Ewen Whitaker

Ranger 6 went off on the day it was supposed to. I’d chosen a place in Mare Tranquillitatis where the angles would be right and it’d be free of rocks and hopefully we’d photograph some domes on the Moon as it went down. But of course Ranger 6, something went wrong with the high voltage in the spacecraft. Before it got out of the atmosphere—and of course in low-pressure atmosphere you can jump sparks long-distances—sparks must’ve jumped and burned out the cameras or something.

So poor Ranger 6 never took any pictures. This was pretty sad. We were all at JPL and the launch was successful and up it went. We got there and we were all chewing our pencils waiting for the news: It’s getting near the Moon—time for camera switch-on—no news of camera switch-on. We’re getting closer to the Moon, distance to the Moon only a thousand kilometers—still no sign of warm-up, switch-on. The signals had ceased. We said, okay, the spacecraft has crashed.

That was Ranger 6. All right, back to the drawing boards. They found out what they thought was the problem with the high voltage, and redesigned it slightly. The next one was Ranger 7. I got this call from Gene Shoemaker once again: “Please find places for Ranger 7 to land.”

The third day of launch would’ve been the best one, and that was the one that was chosen. It went off because the weather was good, and finally got there and everything went fine—Yes, we’ve got camera turn-on! We were all at JPL, there was Urey, and Kuiper, and me, of course all the JPL engineers and everything; it was a big whoopee-do.

There were no pictures coming back live, we couldn’t see anything, but we could hear the signal from the cameras, just a tone coming in, signaling that the video was coming in. It was being recorded out in the Mojave Desert there, one of the tracking stations. So that was that, and of course it was hey, hey, popping champagne and everything.

But of course we hadn’t got the films. They had to be stored, put in a truck and driven down from the Mojave Desert which was a hundred-and-some miles away, so we didn’t get them for quite a long time. Then we got these things and they started printing out of pictures from them, and we got the first few prints—Oh, look at this, wow, you can see these craters! Of course the thing’s photographing as it came in closer and closer, just a solid series of pictures from all these six cameras, and so the view that you got closer and closer all the time.

The press conference was going to be that day, so I think we were all up 26 hours without any sleep. Anyway, Kuiper was on it: “This is a great day for science and a great day for the United States,” and a big whoopee-do and everything. That was very exciting.

Then I went back to England, but I had a two-week stay over here because we got all the negatives of the films—35 millimeter films, just like you put into your camera, but very long films—and then I chose a selection of things and printed up all these negatives. Oh, I tell you, two weeks of solid darkroom work. We got back to Tucson eventually and we had five months of writing out experimenter’s reports, so that meant looking at all these pictures and coming up with our theories. It was really an exciting time but very busy.

Charles Wood

Kuiper was the Principal Investigator, and finally Ranger 7 worked. It had television cameras that photographed ever-closer views as the spacecraft approached and finally hit the Moon, and these were broadcasted live on national TV. I remember Kuiper being interviewed right after that happened, and his first statement was, “This has been a great day for America, this is a great day for science.” That’s how he began. So it was really stirring.

Alan Binder

The first time I knew of Kuiper, he was on television. He had been interviewed at McDonald Observatory—I can still see an image of him standing out on the balcony, talking about astronomy. Kuiper knew that you had to get the public interested in what you were doing. That was a source of funding. He had the European polish and he could talk people into doing what he wanted to in terms of money. Those were his great qualities: He sold what he was doing.

He was the Principal Investigator on Ranger. There were several Rangers and they all failed, and finally we got to Ranger 7 which worked. It took amazing photographs. Bill and Dale and I would run down to the newspaper because they would get the first pictures; because television didn’t quite carry them in the way you wanted it to.

Ranger had gone down and taken these incredible photographs as it crashed on the Moon, and Kuiper got up at the news conference at JPL, and in typical Kuiper fashion, “These pictures are not ten times better than astronomical pictures, which would be phenomenal in itself. They are not a hundred times better than astronomical pictures, which is what the engineers promised us. They are one thousand times better.”

