So, NASA was competent enough to put man on moon and later on send a space probe to Mars, but it was too dumb to preserve the footage transmitted by Apollo 11.
What seems downright more stupid is not that they misplaced the tapes or lost in an accident, but the wise men decided to tape over the original footage as NASA was short of video tapes in the 70’s and 80’s (Makes you wonder what they do with all that funding!).
Some genius up there decided that the 45 original tapes that recoded the footage were better put to use by erasing and reusing them and so NASA just went about the business. Today, as the 40th anniversary of the moon landing is approaching, Hollywood has come to its rescue as it is in the process of restoring and enhancing the original footage.
The $230,000 refurbishing effort is taken up by the same studio wizards who restored “Casablanca”, though this one, they promise, will appear a lot better than the original televised footage of the landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. $0 percent of the work on the historical tape has been already done and within a week or so, one could see the complete footage being restored. The newly restored video was released by NASA on the 40th anniversary and ironically enough NASA seems to be beaming with pride at this new renovation when they should be terribly embarrassed for their monumental error.
From Neil Armstrong getting his historical lines wrong (Which should have been ‘One small step for “a” man and one giant step for mankind), to the erasing of tapes, the high profile comedy of errors seems to flow, but historians are aghast at NASA’s brash disregard towards the preservation of what is considered to be 20th century’s most defining moment. The restoration was done using CBS News originals kinescopes from the National Archives; a video from Australia that received the transmission of the original moon video; and camera shots of a TV monitor.
While conspiracy theorists will jump on these videos again and further their nonsense about how we never got to the moon, what is more shocking is NASA’s official reply to why they taped over such important footage- “Preservation of historical footage is not their job!!”
Posted by Neo on July 17, 2009 in Discoveries & Developments, Sci + Tech · 0 Comment
