Wagging the Moondoggie

[jberryhill]

6. It's beyond obvious you were not around at the time

...or you wouldn't say dumb things like this:

NASA claims that the camera was mounted on the abandoned lunar rover... and that the pan and zoom functions were operated remotely by the ground crew back on Earth. You couldn’t control your television from across the living room in those days, but NASA could pan and zoom a camera from 234,000 miles away. Awesome! ...Apparently there wasn’t any delay in the signal...

Indeed, there was a delay in the signal, which is why they got it wrong on more than one mission. It was kind of a big deal to try to capture the liftoff with the remotely operated rover camera, and they always made a point of discussing that.

http://io9.com/how-nasa-captured-this-iconic-footage-of-apollo-17-leav-1671650186

So the engineers suggested moving the rover a certain distance from the lunar module and setting the camera to automatically tilt to show the lunar liftoff when commanded from Earth.

That was the plan, at least. On Apollo 15, the tilt mechanism malfunctioned and the camera never moved upwards, allowing the lunar module to slip out of sight. And while the attempt on Apollo 16 gave a longer view of the lunar module rising up, the astronauts actually parked the rover too close to it, which threw off the calculations and timing of the tilt upwards so it left view just a few moments into the flight.

Ed Fendall was the person doing the controlling. In an oral history for NASA done in 2000, he recalled how complex the procedure was.

Now, the way that worked was this. Harley Weyer, who worked for me, sat down and figured what the trajectory would be and where the lunar rover would be each second as it moved out, and what your settings would go to. That picture you see was taken without looking at it (the liftoff) at all. There was no watching it and doing anything with that picture. As the crew counted down, that's a (Apollo) 17 picture you see, as (Eugene) Cernan counted down and he knew he had to park in the right place because I was going to kill him, he didn't — and Gene and I are good friends, he'll tell you that — I actually sent the first command at liftoff minus three seconds. And each command was scripted, and all I was doing was looking at a clock, sending commands. I was not looking at the television. I really didn't see it until it was over with and played back. Those were just pre-set commands that were just punched out via time. That's the way it was followed.