Kinda convenient how NASA lost the original tapes and recordings isn’t it? Now all we have are “recordings” of “original” “tapes”. Well tapes probably doesn’t need quotes, since they really were tapes… unless…
Seriously tho, this is so going to add fuel to a fire that should have died out years ago. And honestly, how in the hell do you lose such a valuable piece of our nations history? How does NASA get a shuttle to fly, but cant keep track of some historically important tapes like these?
What we saw on TV in 1969 with the “Live From Moon” subtitle was actually a pretty lousy picture at home, but who’s complaining. Part of the reason being it was a video (NTSC?) feed of another, non broadcast-compatible screen. The tapes aren’t “lost”, they just can’t find them, and it’s not entirely clear they can be played, as it was specialised equipment?
If they never would have said anything, nobody would have ever known. It isn’t like anyone is ever going to re-master the audio and release it on CD so they we can hear the smallest subtleties about what on up there. We have everything that is on them on other sources and it would take the most insane space-nut audiophile to care about whatever loss of quality occurred in those static filled transmissions. Much of the tapes were just instrument readouts that do much better on digital media that they ever did on a tape and nothing should be lost there.
It seems less than catastrphic, given that the tapes are likely to be severely degraded anyhow.
I was brought up short by this line in the report:
Hautaloma continued, “some of the tapes were transferred to other media, of course there are many pages of transcripts, and we recently extended our contract with aerialists The Flying Mazzini Brothers – have you had a chance to see them? They do a recreation of Eagle docking with Columbia that’s just uncanny. You could hardly tell it from the real thing,” Hautaloma assured reporters, “unless you were some kind of rocket scientist or something.” In addition, the spokesman said, the crew of Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin, all still alive, should probably expect a few phone calls asking them to repeat some of the more important things they said 37 years ago.
Seriously, is there any point at all in trying to persuade conspiracy theorists? The ‘debate’ continues precisely because one side isn’t capable of, or interested in, being persuaded.
The apparently degraded quality of the original broadcast had nothing to do with the tape and everything to do with the camera used to record the event - it was too good for the broadcast technology at that time. Take a look at this NPR interview from several weeks ago with one of the techs.
This is not a problem confined to NASA. Organizations have little interest in preserving their own history: it takes up space, and is not part of their main mission.
Cecil has commented on this issue when looking up things like the origin of Oreo and Q-Tips. American Heritage could not find information about the end of Leiderkranz cheese. At best, records are shuffled around; at worst, they are trashed to make room.
Someone else started a thread about this a couple of days ago.
I’ll say here pretty much what i said in that thread:
Sure, it would be nice if they could put their finger on them at a moment’s notice, but it seems likely that it’s simply a matter of going through the storage facility and finding them.
As for your question about how it’s possible to lose a collection like this, i gather you’ve never been inside or done research in a major national, state, or even city archive, or a large manuscript research room. The number of boxes of archival material in these places is staggering. Large repositories contain hundreds or thousands of collections, and individual collections routinely run into the hundreds or thousands of boxes.
In writing the first volume of his epic biography of Lyndon Johnson, which ended before Johnson even assumed the vice presidency, Robert Caro went through 2,082 boxes of Senate Papers related to that early period in Johnson’s career.
While the Civil War era is probably about the most studied period in US history, a friend of mine who works on this era tells me that there are still hundreds, probably thousands, of boxes from the war years in the National Archives that haven’t even been glanced at by historians.
Agencies like NASA generate millions of items and thousands of boxes of records every year. Temporarily misplacing one relatively small collection in a repository is cause for a bit of concern, but it’s a bit early to be writing the stuff off as lost.
As for the conspiracy theorists, if those morons choose to take this as further “evidence” that the moon landing never occurred, why should the sane among us care?
Yes, but at the time those papers were archived, nobody knew what Johnson’s ultimate place in history would be. That’s not the case with the moon landing. People were pretty sure it was going to be considered historically important for a long time.
Because of that, I’m surprised it was (apparently) tossed in with a bunch of other more mundane stuff, and not given a special place that was well documented.