It just brought the house down. He just had that way of connecting with the public. I learned that from him: That you need to have the public involved, and that’s what really counts. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand that. Kuiper really valued that, and I give him a tremendous amount of credit.

Charles Wood

There was a sequence of a wide-angled view and then closer, so a smaller area being seen. The thing we realized was, my gosh, there were craters everywhere. The most close-up picture that we had, there were still craters everywhere. And my job was measuring craters, and I thought, my god, this is never going to end. There’s going to be continuing stuff to do here.

Guy Consolmagno

The thrilling thing was not just seeing the Moon coming at you—because they had the first picture, the next picture closer up, the next picture close up—but below they said, “Live from the Moon.”

Steve Larson

At that time I was working in the darkroom. We got the first high resolution images of the surface of the Moon from this crash-landing spacecraft. After many tries, they finally got a couple to work. It was all very exciting, because we were trying to extract as much information as possible just from imaging, and there was a lot of contention at the time about whether or not the surface was even strong enough to sustain the landing of a spacecraft. Some people predicted this was a very loose, powdery thing that would just swallow it up when we tried to land.

Charles Wood

Kuiper got time on the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope and Alika Herring and I went up to see the impact of Ranger 9, because there had been some suggestion that the Moon had a lot of dust on it, and there might be a large cloud of dust from the impact. So we got to use this really large telescope to look at the Moon with our eyeballs. Almost nobody, then or now, looks at the Moon with a large telescope with their eyeballs. I remember the stability of the atmosphere for seconds would be very good, and we could see tiny, tiny craters on the Moon that no one had ever seen before. They had never been photographed before. It was just very exciting. And when the spacecraft hit—we had the radio on; we could hear when it hit—there was absolutely nothing. That showed us and anybody else who was concerned that no, there wasn’t a huge amount of dust on the Moon.

Robert Strom

Gerard Kuiper and Ewen Whitaker were involved in what was called the Ranger program, which was to send a spacecraft to the Moon and hard-land, impact it, but on the way down take these high resolution pictures, getting closer and closer and closer to see what the surface was composed of.

Ranger 7 was the first successful one, and sent back these high resolution pictures. We looked at those, and did geological analysis. There was still a debate about what the craters were. Were they volcanic or were they impact? That was a heated debate and was really not settled until probably around the late sixties. It turned out that the evidence was very strong that these were impact craters and not volcanic at all.

But it was still argued about what the lunar maria was. This is the dark areas of the Moon. We thought it probably lava. Others thought, no, it was just dust that you’d sink in. Well, the high resolution images from Ranger did not answer the question of whether this stuff was dusty or whether it was solid rock. So after Ranger, there was the Surveyor spacecraft. These were soft-landers, and during those missions there was also a lunar orbiter sent up there to get very high resolution images of the surface of the Moon. Then when the Surveyor soft-landed that would tell whether it would hold the spacecraft or sink in.

It turned out that the Surveyor spacecraft showed that the Moon’s surface was in fact firm enough that it would hold up a spacecraft landing on it, and it dug in the surface and sent back high resolution pictures. It became very clear at that point that, yeah, you could land a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon without it sinking down to hundreds of feet.

Ewen Whitaker

With Surveyor 1 was on Gene Shoemaker’s team. We were in charge of the cameras, what they would photograph. With the first Surveyor, they tracked it down and it photographed all the flat areas, the panoramas. But on the horizon there were little bright peaks. They knew roughly where they were on the Moon, in Flamsteed P.

The people at JPL and others, they figured out the place the thing had landed, because of the way the peaks looked. This was their theory and they published it in Science. I looked at this and thought, “I don’t know, that doesn’t sound right to me.” So I did a real job, I got some better pictures from JPL. They sent them to me of the mountains that you could see in this little piece of the panorama, and I got one of our best pictures—we’d taken it with the 82-inch in Texas—and sort of straightened it up and did the angles. I figured out where this had to be on the floor of this Flamsteed P flat area so that the angles of the peaks that you were seeing fitted in with what we saw from our Earth-based picture.

