Apollo 12's Live TV from the Moon

Astronaut Charles 'Pete' Conrad, commander of Apollo 12, and the television experiment he set up on the Moon - the first live television broadcast from another world.

On 20 July 1969, a week after Apollo 11, Conrad set a TV camera at the Ocean of Storms landing site and pointed it at the lunar module, the surface, and his own boot prints - while 450 million people watched live. The video travelled back on the S-band radio link: the same single channel carried voice, telemetry and video, bounced from the Moon 384,400 km away. It followed a failure: Apollo 11's TV had died during its walk, so the team reworked the procedure for Apollo 12 - and live space TV became standard for every spacewalk since.

Built on the Apollo 11 TV experiment (whose failure it fixed) and the S-band communications standard. Enabled the discipline of deep-space communications - and the idea that the public watches spaceflight live, which is now taken for granted. Sixty years on, a hobbyist's GoPro on a home-built rocket doing a live feed to 89.5 km is the same principle at amateur scale.