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Apollo 11 TV Tapes Go Missing

Posted by timothy on Thu Jul 13, 2006 06:22 PM
from the check-the-roswell-basement dept.
NASA Space
Richard W.M. Jones writes "On July 21st 1969, Honeysuckle Creek observatory brought us the first TV pictures of men on the moon. The original signals were recorded on high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes. What was released to the TV networks was reduced to lower quality commercial TV standards. Unfortunately John Sarkissian of Parkes Observatory Australia reports that 698 of the 700 boxes of original tapes have gone missing [warning: large PDF] from the U.S. National Archives. Even more worryingly, the last place on earth which can actually read these tapes is scheduled to close in October this year. The PDF contains interesting comparisons which show that if all you've seen are the TV pictures from the landing, you really haven't seen the first moon walk in its full glory."
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Related Stories

[+] Has Anyone Seen the Moon Pictures? 474 comments
NASA has received a lot of bad press in the last few years. Now in a stunning move to prove how much they have learned from past mistakes, it appears they have lost the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk. They also seem to have misplaced the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings. Hopefully nobody has taped an episode of "The OC" over them yet.
[+] NASA Has the Lost Tapes 256 comments
The Shuttle launch may have been delayed by two days, but NASA has better news to report. caffiend666 writes "As speculated a few weeks ago, NASA has found and is starting to restore the lost Apollo 11 tapes. A Briefing will be held July 16th at the Newseum in Washington to 'release greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk... The original signals were recorded on high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes. What was released to the TV networks was reduced to lower quality commercial TV standards.'"
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  • Um.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by viper21 (16860) <.moc.yrdnuofqi. .ta. .ttocs.> on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:25PM (#15715440) Homepage
    I knew I forgot to return those rental tapes.

    I wonder if I can talk them out of the late fees again.

    • Re:Um.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Megane (129182) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:33PM (#15715484)
      Remember... Be kind - Rewind!

    • I knew I forgot to return those rental tapes.

      More like they'll show up on eBay.

      There's always the possibility a retiring employee thought they wouldn't be missed. Or some overefficient bureacratic paper shuffler elected to do something about all those dusty boxes on the shelf which look utterly horrid (ever have one of these people sweep into your office and suggest your desk needs cleaning?) and would win some kind of medal if they could only dispose of them and put a spit shine on those shelves.

  • How convenient. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:25PM (#15715442)
    Incontrovertible proof that the moon landing was faked is convenently "lost" by the national archives while Bush II talks about going "back" to the moon.
    • I mean that's just taking it way too far. To think that they actually faked the moon landing.
      So what if they did plan to invade Cuba by shooting down a civilian airliner over Cuba and
      then blaming Castro for it (Operation Northwood, if you're into FOIA documents), so what
      if George W(anker) Bush's Grandpa Prescott cut Onkel Adolf a cheque every now and then and now
      they're friends with BinLaden Terrorgroup Inc. so what if these people used unsuspecting
      civilians and military unwittingly as subjects in radiation
      • The world saw it happen on TV [...]
        Back in 1939, a large part of the eastern seaboard heard about a Martian Invasion on the radio. Turned out it wasn't true.

        There is lots of evidence that we landed on the moon (900 pounds of moonrocks being a good part of it). But to say, "I know we landed on the moon 'cause I saw it on my Tee Vee!" is ridiculous.

        Considering the low resolution television images that came back, it would have been very easy to fake it.

        • TV may be low resolution, but there were several things you could see that still would have only been possible in an airless environment and a substantially lower gravity. Many of those scenes could not have been faked in a studio, even today, let alone in 1969. While one may try to argue that they were faked with photorealistic animation, that leaves the nasty problem of actually GETTING photorealistic animation.... in 1969. Oh... but that creates yet another conspiracy: that NASA and the government had more computing power available to them in 1969 than modern movie studios with huge render farms have today. And it just gets worse from there... one has to keep inventing more extravagant and obviously contrived excuses about why we can't possibly find any evidence for the truth while simultaneous suggesting that all the evidence that might contradict their theory is "obviously" planted which just goes to further "prove" the conspiracy. (insert rolling eyes expression here).

          It's about on par with a Jehovah's Witness trying to say that the geological evidence for an old planet was just put there by God to test our faith.

          Any attempt at a rational discussion with a conspiracy theorist quickly devolves into a flurry of conjecture and hypothesis with no logical foundation. Occam's Razor be damned.

