cosmism was a big influence on early Soviet engineers. I plan to do a taxonomy of space explorers at some point, going through various motivations and the historical analogies used to justify and explain them. I see Nicks’ expansive definition of exploration as human instinct most reflected in Carl Sagan’s writings. ↩︎

Updates

On By Danny RobbIn WritingLeave a comment

It’s been a while since my last post, so I wanted to get back to the blog with an update on what I’ve been working on, and what’s next in 2025.

The USS Nautilus resurfacing. From U.S. Navy/Wikimedia.

This summer I was lucky enough to start working with JSTOR Daily as a regular contributor. JSTOR is a large digital repository of academic journals, and a valuable research tool. I was fortunate to have high school teachers who taught us how to use JSTOR and similar resources, and I used them extensively in college.

It was always exciting for me. These journals contain an ongoing conversation between the brightest minds in nearly every academic field. In some cases, those conversations stretch back centuries. On JSTOR, historical documents live side-by-side with cutting edge research.

Generally you get access to JSTOR through affiliation with an educational institution–college students usually get access with their university email. But there are also subscription options for independent scholars and individuals.

JSTOR Daily is an effort to both show off and share the treasures contained in their repositories. Every day, they post very short summaries of fascinating articles. They strive to make these relevant to current events, or to provide essential context to help understand the significance of the research. Each summary contains a link that provides free access to that article.

I’ve been covering a history of science and technology “beat” for JSTOR Daily. So far, it has been an incredibly fulfilling and instructive experience. Summarizing and contextualizing detailed academic articles in 500 words or less is an intriguing writing puzzle. Every time I sit down to write one, I remember a particular conversation with my dad about writing. He shared a famous remark that stuck with me: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” (From Mark Twain? Now that I’m googling –  Blaise Pascal? Seems like a lot of writers have shared the same feeling.)

It’s helping me accomplish one of my main goals: to highlight and share the incredible work being doing by historians all the time.

You can find my author page here. I’m going to try to start posting on my Bluesky when a new post goes up, but I will also include links in future History Highlights. Here are a few of my favorites so far:

Additional update 2/13/2025:

Since this post, I have been primarily focused on my teaching, JSTOR writing, and other articles, including a new one in Aeon Magazine. However, I have also been doing research for some planned 2025 blog posts. If you’re interested in learning more about early lunar robotics (and musings on the history of scientific exploration and technology), let me know by subscribing to Inverting Vision below:

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The First Time NASA Photographed a Lunar Lander

On By Danny RobbIn History, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Lunar Robotics, Photography, Planetary Science, Robotics, Space Exploration1 Comment

The Odysseus lunar lander built by Intuitive Machines (IM) recently became the first U.S. robot on the Moon’s surface since the Surveyor landers in the 1960s. Earlier this week, IM worked with NASA to get pictures of the lander from orbit. The resulting image is impressive, showing the lander as a tiny speck in the vast grey landscape near the Moon’s south pole. The image is also an echo of the first time NASA managed this feat, 57 years ago. In 1967, NASA’s third Lunar Orbiter spacecraft snagged a photograph of Surveyor I. The story of how engineers acquired that photograph (and it is a literal analog photograph) is fascinating, and the image itself played an important role in getting Apollo astronauts to the Moon. First, here’s the image of Odysseus along with the historic photograph of Surveyor:

Odysseus in the South Polar region of the Moon. Taken with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University
Surveyor I in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon. Taken with Lunar Orbiter III in 1967. Credit: NASA

It’s a bit easier to see Odysseus in the new image than it is to see Surveyor in the Lunar Orbiter (LO) photograph. But both of them are pretty difficult to spot, beyond the telltale shadow. And making out any detail is impossible. So what’s the point? For NASA in the 1960s, it was all about safety.

At the time, the push toward the Apollo landings was quickly accelerating. One of the top priorities was to find suitable landing sites. Telescopic imagery of the Moon was fairly comprehensive, but had some serious limitations, so NASA initiated the Lunar Orbiter program. Engineers put robots into orbit around the Moon, equipped with Kodak cameras and film, and took high-resolution images of potential Apollo landing sites.1 Meanwhile, they Surveyor robots soft-landed on the surface, took pictures, and used scoops to dig into the soil. Knowledge about the nature of the lunar surface grew rapidly. It began to quell doubts that some scientists held about the potential of landing people on the Moon.2 The imaging of Surveyor landing sites was an important part of this process.

For scientists in the 1960s, seeing the lander wasn’t as important as seeing the area around the it. Images from the ground could help scientists understand what they were seeing from above. At the time, orbital imagery was pretty difficult to interpret. Shadows were used to figure out the height or depth of some features, but other patterns in the orbital imagery were harder to make sense of. Scientists used aerial imagery of Earth to get started, since you could easily compare pictures of mountains and canyons taken from airplanes to the real thing.3 But the forces that shaped features on Earth weren’t necessarily the same as those that shaped features on the Moon, so the Earth-analog method was not always a reliable guide. What they really wanted were images from the lunar surface. That’s what Surveyor landers were able to provide.

