They can’t have shipped the entire sound stage to the moon. The Van Allen Radiation Belts would have damaged umm…you know…something important.
I don’t recall this particular incident, but I do recall that the networks often showed simulations (of dockings, orbiting craft, whatever) and they were always labeled as such, even though they could never fool any knowledgeable person.
As I recall, network news was really good about explaining the science and showing simulations and such. They actually seemed to be sincerely interested in educating the public.
If only television news would do that these days, especially about things like climate change, or vaccines, or economics, or election laws, or any number of other things.
I can’t comment on the actual OP question (wasn’t old enough) but according to the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon Bean did indeed accidentally point the camera at the sun after removing the lens cap.and fried the spiffy hi-res color camera they brought (Apollo 11 only had a low-res slow scan (15 fps) B&W video camera). There’s a great scene where the reporter Emmet Seaborne (a fictional amalgam of all the era’s NASA reporters) is live on TV with a small model of the moon landing site and says, “Well folks, unfortunately it looks like we’re not going to be getting the anticipated color footage from the Moon”. They then cut to a commercial and he smashes the model and shouts to his director, "What the fuck happened up there!!"
I remember my primary school class trudging through the snow to the other school site to watch some coverage, and then the caption appearing to tell us that Bean had killed the camera. I wasn’t allowed to stay up to watch Apollo 11 land, Apollo 13 never made it… by the time 14 got there it was an anticlimax.
Unfortunately the women still don’t get it.
Yep!
I found lots of the original TV coverage on YouTube:
As other posters report, a lot of the footage is clearly marked “Training Film” or “Animation”, when live footage was not available.
As the reporters mentioned “if all goes as schedule they will be on the moon in the middle of next week sending back television pictures in Living Color”. They were indeed expecting the color footage but the snafu prevented that.
There was color footage of Pete Conrad descending to the lunar surface.
The camera failure did come after the landing:
It seems that some newscasts reported about the landing using animation and stock footage, seems to me that it is likely that many who remember the landing are remembering the recreations and not the live landing.
I found the American Forces Vietnam Network reporting on the second day activities, and the military reporters mentioned that that CBS got them the simulated footage. And they did mark the footage as “SIMULATION” during the broadcast.
On the next video at 5:00 Andy Rooney reports on the reason why a lot of the live footage was missing, he showed a model of the camera that failed and the Conrad snafu.
As in the American Forces video, when animation and models were used the video does report that it is a “SIMULATION” or “ANIMATION”
Huh? Color me baffled about billfish678’s point.
Here’s a picture of a latter simulation