If you didn’t live through it, it is hard to understand how excited the general public was about the race for the moon. You can capture some of it by watching “Lunar Bridgehead,” a film about JPL monitoring the Ranger spacecraft as it hit, rather hard, on the lunar surface.
The Ranger program had been plagued with problems. The first five didn’t make it to the moon. Ranger 6 hit the moon, but failed to start its cameras. Ranger 7 was the first successful mission. There would be two more successful missions before the end of the program.
Honestly, given the state of technology and computers in those days, it is a miracle they could do it at all. Even more sobering to think that a scant five years later, Neil Armstrong would set foot on the lunar surface. In fact, Ranger 8 would land in the Sea of Tranquility, just like Armstrong’s Eagle.
The video has a lot of cool shots of old tech: magnetic tape drives, teletypes, paper tape readers, and giant dish antennas. The six onboard cameras even had to warm up, something unfamiliar to those who have only used modern electronics.
Of course, the cameras didn’t survive the crash, and that was expected. By today’s standards, the images are crude, but in 1964, they were nothing short of amazing.
Turns out, landing on the moon is harder than people think. Even with modern tech.