NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Video, But Originals Lost

leetrout writes "I attended a media briefing held by NASA at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. this morning where they released restored video of the Apollo 11 mission. The clips released are about 40% of the total footage to be restored by September by Lowry Digital in Burbank, CA. Wired has all the clips. A couple remarkable comments made during the briefing included the opinion from the original footage search committee that the original slow scan footage (stored as a single track on telemetry tapes) has been lost forever as the tapes were likely recycled by the mid '80s (apparently common NASA practice). Also, that someone from the applied physics laboratory was in Australia converting the slow scan directly to video. This differs from NASA's goal of merely broadcasting the event, at which it was successful. Unfortunately, no one knows where those tapes of approximately two hours of footage are located."

Comments

Computing power

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

It is truly amazing what you can "find" when you have unlimited access to huge amounts of supercomputing power.

The render times are probably really impressive too. ;)

An interesting PR problem

[jd]

Having a Hollywood studio "restore" the footage is going to provide wonderful ammunition for the conspiracy nuts, as they now get to claim that even if the tapes were real, you have no way of knowing if the restored information is genuine or inserted.

Re:An interesting PR problem

[athakur999]

The conspiracy nuts will say the reflector on the moon just proves there is a man made object on the moon, it doesn't prove it was actually physically placed there by a person. It could have been dropped on the moon by an unmanned rocket, for example.

Re:An interesting PR problem

[camperdave]

I'm still wondering what the conspiracy theorists say about the retroreflector experiments that have been conducted daily since Apollo 11.

"The lasers are bouncing off crystal formations... duh!"

The laser retroreflector defense will only work if you have proof that there was no retroreflection happening BEFORE Apollo 11. Since you can't prove that, you can't prove that the retroreflection that's happening now is of man-made origin. In short, it's only circumstancial evidence.

NASA or the BBC?

[davidwr]

The BBC "recycled" tapes in the '70s and '80s, losing many episodes of well-known programs forever *coughdrwhoandmanyothers*.

Incredible

[BigJClark]

Its incredible to me that NASA wouldn't think far enough ahead to save these tapes for posterity's sake.

Incredible. One of the defining moments in our history, and they didn't think to hold onto it? The whole goal was to only shoot for live feed?

Re:Incredible

[sjfoland]

I would have liked the restored versions so much better if they hadn't replaced Neil Armstrong with Hayden Christiansen.

Re:Incredible

[jbarr]

While it does seem incredible today, those were very, very different times.

People were far more concerned and enamored with "seeing" an event than how they might see it again. Heck, most people didn't even have colored TVs at that time, and because so much was live broadcast, if you wanted to see something like the moon landing, you planned for it.

Gone are the days of just savoring the moment and keeping the memory alive.

Re:Incredible

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Remember everything that was meticulously preserved from those days were on non-erasable, non-rewritable medium. Magnetic tapes that could be erased and reused were pretty new, and practices for backing important data for posterity, for ever etc were not well thought out. I am sure NASA has meticulously archived and stored the blueprints of Saturn V rockets and wiring diagrams of command modules and such things printed on paper.

On a related note people restoring and cleaning and analyzing old masters and paintings by students of old masters find they were recycling the canvases. Many layers of paintings, some by great old masters, are washed over and painted again.

philosophical rant

Strange, when an object is too close to you in space, it appears bigger than same size object at a distance. But when it is very close to you in time, we don't think it is any big deal. Only later we realize how big whatever that thing was.

/philosophical rant

Re:Incredible

[MaskedSlacker]

Basestar.

I am so ashamed of you.

Re:Incredible

[Dogtanian]

people restoring and cleaning and analyzing old masters and paintings by students of old masters find they were recycling the canvases. Many layers of paintings, some by great old masters, are washed over and painted again.

They probably didn't know they'd be considered *quite* as important as they are today (very high, even if one doesn't consider the obscene millions some paintings sell for as their true "worth".)

The major historical nature of the moon landings would have been glaringly obvious even before they happened.

It was The. First. Damn. Man. On. The. Moon.

I think you're cutting NASA way too much slack- and patronising the people of 40 years ago too much. Old 60s episodes of Doctor Who- bad loss in retrospect, but *almost* understandable in the context of the time (ephemeral, low budget, non-established medium, not reusable).

First man to ever land on the moon- that's blatantly important by itself. The fact they spent billions of dollars to get there you'd think was an added impetus. 40 years doesn't make *that* much difference to people's judgement.

Even if the cost of storing the footage was relatively high, it would have been trivial in comparison with what NASA spent on the programme overall. And even more trivial given its priceless historical and non-repeatable nature.

It's on a shelf

[Voyager529]

Right next to the tape with Nixon's 18.5 minutes.

Pink Floyd

[escay]

wasn't some of the lost footage recovered from tapes that Pink Floyd had? I remember a news article (last year?) about some tapes Pink Floyd got from NASA to use in some music videos, which they fished out for NASA from their archives when they heard the originals were lost.

Re:Pink Floyd

[escay]

on second thought, let me just google and post a link to the article. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/one-small-step/2006/08/19/1155408073519.html

ah, times when i wish /. had an Edit Comment option. or something like google's goggles.

Re:Tape shortage

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

One has to wonder at the penny-wise/pound-foolish confluence of circumstances that would lead to NASA erasing mission data because they couldn't buy more tapes...

Re:Tape shortage

[BobNET]

If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we store the damn tapes of the event properly?!

And worst of all

[qwerty shrdlu]

"If we could send a man to the moon, why can't we send a man to the moon?"

Re:Tape shortage

[pbhj]

"Dude, it's not like we can't just go to the moon again!"

I assumed they dismantled the film studio after the first one ...

Armstrong Shot First

[lennier]

Darn directors cuts! I *liked* the old version where you could see the Vaseline blur under the LM, and Armstrong shot first.

Fifth-rate consolation prize

[Dogtanian]

The BBC "recycled" tapes in the '70s and '80s, losing many episodes of well-known programs forever *coughdrwhoandmanyothers*.

Much as the BBC should be smacked about with a blunt instrument for wiping, they at least have the defence that these were low-budget productions that were seen as ephemeral in nature at the time and of no obvious use. (Legal agreements meant that they couldn't be retransmitted, and there wasn't a home video market as such).

NASA spent billions (in *60s money*) getting the first human being to walk on the moon- which would have been an obviously massive historical event even before it happened- yet thanks to some beancounting jobsworths and bureaucrats, rather than being treated as a valuable historical document and archived as they should have been, the high-quality originals have been lost.

This both defies belief and is all too believable; but that doesn't make it any less of a disgrace.

After initial jubilation, I was right to be sceptical about that the Sunday Express's accuracy (they were the ones who broke the- incorrect- story that the original tapes had been found).

Anyway, getting this digitally tarted-up version of the existing footage instead is a $50 consolation prize after being incorrectly told that you'd won a million on the lottery. Even if the image quality is good, the reprocessed footage still likely won't look as good as the original slow scan would have, and it certainly won't have the same veracity.

And that's the most important thing. They lost the damn originals, and regardless of how good the remasters *look*, they're not the damn originals.

You'll excuse me if I don't feel like breaking out the party poppers at NASA's DVD-age PR fluff hyping the remastering of their crappy fourth-generation footage as a minor success instead of the non-reversal of a massive loss of historical material.

Re:Missing Two Hours of Footage

[machine321]

Yeah, I'll never get those two hours back.