The word about those missing Apollo 11 tapes that I wrote about the other day has hit the streets, and more information about what they are and where they may have gotten to is coming out. Here are a couple of worthy follow-up articles:
This piece in Forbes features some priceless doubletalk (“The tapes aren’t lost, insists the NASA official put in charge of the search. But he doesn’t know where they are.”) but it also gives a pretty good executive summary of the situation, explaining where the tapes came from (they were recorded at a tracking station in Australia), where they most likely reside (“somewhere at the sprawling Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.”), and why the images we’ve always seen on TV of Neil Armstrong descending the lunar module’s ladder aren’t actually what was beamed back to Earth from the moon and recorded onto those tapes (“The original tapes played 10 frames per second [when recorded] in Australia… But television needed 60 frames per second so each picture was repeated six times [resulting in ghost-images].”)
If that’s as clear as mud to you, this article over at NPR explains more clearly why the fuzzy black-and-white TV images of Armstrong’s “leap” were, shall we say, less than optimal:
…the lunar camera was recording in a format that was incompatible with commercial-television broadcasts. So the footage had to be converted to the right format.
Here’s how it worked: The lunar camera was sending images to three tracking stations: Goldstone in California, and Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia. At these stations, the original footage could be displayed on a monitor.
To convert the originals, engineers essentially took a commercial television camera and aimed it at the monitor. The resulting image is what was sent to Houston, and on to the world.
“And any time you just point a camera at a screen, that’s obviously not the best way to get the best picture,” says Richard Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He worked with Apollo’s lunar TV program, and says that conversion was the best they could do at the time.
I find all of this fascinating on so many levels. First of all, you’ve got the stupefying notion that something as important to history as the master tapes of the human species setting foot on another freaking planet could be misplaced, apparently through nothing more than bureaucratic carelessness. Then there’s the spectacle of bureaucrats frantically backpedalling and trying to assure us that this is being blown out of proportion and no one actually screwed up.
There is, of course, the intrigue of where the tapes actually are, or even whether they still exist (there’s a good possibility they were erased at some point so the tapes could be re-used). As a videophile, I’m curious to see the famous images in a higher quality than we’ve seen before, and as an amateur sociologist I find it a bit unsettling that our shared societal memory of this event was based on seriously degraded information.
And finally, it never ceases to amaze me that we actually managed to journey to another planet at a time when our technology was so comparitively primitive. Think about it — we are today awash in video information. We expect it to be ubiquitous and convenient, and we get annoyed when it’s not easily accessible (just think about the frustration you feel if you’re trying to watch something over a slow Internet connection). Pretty much everything is compatible with everything else, or at least easily converted to a compatible format. But in 1969, our video communications tech was so poor that they had to point a camera at a monitor so people at home could see what was happening. What was it Spock once said? A technology barely more advanced than stone knives and bear skins? True, but even that lousy, stone-age, degraded footage had the power to make us hold our collective breath… When the human race lands on the Moon again and documents everything in hi-def that gets beamed back to Earth in a flawless digital signal for playback on our wall-mounted, thin-profile plasma HDTVs, I doubt it’ll have nearly the same impact. It’s simply amazing what they did way back when, when they had so little to do it with.
