Who: James O’Neal and Walt Lindblom
From: National Capital Radio & Television Museum
What: Video in the NASA Space Program: Three Fascinating Vignettes
When: March 11, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Where: Goddard Space Flight Center (Visitor Center) - Register Here
Address: 8800 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
Sponsors: Goddard Amatuer Radio Club , Vertical Technology Services, LLC , Harmonic , and AIMM

SBE Chapter 37, SMPTE DC, and the Goddard Amateur Radio Club bring you three fascinating vignettes about video in the NASA space program:

Apollo Missions Video
Our local historian and SMPTE/IEEE-BTS/SBE senior member James O'Neal will share stories and anecdotes he has gathered and review of articles he wrote over the years interviewing engineers involved in the video division of the Apollo space missions of the late 60's and early 70's.

2024 Eclipse
In 2024, NASA achieved its most ambitious live television project short of video from the Moon. Walt Lindblom will overview the technical setup utilized for the coverage for NASA-TV. The total Eclipse of the Sun in April 2024 was covered from Mazatlan Mexico to Houlton Maine. Video feeds were sent from multiple locations to Cleveland Ohio, where the NASA-TV program was hosted and switched. It required an all-out effort from virtually the entire NASA video community and more encoders/decoders in a single event than NASA has ever used.

NASA UHD
In the early years of UHD (Ultra High Definition) video implementation, "4K" and higher resolution COTS (commercial off the shelf) products began to enter the marketplace. Walt Lindblom shows us how NASA has been experimenting with 4K/UHD video since 2008, beginning with a Red 1 camera. 4K and 8K cameras have been on the international Space Station for 10+ years. Live UHD production followed in the 2020s. Much of the cross compatibility, wide area control, and encoding magic manufacturing protocols development was assisted by the NASA TV engineering group. This included low loss compression and decode between NASA space centers, into and out of the ISS (International Space Station), through NASA headquarters in DC, and out to the consumer via satellite and streaming. NASA TV became the national "trusted 4K reference" for consumers, professionals, and consumers for many years. This presentation will chronicle those efforts and where NASA is headed in UHD.

TO REGISTER:
Regardless of if you wish to attend in person or virtually via Zoom, please Register Here so that we can estimate how much food is needed for the meeting. Doors open at Goddard for fellowship and in person cheer at 5 pm, with a light dinner arriving at 5:30 pm for in person attendees. Zoom meeting will start at 6 pm to allow remote salutations, followed by chapter business at 6:30 pm, and the presentations at 6:45.

Please Register Here regardless of how you wish to attend (in person or virtually via Zoom).

James O’Neal has been involved in broadcast technology for most of his life, beginning a full-time broadcast engineering career upon graduation from the University of Arkansas in 1969. He spent almost 37 years in that field before retiring in 2005 and launching a second career as technology editor at TV Technology magazine. More than 30 years of Mr. O’Neal’s career was spent with U.S. Government television operations, including the United States Information Agency’s Television and Film Service, WORLDNET Television, and VOA-TV. Mr. O’Neal enjoys researching and writing about broadcasting history and the persons who have made important contributions in that field. He is a frequent contributor to TV Technology and several other publications, including Radio World and Government Video, and has been an invited lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution and a presenter at SMPTE, IEEE and NAB conferences. Mr. O’Neal is also author of the “HF Shortwave Radio: Allocation, Design Methods and Regulation chapter of the 11th edition of the NAB Engineering Handbook.” He is a Life Member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers, a Life Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and the Life Senior member of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He is also a member of the IEEE’s Broadcast Technology Society Administrative Committee and served as editor-in-chief of that organization’s Broadcast Technology publication for more than 12 years. In addition, he is a member of the SMPTE Board of Editors. He has also served as a manager of the Washington, D.C. SMPTE section and is a board member of the National Capital Museum of Radio and Television and the Early Television Foundation.

Walt Lindblom is a 50+ year survivor of the video industry. He started his career in educational television as a master control operator with Birmingham (AL) Schools Educational Television. He worked several production/engineering positions before going to work as a contractor to NASA in 1985 to design video and audio systems. He was the conference room system designer for the first NASA-wide video conference network implemented in 1986 and 1987, prepping him for a life in compressed digital video! He managed the Marshall Space Flight Center video production services in the early 90’s. In 1997, he took the position of video engineer for the NASA DTV Program, which was chartered to set digital video standards for NASA and support the transition of NASA video systems from analog to digital. As part of that work, he developed a digital television test facility for testing imaging and video compression systems. This lab was used to chart the course of upgrading engineering imaging systems from analog to HD after the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003. The testing done in the DTV Lab has been used to set technical performance standards for NASA. He supports all NASA centers as needed for new system transitions and production & transmission support for major events. His favorite part of the job is getting to work with the video professionals across NASA.