Forty years ago Thursday, Apollo 11 blasted off on its 280,000-mile journey, fulfilling President Kennedy’s 1961 call to reach the moon by the end of the decade.
To commemorate the anniversary, NASA released newly restored video footage of the Apollo 11 moon landings — but the fabled “lost” moon tapes weren’t among them. Those tapes, alas, which preserved the highest-quality raw feed from the moon in July 1969, appear to have been accidentally erased. Instead, what NASA officials unveiled at a press conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., were partially restored versions of the compressed signal sent to Mission Control in Houston from three ground receiving stations in California and Australia. For example, mission commander Neil Armstrong’s face visor was too fuzzy to be seen in the original-quality recordings. The refurbished video shows his visor and a reflection in it.
“There’s nothing being created; there’s nothing being manufactured,” said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who’s in charge of the restoration project. The recordings of the special “slow-scan” video signal from the lunar lander were probably taped over more than 20 years ago. They had been recorded on data, not television tapes, which may have confused archivists back then. NASA officials at the press briefing said they regretted that proper procedures were not in place to preserve the best-quality recordings of the moon landing. Rumors had been circulating on the Internet for weeks that NASA had found those recordings in the basement of a university campus in Perth, Australia. But Thursday’s press conference dashed those hopes. The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a months-long project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done.
But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder, which includes the face visor image; Buzz Aldrin walking down the ladder; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; the planting of the flag on the moon. The restoration used four video sources: CBS News originals; kinescopes from the National Archives; a video from Australia that received the transmission of the original moon video; and camera shots looking at a TV monitor.
The original videos beamed to earth were stored on giant reels of tapes that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with 13 other channels of live data from the moon. In the 1970s and 1980s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes and erased about 200,000 of those tapes and reused them.
Of course I believe we went to the moon……. several times, but there is something extremely fishy about this story.
O RLY???
Nothing fishy about it at all. Government agencies are all completely incompetent. Period… end of statement.
Happens all the time, take for instance Obama’s birth certificate, it was recycled too. 😉
“There’s nothing being created; there’s nothing being manufactured,”
‘xcuse me, um…why the need to say that?
“..appear to have been accidentally erased”
–right, one of the only *real* historical highlights of modern man’s achievements was accidentally erased and they couldn’t find any other source? I suppose Buzz doesn’t happen to have any private copies in his basement he’d like to share?
I’d replace the bullshit meter with a cracked one that has the needle pegged..
This story stinks to high hell.
-s
# 2
I agree. Bernie Madoff and ENRON were completely incompetent too end of story. Period… end of statement.. that is all… no more to say.. I mean it.
McCullough
I commented on this in comments hours ago. It is outrageous.
P.S. I believe the children are our future.
They just realized that their Hi def “remastered” footage looked like something right out of a PS3.
When they actually saw the footage they realized that it would be too difficult to process out all the UFO’s so they decided it would be best if it were lost.
I’ll be interested to see what this is all about then: http://apple.com/trailers/independent/julymoon/
How does one “erase” film? I know it can be destroyed, but “erased”, like formatting a hard drive? Bullshit.
Or did someone in NASA actually sit there with an pencil eraser and scrub the film?
#9 TooManyPuppies
With a large magnet (degausser).
@LDA
So, after using that they can then take the film and stick it back into the camera and use it again, right? After all it’s been erased and ready for reuse. Like erasing pencil from paper or data from a hard drive. If not, that would be destroyed, not erased.
The reflection in Armstrong’s visor was that of a guy saying “Say cheese!!!”
What’s so “tinfoil hat” about government incompetence? Some government worker taped over the good recording.
Shit happens.
I think it’s just evidence that NASA didn’t give a rat’s ass about the moon landing being “preserved for history”. When the Apollo missions were over, it was a done deal for NASA. They were more interested in the Voyager probes, Space Station, and Shuttles program. Not about looking back at what was done. Leave that up to Hollywood film magic. So they reused the tapes, to save money buying a dozen or so new ones. I know, it seems stupid today, with recording media being so plentiful and cheap. But back then, reels of data tape were probably like bars of gold (or silver anyway). And got reused all the time. Just as we reuse the disks in Tivos. Not preserving much of anything they record, even if we could. Maybe someday there will be PVRs with removable media. And people then will scoff at all the moments we recorded over, back in the bad old days.
But still, you’d think that NASA could have taken the time to transfer to film, these taped images. They’ve only become desperate about finding and providing them now. Because they want to promote a return to the moon. It’s all about the PR, people. They’ve got no real good reason for returning. Just the hype of adventure, jobs (damn few), the vague promise of discovery (that it’s not made of cheese? Or what?). The ISS apparently hasn’t paid off as much as they’d like. So it’s on to the moon, now. The next lead balloon project. Then I guarantee they’d be getting serious about Mars, after that. Whatever keeps the tax dollars flowing.
#11 TooManyPuppies
Yes, erased / reusable.
The Vikings were the first to discover America but they couldn’t prove it because they copied over their charts and notes.
Oh please, it’s so obvious someone has those tapes in their vault and we won’t find out who or where for decades to come.
You folks talking about film — you are aware we’re talking about huge, magnetic TAPES, not spools of 70 MM film, right?
They recorded the signal for the video cameras in one or more of the tracks of the tape and then some incompetent git didn’t write down which tapes had the tracks.
Then some incompetent idiots decided to reuse the tapes without actually checking to see what was ON them.
Par for the course with Nasa.
# 18 Jim said, “…some incompetent git didn’t write down which tapes had the tracks. Then some incompetent idiots decided to reuse the tapes…”
Hmmmm. Damned Aussies!
NASA was a huge, relatively young agency that hired boatloads of new employees every month. And at the end, they all just took off. Lots of stuff left with them, lots was left abandoned, much got swallowed up into the contractor’s main business. Some day it will start showing up on Antiques Roadshow.
My favorite headline from the day:
http://tinyurl.com/l56cq3
In the navy I had to maintain a large library (thousands) of data tapes of the type in question and believe me, back then the older something got the more probable it’s loss. Computer time was too important for something so trivial as library maintnance. So every thing was done with logs, stickers, and cards by hand. Add to that the constant technological advancement in computers since then. It’s not so surprising really.
So why didn’t they copy the data tapes to a more modern digital medium before erasing them? Or maybe they did, to be revealed later.
#9 I know this was before your time but that is exactly what you could do with VHS and such.
“Of course I believe we went to the moon……. several times, but there is something extremely fishy about this story.”
What’s hard to believe about somebody in the records department doing something very stupid with something very valuable. It happens all the time.
If you still find it hard to credit I have one question for you. Have you ever erased a file that you absolutely didn’t mean to erase or do you know somebody who has?
I know people who made the trip of a life time and then erased their only copy of their video by mistake. Leo LaPort and his trip to Egypt for one.
Hard for me to believe when it comes to NASA, but it could happen. I mean they did choose the crappy company I use to work for to provide them with defective actuators :/
Here’s what I’m thinking about this whole thing…
“And this is the best that you c – that the-the government, the *U.S. government* can come up with? I mean, you-you’re NASA for cryin’ out loud, you put a man on the moon, you’re geniuses! You-you’re the guys that think this shit up! I’m sure you got a team of men sitting around somewhere right now just thinking shit up and somebody backing them up! You’re telling me you don’t have a backup plan, that these eight boy scouts right here, that is the world’s hope, that’s what you’re telling me?”
Personally, I think NASA is lying through their teeth. You don’t need a historian to tell you you should keep any data. Most people in science will want to keep data. Data is all that matters >.> It’s not rocket science decision. If you’re out of tapes, BUY MORE.