Quote:
Originally Posted by gary
Hi Scott,
Thanks for your post and perspective from being within the U.S. at the time.
Do you have any recollection of whether the 14 to 17 missions had any
live coverage of the walks on any of the US networks at all? In other words,
if you really wanted to tune in and watch, was it possible?
As you can appreciate having lived here in Australia, there were are a limited
number of broadcasters and television channels here and they provided minimal
coverage.
Absolutely! It's "15 minutes of fame" seemed to have been well and truly used up
as far as the broader public and media were concerned.
Fabulous story and I can well imagine they must have a pretty amazing
aeronautical and astronautical engineering faculty there with such a rich legacy
of alumni. 
Best Regards
Gary |
My memory of the program is colored by my interest (casual not fanatical) so it is hard to speak of my accuracy in remembering from the actual time or what I've seen and learned later. I lived in rural Indiana and depending on the weather and which direction our antennae was turned (imagine one person outside turning the mounting pipe and some one inside hollering "a little more North"), we could get 5 or 6 channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, Channel 4 local Independant, PBS "usually", and sometimes another "Independent") so there was not much difference in the coverage available...It is hard to remember how "primitive" information flow was then and any news from the "outside" (outside being our small community) was also limited and "filtered" for the unwashed masses.
Our standard was CBS and Walter Cronkite...From memory there would always be a segment on the news for launch and landing (at least excerpted) and recovery. Usually there was also some kind of "show and tell" during the mission. Newspapers would have updates as well but they were usually no front page kind of stuff (except for launch and landing). Basically we got to see the same thing every time...
I don't recall much about Apollo 14 I think that was "the golf shot" for Sheppard but there was a bit of hullabulloo after it was made known of Ed Mitchell's ESP experiment (a little to close to "witchcraft" where I grew up for the comfort of many Church goers
)
Apollo 15 had the moon buggy with a mounted TV so that made for a good "sound bite" as they drove around
Apollo 16 and 17 I don't recall so much. My recollection is that they just did variations off of the above but again the same pattern was repeated, it was shown on the news and by that time unless there was something special (launch and recovery) broadcasts were confined to the News programs.
Marathon Oil Company did a "promotion" linked with the Apollo programs...fill your tank and get an "Apollo Glass" a new one with each launch...my family did collect them all although the full sets whereabouts are a matter of secrecy at the moment.