            • Re:The real moon conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)

              by ultrasound (472511) on Friday July 14 2006, @04:22AM (#15717513)
              Am I a conspiracy nutbag or has the US been in possession of high aerospace technology (such as antigrav) for more than 40 years? You be the judge. But don't be hardheaded and blind.

              I'm afraid sir, that Occams razor says that you are a conspiracy nutbag. I did some research, with my eyes open and my head soft.

              From Wikipedia: Proponents of the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax have argued that space travel to the moon is impossible because the Van Allen radiation would kill or incapacitate an astronaut who made the trip. Van Allen himself, still alive and living in Iowa City, has dismissed these ideas. In practice, Apollo astronauts who travelled to the moon spent very little time in the belts and received a harmless dose. [5]. Nevertheless NASA deliberately timed Apollo launches, and used lunar transfer orbits that only skirted the edge of the belt over the equator to minimise the radiation. Astronauts who visited the moon probably have a slightly higher risk of cancer during their lifetimes, but still remain unlikely to become ill because of it.

              Now I'm not saying this is the best authoritative source, but the citation

              [5] The Van Allen Belts and Travel to the Moon. Infrared Processing and Analysis Center. Caltech: (2000). Retrieved on 2006-06-11

              appears to have more rational arguments in favour than you present against.

              If that bit of conspiracy nuttiness is the best argument you have, then I'd say you've got a pretty weak case. Unfortunately reality is much more boring than fantasy conspiracies, because generally the accepted hypothesis is correct, even if its boring because it does not involve secret cabals etc. Conspiracy theories generally fail because they assume that politicians and people in powerful possitions are very good at keeping secrets and not making mistakes. Whereas all evidence of their behaviour points to the absolute opposite. The general level of incompetency would prevent any major conspiracy from working, or being kept secret for more than a few days.

              Hope you can open your eyes and not be so hard headed ;-)

            • Re:The real moon conspiracy (Score:5, Informative)

              by stjobe (78285) on Friday July 14 2006, @04:42AM (#15717535) Homepage
              You need to visit this [clavius.org] site. It answers a lot of your questions.

              Van Allen belts:

              The principle danger of the Van Allen belts is high-energy protons, which are not that difficult to shield against. And the Apollo navigators plotted a course through the thinnest parts of the belts and arranged for the spacecraft to pass through them quickly, limiting the exposure.
              Fuel issues:
              First, the assumption that a given mission must expend all the vehicle's fuel is highly naive. Every rocket is provided with slightly more fuel than its mission requires, as a safety margin. In any event, the rocket is not compelled to burn all of it. The Saturn V was a sophisticated flying machine that was able to shut off its engine when the desired velocity was obtained, regardless of remaining fuel.
              Craters and the like:
              By comparison, a fully-loaded Harrier jump jet produces 27,000 lbf thrust at liftoff -- ten times more than a lunar module. Yet you typically do not see a crater under a Harrier. This is because popular intuition dictates that a rocket engine of any size is automatically more powerful than a jet engine of any size. In fact, most jet engines are more powerful than the lunar module's rocket engines.
              Lunar Module takeoff film:
              Some conspiracists point out that the film of the lunar module ascending from the lunar surface to meet the command module doesn't show any visible exhaust products. That's because by the time it comes into view of the command module the engine has stopped firing. Just as a baseball thrown upward will continue to rise after it has left the propulsive effect of your hand, the lunar module continues to rise after its engine stops firing. Unlike space ships in the movies, real spacecraft don't have to fire their engines continuously in order to make headway.
        • What these conspiracy theorists always forget is that we placed beacons on the moon which we "ping" with lasers constantly.

          Behold more mass-media lies (part of the conspiracy no doubt) here!! [wikipedia.org]

          Even if the footage was all faked, and NASA was nothing but a PR department gone wrong, *something* qwnt to the moon and placed very specifically calibrated censors there, coincidentally, these censors have been used WORLDWIDE for some 40 years now. Fade back...Occum's razor trumps David Duchovny for the win.

  • So.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by arthurpaliden (939626) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:29PM (#15715462)
    So the actual 'raw' proof that men were walking on the moon is gone. How convenient.

  • Back them up! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bun (34387) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:32PM (#15715474)
    Quick! Convert them to HD-DVD, er, Blu-Ray, er...

    • Re:Back them up! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hackstraw (262471) * on Thursday July 13 2006, @08:56PM (#15716167) Homepage
      Quick! Convert them to HD-DVD, er, Blu-Ray, er...

      Funny, but this brings up the debate about distribution, copyright, and file sharing.