Well, that didn’t agree with what they’d written up in Science, so I had to look and see what were the two things the Surveyor radar caught as it was landing, and lo and behold, looking around, there were two very bright little tiny craters. I thought, Oh-oh, I betcha those were the two things that caused the blips in the radar, and therefore from that you could see where the thing had landed.

So I said that Surveyor was right about here. Once they photographed it, it was almost exactly where I predicted from the two craters—very close, within a hundred yards or something. We found out later that Orbiter 1 had actually photographed this thing with its low-resolution camera. You could just pick out a bright spot. Well, then they said, “You’re the one who’s going to find out where these things land in the future,” so that got me that little job, amongst others of course. That was exciting days with all the Surveyors.

Robert Strom

Then things started happening very rapidly, because we were approaching the Apollo era of sending men to the Moon. I was on the lunar operations working group for Apollo 8, 10, and 11. Apollo 11 was the one that landed. We briefed the astronauts on what targets they should image from orbit—they had very good cameras in orbit—and where to take pictures that would be of high scientific interest. All of that is up in the Space Imagery Center here.

Alan Binder

Apollo, in my estimation, is the best thing that humanity has ever done. It was thrilling, because we thought the space program was going somewhere. We were reaching the Moon. Gene Shoemaker had told his students that you’ll be doing your PhD thesis on the Moon. That’s what we believed. It was what we all wanted—some of us wanted to go to the Moon, but we all wanted to study the Moon and the planets. The whole world was listening. Even though the Commies, the Russians, were beaten badly, they were thrilled. The only country that I believe did not tell its people was Communist China. The rest of the world was totally engaged in Apollo.

To see Armstrong and then Aldrin get out, and of course you’ve seen probably the ghostly kind of images—the first TVs weren’t all that hot. Your heart was skipping. God, we’re down! Get the rocks, get the thing done, get back in and make sure you get back. It was so new and it seemed so dangerous that your heart was just in your mouth, so to speak, because you wanted it to succeed. I have all these fantastic memories of Apollo and the men on the Moon, and I envied them so much because I wanted to go. And I still want to go.

Jonathan Lunine

Everybody who was alive at that time, except for the jaded, know where they were when Apollo 11 landed, and I was at the Desert Inn Motel at Miami Beach, Florida, which is where my mom used to take us on summer vacation. Very cheap motel, but it was by the beach. We were there and I remember watching the TV and getting the news about the landing. It was evening there in Florida and then the excitement of being allowed to stay up late to watch the moonwalk, but we didn’t have to stay up late because the astronauts were actually able to get out earlier than expected. We watched these pictures and it was really, really exciting. It seemed to me as a ten-year old that it was the start of a new era.

William Hartmann

I saw the Apollo 11 landing. I was actually up in Flagstaff. My wife Gayle, who I was going with at the time, was working up at the Museum in Northern Arizona. We were invited across the street from the Museum of Northern Arizona. There’s a big, beautiful, white-framed farmhouse-looking thing which was a building that belonged to the Museum. The staff had all gathered there.

We were all sitting around in this nice quaint old house watching this television set. There’re coming around the Moon and now they’re coming around the back of the Moon and yes, we’ve got radio contact again, and now they’re coming around the front side and they’re going to go down and land. [Chet] Huntley and [David] Brinkley were saying this thing about, “Okay, this is such an amazing moment in the history of humanity, we’re just going to stop talking and let you listen to the chatter between Houston and the astronauts,” and that was all coming through. The landing maneuver was just about to start. They’re doing their engine-burn and they’re going to go down, this is going to start in the next few minutes, this is all going to happen, and this little five-year-old kid shouts “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom!” and Daddy has to take him out just at the moment when we’re landing on the Moon.

Charles Sonett

We were halfway between Italy and Corsica, just a summer vacation. It was midnight, and all the Italians on board were being very happy about it all. Just at the moment of landing they were all looking at the TV, and they were whooping it up. It was a very intense time for people working in space. Spent a lot of time in the lab—I remember 60, 80 hour weeks. If you’re getting ready for a flight, you know, you don’t have time to sit around, you have to work day and night. Crazy schedules.

