NASA lost can't seem to find right now 13,000 original tapes of the Apollo moon missions, including footage of Neil Armstrong's "giant leap." Apparently, the quality of the raw reels is several times better than the ghosty images caused by reformatting for TV broadcast. From the Associated Press:
Until Tuesday, the search for the tapes was a spare-time deal and retirement hobby for (Goddard engineer Richard) Nafzger and the 81-year-old (retired NASA TV camera manager Stan) Lebar – not anything organized. Now with news reports of the lost tapes and NASA wanting data for its new lunar missions, the agency ordered a search of its cosmic attics…
Starting in 1970, the tapes were shipped to the National Archives' massive record center in Suitland, Md. And Lebar had hoped he hit pay dirt when he went to the record center, which he compared to the massive warehouse of long-forgotten boxes seen in the final scene of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
But when Lebar got to the area the boxes were supposed to be, he found empty shelves. Later, he and Nafzger determined all the boxes were returned permanently to Goddard.
"They're not lost," Lebar said, "it's just we haven't gotten to the next step yet."
UPDATE: National Public Radio did a recent piece on the search for the tapes with interesting detail about why the footage looked so crappy on TV. From NPR:
To convert the originals, engineers essentially took a commercial television camera and aimed it at the monitor. The resulting image is what was sent to Houston, and on to the world.
"And any time you just point a camera at a screen, that's obviously not the best way to get the best picture," says Richard Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He worked with Apollo's lunar TV program, and says that conversion was the best they could do at the time.
Link (Thanks, Nicolas Soichet!)
