Seeing the Big Picture

 I know exactly where I was on the night of July 20, 1969. At 9:56 PM, Central Daylight Time, I was in front of our black-and-white television set along with the rest of my family. We were part of the 600+ million people around the world doing exactly the same thing at that same moment. 

Apollo 11 Moon Landing Live Broadcast 

Neil Armstrong went down the ladder of the Lunar Lander and stepped off the last step onto the lunar surface. Humanity had put a footprint on the moon. The sense of history-in-the-making was palpable to everyone watching. It was astonishing -- mind-boggling, really -- that we could be watching something happening in almost real-time from a distance of 238,000 miles on another celestial body!

I'm not certain, but our television was probably no more than 27 inches. I remember it was contained in a plastic box which probably weighed fifty pounds because of the heavy cathode-ray picture tube. Long before the internet or even cable television, television signals arrived via an antenna. The picture was often grainy. Color television had been introduced in the late 50s but it was still expensive and my parents didn't own a set. Color broadcasts were limited to selected programming, I remember that NBC introduced theirs with the colorful peacock logo. 

But color television made no difference that night because NASA had only installed a black-and-white video camera on the Lunar Lander. Color video would have taken too much weight and too much power. We were still thrilled to be watching. 

What made me think of all this was that I recently came across a photograph of NASA Mission Control at the Houston Space Center. On the large screen on the wall, you can make out the same black-and-white image of the first moon walk. Today, we think nothing of large video displays and it barely catches our attention.

Large Panel Display in Mission Control

But like everything else associated with the Space Program of that era, even the video displays were state-of-the-art. There were no color LED panels that now fill every niche of our lives. The conventional broadcast video technology of the day was created using the cathode-ray tube. But a display of the size in Mission Control would have required a cathode-ray tube with an enormous glass enclosure weighing tons and needing immense power. So how did NASA create such a display?

The answer was revealed to me when I posted the Mission Control photograph to a Facebook group dealing with old technology. People commented almost immediately about the video display. It was created with a technology called Eidophor. I had never heard of it. 

A little more researching on Wikipedia and YouTube enlightened me further on what this was all about. What you see in the photo of Mission Control is only the front portion of a much larger room. Behind the wall was another room at least as large and painted matte black. Technicians called it the Bat Cave.  The equipment needed to project these displays filled the room as you can see in the schematic below. 

Layout of Bat Cave

The Eidophor projectors themselves were marvels of technology as can be seen in the drawing. Read Wikipedia if you want to know more. 

Schematic of Eidophor Projector

These projectors were around for a while beyond the Apollo missions and were used for sports events, rock concerts, and other large-screen applications. By then they had shrunk considerably from the NASA days but were still formidable hardware systems.

Refined Eidophor System

Today, flat-screen LED and OLED technology is so good that an 8K image can be displayed for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the power. Cameras on spacecraft have also improved so much that we can now watch full-color, hi-def video in virtually real-time. 

On Feb. 18, 2021, the Mars Rover, Perseverance, made an extremely complex and completely autonomous landing as we all watched both the descent vehicle and the Rover as the maneuver was accomplished. We might even have been watching on our Smartphone while sitting at a local coffee shop enjoying a latte. 

We have come a long, long way in fifty years. Sadly, almost no one could tell you where they were on Feb. 18, 2021 when Perseverance landed. We take so much for granted.  Time for a refill of my coffee. 

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." 

- Charles Mingus