That’s like God giving Moses the Ten Commandments and he forgets to bring them back down the mountain.
NASA was a hero then, and sort of a dufus now.
Just thinking about it, is overwhelming. Man landing on the Moon, talking to the Earth from the Moon. Sending back pictures of himself from the Moon.
Elementary school kids can bury fingerpaintings in a steel can in time capsule in the play yard and NASA doesn’t have a plan for tapes that are more valuable than historical gold.
Pull the little record tab you freaking idiots! Put a sticky note on the cannister: MOON LANDING. DO NOT ERASE.
What happened? Well according to Dick Nafzger, a senior engineer at NASA, 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused.”
Sure, why not?
The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video. Those tapes just sort of gathered dust and ultimately were forgotten, NASA officials have explained to a perplexed world.
It’s like finding the Arc of the Covenant, and then putting it in a trunk in the attic under grandma’s old clothes.
These are the actual videos that your spacemen sent from the Moon to the Earth and you kind of forget where you put the reels?
Somebody should get a spanking for this one. Somebody should have their nipples hooked up to jumper cables and the battery engaged. This should be a punishable offense.
Problem is, the guy who forgot to remember is an old dude now. The landing was forty years ago. Who knows how many guys have had the key to the tape room since then? The original guy, he’s in an assisted living facility with bigger problems than some lost tapes.
When NASA admitted its blunder, historians around the globe collectively sat down, their eyes rolling around their heads like a Coo Coo Clock set on fire.
How big a deal is stepping on the Moon? Well, Cavemen threw rocks at the big glowing disc in the night sky. Mayans used the moon’s orbit to predict celestial events and formulate rudimentary calendars that we still use today. 15th century explorers used the moon to light night the sky as they sailed bravely toward the end of the Earth.
The moon is the inspiration of dreams and what could be. It was the goal laid down by a President and an accomplishment achieved by a nation.
July 20th 1969, we land on the dream and declared all things possible.
You’d think there was a plan for preserving the original tapes? You would think the plan didn’t include, taping a Lavergne and Shirley episode over them.
What did NASA need the tapes for? What’s more important than the biggest thing ever in the history of our world? Did someone record some bad 70’s porn on the moon landing tapes? Do they now contain Apollo 13’s, Jim Lovell’s bachelor party? Did the tapes end up in the big warehouse from the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. A historical junk yard where important relics go to be classified, boxed up and stored in anonymous oblivion?
I don’t have these answers. I am dazed by the insidious recklessness of the loss.
The good news; Hollywood wizards are coming to the rescue. The AP reports that the same people who digitally restored Casablana are cleaning up the grainy footage that was saved by news agencies, which had better sense than to use the footage for some ticker tape parade years later. Some say, the restoration will ultimately make the footage better than what I witnessed live in 1969.
It still leaves a lemon wedge of stink in my mouth.
Conspiracy theorists who still doubt that man has gone to the moon, are saying “I knew it!”
Finally, proof, or the lack there of, documenting the biggest sham in the world’s history.
The movie Capricorn One was a story that played up this angle. A Mars landing goes awry. Astronauts never leave the planet and execute slow motion activity from a clandestine movie set painted red to look like the Martian landscape.
The theatrical presentation is gobbled up by the world as reality. Then the spacecraft is destroyed and the movie turns into a governmental cover up to kill the astronauts before they can expose the truth.
OJ Simpson was one of the movie’s stars if this tells you anything about that flick.
One small step for Hollywood. One giant leap for conspiracy theorists.
All I know is that the next time we do something so amazing, so Earth shattering; have a plan for documentation.
One small step for man. One giant leap for better video storage capacity.