64 Australian Geographic
A
LL THE WHILE, THE astronauts were suiting up in the
Lunar Module. To survive during their Moon walk,
they had to turn themselves into what amounted to
small self-contained spacecraft, capable of maintaining Earth-
like conditions around their bodies and ongoing communica-
tions with Mission Control.
Specially cooled and ventilated, their space suits were bulky
and cumbersome to put on, and this took much more time than
expected. But the astronauts were in no hurry. To make a
mistake was to chance a horrible death by asphyxiation: their
lungs would collapse as the air in their hearts bubbled and their
blood vessels ruptured, all within a minute or so. It wasn’t until
sometime after 12.30pm that Neil Armstrong sounded like he
was ready to emerge from the Lunar Module. Back on Earth,
a record live-television audience of 600 million people – then,
almost a fifth of the world’s population – listened to various
commentators doing their best to fill in time as they waited for
Mission Control to begin its promised live TV feed of Armstrong
starting his climb down the Lunar Module’s ladder.
It was now clear to Tom that Armstrong would take his first
step onto the lunar surface minutes before the Moon rose over
Parkes. Although Parkes’s off-axis receiver might be able to pick
up a TV signal a little earlier, Tom knew it would be unstable,
possibly jerky, prone to drop in and out, and wouldn’t be of
broadcast quality. This meant that for Armstrong’s first step,
Honeysuckle’s dish would be Goldstone’s only backup. With
mounting excitement, Tom pressed his intercom button and
barked “Battle short!”, a direction to his team to let their equip-
ment bypass safety circuit-breakers for the next crucial minutes.
After emerging from the Lunar Module, Neil Armstrong
crawled backwards across a small platform he’d nicknamed ‘the
porch’, towards a 2.4m ladder attached to one of the module’s
landing struts. Before taking his first step down the ladder, he
pulled on a D-ring attached to a lanyard. This activated the Lunar
Module’s external stowage bay, which swung out and down to
reveal a small TV camera trained on the ladder. After some
adjustments to a circuit-breaker, it began filming from its upside-
down position. For a split second, what Honeysuckle’s TV
technician Ed von Renouard saw confused him: “It was an inde-
cipherable puzzle of stark blocks of black at the bottom and grey
at the top, bisected by a bright diagonal streak. I realised that the
sky should be at the top, and on the Moon the sky is black, so I
reached out and f licked the switch and all of a sudden it all made
sense, and presently Armstrong’s leg came down.”
However, at Goldstone, the TV technician mucked up his
reversing switch. After attempting to correct his error, he increased
the contrast on his TV scan converter’s output, dragging most of
the picture into the black, and making it very high contrast. Still
struggling, his next mistake was to adjust the focus, the result
being that the photo was not as sharp. A little while after that,
he tried another setting, turning the picture to negative. This
had the effect of compressing the shadow areas into white. With
each mistake, Goldstone’s TV technician compounded his prob-
lems. In a room behind Houston’s main Mission Control room,
Ed Tarkington, who was responsible for deciding which lunar
TV feed to put live to air, could not understand why the pictures
he was seeing coming in from Honeysuckle were so much better
than those from Goldstone. How was it that Tom’s team withA lack of space meant Apollo 11’s TV camera had to be mounted
upside down in the Lunar Module’s stowage bay (above le).
At Australia’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Parkes
(above) during the 1969 Apollo 11 moon walk, American scientists
(le) collected the astronauts’ television images and sent them
around the world by satellite.PHOTO CREDITS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NASA; IMAGE COURTESY NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF AUSTRALIA, NAA: A1200, L60928; IMAGE COURTESY NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF AUSTRALIA, NAA: A1200,