The case of the missing moon-landing tapes
- 30 years experience at tech and consumer publications, print and online. Five years in the US Army as a translator (German and Polish).
Houston, we have a problem.
NASA officials are engaged in a very terrestrial hunt for thousands of hours of original videotapes of the Apollo moon missions. But don't call them lost, the red-faced and rather defensive space agency says as it rummages around the dusty storage bins at the Goddard Space Flight Center--it's just that, well, they aren't making themselves found, either.
The slow-scan tapes, should they ever resurface, would offer a much higher quality of video than that seen by television viewers who crowded around black-and-white sets in July 1969 to see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Sea of Tranquility. First-generation copies, and a few originals, do still exist in a video vault at the Johnson Space Center, NASA says.
As the search goes on, bloggers seem torn between two themes: the perennial favorite of slamming the incompetence of government agencies, and the ever-prone-to-erupt conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked to begin with.
Blog community response:
"I know the data exist elsewhere, but this does not speak well at all for NASA, an agency that continues, in one way or another, to shoot itself in the foot. This makes me sad - in so many ways it seems that the glory that once defined America is gone forever. Incompetence, layered atop indifference, topped by revisionism. Sigh."
--Zero2Fifty
"That doesn't seem suspicious at all. I sense another round of obfuscatory governmental cover-ups and misdirection! Wonder what was on those tapes that they didn't want everyone to see?"
--Allergic Reality
"Now, when I lost a tape of one of my childhood talent shows, I could forgive myself (maybe I was kind of glad, even). However, if I were NASA, I would be losing a bit of sleep over this."
--The Scientific Activist