Archives failure: NASA loses moon landing original video

From Eric Ederer via Red Tape

The government has misplaced the original recording of the first moon landing, including astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” a NASA spokesman said yesterday.

Armstrong’s moon walk, seen by millions of television viewers on July 20, 1969, is among the transmissions that NASA has failed to turn up in a year of searching, spokesman Grey Hautaloma said.

NASA has retained copies of the TV broadcasts and offers several clips on its Web site. But those images are of lower quality than the originals stored on the missing magnetic tapes.

Archives and museums are not just for teaching history; NASA is also going back to museums to see original Apollo rocket parts (Washington Post/AP, Aug 15 2006) to get ideas and examples for engineers who are building the next generation of spacecraft.

UPDATE: also seen on Boing Boing.

(this should go in a government documents / archives category too)

Technorati Tags: apollo, archives, govdoc, moon, nasa

Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

more "moon archives" info

Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:16:52 -0000
From: Chris Leeson
Subject: Vintage IBM tape drive in Apollo moon dust rescue

Yet another data recovery exercise

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/11/vintage_ibm_tape_drive_moon_dust
_data/

A day after reading Mike Tibbetts post about the Domesday project, I came
across this article on The Register.

Data on Moon Dust from Apollo 11, 12 and 14 was stored on a number of tapes
requiring a "1960s-era IBM 729 Mark V tape drive". The tapes were archived
by NASA and Sydney University. Alas, due to an "archiving error", the NASA
copies were disposed of. The Sydney ones are, however, still available.

SpectrumData, a data recovery firm, have managed to track down a tape drive
in the Australian Computer Museum Society, and will be borrowing it to try
and read the tapes. They hope to have the hardware working by January, and
to extract the data from the tapes then.

The tapes were stored in a climate-controlled environment, so may still be
viable (although there are lots of things that can wreck tapes). On the
other hand, the restoration job is described as "It's going to have to be a
custom job to get it working again. It's certainly not simple, there's a lot
of circuitry in there, it's old, it's not as clean as it should be, and
there's a lot of work to do."

[Edward Vielmetti]

restored tapes

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-111408a.html

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/LOIRP/