Documentary about the first Surveyor moon lander in 1966, based on existing historical footage and narration. The Surveyor Program, including objectives, rocket, and spacecraft, is described in detail. Multiple camera angles of the launch are shown. Mission audio and a TV broadcast are used for the landing, along with animations. The reception of the first pictures is shown live, accompanied by good-quality archive scans of the photos. When no audio existed, ambient sounds were added.
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CHAPTERS
00:00 Surveyor Program
02:45 Hardware Development
06:00 Surveyour 1 Launch
12:57 Earth-Moon Trajectory
20:15 Surveyour 1 Landing
25:43 Lunar Surface Images
29:57 First Lunar Surface Images Press Conference
31:57 Mission Results
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The Surveyor program was a NASA program that, from June 1966 through January 1968, sent seven robotic spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Its primary goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of soft landings on the Moon.
Surveyor 1 was launched May 30, 1966 and sent directly into a trajectory to the Moon without any parking orbit. Its retrorockets were turned off at a height of about 3.4 meters above the lunar surface. Surveyor 1 fell freely to the surface from this height, and it landed on the lunar surface on June 2, 1966, on the Oceanus Procellarum.
Surveyor 1 gathered data about the lunar surface that would be needed for the crewed Apollo Moon landings that began in 1969. The successful soft landing of Surveyor 1 on the Ocean of Storms was the first by an American space probe on any extraterrestrial body, occurring on the first attempt and just four months after the first soft Moon landing by the Soviet Union's Luna 9 probe.
