Recognize that downright iconic image at right?  Well, if you do, you’re not alone, and you’re one of the literaly millions of people out there who needs to spare a thought for a man named Stanley Lebar

Lebar, you see, designed the TV camera that the Apollo mission folks took with them in orbit back in the sixties to film the moon landing. He was eighty four.

The camera Lebar designed was no ordinary camera, you see.  It could withstand searing heat of two hundred and fifty degrees in the middle of the lunar day, and could function in lunar dark, where temperatures dropped to an outlandishly low minus three hundred degrees.  Oh, and those temperatures are in Fahrenheit, by the way.  But that wasn’t all this camera could do–it also required its prototype, a studio camera, to be shrunk down from four hundred pounds to JUST SEVEN POUNDS.

But the job was done, no matter how bizarre the prospect was, and partially because of Stanley Leben, we have our modern flip video cameras and the like.  So next time you go to shoot a bit for YouTube, spare a thought for Stanley Leben, the man who brought us space.

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