Houston, our tapes have gone missing
The search is on for historic TV footage of
mankind's first landing on the Moon. Seems to be missing.
Tee-hee.
Houston, we have a problem. There is probably no artifact in the history of space exploration more precious than the first television images of the Moon captured by Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts as they disembarked from their lunar module in July 1969.
Unfortunately, the magnetic tapes of those images have gone missing. Worse still, they appear to have been missing for at least 30 years - and nobody, until now, even noticed.
The man who devised the lunar camera for the mission, a retired Westinghouse engineer called Stan Lebar, is hoping the tapes can still be recovered somewhere from the bowels of NASA, the US space agency, or from one of the companies to which NASA has outsourced its archival storage.
But, after a year of looking, he and a small band of old-timers in the space business have turned up precisely nothing. Their hope is to track the tapes down before they deteriorate so far as to be unreadable, then transfer them to digital format so they can be preserved for ever.
Until now, they have kept the story out of the press because, they say, they do not want to embarrass NASA. They insist it is wrong to characterise the tapes as “missing”. “They’re not missing,” Mr Lebar said, “we just haven’t found them.”
Of course, there’s another reason to keep quiet about this. Maybe the tapes didn’t exist in the first place? There are more than a few folks who think the whole adventure was the product of a secret film production crew — that we never set foot on the moon.
I'm not one of them.
Posted: Mon - August 14, 2006 at 05:56 AM