Imagine if Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon without anybody on Earth being watching.
“Those television transmissions almost didn’t happen,” said Richard Jurek, co-author of a book on the Apollo program. “Live TV wasn’t in the original plans. The engineers argued it was a waste of resources. Plus TV cameras back then were huge. They weighed a ton.”
Jurek, along with former astronaut Capt. James Lovell, spoke May 5 at Lake Forest High School at an event organized by the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society.
Jurek, whose book is titled “Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program,” said the first moon landing might have been the single most watched event in TV history – as a percentage of the 1969 global population – with an estimated 600 million viewers watching from around the world.
In today’s world, it’s hard to imagine something as momentous as the U.S. space program having a rather limited communications strategy.
“NASA, contrary to popular belief, did not have a massive public relations machine or master marketing plan,” said Jurek, whose background is in marketing and public relations. “It had a small, understaffed team of communications people; dozens against hundreds of millions of people around the world and thousands and thousands of reporters.”
The rise of U.S. space exploration was in part a response to the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, which took the world by surprise in 1957. It was the Cold War era and Soviet launches were conducted in secret and only announced if successful, Jurek said.
According to Jurek, NASA had a congressional mandate to report freely and openly.
“It was a bold and radical decision,” Jurek said. “Success and the very real specter of failure would be reported equally and without delay.”
Contractors that built parts for the rockets became the primary source of technical information, rather than NASA officers, Jurek said. Astronauts became spokesmen for the program and were never formally scripted, he said.
“When Neil Armstrong gave his ‘One small step’ speech, that was his,” Jurek said. “No one scripted it. The astronauts weren’t even media trained.”
When Jurek finished speaking, he joined moderator Larry Potash of WGN News and Capt. James Lovell, a Lake Forest resident and former astronaut who commanded the famed Apollo 13 and served on Apollo 8, Gemini 7 and Gemini 12.
“We could say what we wanted,” Lovell said. “We were all part of the program, we wanted to bring a positive attitude to the program.”
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Asked about colonizing space, Lovell said public enthusiasm is currently low.
“The way I see our space program evolving is probably going back to the moon, building infrastructure and bringing it up to maybe making a Martian trip,” Lovell said. “I read somewhere that they could do that in 2030. But don’t hold your breath.”
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