      Just think. If these recordings were digitally transferred and uploaded somewhere like http://archive.org/ [archive.org] (which I believe they belong), then we would have access to these things basically forever in the best quality that they could be.

      As Linus has said, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."

      Well, times have changed and p2p is arguably better than ftp.

  • I've got some more copies. No worry (Score:4, Funny)

    by krell (896769) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:33PM (#15715481) Journal
    They let me on the Warner Bros backlot where the first Apollo landings were filmed back in the 1960s (my dad was friends with the guy they hired to dump the "lunar sand" in the studio). I had my 8 mm Kodak movie camera with me, and I still have some reels that I filmed myself during the shooting of important scenes. I'll put them on Youtube soon. (If you ever see the finished films, you'll see the edge of one of my footprints from when I strayed into the actual set in the "lunar soil" near Neil at one time. I'm surprised that, perfectionist as he was, Kubrick did not catch that and edit it out.

  • Ebay? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cadallin (863437) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:34PM (#15715490)
    Firstly, Isn't this a dupe? And secondly, have they checked ebay yet?

  • Not surprising, actually (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Raul654 (453029) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:39PM (#15715510) Homepage
    In May, I was a speaker at the ACM Conference on Computers, Privacy, and Freedom (CFP). On the last day of the conference, one of the speakers was the guy in charge of digization efforts at the Smithsonian Musuem of the American Indian. (Granted, a different branch of the government than the National Archives, which this story pertains to). He said that digization efforts are hampered by a number of issues, not the least of which are the sheer size of the collection, the relatively small budget available, the extreme difficulty of digitizing some parts of the collection (like a 16-ton statue, for example). At this point, even getting an electronic catalogue of the entire collection would be a huge step forward.

    • Re:Not surprising, actually (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > ... even getting an electronic catalogue of the entire collection would be a huge step forward

      you mean, like one giant leap?
    • ...the extreme difficulty of digitizing some parts of the collection (like a 16-ton statue, for example)...

      Actually, at the University of Chicago we've been doing this sort of thing for about four years now [uchicago.edu], though with a bit more than statues. It's time consuming given the current state of scanner hardware, the shear amount of data to be collected and stored and the absolutly shitty software [rapidform.com] availiable, but it's certainly not extremely difficult. Unless, of course, you count something that's time consu
    • I've toured the archives for work purposes and planning purposes for large digitization efforts. The speaker from the Smithsonian is absolutely right- just how the hell do you digitize that much crap? The numbers are staggering- pick any task and multiply it by the billions of feet of film and you've got serious timeframes- in the order (of some estimates I did) 30 to 50 years.

      But I find it odd that they could misplace all the boxes. The check-in/ check-out procedure used at the archives is fairly regimented- to screw something that large up requires a deliberate effort to delete or mis-file the boxes.

      To give you an idea, a box is received / dropped off at the archives. It has it's master database that says "This box is #####". The organization that drops it off maps a number assigned by the archive to that box, and said org maintains all the details of what is IN the box.

      The archives then move the box and it's paperwork to the specific row, shelf, and complex. I believe they are to make a total of 12 to 15 'pulls' per hour, which when we were wanding meant actively finding an item in about 2 minutes after you walk into a complex (this place is huge- each complex is a football field).

      The paperwork is then returned to central processing for annotation and entry into the DB.

      But to lose 700 CF (each box is 1 CF or so) requires serious effort- that implies that someone filed them all in either the wrong complex or completely off the wall location- and that NO ONE has tried to place another item on wherever they are currently sitting.

      Now, assume they've been actively 'pulled' for a number of years. Your standard pull & return places a piece of paper at the boxes location- it's a copy of the form showing who pulled it and when. The paper sits where the box originated- I saw some papers from the 70's which implied that the organization pulled the item yet is still paying around 30 cents / month for that space.

      A permanent withdrawl could have been done to 'stop the monthly fees', but that means the box wouldn't necessarily go back to the same spot. If all those boxes were moved around the entire archives it would be nearly impossible to locate- there's just not enough eyes to find them- and even then you can double stack boxes to boot so you'd never see them.

      So... either the boxes are there or someone checked them out. If they were checked out and the paperwork was lost.... you'll never find them. If they weren't checked out, you would need a miracle (and yes, they do have 'reward' sheets for lost boxes posted around the area) to find them. Maybe there's a cache of boxes somewhere... and then maybe not.

