Apollo 13: CBS News Coverage

[Stanislav]

Someone has uploaded to YouTube about 2 1/2 hours worth of various clips from the CBS news coverage of the 1970 Apollo 13 near-disaster. There may be more to come as the most recent video was added just yesterday. (He's probably doing this now as we are about to hit the 40th anniversary of that mission.) I have no idea where this guy got hold of the footage, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see it for the first time since it originally aired. Grab it while you can before the overpaid suits at The Eye cry copyright.....

http://www.youtube.com/user/zellco321#g/u

 

[Cincinnati Kid]

Isn't some of this actual CBS-TV footage used in the motion picture "Apollo 13"?

 

[Corky Marlowe]

Isn't some of this actual CBS-TV footage used in the motion picture "Apollo 13"?

I thought it was ABC, because Jules Bergman and maybe Frank Reynolds) were shown while people were watching the news in Lovell's home and (I think) in his kid's military school classroom.

 

[Stanislav]

Isn't some of this actual CBS-TV footage used in the motion picture "Apollo 13"?

I thought it was ABC, because Jules Bergman and maybe Frank Reynolds) were shown while people were watching the news in Lovell's home and (I think) in his kid's military school classroom.

I remember the ABC Bergman clips, but I think I recall seeing Uncle Walter in there as well?

 

[OldNumber7]

Interesting video footage. I was 10 years old and a huge space buff and news buff (still am!). Of course, the failure occurred after my bedtime so I saw nothing of the early hours of the coverage. The CBS part 1 video on this site is very instructive.
1) Three hours after it occurred, Walter still didn't understand what had happened. He explained the fuel cell issue, using the LEM as a lifeboat, and reconfiguring the navigation -- but he didn't seem to know about the explosion and that the SM had been venting (even though much of this had been described earlier in air-to-ground chatter).
2) I was interested to hear a Mission Control report from Roy Neal. IIRC he was an NBC reporter, but I suppose this was some sort of "pool" report. Please correct me if I am wrong. Or was he employed by CBS at the time?

 

[OldNumber7]

Isn't some of this actual CBS-TV footage used in the motion picture "Apollo 13"?

I thought it was ABC, because Jules Bergman and maybe Frank Reynolds) were shown while people were watching the news in Lovell's home and (I think) in his kid's military school classroom.

I remember the ABC Bergman clips, but I think I recall seeing Uncle Walter in there as well?

The movie uses both Bergman and Cronkite clips. It also uses some faked news clips -- generic news guy with generic analyst.

 

[Stanislav]

Interesting video footage. I was 10 years old and a huge space buff and news buff (still am!). Of course, the failure occurred after my bedtime so I saw nothing of the early hours of the coverage. The CBS part 1 video on this site is very instructive.
1) Three hours after it occurred, Walter still didn't understand what had happened. He explained the fuel cell issue, using the LEM as a lifeboat, and reconfiguring the navigation -- but he didn't seem to know about the explosion and that the SM had been venting (even though much of this had been described earlier in air-to-ground chatter).

I found that odd, as well, and odder that Wally Schirra didn't correct or clarify some of this (at least not in the first couple of clips, which are all I've watched so far). Cronkite seemed to imply that the fuel cells had simply malfunctioned, not been starved of power due to the oxygen tank explosion, and he didn't seem to address that this same mishap could potentially have left insufficient oxygen just to breathe for the trip home. He also seemed to connect the fuel cells going offline with the use of the LM's engine for course correction burns, rather than the CM's SPS engine -- in reality, they could have used the latter, but were reluctant to do so because they didn't know if it had been damaged in the explosion.

2) I was interested to hear a Mission Control report from Roy Neal. IIRC he was an NBC reporter, but I suppose this was some sort of "pool" report. Please correct me if I am wrong. Or was he employed by CBS at the time?

Roy Neal was, AFAIK, an NBC lifer, so it must have been some sort of pool arrangement. The crisis was only hours old at that point, and the networks had already begun scaling back their space coverage after Apollo 11, so perhaps at that early stage not everyone was set up yet to send live reports from Houston, and there was an agreement among the networks that anyone could tap in to whatever was being sent out. The Neal report does seem to catch Cronkite off-guard, and Neal is slightly upcut at the beginning of his report, so it was likely not planned or expected by CBS -- they just saw something being fed from Houston and cut to it as quickly as they could.

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

I also remember seeing the CBS Apollo 13 coverage used in "The Wonder Years" (although it was an ABC show) in the Apollo 13 episode (although the main storyline involved Norma accidentally losing the receipts needed to prepare the Arnold family's tax returns).