[Cofike]

Is there any instances of people claiming the government purposely edited the original images to make them lower quality back when they were first released?

I’m curious if anyone realized the government may be hiding their true capabilities.

[ggg9990]

Back then most people would have been supportive of that. If someone noticed they probably wouldn’t say anything for fear of blowing the governments cover.

[Cthulhu_]

I'd like to know more about that too. I can imagine that since the space race and cold war was in full fledge at the time, they neither wanted to give the Russians intel on the moon, nor let them in on their camera quality.

[abecedarius]

It surprises me they could transmit an analog signal back while keeping its quality secret from the Soviets. I wonder if they did succeed at that, or just at keeping the rest of us in the dark.

[yosito]

It wasn't like the Soviets could just turn their TVs to the right channel. I doubt the Soviets knew what frequency they were using, and analog video is still "encoded" in the radio waves. These signals still required that specialized $300,000 equipment (which I'm sure was top secret at the time) to make sense of.

[slededit]

The height of the antenna would give away the frequency. But the soviets had good spy penetration into the US industrial base so it's likely they already knew anyways.