One small step
NASA, like any large governmental agency has problems with basic incompetence. Look at the International Space Station or the Shuttle for a good example.
Now it seems that many of the video and data tapes from the ground-breaking Moon Flight series are missing and presumed lost.
Fortunately, according to the
Sydney Morning Herald:
One small step in hunt for moon film world didn't see
A reel of film held for 20 years in a Sydney vault could unlock the mystery of what happened to the original tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The reel belongs to Australian film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton, who had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimetre film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue.
Mr Clifton had ordered the reel in 1979 for a rock film he was making about Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon but forgot he had it until seeing a news report on television recently.
The footage of Neil Armstrong's "one small step" is considered among the most important artefacts of the 20th century but the original NASA tapes have been mislaid somewhere in the US.
It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist.
The grainy black-and-white television images broadcast to 600 million viewers on July 20, 1969, were a photocopy of a photocopy of the original images captured on the moon's surface by a specially built camera.
Few people ever saw the high-quality original images shot at 10 frames a second and beamed back to the Australian tracking station at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory.
When the images reached the tracking station they were transferred onto a one-inch, 60-frame-per-second tape and sent to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, at Maryland near Washington, DC, for safekeeping.
The footage broadcast to the world was shot by a television camera pointed at a monitor receiving the images from the moon.
"What was broadcast to the world was nowhere near as good as what was received," said John Sarkissian, an engineer at the Parkes Observatory.
All the Apollo mission flights and moon landings were captured in this way and transferred onto one-inch tapes at Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek in Australia and the Goldstone Observatory in California. The tapes were stored in 2614 boxes containing five reels of tape each and held for years in the US National Archives.
By 1984 most boxes were recalled and sorted at the Goddard Centre, but only two of 700 original Apollo 11 tapes have been found.
NASA announced last week it was launching a formal search and is recalling all the paperwork associated with the tapes.
Cool!
There was a wonderful film made of the Parkes Station and its role in the Apollo 11 flight.
It's worth your time to track it down and rent
The Dish.
Posted by DaveH at August 28, 2006 10:38 AM