To the moon: Historic TV coverage, global audience

The first words from the anchorman that Friday morning were calm and measured. He didn't seem intent on recording history but, one might have imagined, citing the next stop on a commuter train.

"Good morning," said Walter Cronkite. "Man is about to launch himself on a trip to the moon with the expectation of landing there."

The expectation seemed reasonable but hardly a certainty. Cronkite would admit years later that he spent much of those next few days in a state of exhilaration and fear.

Continuous TV coverage of the moon landing was not to begin in full and unbroken detail until 11 a.m. on July 20. CBS News - the most exhaustive of the three major networks - would not go off the air until 32 hours later, or 7 p.m. on July 21, making the historic event the longest continuous news program ever to that point, according to CBS, which said that around the world, 600 million people watched the coverage.

Most of the viewers in the United States watched Cronkite; that's just the way it was, and usually was. He dominated network news as no one had before and no one has since. He had prepared for this moment for more than a decade. The Apollo moon landing was the most important story in his career, he would later aver. To him, it was probably the most important news story since the building of the Pyramids.

Despite CBS' dominance over those days, American viewers often saw exactly the same thing on all three networks, because they broadcast the same coverage from NASA.

"You didn't have the visuals that you have today, [and] that was a good thing and a bad thing," says Mark Gray, president of Columbus, Ohio-based Spacecraft Films and an expert on NASA footage. When the lunar module landed, he said, there was - of course - no coverage, and to illustrate the historic moment, the networks displayed a "cheesy" module settling down. The CBS director then switched back to Cronkite: "He wipes his forehead and goes 'phew,' and that just captured the emotion of the moment."

There had been considerable debate inside NASA, Gray says, over whether to bring a TV camera to the moon; Christopher Kraft Jr., chief of Mission Control operations, finally overruled the naysayers. The camera would go.

Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface at 10:56 p.m. EDT. Moments earlier, viewers did not actually see him emerge from the craft; he had to pause on the second step, then reach down and pull a cord to open a compartment holding the TV camera that would record history.

When the camera was on, Armstrong descended further. Only one problem - the camera was upside down, and millions on Earth had to bend their heads to see the moon right-side up. He flipped another switch. The camera righted itself. The photos were not very clear, owing to the lighting conditions, the technology available at the time and the fact that the signal was transmitted 240,000 miles.

"Neil Armstrong is on the moon," Cronkite said calmly. A "38-year-old American, standing on the surface of the moon."

When the astronauts returned safely to Earth, Cronkite had prepared comments:

"Through all time, the moon has endured out there, pale and distant, determining the tides and the tugging of the heart. A symbol, a beacon, a goal. Now, man has prevailed.

"The least of us," he concluded, "is improved by the things done by the best of us."