Floyd Herbert

One of the big surprises for everybody was they actually did go to the Moon, but it was the government that did it. Everybody had always thought that it would be some sort of pioneering industrialist that would finance this thing and they’d build it in their backyard. Then it actually happened and, my God, it was a 25 billion dollar project run by the federal government, and bureaucracy as far as the eye could see, because if you didn’t have bureaucracy you wouldn’t get anything done.

Randy Jokipii

There’s nothing like observing new things. I think most scientists feel that way, no matter what their field is. I can remember in 1969 I spent two weeks in Budapest. This was when the Iron Curtain was still strong.

People would just walk up to us in the streets and say, “Congratulations, Americans!” I still remember that. That was very riveting to them. I think part of it was a reaction to the Russians, because they were under the foot of the Russians at the time. But also it was partly that it was a very exciting time.

William Hartmann

I actually got to see Apollo 14 launched, which was very impressive. The big physical sensation is just that the low-frequency sound. You can actually feel it sort of hitting in and vibrating your stomach. That’s the sound the microphones can’t catch.

Charles Wood

On the wall of the Atmospheric Science Building there were posters for the International Geophysical Year, which was 1957-58, and one of those posters was the western half of the United States as seen by a rocket—one of the rockets that we had captured from the Germans with von Braun. We would launch from New Mexico to explore rockets and to explore space.

There was this fantastic picture that showed the curvature of the Earth, and showed New Mexico and Arizona and California and northern Mexico, and I saw that in the early sixties when we first got there. To me it was more spectacular of the picture we later saw from Apollo, because it was so much earlier.

William Hartmann

They had launched the first weather satellite, and here was this first picture of the cloud formations of Earth as seen from space. Those kinds of pictures really affected our view of our planet.

I’m a big fan of the early artistic renditions of the solar system. Chesley Bonestell was the father of astronomical art in the United States. He had seen the first V-2 pictures from New Mexico looking down, and New Mexico had a very specific kind of cloud pattern. There are lots of these little individual cumulus clouds, and they would actually cast a shadow. Bonestell would paint the Earth this way, with these little patchy clouds.

Nobody realized that these clouds were organized into these huge systems; these big cyclonic bands and spirals and so forth. People knew a hurricane was a spiral, but the early artists trying to understand what the Earth would look like from space didn’t sense the extent of it —they painted all the clouds as sort of separate little clouds because that’s what you could see from the V-2 photographs in New Mexico. So that first picture coming in from a weather satellite, and the idea that they were going to be able to track these systems, was an amazing thing to look to.

Robert Strom

The first picture of Earth from space was not taken by the astronauts. It was taken by the orbiter. It got the horizon, and there was the Earth. It was not in color, it was in black and white, but there was the Earth. That was the first picture of the Earth ever taken from a great distance. It was amazing.

Now the public really didn’t know about that photograph very much. But when the astronauts returned the first pictures of the Earth from the Moon—that was Apollo 8—it kind of shocked people. The reason it shocked people: Here was this little blue marble sitting there in black space, and you could hardly see the atmosphere. Then I think it dawned on people, wow, we live in a precarious environment, and the only thing separating us from death is this thin atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen.

Charles Sonett

There was one very interesting picture especially, taken from the Moon. You could see the oceans of the Earth, and the clouds. That’s something to think about. That’s worth contemplating.

Don McCarthy

You put a picture of the whole Earth from space in your class, and you ask the audience when they saw that. Young people cannot answer that. You cannot answer that, most likely, because you’ve grown up with it. Whereas people my age saw the transition, of being able to see part of the Earth to the whole Earth. It is speculated that that new view of the Earth as a whole from space inspired the whole environmental movement, and certainly has changed the way generations of people around the globe think of themselves as fitting into the universe. Not just one locale; now we think globally. What price do you put on a single picture that had that impact? It’s priceless.

Alan Binder

I don’t think it was so much seeing the Earth from the Moon: It was being on the Moon. Man was up there. You could look up, and people were up there. Because I had my telescope, I would look at the landing site and see the mountains and see the craters and I knew there were people down there. I could look in the window at the television and see those mountains. That was an amazing connection to me.