If scientists could compare orbital images with ground-based images of the real lunar surface, they could be more confident in their interpretations. This could make it easier to select Apollo landing sites with confidence. And that’s exactly what they did using a combination Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter imaging. The story of Surveyor III gives us a great example of this.

Surveyor III. Credit: NASA/Lunar and Planetary Institute

In the same mission that took the photograph of Surveyor I, engineers also took photos of the planned landing area for Surveyor III (which launched while LOIII was still in orbit around the Moon). They hoped that a successful Surveyor III mission would then provide images from the ground that scientists could compare to orbital imagery. The plan was a complete success. Using pictures from Surveyor III, they were able to isolate the exact position of Surveyor III in the orbital imagery.4

An image from Boeing’s contractor report on Lunar Orbiter III photography. The final Surveyor landing site is shown, along with features that later seen in Surveyor pictures, included below. Credit: NASA/Boeing
A mosaic of images taken by Surveyor III, with features labeled A, B, C, D, which correspond to labels on orbital images.
Mosaic images of the area to the north of Surveyor III, including one with labels that correlate to those on the Lunar Orbiter photograph above. Credit: NASA/LPI
An image taken by the Surveyor lunar lander, showing two boulders that were labeled "C" on orbital images.
A close-up of boulders, labeled “C” on the orbital image above. Taken by Surveyor III in April 1967. Credit: NASA/LPI

Scientists got a lot of great data from the robots. Apollo planners analyzed the images and data, and used the information to plan Apollo landing sites. They were able to find places that were both safe for landing, and scientifically interesting. For scientists, that generally meant trying to land Apollo astronauts in places that were geologically distinct.

This wasn’t really something that many of the astronauts were particularly interested in, at least at first. They were something of soldiers in the Cold War, and neither they nor the government officials directing the program thought that science was the main priority. The priority was getting a man to the Moon before the Soviet Union.5 The selection of later Apollo sites based on scientific interest was, at least in part, a concession to the scientists who were integral to the safety and success of the mission’s primary objective. But this isn’t to say that these groups saw no use for science within Apollo. Science itself could also serve Cold War goals, as it became a source of prestige–a pattern in scientific exploration going back centuries.

With Apollo 12, the story of Surveyor III came full circle and we got one of the coolest pictures ever taken from the lunar surface. Out of scientific and engineering interest, Apollo 12 landed in the same site as Surveyor III. Al Bean and Pete Conrad got to see the robot up close, which is how we have the image from earlier showing Surveyor sitting on the Moon. They took pictures, and even grabbed pieces of the robot to bring back home for analysis. Right now, the TV camera of Surveyor III sit in the Smithsonian, where you can visit and see actual hardware returned from the Moon. The Apollo astronauts also took what I think are some of the most incredible photographs from the history of exploration–human space explorers interacting directly with their robot counterparts.

Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad “jiggles” the spacecraft to see how firmly it’s rooted to the ground. Credit: NASA

CORRECTION 11/21/2024: The original version of this post identified the astronaut in the last picture as Alan Bean. It’s actually Pete Conrad, and Alan Bean is the one taking the photograph.

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Footnotes:

  1. If you want to know more about this, Lunar Orbiter photography was the topic of my master’s thesis, which can be found in the about section. ↩︎
  2. There’s a famous story of how scientists feared the landing vehicle would sink into the soil, an idea that did come from a fairly well-known scientist. But many geologists at the time were pretty dismissive of his claims. There were other potential issues though, including ignorance of the electrostatic properties of the lunar material, which could have led to severe dust build-up on equipment. Bottom line: not a lot was known for sure about the nature of the surface. This was an issue if you wanted to land there. ↩︎
  3. For a description of lunar mapping efforts around this time, see Kopal and Carder, Mapping of the Moon. The difficulty of interpreting the photographs can be seen in a variety of scientific papers from the time. Examples can be found in Interpretation of Lunar Probe Data, ed. Jack Green, 1966. ↩︎
  4. Boeing was the primary contractor on Lunar Orbiter. Images and methods can be found in their contractor reports for NASA. ↩︎
  5. Detailed comments the relative priority of science on the Apollo Mission can be seen in A Review of Space Research, the document that came out of the 1962 Iowa Summer Study. ↩︎

History Highlights 3: Mapping the Ocean and the Moon, Living Museums, Ancient Arctic Voyages

On By Danny RobbIn Arctic, Biology, History, History Highlights, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Mapping, Maritime, Oceanography, Photography, Robotics, Space ExplorationLeave a comment

Welcome to Inverting Vision, a blog about the history of exploration, science, and technology. From this point forward, I will be publishing posts every Thursday unless fate intervenes. History Highlights will appear occasionally as I work on more substantial posts. Next week I’m hoping to write about the scientific instruments that appear in Herbert Ponting’s photographs of the British Antarctic Expedition. Until next week, here are some highlights from my readings and the wider exploration and science community.

