Filming Apollo

As many checks as possible were made to the LM within the time available before it was allowed to fly free and continue to the surface. While these were being carried out. the CMP mounted cameras in brackets to monitor the departure of the lander through the CM windows. A television camera would then allow live pictures to be sent to Houston and the world, although on Apollo 11, the opportunity was passed by. A 16-mm movie film of the event would also be taken using the lightweight Maurer cameras carried on all Apollo missions.

These 16-mm cameras have provided much of the best motion documentation of the Apollo flights, yet their official NASA designation implied that history and posterity w7ere far from the thinking behind their inclusion on the trip. NASA called them data acquisition cameras (DACs) and used them in precisely that way – to gather data on the performance of its vehicles. For example, one of the most familiar Apollo scenes is a short shot of a lunar rover being driven around the Apollo 16 landing site at Descartes, w7ith John Young at its controls and a great rooster-tail of dirt rising from its wheels. This wonderful film was shot only because engineers wanted to see how the rover performed in its designed

environment. Since the TV camera was mounted on the rover itself, it was unable to provide such coverage and in any case, a moving rover could not maintain the aim of its dish antenna.

With a DAC mounted in a command module window, the first moments of the lunar module’s flight were recorded, and for Apollo 11, this included a pirouette to allow the landing gear to be inspected. This DAC would also film the LM’s ascent stage as it returned from the Moon. Another DAC mounted in the right-hand lunar module window would film the approaching landscape during the descent, and again as the ascent stage rose from the surface.

The DACs have played their part in distorting the historical record, not in terms of image, but of time. NASA instructed the crews to shoot at frame rates that were often much slower than that normally used for live action. Conventionally, movie film is shot at 24 frames per second and subsequently projected or transferred to TV at about the same rate. The Maurer cameras that were used on Apollo could also shoot at one, six or 12 frames per second, and much of what was shot during the missions used these slower rates to conserve film. When replayed on conventional equipment at the higher frame rate, the recorded events would be portrayed at twice, four times or even 24 times their actual speed. Eventually those recordings found their way into TV and film documentaries and influenced the public’s notion of the Apollo spacecraft. It was only with the advent of advanced video processing technology in later years that careful researchers were able to restore a true sense of the speed of the Apollo films. It was also common to keep a window clear by mounting a camera to one side and have it look through a small mirror, thereby

reversing the shot and further misleading future interpreters of the imagery. In the long run, while the television coverage suffered from the degradation inherent with the technology of the time, the movies shot by the DACs have stood as a clear, high – quality record of the achievements of Apollo.