[Infowarrior] - FW: NASA loses videotapes of moon landing

[Richard Forno]

From:   D

There must be some sort of black (bleak?) irony in an Australian
newspaper reporting this straight from Maryland, but I guess the moon
landing belongs to the whole world.

<http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/08/04/1154198328978.html>

  Richard Macey
August 5, 2006

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"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows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."