# Were the later Apollo missions really greeted with such apathy by the public? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 19, 2008, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039 "2008-07-19T14:02:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2009, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/61 "2009-07-29T22:06:50Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Right. Man, I’m making a lot of brain farts lately. You must have been thinking of the Perry Rhodan/Reg Bell mission. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2009, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/62 "2009-07-30T02:42:59Z")
> [@Abby\_Emma\_Sasha](#): > > I got in trouble at school for not watching Apollo 11. The teacher brought in a television set and expected us all to be excited. I was not. I put my head on my desk and tried to sleep. > > My teacher immediately called me out and made me stand outside in the hallway until class was over. I mean, hell, if I couldn’t get with the program I _must_ be punished. Never mind that this shit bored me,a 9 year old, I was so un american I desreved to be banished. A pox on my bad self, huh. > > The irony is my cousin, my only real claim to fame, Fred “Pecky” Haise was on the ill fated Apollo 13. I had some interest in that one. I’ll third the confusion. Why were you in school in July? ---
**Author:** ![Nunzio\_Tavulari](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Nunzio\_Tavulari](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nunzio_Tavulari)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2009, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/63 "2009-07-30T20:45:16Z")
> [@commasense](#): > > No, not really, unless you mean that many people didn’t have good reception of all channels in those pre-digital (and mostly pre-cable) days. But the pristine video signal as it left the TV stations was much better than the moon video. No, I meant that TV pictures looked like crap in those days. Then it was often further degraded by poor reception. Sony made the first transistorized TV in 1960 but it was small, and most people bought TVs with tubes until probably the mid-1970s. Watching lousy moon video on lousy TV screens was a bit bowl of not good. The tubes were always going out of spec. Color TVs would often take on an odd tint. Black and white TVs would get dark but not always evenly across the screen. There were knobs to control horizontal and vertical and height and width and pin-cushioning and brightness and contrast and focus and who knows what else. You’d get one channel OK just right, then have to readjust when you changed channels. If your new TV has even half those adjustments, they’re hidden in a menu, not prominently displayed on the front. The screen was rounded, not flat. So there was distortion near the edges. The technology in general wasn’t that great, so everything looked fuzzy. The black aperture mask of the Sony Trinitron had only appeared the year before and it was big but expensive improvement for an already expensive color TV. One doesn’t have to find a 1960s TV to prove these points. You need only compare a late '80s computer monitor to a recent CRT monitor. Huge difference. ---
**Author:** ![commasense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/commasense/32/3017_2.png) [@commasense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/commasense)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2009, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/64 "2009-07-31T04:19:52Z")
**Nunzio** : All of what you said in your last post is perfectly correct: for many reasons, TV back then was nowhere near as good as the HDTV we have today. But as I showed in the post you quoted, your claim that all TV in the 1960s was \*\*as bad as \*\*the moon images is hyperbole. In fact, the difference between the image from the lunar camera and standard TV of the day, as seen by most people with decent reception on a decent TV, was about the same as the difference between an “'80s computer monitor and a recent CRT [did you mean LCD?] monitor.” VGA was 600x800 (480,000 pixels), a decent large LCD monitor today can display 2650x1600 (4 million pixels), a 1:8.5 ratio. As I mentioned above, the lunar camera’s image had about 1/7 the information of an NTSC picture. ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2009, 12:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/65 "2009-07-31T12:46:12Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Ever heard the phrase "They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t \_\_\_\_ " ? Yep. We use it all the time here in Houston, home of NASA. “They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t drain the damn streets when it rains for more than 30 seconds!” ---
**Author:** ![tanstaafl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ba8739/32.png) [@tanstaafl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tanstaafl)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2009, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/66 "2009-07-31T16:15:38Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > You must have been thinking of the Perry Rhodan/Reg Bell mission. You forget that there were _four_ men on the Stardust. Clark Fletcher and Eric Manoli were also on board. ((Yeah, I forgot their names and had to look them up.)) ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2009, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/67 "2009-07-31T16:32:14Z")
With regard to the OP, let’s put it this way. The Space Shuttle landed about an hour ago. During this mission there were more people in space at one time (13) than ever before. They were up there for 16 days and the worst problem they had was an overflowing toilet. Previous Shuttle missions have included tragedies both on takeoff and re-entry. Indeed, this mission was postponed because of potentially deadly fuel leaks on the launch vehicle. There was high-quality video and audio throughout the mission, including spacewalks. How much of the coverage did you watch? ---
**Author:** ![Merijeek](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f05b48/32.png) [@Merijeek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Merijeek)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2009, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/68 "2009-07-31T17:18:48Z")
> [@three\_feline\_household](#): > > Back around 1970 one of the political columnists for the “New York Times” (probably Tom Wicker although it could have been James Reston) suggested that people weren’t interested in the astronauts. They were boring people, well qualified to do their jobs, but didn’t spark any interest in an audience in the time of Joe Namath and Muhammed Ali. Are you suggesting Apollo I: The Next Generation: The Reality Show? That would be so awesome. Gary Coleman and Richard Hatch on a four year round trip to Mars. It would pay for itself! -Joe ---
**Author:** ![DSYoungEsq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c6cbf5/32.png) [@DSYoungEsq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSYoungEsq)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2009, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039/69 "2009-07-31T17:43:54Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > With regard to the OP, let’s put it this way. > > The Space Shuttle landed about an hour ago. During this mission there were more people in space at one time (13) than ever before. They were up there for 16 days and the worst problem they had was an overflowing toilet. > > Previous Shuttle missions have included tragedies both on takeoff and re-entry. Indeed, this mission was postponed because of potentially deadly fuel leaks on the launch vehicle. > > There was high-quality video and audio throughout the mission, including spacewalks. > > How much of the coverage did you watch? There is a significant difference, as you know. We are quite used to men in space, since they are now ALWAYS in space (the ISS is constantly manned). In 1972, not so much. Further, Apollo dealt with the Moon, whereas the shuttle deals with near Earth stuff. There was tremendous interest in the shuttle launches and landings during the first few years of the shuttle, though not as much as with Apollo. And I don’t agree that there was THAT much reduction in interest. I recall quite vividly watching take off and splashdown in 1972 during class my sixth-grade year, which would have made it Apollo 16. The fact that we were still holding up classes to watch these would indicate there was still significant interest in them. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-later-apollo-missions-really-greeted-with-such-apathy-by-the-public/457039.md?page=3)