From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written
On Sun, 1 Mar 2026 13:42:58 -0500, Cryptoengineer wrote:
On 3/1/2026 9:51 AM, danny burstein wrote:
In <10o1jch$3vb$1@panix2.panix.com> kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey)
writes:
In article <pan$c05fc$7a52f22d$e15ebac5$61c8f932@cpacker.org>, Charles
Packer <mailbox@cpacker.org> wrote:
Does anybody remember watching live TV coverage when NASA's first
deep space probes reached their objectives? As I recall, guest
scientists gave first impressions while the telemetry came in.
I'd like to pinpoint which missions were covered like that and by
which networks.
I know the first Voyager mission was like that. Somewhere I have a
roll of photos that I took off the TV set at the time.
--scott
Not "deep space", but I remember the live tv coverage of Sureveyor
making the first soft landing on the moon and the picture it sent at
something like 2 AM NYC time.
I remember live transmissions of Ranger 7's photos of the Moon as it (deliberately) crashed into the surface in 1964.
pt
From a dive into the newspaper archives I found that the
success of Ranger 7 was banner headline front page news after
a long string of failures. The pictures, though were shown to the
public the next day at a news conference. Maybe there was a live
radio broadcast from JPL, as there was with Mariner 4 on July
14, 1965? The kind of telecast I had in mind was for the
Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune on Aug. 25, 1989:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLMGHMU8UKg
The catch is I couldn't have seen it since I didn't own a TV at
the time. I must be remembering one of those next-day press
conferences after earlier missions with scientists present to
offer first impressions of the data. Although the papers reported
a week in advance the TV coverage of the Voyager 2 Neptune flyby,
the post-mission reportage didn't mention the live telecast,
evidently because it all came from reporters who were on the scene
at JPL.
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