Posted on 08/05/2006 7:34:12 AM PDT by oxcart
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"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.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."
(((PING)))
Amazing...and these people build and fly rockets to space...better take better care of my tax money fellas.
Have they checked eBay listings?
I thought this was going to be about Bean ruining the camera...
Well, Congress had stopped funding the archive for our satellite data, too, and it took Dan Quayle (remember that he had the Space Policy Advisory Council) to step in and get it emergency funding so all our Landsat data weren't lost. Of course, with it being Dan Quayle saving the day, it got only about a column-inch in our paper.
These tapes are very large and not easily lost in a drawer, but being large, they take lots of room and could easily have been pitched for space (no pun intended). :-( Also, though, they are easy to forget about since they aren't used much now...so perhaps they are still out there. It's a shame they weren't already backed up to newer media, but much isn't.
I can attest to some of the antique equipment - much of which has no documentation and one-of-a-kind. I fixed that which could be fixed and recreated other equipment.
I dont think that aging equipment will be the problem. I do think that its highly probably that some NASA career "manager" had the tapes in a file cabinet for 20-30 years, then threw them away when he retired.
An evil ping, but somebody has to do it.
The will be found right next to the Ark of the Covenant in some forgotten government warehouse.
If you want on or off my aerospace ping list, please contact me by Freep mail.
Here's a still:
"We've lost the moon."
/sarcasm off????
BWA HAHAHAHAHA
Shhh - don't tell anyone that I have the original unedited version of the tapes, produced on the back lot, Studio 5, of MGM. The actors, directors, film crew, and stage hands involved all mysteriously disappeared immediately after filming and have never been seen or heard from again.
- Art Bell
This 3-DVD set chronicles America's "one giant leap for mankind" from launch to landing with comprehensive footage from the film and videotape records of Apollo 11.Maybe they even are the borrowers of the missing tapes. At least someone is working to make history available to the public. Godspeed, Spacecraft Films!
Included in the set are the complete in-flight TV transmissions and onboard 16mm film footage, astronaut commentary from post-flight debriefings, the lunar landing with rare multi-track sound, spectacular multi-angle launch footage, along with pre-mission interviews, training and preparation footage, Saturn V stacking and rollout, pad operations and more.
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