  • youtube please (Score:3, Funny)

    by in2mind (988476) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:40PM (#15715515) Homepage
    Whoever has those tapes now,upload to youtube please! :p

  • Did they ask Dan Rather? (Score:4, Funny)

    by krell (896769) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:42PM (#15715522) Journal
    These original DVD's from the CBS vaults were really interesting. They were mastered in 1969 using Amiga Video Toaster. It is probably no coincidence that they turned up missing about the same time Dan Rather left CBS. I wonder if Rather took the wrong boxes when he carted off those old 3.5" inch floppies containing the MS Word 97 docs George Bush's original military service records and archive copies of Bush's Myspace page from 1973.

  • Actually... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rackhamh (217889) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:48PM (#15715544)
    Wouldn't you think that only the people who were THERE have seen the moon walk in ALL its glory? ;)

  • How can you "lose" 698/700 boxes??? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Danga (307709) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:49PM (#15715550)
    Ok, seriously, how can you lose ~99% of the data from something that is such a HUGE part of history? It is not like this was video of the 30th space shuttle launch or something, this was the first time humans had landed on the MOON. I would think that somebody would realize this and would have taken much more care of those tapes.

    Since the PDF is slashdotted so I can't read it I also am curious as to why if "the last place on earth which can actually read these tapes" closes down someone won't be able to save whatever is required to read the tapes, are they just going to trash the machines? That would seem pretty stupid to me. Anyone have any answers?

    The worst part is the conspiracy theorists claiming the landing never occurred are going to go nuts over this. Almost all the tapes of the landing mysteriously disappear as well as the only way to read the tapes, if I was one of them I would go nuts too.

    • stolen, of course (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperBanana (662181) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:19PM (#15715710)
      Ok, seriously, how can you lose ~99% of the data from something that is such a HUGE part of history?

      Because most likely they were stolen by NASA employees/managers, government contractors, or "given" (improperly) to elected officials. There a case within the last few years where someone found a storage room at NASA chock full of stuff including two space suits [wired.com]. The stuff was supposed to have gone to the Smithsonian, but oops, gee, donchaknow, it just mysteriously ended up in a storage room nobody knew anything about.

      Rumsfield had a piece of the airplane that hit the Pentagon, as a showpiece- almost like a trophy. There were plenty of other examples of thefts [google.com]. I doubt any of the victim's families saw so much as a pebble. In the executive branch of the federal government the World Trade Center site was like a free-for-all memento/souvineer stop. I'd be astounded if visiting officials at NASA didn't have the same 'sticky fingers'.

      • Re:stolen, of course (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Rorschach1 (174480) on Thursday July 13 2006, @11:37PM (#15716868) Homepage

        A lot of this can be attributed to staff turnover and lack of continuity. I used to work in a building associated with various launch programs at Vandenberg AFB. I found out at some point that the systems I was responsible for used to be housed in a basement computer room, and that there might still be documentation and stuff there. But with the exception of the maintenance guys, NO ONE had key card access through the three locked doors you had to go through, and no one had even been assigned responsibility for those areas. When I finally did get access, I found whole racks of equipment that were still powered on, not connected to the outside world. A power line monitor had logged every power glitch for years before its paper tape finally jammed. To this day, I think there are still racks of backup tapes down there.

        Of more historical interest, I was once in a plain, ordinary conference room in another building when someone pulled aside the curtains draped around the walls to show me what was there. One whole wall was covered with a schedule matrix running from maybe 1985 through 1989 or so, with little magnetic space shuttles on it. When the west coast shuttle program was canned back in '86, they just pulled the curtains closed and walked away.

        Yeah, some stuff of historical value gets stolen. But much of it is just overlooked, misfiled, misplaced, or just plain forgotten.

    • PDF (Score:5, Informative)

      by antdude (79039) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:20PM (#15715718) Homepage Journal
      Just go to http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/tapes/Se arch_for_SSTV_Tapes.pdf [honeysucklecreek.net] :) The story had Coral Cache URL. =)
    • This is the U.S. government we're talking about. Shouldn't the question be, "How did they manage not to lose 2 of the 700 boxes?"

  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by mgabrys_sf (951552) on Thursday July 13 2006, @06:54PM (#15715579) Journal
    Nearly 700 copies of "A Star Wars Holiday Special" appeared in the trash around LucasFilm that had been taped over some old media George had obtained from NASA years ago.

