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Weird Houston Television History Question

G

gbranch

I am not sure if anyone can answer this, but here goes:

I just watched Apollo 13 for the umpteenth time, but saw something I had never seen before, and am curious. There is a scene in the movie when the astronauts' families are at Mission Control to watch a live broadcast from the crew. None of the networks pick up the broadcast because the American viewing public has began to believe that space travel is routine and there is little interest in the mission. There is a bank of 4 tv sets or monitors in the room where the broadcast is being watched. I could clearly see 3 of the sets were labeled KTRK-ABC, KHOU-CBS, and KPRC-NBC, but could not make out what was on the fourth set. I don't know how accurate this is, but would the fourth set have been KUHT, and did KUHT and/or NET show live crew broadcasts during the Apollo missions?
 
Can't speak to what KUHT would have done at the time, but I don't recall other PBS stations having live coverage (NET was gone by this time, BTW.)

Keep in mind that the Apollo 13 movie is loaded with historical and technical errors regarding the Apollo 13 mission.
 
I can't find this scene among the many clips on YouTube, but here's my thought.

I'll bet the fourth monitor was NASA's in house-channel. It would have been the same thing they were feeding to the local stations and to the networks (who just used it for later broadcast.)

NASA select didn't exist then, but it seems pretty likely they would have had their own in-house television system.
 
The MSC did have its own in-house system that fed live mission control commentary and air to ground audio/video to the area where the news media camped out, which was the lobby of the auditorium next door to the PAO offices. I spent many nights and days sleeping on the floor of that place during the Apollo program.

Networks that wanted to carry live audio and video had to pick up that feed. This was before NASA allowed off-site networks and other outlets to hook up to that feed -- the line known as NASA Select. These days the media gets everything it needs off the NASA channel on cable and satellite TV

BTW: In 1970, the center was still called the Manned Spacecraft Center. It didn't become the Johnson Space Center until after LBJ died in 1973.
 
Mediafrog+ said:
(NET was gone by this time, BTW.)
Click to expand...

Are you sure? The Apollo 13 mission was in April 1970. What I have read about NET was that it was shut down as a network on October 5, 1970 and PBS began broadcasting on the same date. Most stations just did a flash cut from NET to PBS, although NET still continued producing programs for PBS for a few years after.
 
Another small blooper in that movie. Check out the live truck camped outside the home of the astronaut's families. The microwave dish is aimed at the sky instead of the horizon. Satellite trucks would not come into use for another couple of decades.
 
My favorite of many bloopers in Apollo 13 is in the opening scene, where there is a party going on at Jim Lovell's house. On the TV, we hear Walter Cronkite saying Apollo 11 would be lifting off only 18 months after the disastrous Apollo 1 fire at the Kennedy Space Center. The Apollo 1 fire happened in January of 1967. Apollo 11 lifted off in July of 1969 -- two and a half years later.

Another favorite is after liftoff when the Apollo assembly is shown rocketing out into space straight toward the moon. If that had actually happened, Apollo 13 would have missed the moon by tens of thousands of miles. For once, it really IS rocket science. Like a QB throwing a long pass, they aimed for a point in space where the moon would be four days hence.
 
FWIW, the only TV stations OTA in Houston at the time were 2, 8, 11, 13 and 39 (KHTV owned by WKY, Inc aka Gaylord). I was not in the market at the time and have no idea what 8 or 39 were capable of in the way of live coverage of space shots.
 
Channel 39 -- KHTV at the time -- was an independent station from the time it went on the air in 1967 till 1995 when it became a WB network afffiliate.

I'm not certain about KUHT Channel 8. It was an NET affiliate in 1970, but I don't know to what extent, if any, NET provided live coverage of space flights. I rather doubt it though because NET was in the process of going out of business in 1970. It was replaced by PBS, a creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

An aside: NET went out of business because so many of its affiliates dropped it, in the belief that it was "too liberal". It was replaced by a network which, today, many of its affiliates and millions of people think is "too liberal".

A classic example of the French adage: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Translation: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
 
hrhwebmaster said:
FWIW, the only TV stations OTA in Houston at the time were 2, 8, 11, 13 and 39 (KHTV owned by WKY, Inc aka Gaylord). I was not in the market at the time and have no idea what 8 or 39 were capable of in the way of live coverage of space shots.
Click to expand...

That is correct. Shortlived KVVV-16 had gone off the air by April 1970 and KVRL-26 was still a more than a year away.
 
Greg Branch said:
hrhwebmaster said:
FWIW, the only TV stations OTA in Houston at the time were 2, 8, 11, 13 and 39 (KHTV owned by WKY, Inc aka Gaylord). I was not in the market at the time and have no idea what 8 or 39 were capable of in the way of live coverage of space shots.
Click to expand...

That is correct. Shortlived KVVV-16 had gone off the air by April 1970 and KVRL-26 was still a more than a year away.
Click to expand...

And didn't the KVVV calls resurface as the ValueVision shopping network on Channel 57?
 
Naively, I had thought "VVV" was merely a pseudo-Roman numeral for channel 15. But apparently KVVV has only been on channel 15 since last year! The two "old" KVVV's were on channels 16 and 53.

According to Wikipedia, channel 53 did air ValueVision, but didn't have the KVVV call letters at the time. When they changed to KVVV, they became a translator for KAZH/57, which may be why you're remembering channel 57.
 
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