Apollo 11 TV Tapes Go Missing

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."

Comments

Not surprising, actually

[Raul654]

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.

Re:Not surprising, actually

[goofyheadedpunk]

...the extreme difficulty of digitizing some parts of the collection (like a 16-ton statue, for example)...

Actually, at the University of Chicago we've been doing this sort of thing for about four years now, though with a bit more than statues. It's time consuming given the current state of scanner hardware, the shear amount of data to be collected and stored and the absolutly shitty software availiable, but it's certainly not extremely difficult. Unless, of course, you count something that's time consuming as difficult.

More like...

[ackthpt]

I knew I forgot to return those rental tapes.

More like they'll show up on eBay.

There's always the possibility a retiring employee thought they wouldn't be missed. Or some overefficient bureacratic paper shuffler elected to do something about all those dusty boxes on the shelf which look utterly horrid (ever have one of these people sweep into your office and suggest your desk needs cleaning?) and would win some kind of medal if they could only dispose of them and put a spit shine on those shelves.

How can you "lose" 698/700 boxes???

[Danga]

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.

Re:How can you "lose" 698/700 boxes???

[1u3hr]

It is that reason why there are so many cooks on the TV.

The Iron Chef is good, but I like Jamie Oliver too.

stolen, of course

[SuperBanana]

Ok, seriously, how can you lose ~99% of the data from something that is such a HUGE part of history?

Because most likely they were stolen by NASA employees/managers, government contractors, or "given" (improperly) to elected officials. There a case within the last few years where someone found a storage room at NASA chock full of stuff including two space suits. The stuff was supposed to have gone to the Smithsonian, but oops, gee, donchaknow, it just mysteriously ended up in a storage room nobody knew anything about.

Rumsfield had a piece of the airplane that hit the Pentagon, as a showpiece- almost like a trophy. There were plenty of other examples of thefts. I doubt any of the victim's families saw so much as a pebble. In the executive branch of the federal government the World Trade Center site was like a free-for-all memento/souvineer stop. I'd be astounded if visiting officials at NASA didn't have the same 'sticky fingers'.

Re:stolen, of course

[glass_window]

I'm not sure if it is related, but they did just have the National Archives's basement flood very badly with the large amount of rain the end of last month. It's possible things were hastily relocated. Due to the massive volume of missing tapes, I'd venture to guess they'll either start showing up somewhere, or they'll realize they were moved somewhere else without it being recorded.

Re:stolen, of course

[Rorschach1]

A lot of this can be attributed to staff turnover and lack of continuity. I used to work in a building associated with various launch programs at Vandenberg AFB. I found out at some point that the systems I was responsible for used to be housed in a basement computer room, and that there might still be documentation and stuff there. But with the exception of the maintenance guys, NO ONE had key card access through the three locked doors you had to go through, and no one had even been assigned responsibility for those areas. When I finally did get access, I found whole racks of equipment that were still powered on, not connected to the outside world. A power line monitor had logged every power glitch for years before its paper tape finally jammed. To this day, I think there are still racks of backup tapes down there.

Of more historical interest, I was once in a plain, ordinary conference room in another building when someone pulled aside the curtains draped around the walls to show me what was there. One whole wall was covered with a schedule matrix running from maybe 1985 through 1989 or so, with little magnetic space shuttles on it. When the west coast shuttle program was canned back in '86, they just pulled the curtains closed and walked away.

Yeah, some stuff of historical value gets stolen. But much of it is just overlooked, misfiled, misplaced, or just plain forgotten.

Re:stolen, of course

[smellsofbikes]

That's an incredibly depressing thought.
The area where I grew up had a lot of mining history in the 1890's and some up until the 1940's. When I was young and we'd go out exploring in our Jeep sometimes we'd come across old mine buildings way up in the middle of nowhere that had been similarly abandoned at the end of one season and just never opened back up: cookhouses with all the spices still on racks on shelves, bunkhouses with newspapers and gloves. Two years ago I was hiking way above treeline and came across a place that probably closed in 1978 and there were file cabinets filled with maintenance reports on the bearing wear on some of the air-powered drills. It's *weird* to walk into someone's life from (30-100) years ago.
(No, there were no boxes full of old tapes in any of the aforementioned places.)

Re:Australia!!!???

[Demolition]

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:Welcome to the new Digital Dark Age!

[afidel]

Actually I think it will be quite the opposite. The explosion of cheap means of creating content will mean that much more will survive. I don't think a large percentage of correspondance from say the civil war survived, and the high cost in both materials, education and time to create the material means that there was much less content originally made. If even a fraction of the same percentage from today survives it means that future historians will have such large mountains of information to go through that their problem will be one of cataloging and sorting, not in finding the information to research.

Old Media: readable?

[tcgroat]

"With the use of modern image processing techniques, it is hoped that the original high quality TV images can be restored for public viewing before the magnetic data tapes deteriorate beyond repair." Is it likely the originals are still in good condition? 37 years is a long time for archiving magnetic media. This also implies that there are no high-quality, first-generation backups: what utter negligence! Nixon's 18 minute gap should have been sufficient warning!

Re:The real moon conspiracy

[ultrasound]

Am I a conspiracy nutbag or has the US been in possession of high aerospace technology (such as antigrav) for more than 40 years? You be the judge. But don't be hardheaded and blind.

I'm afraid sir, that Occams razor says that you are a conspiracy nutbag. I did some research, with my eyes open and my head soft.

From Wikipedia: Proponents of the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax have argued that space travel to the moon is impossible because the Van Allen radiation would kill or incapacitate an astronaut who made the trip. Van Allen himself, still alive and living in Iowa City, has dismissed these ideas. In practice, Apollo astronauts who travelled to the moon spent very little time in the belts and received a harmless dose. [5]. Nevertheless NASA deliberately timed Apollo launches, and used lunar transfer orbits that only skirted the edge of the belt over the equator to minimise the radiation. Astronauts who visited the moon probably have a slightly higher risk of cancer during their lifetimes, but still remain unlikely to become ill because of it.

Now I'm not saying this is the best authoritative source, but the citation

[5] The Van Allen Belts and Travel to the Moon. Infrared Processing and Analysis Center. Caltech: (2000). Retrieved on 2006-06-11

appears to have more rational arguments in favour than you present against.

If that bit of conspiracy nuttiness is the best argument you have, then I'd say you've got a pretty weak case. Unfortunately reality is much more boring than fantasy conspiracies, because generally the accepted hypothesis is correct, even if its boring because it does not involve secret cabals etc. Conspiracy theories generally fail because they assume that politicians and people in powerful possitions are very good at keeping secrets and not making mistakes. Whereas all evidence of their behaviour points to the absolute opposite. The general level of incompetency would prevent any major conspiracy from working, or being kept secret for more than a few days.

Hope you can open your eyes and not be so hard headed ;-)

Re:Welcome to the new Digital Dark Age!

[smellsofbikes]

>Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't.

To be fair, lots of people DO know other people got here first. It didn't become a big deal in the world because there wasn't any compelling economic reason for their discovery to be important. The route the Vikings took was followed by fishing fleets, which were working the North Banks between Greenland and Newfoundland in the 1400's: because there was incentive, they were going there, and in those communties it was well-known that there were landmasses to the southwest of Greenland. But until someone found a good source for slaves, and soon thereafter, silver and gold, there wasn't any reason for the general public to pay attention to the New World any more than to news of Madagascar, the southeastern coast of Africa, the Spice Islands, or Australia until such time as they started being Important.