  • Terrible! (Score:3, Funny)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (613870) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:02PM (#15715621) Journal
    This is terrible. We know that in the far future the crew of the Battlestar Galactica [wikipedia.org] intercept some of these recordings but it seems that they just miss the transmissions from the moon. These recordings are doomed to be lost forever.
  • Do not worry, dear consumers! The tapes have not gone "missing". The studio that made the original landing footage simply took it back to their labs to Digitally Re-Master it for the Special Limited Collector's Edition DVD, which will be out by Christmas. Since the original director (Kubrik) is gone, they will have directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg collaborate on this wonderful new addition to the Disney(TM) Classics(TM) Collection(TM).

    New, never-before scenes will be inserted into the middle of the old, staid footage!
    Tom Hanks will replace Neil Armstrong through the magic of digital effects!
    Kristie Alley will be Buzz Aldrin, adding an exciting new romantic subplot to the mission!
    A lovable animal sidekick will have your kids squealing in delight!
    Gagarin shoots first!

    Master directors Spielberg and Lucas will also modernize the plot and imagery to give a fresh, "post-2001" look!
    The American flag, such an archaic-looking symbol (that didn't test well with audiences overseas), will be replaced with a pleasant, pastel blue UN flag. The ugly SUV 'lunar rover' will be digitally removed, and replaced with bicycles which the astronauts will pedal about the moon. The President will be updated to be a Texan oil millionaire conducting a needless war in Asia, who commander Michael Collins (played by academy award-winner Liam Neeson) will denounce for "having turned to the dark side". The "Cold War" sideplot will be updated to be a "Temporal War On Terror", which will feature terrorists from the future attempting to fly the Space Shuttle Columbia into the White House! Can our heroes stop them 'in time'?!

    This and other new changes will keep the franchise fresh and exciting to today's viewers, and like Star Trek: Enterprise, will boldly re-write history that no one but nerds cares about anyways!

    Apollo 11: The Special Limited Collector's Edititon: Coming Christmas 2006 - collect all 6 covers!

  • Welcome to the new Digital Dark Age! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Artifakt (700173) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:14PM (#15715683)
    It's been said that future generations will regard the next few decades as a dark age, where the culture lost most of its common heritage. This will supposedly come about because so much audio and video is mouldering away (sometimes literally), locked in vaults where it will rot before anyone can recover it. While such factors as copyrights much longer than the physical life of the archival media are likely to contribute to this, the loss of these tapes is an example of another cause.
          Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't. Will Neal Armstrong be the Lief Ericson of the 26th century, and some one from the Chinese, Indian or Nigerian space program get all the credit, because they kept thir records?
    • Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't. Will Neal Armstrong be the Lief Ericson of the 26th century, and some one from the Chinese, Indian or Nigerian space program get all the credit, because they kept thir records?

      Neal Armstrong could only become "the Lief Ericson of the 26th century" in some weird fantasy future - in which the thousands of books on the topic become lost, along with every TV recording, dozens of DVDs, about the same number of video releases, at least five different (LP) albums... Neal Armstrong is pretty firmly in the permanent record.

  • Does it surprise anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by awfar (211405) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:58PM (#15715911)
    Does it surprise anyone they are missing, neglected, with no funding for perpetually archiving the results?

    If a tree falls in the wood, and there is no proof, was a sound made?

    Do the presidential libraries suffer that fate?

    That critical things that the US (or any) Government is actually responsible for is, once again, messed up?

    They are like an unfocused, irresponsible child, except they have big guns, our credit card with unlimited limit, and the legal system to perpetuate it.

    If I am out of line consider Katrina, War on Terror, Social Security, the scandals, Halliburton, energy prices, approach to global warming, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

    Dumbasses all around.

  • Not faked...but UFOs in the background (Score:4, Funny)

    by Danathar (267989) on Friday July 14 2006, @05:31AM (#15717622) Journal
    Unlike SOME cooky crazy people I don't think the moon landing was faked, BUT it IS obvious that the tapes were taken by MIB in order to conceal alien spacecraft that were imaged on the tapes.....

    • Re:Australia!!!??? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Demolition (713476) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:19PM (#15715712)
      Why were the original US moon landing tapes stored in an Australian observatory!!??

      As it says in the summary, the tapes were stored in the U.S. National Archives. The man who reported them missing (John Sarkissian) just happens to work for CSIRO Parkes Observatory in Australia.

      • Re:Australia!!!??? (Score:5, Funny)

        by mwillis (21215) on Thursday July 13 2006, @10:05PM (#15716486) Homepage
        Born Canadian; I lived in Parkes between 1988 and 1989. Nobody else in /. can say that. Even the ozzies I meet say "wtf?".

        My advice:

        Can you trust somebody who lives next to a giant space telescope? Who knows what planet their allegiance lies with?

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