back to article It is 60 years since a US spacecraft first took a close-up of the Moon

It has been 60 years since a spacecraft snapped the USA's first close-up images of the lunar surface, a mere five years before astronauts set foot on the Moon. Ranger 7 finally achieved the feat in July 1964. The Ranger program began in 1960 and was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. The Soviet …

  1. Paul Crawford Silver badge
    Pint

    A beer for those involved!

    Few projects would have the backing to try again and again now :(

  2. Francis Boyle

    My first thought was

    "sixty years, but that was when Apollo was happening, there must be some mistake". It's hard to imagine now the blistering pace of spaceflight development back in the Sixties.

    1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Re: Sixties / Now

      In the '60s congress allocated a huge budget for sending men to the Moon. These days congress allocates a huge budget to purchase space shuttle components from their monopoly manufacturers. The ridiculous price gouging is considered a feature: "Look how much money I am bring to my donors our state".

    2. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: My first thought was

      And only 15 years after the invention of the transistor, and about 5 after the IC. Much of the technology they were planning these missions around was still in its infancy.

      1. sitta_europea Silver badge

        Re: My first thought was

        "And only 15 years after the invention of the transistor..."

        When you look at it this way, yes, the pace has been staggering.

        Just before my final year at university I went to work at AERE Harwell for a year - it was called a "thick sandwich" course - and I went back there after my final year. My first posting was to Electronics and Applied Physics Division. The building where I worked had been converted from RAF barracks. It had metal framed, single-glazed windows, a corrugated asbestos roof, and it was catchily named "347.3". There were free bus services from nearby towns such as Reading, where I rented a flat. The bus dropped us off on what had been RAF Harwell's runway, about half a mile from the building where I worked. Most of the people I worked with were much older than me - some of them had been there in the RAF in wartime - and they liked to tell stories. One of the stories was that a few years before I got there, the first transistor made in the UK was made in that laboratory, actually in the room where I was working.

        Amongst my first projects was working on the first charge-coupled devices made in the UK. These CCDs cost a small fortune, and they had one row of eight elements, and they had absolutely horrible characteristics. With their serious limitations we struggled to figure out how to make use of them. That was in 1973. Now, there must be a dozen megapixel-sized CCDs within ten feet of me and they probably all cost less than a fiver to make. We have gigapixel CCDs in space, and if I feel the need I can see the images which they've taken of the first stars to illuminate the cosmos.

        Unfortunately for the history buffs, 347.3 and its sister buildings were demolished many years ago. Not so unfortunate for the people who work at Harwell now though. I remember my time there as being uncomfortably cold in winter and very uncomfortably hot in summer. But I'm very glad to have experienced a tiny part of history in the making.

        1. NickHolland

          tell us more...

          Please...write your stories down while you can. As someone who has lived a little history myself...I'm often shocked and amazed by the modern retellings by people who think they have "the" story, but in reality, only know one little part (and often, I realize *I* have just one little part, too).

        2. Mast1

          Re: My first thought was

          A few years later than that I worked in another UK semiconductor (attempt at) manufacturing lab.

          The story I heard there was that, years before, one of the more senior members of the lab had increased the yield of his germanium transistors by taking them over the public corridor to wash them in the "washrooms" in between processing stages. Date undefined, but you could call it an early "clean room" (because everywhere else was "dirty" in comparison).

      2. Version 1.0 Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: My first thought was

        And only 15 years after the invention of the transistor - thanks for that thought, it has remained me of starting to use transistors and seeing them as far more technical because before they appeared it was so easy to diagnose a problem ... "Oh look, the valve is cold so it needs to be replaced!" I was just a little kid fixing peoples TV problems back in those days.

        1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

          Re: My first thought was

          And when you replaced the valve and noticed it getting much too hot, you could measure voltages quickly to diagnose the problem before things went too far. Transistors just go 'click', and you're back to square one...

  3. Bill Gray

    Pictures ('cuz it did happen)

    (for all the Ranger missions, and some interesting documentation from that time) are at https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/ranger/. Same page has some links to images from the Surveyor, Apollo, and Lunar Orbiter missions.

    The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images are much better, of course, but I gather the old data are still sometimes consulted to see what's changed in the intervening ~60 years.

  4. TheRealRoland
    Pint

    The names of some of the team members listed in the preface / foreword of some of the accompanying books of photos. Kuiper, Shoemaker... Amazing :D

  5. cjcox

    Waiting

    We're waiting for the silver flat disk to flip and show us its other side before we go back. Until then, we wait. We've yet to explore the flat under side of our disk.

    For those that think the Moon (or Earth) are spherical, watch the documentary about OJ's trip to the moon in the movie, Capricorn One. Getting the truth out.

  6. DS999 Silver badge

    Missed the Moon by 22,000 miles?

    I assume some sort of thrust failure was the cause, rather than rocket scientists getting rocket science wrong?

    1. David Hicklin Silver badge

      Re: Missed the Moon by 22,000 miles?

      > Missed the Moon by 22,000 miles?

      In those days it was hard to get it right, the moon may look big to you looking up at it as night but if you take a space view to scale it is a very small target quite a long way off

      1. ravenviz Silver badge

        Re: Missed the Moon by 22,000 miles?

        It is interesting that even the Apollo astronauts would have trouble locating the Moon on the way to orbit and still had to rely on star charts for navigation!

  7. GuldenNL

    Lived it up close

    I could have spit out numbers and facts like a Program Director back then. My father headed up Quality at one of the top NASA vendors.

    I'll be honest, I barely think back on purpose. The hope and the feeling of "We're living in the future!" was so positive. Nothing like it these days for we Space freaks.

    Somehow my view of spending a good part of my life on the moon, helping the next leap to Mars died out in the mid-80s.

    These days I spend my focus on Hubble and other views of the greater universe as I approach seeing them on the astral plane.

  8. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
    Alert

    Relive the Apollo days

    Warning: time sink ahead!

    If you're interested in things Apollo...

    There's a Youtube channel "curiousmarc", where they are rebuilding the Apollo communications link, from original pieces of equipment, using modern test gear to fill in the empty spaces. It's quite interesting, because (1) not all the equipment they get, works, and they have to debug and repair it, and (2) they take the time to explain how it all fits together, including block diagrams, descriptions of the modulation scheme (quite clever) and circuit diagrams. The material can get pretty "hardware nuts and bolts-ish", but it's a well done view into the tech that put men on the Moon.

    This is the same channel that reverse engineered and repaired the Apollo LEM Guidance Computer and got it running code.

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