January 30, 1964: Ranger 6 – Success or Failure?

Today is the 43rd anniversary of the launch of Ranger 6, an unmanned spacecraft that tried but failed to capture the first close-up pictures of the surface of the moon. According to William J. Coughlin, editor of Missiles and Rockets magazine, Ranger 6 was a "one-hundred percent failure" and a $1.2-million boondoggle. The spacecraft's malfunctioning television system, Coughlin wrote, bore the mark of the "leisurely university atmosphere" at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA's main contractor for unmanned space exploration.

Though critics dismissed Ranger 6 as America's 12th successive lunar failure, the space agency's supporters painted a different picture. According to NASA historian R. Cargill Hall, the Ranger program was "the first successful American project of lunar exploration". Although Ranger 6 failed to capture pictures of the Moon's surface, the mission was part of a larger effort which established the management techniques, flight operating procedures, and experimental standards that NASA used to put a man on the moon.

On January 30, 1964, Ranger 6 was launched into space aboard an Atlas-Agenda B rocket. The Block 3 spacecraft consisted of a hexagonal aluminum frame with a truncated conical tower, two solar-panel wings, a high-gain dish antenna, and a cylindrical quasi-omnidirectional antenna. The 3.6-m aluminum tower housed two wide-angle (full-scan) and four narrow-angle (partial scan) television cameras that were arranged in two chains. To ensure picture quality, each chain or channel was equipped with a separate power supply, timer, and transmitter. Composite video signals from the transmitters would be converted into radio frequency (RF) signals for subsequent transmission through the high-gain antenna.

During booster separation, the power supplies for the television cameras short-circuited, rendering the TV equipment inoperable. Although Ranger 6 flew to the moon without further incident, its on-time impact in the Sea of Tranquility was anything but peaceful for NASA and JPL. Back on Earth, NASA officials prepared to testify before Congress on behalf of a $5.3-million budget, much of which was earmarked for unmanned lunar explorations during fiscal year 1965. For its part, JPL convened its own internal investigation.

Resources:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19780007206_1978007206.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_6