We’ve all seen the rough tapes of the landing on the moon, but it turns out that the original tapes were of much better quality.
Not long ago, Lebar learned why the footage had looked like mush: The transfer and broadcast had degraded the image badly, like a third-generation photocopy. “What the world saw was some bastardized thing,” says Lebar, now 81. “Posterity deserves more than that.” Good thing the engineers in Australia recorded the raw feed. Now Lebar and a crew of seasoned space cowboys are trying to get that original footage and show it to the world.
There is just one problem: NASA has lost the tapes.
I want to know, are there any tv stations that didn’t send in their footage and have it hidden? TV stations, dig into your archives! – [via] Link
Update: It looks like they might be found! Thanks Christian! – Link
8 thoughts on “Lost Moon Tapes”
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Are these the tapes you are looking for?
We all know it was a hoax anyway :)
>>I want to know, are there any tv stations that didn’t send in their footage and have it hidden?
Sorry, it didn’t work that way (I read the article in Wired a couple days ago). The moon video was a weird format, in part for economy (less bits) and partly because the usual TV bands were taken up by other communications. The tapes were only readable by NASA equipment. The video signal was up-converted to standard TV resolution and then beamed worldwide.
I guess we have to keep looking for those stolen (*ahem*) lost tapes. The ones in Australia are apparently just telemetry for some experiments on the lunar surface…