Post by Gary on Nov 15, 2006 12:54:26 GMT
Just came across this story - apologies if it has already been discussed. Anyone know if the tapes were ever found ?
Houston, you have a problem
Stephen Moss
Wednesday August 16, 2006
The Guardian
It was the BBC that previously held the record for losing historic tapes - the first Top of the Pops, the early Pete 'n' Dud shows, and more than 100 episodes of Doctor Who have all disappeared. But US space agency Nasa has now claimed the crown. In fact, it has set a record that may prove impossible to beat. It has managed to lose the original footage of the first moon landing by Neil Armstrong and his crew on July 21 1969. Mankind's giant leap has been followed by an equally giant pratfall.
The epic nature of Nasa's achievement lies in the scale of the material lost - some 700 boxes of tapes. It's not only the first landing that has gone missing, but footage from all six Apollo landings. "We haven't seen [the tapes] for a while," Nasa spokesman Grey Hautaloma admitted this week. "We've been looking for over a year and they haven't turned up. I wouldn't say we're worried. We've got all the data. We have everything in one form or another."
Ah, but ... what Nasa has are the fuzzy television pictures broadcast at the time, which were obtained by pointing a camera at the higher-definition images being beamed to three tracking stations around the world. It's the tapes of the high-quality stuff that have now gone missing. They were originally stored at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, then moved to the US National Archives. In the late 1970s, apparently at Nasa's request, they went back to Maryland. No one seems to have seen them since. "We're looking for paperwork to see where they last were," said Hautaloma, which seems to imply that the paperwork has been lost as well.
"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn [from the National Archives], but no one knows exactly where they went," said one of the group of veteran scientists pursuing the lost tapes before they (either the tapes or the veteran scientists) disintegrate with age. But who withdrew them? Conspiracy theorists, who are having a field day, would probably say Elvis, or maybe JFK. The conspiracists have always believed that the '69 landing was faked - "How come the flag is fluttering?" - and the Nasa debacle is grist to a hard-grinding mill.
"Question all, suspect everything, believe at your own peril," says one of many internet sceptics. Up to 30% of Americans already believe the landing was faked in a desperate ploy to make good JFK's promise to get a man on the moon by the end of the decade and thus beat the Soviets. Thanks to Nasa's ineptitude, that number now looks sure to rise. Meanwhile, the advice offered to the searching scientists, who have asked the public for information on the missing tapes, is: look on eBay.
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