Media Attendance
On July 16, 1969, 3,493 journalists from the U.S. and 55 other countries attended the launch of Apollo 11. A plaque noting the event placed in 1975 by Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists, designates the location as an Historic Site in Journalism for "the largest corps of newsmen in history...to report fully and freely to the largest audience in history". After Apollo 11, however, media attendance diminished. Apollo 17, the last in the lunar landing program and its only night launch, prompted a resurgence in attendance, as did the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project launch in 1975.
The STS-1 launch on April 12, 1981 had 2,707 accredited representatives present. The second-largest number, 2,468, was for the STS-26 launch on September 29, 1988. Most, however, covered the launch from a more distant causeway viewing site because the LC-39 Press Site was restricted to a limited number of journalists as part of safety precautions implemented after the 1986 Challenger explosion. The restriction was dropped for subsequent launches. Media attendance spiked again in October 1998 for John Glenn's launch aboard STS-95, and for the final shuttle launch, STS-135, on July 8, 2011 when 1,585 news people attended.
Read more about this topic: Launch Complex 39 Press Site
Famous quotes containing the words media and/or attendance:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“We, too, had good attendance once,
Hearers and hearteners of the work;
Aye, horsemen for companions,
Before the merchant and the clerk
Breathed on the world with timid breath.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)