NASA Erased First Moon Landing Tapes

The news is trickling out today that NASA, our government's space agency, apparently screwed up royally again a few decades ago by completely erasing over the original videotapes made on July 20, 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. The first humans to ever set foot on the lunar surface, Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, spent almost three hours outside the spacecraft collecting lunar material while astronaut Michael Collins piloted the command module in lunar orbit. All the action and suspense was duly videotaped by NASA's remarkable camera and recorded on 1-inch videotape for the world to cherish and remember forever. Or so we thought.

The television camera that recorded all the action was mounted onto the side of the Lunar Module. Armstrong was recorded stepping down onto the lunar surface, describing the event as "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." 

When the lunar module landed, it effectively ended the "Space Race" between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and fulfilled a national goal proposed earlier in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy in a speech before Congress that the U.S. would land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth "before this decade is out."

The broadcast of Armstrong setting foot on the moon and subsequent video of the astronauts on the Lunar surface was recorded by NASA on 1-inch magnetic tapes. NPR attempted to find the tapes in 2006 and reported to NASA that they appeared to be missing. NASA launched an exhaustive 3-year search to find the missing tapes and determined that they had been inadvertently erased. Apparently the original tapes were probably destroyed during a period when NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reusing them to record satellite data.

"We're all saddened that they're not there. We all wish we had 20-20 hindsight," says Dick Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who helped lead the search team. "I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong," Nafzger says. "I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it."

Since then, NASA has arranged with a Hollywood digital restoration firm to enhance old television footage of the event so that the public can see the first moonwalk in more detail than ever before. But the lost tapes mean that the world will probably never again see the original images beamed back to Earth by the lunar camera that is now resting on the moon's dusty Sea of Tranquility, right where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left it.

Wait a go, NASA! ;-{