OT: Moon Landing

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NASA had more bandwidth than Amateur Radio operators were allowed, so th ey could scan a little faster, but both systems used free running sync syst ems. Film shot off of a CRT is called Kinescope. The scan converters were p hysically similar to a Kinescope system, but with a video camera instead of a 16mm B&W camera. I hated running Kinescope films for Broadcast. It was c heap, and flimsy. It was intended for archival, or very limited runs. It wa s easy to break, and lower quality than a real film. There was no way to ge t the two sets of scan lines, to line up so the quality went down. I had li ne regulation problems at that TV station. It wasn't unusual to have the pr ojector strip the sprocket holes, or cause multiple breaks from sudden chan ges in line voltage.

That's what I remember seeing, a long time ago. :)

Apparently the original design assumption was that the Orbiter would only require an airline style A-check between flights, but in reality heavy C- or D-checks were needed to be perform between flights essentially disassembling and reassembling a lot of the Orbiter.

On a sunny day (Thu, 18 Jul 2019 15:27:46 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Klaus Kragelund wrote in :

Thank you, nice paper. it takes me right back to those days working with Ampex quadruplex 2 inch tape. we got the Apollo feeds nicely at 625 lines interlaced, I think at that time real time converted by the BBC converter in the UK from the US 512 lines or whatever feed. Nice how they use the vidicon storage, takes me right back to my first vidicon camera design in 1968 or so. We had vidicons everywhere, those were used in film editing tables. Ah all the time element compensation, for those who know about amtec and colortec... All the sync stuff, been a while... Nice job!

I think sometimes it's difficult to know what it's actually going to be like to do things until you actually do them and get away from the abstract and into boots-on-the-ground work. A lot of things were still unknown at the time of the first flight and the engineers would be happy to test and verify each stage in the design as long as possible it was finally management's job to say "okay guys we have to fly this thing, can't test and revise forever on the ground, and start doing it and see how it goes."

The A-checkout was the ideal but I think once they started launching and servicing they realized that the system of launch/service/turn-around was all a much more complex thing than any airliner was. There were many more criticality 1 systems as compared to an airliner that had to be right or a loss of the crew was almost guaranteed like the heat shield and the payload bay door latching system, for example. Nobody ended up wanting to be the person that hurry-upped any of that stuff.

I think due to compartmentalization and the sheer size of the project involving many teams working on many specialized systems it was possible for some to lose the forest for the trees and even some in NASA management, perhaps, didn't quite realize the scale and complexity of the thing they were working on the construction of.

Thinking they're managing the development of something more like a space-airliner and they don't even quite realize the total scope of the project until it rolls out into the sun out of the VAB the first time and they realize "Oh, it's this gigantic super-complex machine from the future" it may have been a humbling experience even for some involved directly in its development.

Keep in mind some of the people involved in the project probably dated back to the Mercury and Gemini projects, the first flight of the Shuttle was only 20 years after the first manned orbit. It wasn't that long ago at that time.

Sort of like the Concorde rolling out 20 years later to an audience of some of the same people that had watched the Wright Flyer as comparison, even the NASA veterans may have felt a little out-of-the-depth.

This document also mentioned the 1.6 s 1280 line super low scan mode, which was available in the lunar surface camera. It was intended if the ascent stage failed to ignite so that the astronauts could send back high definition pictures from the Moon until their oxygen supply would run out.

When viewing the video in Europe, the picture quality from the Houston and from the Moon was further degraded due to the 525/60i to 625/50i scan conversion.

Wonder if the original 10fps tapes are still available ? Running them through a modern digital scan converter and gamma correction might get a bit better picture.

Regarding the picture quality of early satellite links, I was watching the live broadcast of Surveyor 1 landing from JPL control center Pasadena CA in 1966. Apparently the broadcast came through two satellites to Europe and had at least one standard conversion in the chain. Apparently they had compressed the video waveform and horizontal synch pulses too much, since all vertical things in the picture from Pasadena were wavy and that changed all the time :-).

With square pixels 320 x 4/3 x 320 x 10 Hz = 1.4 Mpix/s and 6 bits/pixel is 8 Mbit/s which requires a considerable bandwidth. The available bandwidth was 0.5 MHz, so you must remember wrong.

The baseband analog bandwidth required by 1.4 Mpix/s is 700 kHz, so using the 0.5 MHz analog bandwidth, the horizontal resolution was slightly worse than vertical resolution.

Yes, like replacing large numbers of the fragile tiles after each flight. Almost each one a different shape to all the others and each taking man hours to affix, a massive achilles heel in the scheme.

piglet

There were cameras pointed at TV, including 8mm film, and still film shots. It's not clear to me a video camera was used, but a scan converter was used for the TV broadcast, and this was also videotaped.

Greg

And less than 40 years since the V2 first launch.

Previously with expandable vehicles, you could take ultimate performance from various components such as engines. The only requirement was that it should last long enough until the stage had separated and the next stage taken over. Some Saturn V first stages have been recovered from the Atlantic. Some F1 engines were nearly burned through, so a JOT (Just on time) performance.

For a reusable device, you have to derate it sufficiently, so that it is reliable for multiple flights before a large overhaul. Clearly too much performance was required from the SSMEs, since a lot of overhaul was required after each flight.

Martin Brown wrote in news:qgpol8$1hfc$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org:

Again you prove to be one of the most informed and intelligent posters in the group.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Except this is the Moon, and there is none there either. They "showed" nothing but their stupidity... those 'they' people you speak of.

I can put one in your forehead from the hip, putz. And that is with a short barrel. I'll put a smiley face on your lead pierced face with a long barrel (except there would not be anything left of it).

I was born. You were shat. BIG difference. B I G !!!

Michael Terrell wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Hell, even "The Fly" does by about one decade. 1958, with Vincent Price.

piglet wrote in news:qgrv02$v6f$1@dont- email.me:

EVERY single one, a different shape.

Roku users can watch videos about the lunar landing, both free and premium.

I think they thought that by putting the main engines on the orbiter itself and making a vehicle that was a compromise between a traditional vertical rocket, and a single-stage-to-orbit craft, they'd end up with some of the advantages of both types of vehicle.

Turned out they got a finished product that wasn't nearly as reliable as a traditional vertical rocket, and whose turn-around time and cost for a follow-up launch wasn't any better, either.

Don't really know until you try I guess but I understand the argument that in hindsight the problems with this design should have been better apparent.

I think it's possible that within my lifetime there will be a true single-stage-to-orbit launch system that approaches the turn-around time of an aircraft, using something like the Skylon combined-cycle ramjet/rocket engine. In 2020 the engine engineering and materials science I think is mostly up to the task (it definitely wasn't in the

All the European TV coverage of the moon landings came via the Goonhilly Earth Station in England:

Only just found that out from a feature on the local news tonight.