Do we know more about space than the deep sea?

Probably not these days, according to marine scientists Alan Jamieson, Premu Arasu, and Thomas Linley. In a fantastic article in The Conversation, they write that the truth of this notion depends on what comparisons you make. They explain that if you just consider the Moon, it may have been true during a small window in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact this may have been when the impression that we know more about space than the oceans originated. In those decades scientists were mapping the Moon more extensively, especially as NASA prepared for the Apollo landings. The Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter missions played a key role in this process, taking photographs of the lunar surface that were used by scientists and Apollo mission planners.

A photograph of the far side of the Moon from Lunar Orbiter 3. From NASA/LOIRP.

But this same period was very early in the history of fruitful deep sea oceanography. Echo sounding tech had only been in use for a few decades, and scientists were just starting to use echo sounding to map the seafloor (the first truly comprehensive map wasn’t published until Marie Tharp’s map in 1977). The authors of the article argue that since then, more robust exploration of the deep sea has produced a wealth of knowledge that probably surpasses our knowledge of the Moon and especially Mars. Go read their article to learn more.

A painting of Marie Tharp’s map by Heinrich C. Berann. From the Library of Congress.

In my experience, people casually referring to this idea often extend it to saying that we know more about “space” than the ocean. This must be even farther off the mark, even when you just consider objects in our solar system and disregard exoplanets. Europa and Enceladus may contain entire oceans that we know very little about. I’m looking forward to the launch of the Europa Clipper mission in 2024, which will hopefully bring us more information about Europa (although it won’t arrive at Jupiter until 2030).

Alvin and the Recovery of a Broken Arrow

Woods Hole tweets about the role DSV Alvin played in the 1966 recovery of a hydrogen bomb (referred to as a “broken arrow”) from the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Missions for the military were relatively common in the early days of deep-submergence vehicles, and especially for Alvin. The scientists were sometimes able to tack on scientific objectives to these missions, or military missions became a way to test or fund the development of vehicles and scientific projects. The relationship between the military and deep sea exploration will probably be a topic for a future blog post.

The Curious Life of the Vema

The Vema was an oceanographic research vessel that played a crucial role in the early mapping of the ocean floor and exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the 1950s. Marie Tharp and her research partners used data from the Vema to create the seafloor map mentioned earlier. But that was only one small chapter in the life of the Vema. The sailing vessel was built in the 1920s for a wealthy American financier who used it as a yacht and hosted actors and celebrities. He sold the yacht to a Norwegian buyer who gave it the name Vema. Then the US military acquired the Vema in WWII and used for training. After the war the military discarded it, and eventually it was recovered and sold it to Columbia University, where it was used as a research vessel until the 1980s. Since then, it has been a chartered yacht for vacations in the Caribbean. Last year the yacht company announced they had new plans for the ship formerly known as Vema. They haven’t revealed what the new plans are.

The Vema being used as a training vessel in World War II. From Wikimedia.

Whales as Living Museums

Bathsheba Demuth writes about the role of whales in the history of Beringia in her book Floating Coast. She describes how bowhead whales were hunted by various groups throughout the history of the region. Sometimes the whales escaped these hunts with harpoons still buried in their bodies. Because bowhead whales can live for over 200 years, they sometimes collected a decent number of the tools used against them. Demuth describes a particular whale that carried “a museum of old weapons in his flesh.” These weapons ranged from ivory harpoons to explosive lance tips.

Ancient Voyage to the Arctic

It’s possible that in the 4th century BCE a Greek explorer named Pytheas ventured as far as the Arctic north of Europe, but later classical writers seriously doubted his claims. We know about him from later writers like Strabo and Polybius. In the Histories, Polybius recounts with skepticism Pytheas’ claim that in the far north “there [was] neither unmixed land or sea or air, but a kind of compound of all three (like the jelly-fish or Pulmo Marinus [sea lung]), in which earth and sea and everything else are held in suspense, and which forms a kind of connecting link to the whole, through which one can neither walk nor sail.”(Plb. 34.5) Voyages this far were rare for the Greeks, and Polybius was in part doubtful about how far Pytheas claimed to have sailed.

For more History Highlights from past weeks, click here. Follow the Inverting Vision Twitter account for updates on posts and other history of exploration and science content. Subscribe to get updates in your inbox:

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