NASA misplaces recordings of the original moon landing

[LeeshaJoy]

Can’t find this anywhere else on the SDMB, so I guess I get to be the one to break the news: NASA officials can’t find the original magnetic tape records of the Apollo missions.

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

“We haven’t seen them for quite a while. We’ve been looking for over a year and they haven’t turned up,” Hautaloma said.

The tapes also contain data about the health of the astronauts and the condition of the spacecraft. In all, some 700 boxes of transmissions from the Apollo lunar missions are missing, he said.

How in the hell do you lose seven hundred boxes of anything, let alone something as historically significant as this?

[Sage_Rat]

This can be viewed as a good thing, though. Theoretically anyone smart enough to be able to steal stuff from NASA should be smart enough to not try and sell it on eBay.

So if it is sold on eBay, then we know that NASA needs a boot in the ass.

And if it doesn’t show up on eBay then we know we’re at least not that bad off.

[mhendo]

@LeeshaJoy

Can’t find this anywhere else on the SDMB, so I guess I get to be the one to break the news: NASA officials can’t find the original magnetic tape records of the Apollo missions.

How in the hell do you lose seven hundred boxes of anything, let alone something as historically significant as this?

Well, according to this somewhat less sensationalist account, it’s not quite as dire as all that.

“I would simply like to clarify that the tapes are not lost as such, which implies they were badly handled, misplaced and are now gone forever. That is not the case,” John Sarkissian, operations scientist at the Parkes Radio Observatory in Parkes, Australia, told the Space.com Web site.

Sarkissian also rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “The archiving of the tapes was simply a lower priority during the Apollo era,” he said.

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 700 boxes, 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.