[X] My Assistant

[hal_9000]

From http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/07/13/1654200.shtml


Apollo 11 TV Tapes Go Missing

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 13, @07:22PM
from the check-the-roswell-basement dept.

NASA Space

Richard W.M. Jones writes "On July 21st 1969, Honeysuckle Creek observatory brought us the first TV pictures of men on the moon. The original signals were recorded on high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes. What was released to the TV networks was reduced to lower quality commercial TV standards. Unfortunately John Sarkissian of Parkes Observatory Australia reports that 698 of the 700 boxes of original tapes have gone missing [warning: large PDF] from the U.S. National Archives. Even more worryingly, the last place on earth which can actually read these tapes is scheduled to close in October this year. The PDF contains interesting comparisons which show that if all you've seen are the TV pictures from the landing, you really haven't seen the first moon walk in its full glory."

PDF: http://www.honeysucklecreek.net.nyud.net:8..._SSTV_Tapes.pdf
SITE: http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/TV_from_Moon.html

[Phil Stooke]

Oh yes, I certainly did. I was a teenager in England, where the EVA happened after midnight. I stayed up all night, my family thought I was nuts. They showed it live, then when it was over they repeated the whole thing, and after that I walked down the road and bought one of every newspaper as the shops opened. It was great! Bliss was it, etc.

Phil

[Stephen]

Oh yes, I certainly did. I was a teenager in England, where the EVA happened after midnight. I stayed up all night, my family thought I was nuts.

Luckily my own family didn't think like that. When Armstrong & Aldrin decided to go early it was the middle of the day for me--a school day! So I might have missed the entire thing. (I was about The Other Doug's age.) Fortune smiled, however. My mother came and plucked my brothers and me out of class and took us home to watch it.

(Not that you saw very much at first! As anyone who saw that telecast can testify, at first the contrast was so bad that it was not at all clear what you were looking at! To me it looked like a lot of vague shapes of lightness and shade shifting about in incomprehensible ways. It was only later that it improved. I've since read that some of the powers-that-be at NASA were appalled when they saw those pictures. There they were spending billions to land a man on the Moon yet some penny-pincher had scrimped on what must have seemed at that moment to be was the most important item on board: the TV camera.)

======
Stephen

[dvandorn]

...I've since read that some of the powers-that-be at NASA were appalled when they saw those pictures. There they were spending billions to land a man on the Moon yet some penny-pincher had scrimped on what must have seemed at that moment to be was the most important item on board: the TV camera.

We should feel lucky that there was a TV camera on board at all. There was considerable resistance to having a TV camera aboard the lander on the first landing, mostly from the Crew Systems Division people but also from a variety of mission planners. Their argument was that we were trying this very difficult operation for the very first time, and anything that wasn't absolutely essential to the mission of just landing, grabbing a few rocks and getting back into orbit was a complication that could spell disaster somehow. (In fact, there was seriously strong pressure for the first lunar EVA to be a one-person EVA, without using a PLSS but simply piping air, water and comm/electrical lines to the moonwalker via an umbilical.)

The question of carrying the TV camera finally came to a head in early 1969, at which time Deke Slayton (representing the astronauts) and the various officials of CSD sat down with MSC management and argued against it. Finally, Chris Kraft and Bob Gilruth got together and informed their various sub-managers that it was *incomprehensible* not to take a TV camera and share this historic event with the world. When faced with such strong opposition to their plans to try and quietly sink the TV camera on the first landings, those arguing for its deletion were silenced, and the camera was officially included on Apollo 11.

In general, though, the astronauts tended to view the TV cameras as an unwarranted intrusion into their work, and Father Slayton argued this position on their behalf to upper management. Fortunately for us, wiser heads prevailed.

-the other Doug