NASA Trying To Find Original Moon Landing Tapes

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WASHINGTON -- NASA wants to find the original videotapes from the first moon landing in 1969 to see if they can be made sharper.

Video of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon were transmitted from the moon to tracking stations in California and Australia. The images were then sent to Houston. By the time the world saw them, they were substantially downgraded.

Space program veterans believe the original recordings are stored somewhere at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

One Australian expert said modern technology would make it possible to recover the original high quality television of the moon landing and make it available to the public for the first time.

The Australian said he doesn't believe that the tapes are lost, just that archiving them was not a priority during the Apollo era.

http://www.wftv.com/technology/9679800/detail.html

The tapes are probably in a carton somewhere in a dusty old storage closet, and the question is, which carton in which closet?

In the glorious march of bureaucracy in the 20th century (which I contend is the most effective jobs program in American history), we evolved some pretty good tools for taking care of paper, such as the filing cabinet. Tapes came late to the party and didn't get the attention they deserved, with the consequence that a lot of really important stuff went missing. Some things have turned up since: one of my favorite CDs of the 21st century, for example, is a live concert of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane, which historians knew was recorded, but the tape was languishing in a basement somewhere, until it was discovered by an archivist 40-some-odd years later.

I have cartons of cassettes of jams by my various bands. They're gonna be so valuable when I'm rich and famous, but they're threatening to take over the house now.

and told me all of the Apollo records and tech stuff went home with people as they retired as NASA wasn't interested in preserving any of it. Just think, stuff that should be in the Smithsonian is molding away in folk's basements.

Maybe they should look on Ebay. Everything seems to end up there eventually.

Or at least that's all I'm saying...

...or who might have some insight.

:shrug:

those videos we watched at your place were "authentic"... :o

First, the original tapes are FAR clearer than anything that has been made public. Back in 1969, NASA was using a new form of high quality television transmission that was incompatible with the systems used by the TV networks. Because the systems didn't plug into each other, NASA projected the image onto a large screen in the spaceflight center. The networks then pointed their normal analog cameras at that screen, and the resulting image is what everyone saw on their televisions...and those are the images that have been seen on TV ever since. The original moon video's are supposed to be extremely sharp, but were never released to the public.

This Australian "expert" correctly points out that archiving them was not a priority during the Apollo era, but is way too optimistic in his hopes that they weren't destroyed. Back then, and for quite a while afterward, the tapes weren't considered to have any real historic value. The rocks they brought back were valuable, the sensor readings were valuable, but the video was simply a recording of a historical event...and every major TV network in America had an "original" master from 1969 sitting in their vaults. The original NASA copy wasn't considered any more or less important than the other copies floating around (the people doing the archiving generally didn't realize that the original was of far higher quality). Over the years there have been many "housecleanings" where un-needed video, data, and audio tapes were destroyed because their content was considered unimportant and they were taking up valuable shelf space.

The worry is that the original tapes were all sent to the National Archives, but these tapes were sent back to NASA at one point. It is very possible that somebody decided that it wasn't necessary to keep "another copy" around and tossed it, possibly not even realizing that the copy they were tossing was the original (since most people believed that the originals were in the National Archive). Even if it wasn't destroyed, the tape might have been given to somebody as a souvenir, or tossed into a storage closet somewhere where it has almost certainly been disintegrating ever since. NASA has already checked all of its "controlled storage" rooms where a tape like this might have been preserved, and it's not there. If the tape exists, it's in a closet or some old desk somewhere, and it hasn't been maintained at all.

I mean, imagine all the cool digital effects they could use...




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