Ranger 7 was the first spacecraft in the program to work. Five predecessors failed to reach the moon. Ranger 6 hit the target but its cameras never activated. The 1964 JPL film 'Lunar Bridgehead' documents the moment the program finally delivered, capturing ground control operations as Ranger 7 made a hard, intentional impact on the lunar surface.
The footage is worth watching for the hardware alone: magnetic tape drives, teletypes, paper tape readers, and six onboard cameras that required a warm-up period before use. Those cameras were destroyed on impact, as planned. The images they returned were crude by any modern standard, but they were the closest views of the lunar surface anyone had ever captured. Ranger 8 would later strike the Sea of Tranquility, the same site where Apollo 11 landed five years later.
The full film makes the five-year gap between Ranger and Apollo feel both impossibly short and entirely plausible. Read the original to get the context on what kept the first six missions from working, and why a crash-landing probe was considered a success worth celebrating.
[READ ORIGINAL →]