I didn't recall that two Mercury astronauts had re-entry problems and splashed down off target. I mentioned the anxiety we felt at school when Scott Carpenter was floating around in the Atlantic, 250 miles off target. I guess a year later Gordon Cooper was in his capsule in the Pacific waiting for rescue 4 miles from a ship. His heroics included landing without electric devices after equipment problems. Anyway, part of the news coverage included some innovation back in the studio:
For two decades, before the existence of the Quantel Paintbox, a high-tech computer tool for rendering graphics, Mr. Blank did all his work by hand, using materials like cardboard and glue. When the Mercury astronaut L. Gordon Cooper set down in the Pacific, far from any cameras, Mr. Blank used a small-scale model of the space capsule from the office of ABC’s science editor, Jules Bergman, and floated it in a janitor’s water bucket. To animate this makeshift display, he had a stagehand jiggle the pail as the camera moved in close, illustrating the astronaut’s risky situation.(From a New York Times story on the death of Ben Blank, a graphic artist pioneer for TV news.)