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Apollo 11 TV Tapes Go Missing

Posted by timothy on Thu Jul 13, 2006 07:22 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) <scott&iqfoundry,com> on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:25PM (#15715440) Homepage
    I knew I forgot to return those rental tapes.

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

  • How convenient. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:25PM (#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.
      • 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.

  • So.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by arthurpaliden (939626) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:29PM (#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, @07:32PM (#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, @09:56PM (#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.

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

    by Raul654 (453029) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:39PM (#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.

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

    by Danga (307709) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:49PM (#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.

  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by mgabrys_sf (951552) on Thursday July 13 2006, @07:54PM (#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.
  • 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, @08:14PM (#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?

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

      by Demolition (713476) on Thursday July 13 2006, @08:19PM (#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, @11:05PM (#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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