At 2:00 PM Sunday afternoon the astronauts were scheduled to hold their first televised press conference in space, preempting Sunday football. By now their tiny spacecraft had climbed more than 138,000 miles into the sky, and though the earth's gravity was steadily pulling at them, they were still moving at more than 3,000 miles per hour.
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The black and white camera was small for its day, about the size of a large hardcover book and weighing four and a half pounds. Very similar to the one used on the first manned Apollo mission three months earlier, these were in a sense the world's first hand-held video cameras.
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Borman, who had adamantly fought to keep the mission as simple as possible, had tried to keep the camera off as well. He argued that the extra weight was unneeded and that the extra chore of televising press conferences would only distract the astronauts.
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Borman lost the argument. NASA very much wanted to give the people on earth a personal view of the first human flight to another world. The camera was included, and six separate space telecasts were scheduled, two on the way to the moon, two in lunar orbit, and two on the way home.
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The first conference began with Bill Anders as cameraman, shooting Frank Borman floating freely in the cabin. Anders then worked his way down to what the astronauts called the lower equipment bay, a small area below their feet where Jim Lovell was supposed to be doing navigational sightings. Instead, he was preparing himself a snack. "We gotcha!" Borman joked.
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"This is known as preparing lunch and doing P23 at the same time," Lovell grinned. P23 referred to program 23, a computer routine Lovell used when he did navigational work. Rather than do this, he instead demonstrated to his earth audience how he injected water into a bag to make chocolate pudding.
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Next Anders took off the wide-angle lens and put on the telephoto lens so that he could show the earth-bound what their planet looked like from 138,000 miles away. Unfortunately, the telephoto lens wouldn't work, and the normal lens only showed what Ken Mattingly called "a real bright blob on the screen."
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"I certainly wish we could show you the earth," Borman lamented. "It is a beautiful, beautiful view, with predominantly blue background and just huge covers of white clouds."
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