Houston, we have a problem. The Apollo 11 moon landings were one of the defining moments of the 20th century. In 1969, an estimated 600-million people watched the grainy black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking ”one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” as they became the first men to set foot on the surface of the moon.
But now the original recordings of those moments have been mislaid. The poor-quality images broadcast on television at the time were video recordings of the original film. Shot at 10 frames a second, the original is much clearer and is thought to include details that are not discernible on the television recordings.
The grainy television recordings have buoyed the many theories that suggest the moon landings never took place, and were instead a Cold War propaganda ploy. Critics point to the lack of stars in the broadcast images of the night sky, as well as the multiple shadows — suggesting, they argue, a second light source, such as a spotlight — and the fluttering of the United States flag on the breezeless moon.
”The conspiracy theorists have been with us since day one on this,” said a Nasa spokesperson. ”We hope that when we go back to the moon again they’ll finally believe us.”
The original tapes of the moon landings were shot from a camera mounted on top of the Eagle lunar lander. These were sent back to three tracking stations, two in Australia and one in California. After being converted to the 60 frames a second used for television broadcast, they were sent by analogue signal to Houston for broadcast, further degrading the image quality.
A year after the landings, the original film was copied on to magnetic tape and delivered to Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. All but two of the 700 boxes of magnetic tapes are now missing.
”I would simply like to clarify that the tapes are not lost as such,” John Sarkissian, of the Parkes Observatory in Australia, who has been involved in the search for the tapes, told the website space.com. ”We are confident that they are stored at Goddard … we just don’t know where precisely.”
The data-evaluation lab at Goddard is the only known place to have the equipment and expertise to play back the tapes, according to Sarkissian, but the lab is scheduled for closure in October. Even if the lab’s equipment is saved, the tapes may be of little use. ”They are so old and fragile, it’s not certain they could even be played,” said the Nasa spokesperson. — Guardian Unlimited Â