In 1965, NASA deliberately crashed Ranger 9 into the Moon, creating live TV from crater Alphonsus with more than 5,800 images

On March 24, 1965, thousands of Americans were glued to their televisions to see something that had never been shown before: a mechanical death, deliberately performed 240,000 miles away from Earth. According to the official NASA Science records, the vehicle was called Ranger 9, and for the last 20 minutes of its life, it took photos of the Moon while falling towards a crater named Alphonsus. It sent 5,814 photos back home before crashing into the lunar surface at the speed of more than 6,000 miles an hour. There were no countdowns, no last messages. Only static, then silence. This was, in reality, NASA's doing.

A kamikaze mission with a TV deal attached

The surprising fact about Ranger 9 is that it was not supposed to live; it was supposed to die, and to record its own demise all the way down. The irony here is that, in essence, it was like putting a 1960s GoPro on something as it falls off a cliff, only the "cliff" was another world, and what was at stake was the reputation of the whole US space exploration effort.

The Ranger series had failed spectacularly six times in a row before success came around. By the time Ranger 9 was sent up, however, NASA really needed a success story, and it decided to put its money on the line and make sure that the event got as public as it possibly could.

The real reason NASA aimed for Alphonsus

Alphonsus was not some random target for NASA to destroy the Ranger 9 craft on. Six years before that, in November 1958, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Kozyrev declared reported a glowing red haze around the central mountain of this moon's crater and obtained its spectrum, suggesting gas was being released from the lunar surface, thus the possible presence of an active volcano in a place everyone thought to be dead.

According to a detailed JSTOR Daily article on the subject, the American scientist Gerard Kuiper did not believe in this at all, and a genuine Cold War science conflict between the scientists ensued, with Soviet observations versus American skepticism being held at academic conferences rather than on stage. Sending Ranger 9 on a collision course with Alphonsus was the way for NASA to prove its point with evidence rather than arguments.

Spectacle, sure, but was it science?

Ranger 9 provided only one answer to an important question: no, there was no glowing volcano inside the crater. According to Smithsonian Magazine, this negative conclusion was one of the final findings of a program that cost America a quarter of a billion dollars in the 1960s. Nevertheless, writing it off as yet another expensive TV show is to miss the point entirely.

The photos taken by Ranger 9 showed details with a resolution a thousand times better than those that were possible for ground telescopes, becoming the roadmap NASA needed to find better landing sites for its Surveyors and, ultimately, for the Apollo missions. The live broadcast wasn't some accidental hit that happened to piggyback on a science mission, it was engineered from the start to be must-watch television, and it delivered exactly the kind of gripping, real-time spectacle NASA needed after six straight failures.

Why this 1965 crash still matters

It isn't like NASA was perfect with Alphonsus. They certainly didn't discover a volcano there. But it did something even more difficult: it made its process transparent and showed it to a country that was paying attention.