One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures

Richard Macey
August 5, 2006

THE heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative
steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century:
grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that
recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking
stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's
Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.
A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate
to dust before they can be found.

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the
moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry
version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.
Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Sarkissian, a
CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We are working on the
assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told the Herald.
"Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."

Mr Sarkissian began researching the role of Parkes in Apollo 11's
mission in 1997, before the movie The Dish was made. However, when he
later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the tapes, they could not
be found.
"People may have thought 'we have tapes of the moon walk, we don't need
these'," said the scientist who hopes a new, intensive hunt will locate
them.
If they can be found, he proposes making digitalised copies to treat the
world to a very different view of history.

But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment
on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard
centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are
found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.
"We want the public to see it the way the moon walk was meant to be
seen," Mr Sarkissian said.
"There will only ever be one first moon walk."
Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US
National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of
space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.
"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows
exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.

Many people involved had retired or died.
Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of the other
five Apollo moon landings. The format used by the original pictures
beamed from the moon was not compatible with commercial technology used
by television networks. So the images received at Parkes, and at
tracking stations near Canberra and in California, were played on
screens mounted in front of conventional television cameras.

"The quality of what you saw on TV at home was substantially degraded"
in the process, Mr Sarkissian said, creating the ghostly images of
Armstrong and Aldrin that strained the eyes of hundreds of millions of
people watching around the world.
Even Polaroid photographs of the screen that showed the original images
received by Parkes are significantly sharper than what the public saw.
While the technique looks primitive today, Mr Sarkissian said it was the
best solution that 1969 technology offered.

Among the few who saw the original high-quality broadcast was David
Cooke, a Parkes control room engineer in 1969.
"I can still see the screen," Mr Cook, 74, said. "I was amazed, the
quality was fairly good."