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.
This is like "losing" the Mona Lisa. Or somehow misplacing one of the Pyramids.
Of course, no one is likely to give a damn because an alarming percentage of the US population, steeped in religious prattle, television and enamored of hideous fetishistic vehicles, has decided that the Moon landings were staged.
7 comments:
The second-earliest memory I have that I can put a date to is watching the moon landing. I was 4. Our whole extended family gathered to watch at my grandma's house. I was amazed. I never saw the moon the same way since.
I'm astounded that the original tapes hadn't been digitized a long time ago. The moon landing was an astounding accomplishment. Losing the original data is, perhaps, equally astounding.
This is almost as bad as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation losing all of the footage of William Shatner and Lorne Greene's televised Shakespeare performances from the mid 50's.
Seriously though, WTF?? If ever the phrase "Taken out in the street and shot like a dog" was a fate that someone actually deserved, it's fitting for the person or persons who lost these NASA tapes.
Now that I think about it, which is more likely... that the tapes were genuinely misplaced, or that they were stolen and sold on the black market?
Hell, if I were a billionaire and had the opportunity, I might buy them myslef, if only to ensure that someone backs up all the freaking data.
Either way, this is a huge black mark for NASA. I wish it weren't so representative of the general slide to incompetence (managerially speaking) the agency has experienced.
JohnFen--
I tend to think NASA *really is* incompetent enough to lose the tapes, but I'll buy into your black market theory because it makes me feel better!
Coming soon to a youtube near you!
Here is my letter to the Sydney Morning Herald about this thread:
To the Editor
Your highly misleading headline "One Giant Blunder for Mankind - How NASA Lost Moon Pictures" has done a great disservice to a group of Australian and US Apollo tracking station veterans involved in a new search for better Apollo 11 EVA images.
Whoever wrote the headline and introductory paragraphs mangled John Sarkissian's remarks to SMH reporter Richard Macey and sensationalized a serious search for better versions of that historic telecast received at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in the ACT and through the giant Parkes Radio Telescope.
First of all, we are not looking for missing Apollo videotapes. We are looking for special raw data recordings that contain unconverted slow-scan television, recorded as a backup in case of an equipment failure or a video circuit outage during the Apollo 11 EVA. Since there were no problems converting the slow-scan signals to NTSC video, there was no need to use the backup telemetry recordings. These were shipped to GSFC were they were placed into storage for several years.
There are NO missing Apollo videotapes. All of the mission television broadcasts are available in many different formats including DVD's that contain every second of every Apollo television broadcast.
Since your misleading headline has kept this mangled story number one on the most read roster on the SMH web site, you need to post a correction with the story and directing web visitors to the web page that tells the true story about the search for better Apollo 11 television pictures: http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/tapes/index.html or http://tinyurl.com/g7edh
Regards
Bill Wood
Retired Apollo tracking station engineer
Barstow, CA USA