WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The original recordings of the first humans
landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly
restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA
officials said on Thursday.
NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of
the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy
images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the
moon.
The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank,
California-based Lowry Digital, will be released in September. The
preview is available at www.nasa.gov.
NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video
recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.
Since then, Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the
ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking
for them.
The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were
part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed -- magnetically
erased -- and re-used to save money.
"The goal was live TV," Nafzger told a news conference.
"We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if
you are ever going to use them -- we are going to keep them'," he
said.
They found good copies in the archives of CBS news and some recordings
called kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson Space Center.
Lowry, best known for restoring old Hollywood films, has been
digitizing these along with some other bits and pieces to make a new
rendering of the original landing.
Nafzger does not worry that using a Hollywood-based company might fuel
the fire of conspiracy theorists who believe the entire lunar program
that landed people on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972 was
staged on a movie set or secret military base.
"This company is restoring historic video. It mattered not to me where
the company was from," Nafzger said.
"The conspiracy theorists are going to believe what they are going to
believe," added Lowry Digital Chief Operating Officer Mike Inchalik.
And there may be some unofficial copies of the original broadcast out
there somewhere that were taken from a NASA video switching center in
Sydney, Australia, the space agency said. Nafzger said someone else in
Sydney made recordings too.
"These tapes are not in the system," Nafzger said. "We are certainly
open to finding them."