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[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Search Is on for Original Apollo 11 Footage

The astronauts actually beamed higher-quality footage back to Earth, but it was only seen by a small number of people at three tracking stations.

Those original images were recorded and put into storage -- somewhere. Now, a small crew of retirees, space enthusiasts, and NASA employees are searching for a moon landing that the world has never seen.

The original lunar footage did get recorded -- onto 14-inch spools of magnetic tape, along with telemetry data. And by 1970, the tapes had made their way to a giant government facility known as the National Records Center in Suitland, Md. Soon after that, records show that NASA brought the tapes to Goddard for "permanent retention."

Source: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5578853

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One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures

The heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.

Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We are working on the assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told the Herald.

"Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."

Mr Sarkissian began researching the role of Parkes in Apollo 11's mission in 1997, before the movie The Dish was made. However, when he later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the tapes, they could not be found.

"People may have thought 'we have tapes of the moon walk, we don't need these'," said the scientist who hopes a new, intensive hunt will locate them.

If they can be found, he proposes making digitalised copies to treat the world to a very different view of history.

But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.

"We want the public to see it the way the moon walk was meant to be seen," Mr Sarkissian said.

"There will only ever be one first moon walk."

Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.

"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.

Many people involved had retired or died.

Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings. The format used by the original pictures beamed from the moon was not compatible with commercial technology used by television networks. So the images received at Parkes, and at tracking stations near Canberra and in California, were played on screens mounted in front of conventional television cameras.

"The quality of what you saw on TV at home was substantially degraded" in the process, Mr Sarkissian said, creating the ghostly images of Armstrong and Aldrin that strained the eyes of hundreds of millions of people watching around the world.

Even Polaroid photographs of the screen that showed the original images received by Parkes are significantly sharper than what the public saw. While the technique looks primitive today, Mr Sarkissian said it was the best solution that 1969 technology offered.

Among the few who saw the original high-quality broadcast was David Cooke, a Parkes control room engineer in 1969.

"I can still see the screen," Mr Cook, 74, said. "I was amazed, the quality was fairly good."

Source: www.smh.com.au/news/national/one-giant-blunder-for-mankind/2006/08/04/1154198328978.html

www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51404

www.seacoastonline.com/news/paulb/8_1briand.htm
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This is so inconcievable! Is it pure incompetence or were they "lost" on purpose? Common sense would dictate making copies and storing the originals in a secure location.

I first heard of this terrible news on the Coast to Coast am radio show with Richard Hoagland. He has been closely following this story and has good content on his site on the lost tapes:

www.enterprisemission.com

But since many feel Hoagland and C2C content is folly, I am glad that it has started to hit mainstream media sources.

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

NASA: Moon landing film is lost

NASA says the original film depicting Neil Armstrong taking his "giant leap for mankind" on the moon has been lost.

NASA says the TV version of the July 1969 event has been saved. But the sharper, far better quality original image has been lost, The London Telegraph reported Monday.

The man NASA had placed in charge of the images from Apollo 11, Stan Lebar, says the tapes were apparently filed and, as personnel retired or died, the location of the recordings was forgotten, the newspaper reported.

"I just think this is what happens when you have a large government bureaucracy that functions for decade after decade," Keith Cowing, editor of the Web site NASA Watch, told The Telegraph. "It's not malicious or intentional ..."

Now some scientists are urging NASA to intensify its search for the film.

"For all we know, it's sitting somewhere in a nice, cool dry place, exactly where it should be, but someone's mislabeled a routing slip," Cowling told the newspaper. "I can't imagine they'd throw this stuff out."

Source: www.physorg.com/news74777808.html

www.moondaily.com/reports/NASA_Says_Original_Moon_Landing_Video_Maybe_Lost_999.html

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This crime of incompetence is unexcusable. Doesn't NASA have a curator?

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

NASA Provides Further Update On Apollo 11 Tapes

Washington DC (SPX) Aug 16, 2006
NASA personnel continue to sift through 37-year-old records in their attempt to locate the magnetic tapes that recorded the original Apollo 11 video in 1969. The original tapes may be at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which requested their return from the National Archives in the 1970s, or at another location within the NASA archiving system. Despite the challenges of the search, NASA does not consider the tapes to be lost.

The tapes were sent from Goddard to a storage facility of the National Archives in late 1969. This kind of transfer is standard for government records, whether contracts, memos, photographs or space telemetry.

Among the 2,614 boxes of Apollo mission tapes that went to the facility, the original Apollo 11 may have been among them. Between 1975 and 1979, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center recalled all but two of the 2,614 boxes. The remaining two boxes included telemetry tapes from Apollo 9, leading engineers to believe that these shipments contained most of the Apollo related materials.

First-generation copies of the converted video from Apollo 11 as well as other first-generation copies and some original versions of the converted video for the Apollo 12 through Apollo 17 flights are still in NASA Johnson Space Center's Informational Resources Directorate's video vault in Houston.

About 18 months ago, NASA Goddard began an informal search for the tapes after some inquiries from retirees from the space agency and others from the Apollo program. NASA engineers are hopeful that when the tapes are found, they can use today's digital technology to provide a version of the moonwalk that is much better quality than what we have today. Goddard engineers were able to extract data from a nearly-identical type of tape recorded in 1969 of an Apollo simulation from the Honeysuckle Creek, Australia tracking station providing optimism that when the tapes are located, we can preserve original video.

In the event the tapes are found, NASA Goddard is taking steps to make sure all the unique hardware required to process the Apollo 11 moonwalk tapes is still around and can be used to make digital reproductions of the tapes that will be kept with the NASA History Office to make sure the video is protected and restored as needed.

NASA has also asked that any paperwork related to the transfer of the tapes from the National Records Center to NASA Goddard and paperwork related to the NASA Johnson Space Center's transfer of tapes to the National Archives be preserved and digitized to prevent further deterioration of these historical records.

Because of power limitations, Apollo 11 used specially developed slow-scan video that had to be converted into a format that could be broadcast over commercial television. The original signal was transmitted at 10 frames per second and had to be converted to 60 frames per second to be viewed on your TV set.

The signal originated on the Moon, traveled through the emptiness of space back to Earth, and was received by tracking stations on the ground in Goldstone, California; Parkes, Australia; and Honeysuckle Creek, Australia. These three tracking stations recorded the original signal that included the television video, as well as voice, telemetry, and biomedical data.

The data was recorded onto magnetic tapes, and simultaneously converted into a U.S. broadcast format for transmission to Houston and final release to U.S. television networks. The equipment used to convert the signal unfortunately caused some unavoidable loss of image quality.

Source: www.moondaily.com/reports/NASA_Provides_Further_Update_On_Apollo_11_Tapes_999.html

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It's a wonder that the machines that could play back these tapes were all not destroyed.

[candy]

We know someone who works for Goddard Space Flight Center. ToSeek from BAUT.

We should "probe" him for more information. Assume the position, ToSeek. #Thumbsup#

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

I wonder if everybody in the NASA circle are unaware to the where abouts of the lost tapes are at. Perloined or just missing. It's just so ignorantly wrong.

The anti-moon landing groups think that they were destroyed to prevent scrutiny on the farce.

This is a job for Columbo, Magnum, Baretta, Dr.Who, Rockford, Drew, Inspector Clouseau, Harry O, Mannix, and CSI (any brand).

[Centaur]

Perhaps the guys on the night shift couldn't find blank tapes. So they may have recorded the Playboy Channel over the Apollo footage.

[candy]

You don't suppose the tape of Buzz Aldrin punching Bart Sibrel could be one of the missing... no, never mind. ;D