Original moon landing video is lost!

Did you know that NASA’s original video footage of the moon landing has been lost?

Apparently the footage that was broadcast (check it out) had something go wrong with the processing, and the video that everyone saw was not nearly as clear as it should have been!

A couple years ago, the original people who worked on the technology (retired now, of course) saw some old stills that showed how clear the raw footage was and wanted to get the originals and take another swing at it. Only NASA couldn’t find the tapes. Apparently the NASA filing system isn’t particularly strict. There are no proper databases, only the flimsiest of paper trails – which get dropped behind shelves.

In fact, an office can sign material out of storage, keep it for a few years and then decide to destroy it themselves and never let the place they borrowed it from know!

It doesn’t help that the time period was during the cold war, so they kept limited records of everything to keep them ‘out of the wrong hands.’ Or apparently, any hands.

Check out this article where the original scientist in charge of the video is interviewed: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.01/nasa.html

Apparently the bad quality video has been bugging him for a while . . .

- zoe