Rangers

My Uncle was in the prime of life when one of his projects hit the news. It was 1964, at the end of July, when the press conference was held. He must have been in his late 50’s, not much different than I am now. Only smarter, of course, and still at the zenith of a remarkable career.

Pictures had been beamed back from the surface of the moon. It was quite remarkable. Detailed pictures sent by radio signal, no film required. It was a revolutionary development, and one that was absolutely required to survey the sites where the astronauts would land.

My Uncle wasn’t there. He was not supposed to talk about what he and his team had contributed to the accomplishment. They were pioneers, rangers, if you will. Path-breakers on the forward edge of technology.

I was thirteen and excited about going to the Moon. The murder of President Kennedy had made the trip something of a holy crusade, even if things were not going to well. That was in the time when people could use the word “crusade” without looking embarrassed about it, or blushing.

Not that any of us were going to the Moon. That was for the NASA demi-gods like Alan Shepperd or John Glenn of the Mercury Program. But someone was, and it was going to be an American if we had anything to do with it. And my Uncle did, but he labored under a cloak of secrecy, since the technology had more than one application.

Going to the Moon seemed safer than going to Mississippi , since the murder of Emmett Till a decade before had shown the naked face of something quite awful there. It was infinitely preferable to think about the cool dark of space than the hot darkness of the human heart.

The land was still buzzing about that. Earlier in the same month, Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed some basic constitutional rights to all citizens. The Constitution should have been enough, but there were some issues with the compromise that permitted the establishment of the United States . The Civil War had not solved them, and over time, the follow-on system to the Peculiar Institution had settled into a way of life in which a fourteen-year-old visitor from Chicago to the hamlet of Money, Mississippi, could be kidnapped, tortured and murdered for whistling at a woman not of his color.

And his killers could be acquitted of the crime after the jury deliberated for just over an hour, stopping for a Royal Crown Cola to stretch the time out and “make it look good.”

Not that the Civil Rights Act solved any of those problems directly. Honest Americans of good faith, like Barry Goldwater, had some reservations about the unintended consequences of such a far-ranging piece of legislation that tinkered with the internal workings of the founding documents. Change should be considered carefully, and pressure to do so had built up behind the solid dam of Southern resistance for a century.

Change was coming, and the reaction to that change has not fully played itself out. Like the technology that was changing the world, being created in the labs and launched off into space. Barry Goldwater was a ranger of a movement of reaction whose time had not come, and wouldn’t until the smiling face of Ronald Reagan brought it to us, batter-dipped and deeply fried.

In the garage up at my Dad’s house on Lake Michigan there is a curious picture in a nice frame. It is a large-format image, and it shows the face of the lunar surface. It is not a pretty picture, per se, but it remarkably detailed. It shows the acne-pocked gray surface, and provided a detailed view never before available. It was detailed enough to start planning for a flat surface on which to land.

The image is built of hundreds of horizontal scanned lines, built a little like a television image from the old days. The most interesting thing about the picture is what is taped on the back. It is a stern warning that the picture remains the property of my Uncle, and that it may never, ever be given away or further transferred. It is a stronger admonition than the warning from Major League Baseball about not re-transmitting the accounts of a televised game.

Ranger 7 was the name of the project that was announced to great fanfare on July 31 st , 1964. It was a triumph that took our minds off everything else that was happening. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was under intense pressure to produce a success. America ‘s reputation was at stake. Twelve previous missions to place scientific instruments on the Moon had failed. It appeared that the Soviets were ahead in the race to the moon.

The very best minds in America were on the case, the race to the Moon being perhaps the last time the government and private sector partnered with such efficiency. The most advanced technical experts had almost unlimited resources to provide success, and there was more happening in the background, science leveraged for public and strictly private eyes at the same time.

Ranger 6 had almost produced the success that NASA needed. It worked perfectly right to impact, but the transmission of the images had failed. The spacecraft flew into the surface of the Moon at a speed of 5,850 miles an hour.

The collection mechanism was complex. The Radio Corporation of America built six special television cameras which captured the images of the surface as electronic signals. The signal was, in turn, pumped through two 60-volt transmitters across the 240,000 mile void to a pair of 85-foot dish antennas at the mission ground station at Goldstone, California.

There it was recorded by three methods, a triple back-up to ensure that something of value would be salvaged regardless of what happened. On the ground, a special Kinescope camera immediately photographed the image. A second copy was captured on magnetic tapes, and a second set of 35-mm negative rolls were made. Quick-look Polaroid pictures were taken to enable engineers to judge how the equipment was working without having to wait for film processing.

The magnetic-to-film negatives were flown from Goldstone to Burbank and then rushed by convoy to Hollywood . Officials of NASA were secretive about precisely where the laboratory was located, and who was doing the processing. It might have been a matter of national security.

Ranger 7 was a huge success.

The pictures were described as being a thousand times clearer than anything ever observed from a terrestrial telescope. The Ranger cameras identified craters as small as three feet in diameter, and as shallow as a foot deep. The granularity was superb.

After the transmission, Ranger 7 plunged obliquely into the lunar surface just northwest of the Sea of Clouds .

At the press conference at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena , scientists described the feat as the greatest advance in lunar astronomy since Galileo. They were rock stars. The publicly announced team was headed by the eminent astronomer Gerard Kuiper of the University of Arizona .

He said: “This is a great day or science, and a great day for the United States . . .we have made progress in resolution not by a factor of 10, not by a factor of 100, which would have been remarkable, but by a factor of 1,000.”

It was quite a remarkable achievement. The others who were not named were used to having others get credit for some of the things they did. They were veterans of wartime projects that were deeply classified. Military secrets.

My Uncle was one of them. The role of his company- your might have heard of the Kodak company in Rochester , New York – was significant, even if it was unsung. It would not have been hard to connect the dots between the largest and most innovative photographic concern in the world, and the most advanced picture-taking.

But of course there were other things going on in space, quite outside the spotlight shown on NASA projects and going to the Moon.

A camera system that can perform a thousand times better than a telescope and then beam the picture back to earth is a remarkable capability. Suppose you turned the camera around and looked at the earth? What might you discover? Could you see inside the inner workings great projects that even the best spies could not penetrate?

Map them in the same precise detail required for a lunar landing?

That would be a pioneering application to space photography. It would take engineers with the personalities of rangers on the frontier of science.

My Uncle was a modest man, even if there were things in which he took great pride. Some of them he never, ever, talked about. But even a modest man can take a certain example of his unique art, the last time anyone would see it displayed publicly.

The rest of that work he would take with him to his grave. But he could provide at least one of his pictures, even if it is the only one that will ever hang on a wall.

And it still belongs to him. The note on the back says so. I have no earthly idea how it could be returned.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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