Ok fair enough. I have worked for the Government and have no doubt the things simple get erased and misplaced. Why is it though that the high res footage was never shown? I get the moon landing footage is actually a recording of a TV screen but why did NASA never release the good stuff to the public? I know that the formats were different and scan lines and they had to be converted but after Apollo 11 got back and everything settled down why wasn’t the good film stuff released to news studios for archival purposes?
I don’t believe too many news studios were in the archive business 40 years ago. I’m sure that if NASA asked, they’d have been greeted with “It’s your tape. You keep it.”
I think you misunderstand what tapes were lost. It wasn’t the “high-res film”, it was the original tapes of the telemetry. That required very specialised equipment to convert into a viewable format.
This “missing tapes” thing seems to have been widely misinterpreted in the media. The fact of the matter is that the original tapes really weren’t much use for anything - there is no existing equipment that could even read them any more. We have plenty of copies of the converted video.
So I am incorrect in assuming that the only footage we have is the one recorded by a video camera pointed at a TV?
Yes you are.
The telemetry incorporated “slow scan” TV pictures, which were not in a broadcastable format.
As I understand it, the live TV pictures that were broadcast around the world were from a TV camera pointed at the monitor on the scan conversion equipment.
The converted footage (from the scan conversion equipment, NOT a “video of the monitor”) was kept and transferred to videotape. We still have that.
What we DON’T have is the original telemetry tape. The only reason that is a bad thing is that it is possible that, if we did have it, modern conversion techniques could produce a better image.
See Apollo 11 missing tapes - Wikipedia
Actually on rereading that page, it appears I might be mistaken. I understood that the scan conversion process was separate from the “live” process, but that may not be true…
Yes, during the anniversary I read a long story about how the engineer in charge of building the slow speed camera had been disappointed by the quality of the moon video. It had looked much better when they had developed the system.
It went on to say how the Australian tracking station was the one to pick up the signal from the landing and that there was a reunion every year. One year he saw the 8mm film that was taken of the slow scan monitor and realized that it was what he had seen in testing.
He located one of the last tape machines in NASA that would handle this video and has been trying to keep it running until the slow-scan film can be found. The equipment is so old that nobody else knows how to use it and it must be run periodically to keep everything working. NASA has reluctantly and only recently allowed him to spend any time trying to find the missing tapes.