NASA's Captain Video

THE stunning telecasts from Apollo 15's landing site involved an army of technicians, a worldwide network of tracking stations and a remarkable new $582,000 color camera developed by RCA. Yet if any single person can be credited with the success of the lunar sound-and-light show, he is a quiet, cherubic-looking NASA engineer named Edward I. Fendell, 39, who clearly ranks as the space agency's own Captain Video.

It was Fendell's responsibility to control the moon rover's camera during the astronauts' lunar explorations. Sitting at his large, 15-button console in Houston, Fendell operated the RCA camera from a quarter of a million miles away. With a push of the appropriate button, he could swing it across the mountain-ringed horizon, raise it up to focus on a peak or lower it to peer down Hadley Rille. He could zoom in on the astronauts for a closeup or even adjust the lens opening to compensate for the moon's harsh lighting conditions.

For all the technological help at his disposal, the job was unusually tricky. Because radio signals travel at the speed of light--186,000 miles per second --Fendell's commands took 1.8 seconds to reach the camera. Another three seconds elapsed before the image arrived back in Houston (the extra time was needed to convert the signals into a standard TV picture). Thus, before he or his assistant, Al Pennington, 27, saw the camera's response to their com-NASA mands, a total of nearly five full seconds had gone by.

Mastering such sluggish, long-distance photography required painstaking months of rehearsal during which electronic time delays were built into the system's circuitry to simulate the moon's distance. Perhaps just as difficult was the need to satisfy the conflicting demands of two masters: scientists and the public. NASA's geologists were primarily interested in terrain and rocks, while NASA's public relations men and the television networks wanted to focus on the astronauts themselves for a maximum amount of time. NASA worked out a compromise to appease both scientific inquiry and public curiosity.

At the beginning of every stop along the rover's route (there were no telecasts while the car was moving because its high-gain antenna could not be kept aligned with the earth), Fendell's "shooting script" called for what was dubbed a "WAP," or wide-angle panorama. The camera slowly swept in a full circle around the horizon, enabling the scientists in Mission Control's science support room to take a series of overlapping Polaroid snapshots off their TV monitor, quickly study them for any oddity and then request Fendell to zoom in on it. Such a closeup was called a "NATO," or narrow-angle target of opportunity. While the scientists pored over their pictures, Fendell adroitly mixed his WAPs and NATOs with numerous shots of the moon walkers. -

An electronics engineer with no previous TV experience, Fendell faced his toughest challenge at the end of the lunar visit. Left behind on the moon along with the rover, the remotecontrolled camera was scheduled to give the world its first pictures of a lunar lift-off taken from the moon's surface. Because of the nagging time lags, Fendell could not afford to look at the TV monitor himself. He had to go completely by the clock. At exactly T-minus-zero, Fendell had to begin tilting the camera upward. Thus, by the time his command reached the moon, the camera would--he hoped--follow Falcon's ascent stage until it drifted off the tube. Then, in order to bring it back into sight, Fendell would have to press an-other button precisely two seconds after liftoff, ordering the camera to pull back to a wide-angle view. Noting NASA's --and the public's--keen interest in watching the lunar liftoff, Fendell conceded that "if we don't see it, I'd better get out of town."

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