One small stuff up for Nasa

[Guest Steve R]

One giant cock-up for mankind

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... moon14.xml

 

 

[Guest Chainsaw]

ONLY in America!

 

 

[Guest Glenn]

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/ ... 71301.html

 

Rare film find may help NASA uncover the reel thingFootage of a small but important step 'discovered' here may solve a big mystery.

 

A REEL of film packed away in a personal collection and placed in storage 20 years ago could be a key to unlocking the mystery of the missing tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

 

The footage of Neil Armstrong's "one small step" on the moon is considered among the most important artefacts of the 20th century. But the original NASA tapes have been mislaid in a labyrinth of archives in the United States. It is now hoped that a reel of 16 millimetre film owned by two Australian music-film producers will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored ? if they still exist.

 

The grainy black and white television images broadcast to 600 million viewers on July 20, 1969, were actually a photocopy of a photocopy of the original images captured on the moon's surface. Only a handful of people ever saw the high-quality original images shot at 10 frames per second and beamed back to the Australian tracking station at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory in NSW.

 

When the images reached the tracking station, they were transferred onto one-inch, 60-frame-per-second tape and sent to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, at Houston, for safe keeping.

 

The footage broadcast to the world was actually shot by a television camera pointed at a television monitor receiving the images from the moon.

 

"What was broadcast to the world was nowhere near as good as what was received," said John Sarkissian of the Parkes observatory.

 

All the Apollo mission flights and moon landings were captured in this way and transferred onto one-inch tapes. The tapes were stored in 2614 boxes containing five reels of tape each and held for years in the National Archives in Maryland, outside Washington DC.

 

By 1984 most of those boxes were recalled and sorted at the Goddard Centre, but only two of 700 original Apollo 11 tapes have been found.

 

Australian film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton had all but forgotten that the pristine film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue. He had ordered the film for $US180 ($A236) from the Smithsonian museum in Washington in 1979 for use in a film he was making of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

 

"I had this idea that I could take segments out of Dark Side of the Moon and make them into a TV special," said Mr Clifton at his Sydney home last week. "On a visit to Washington, I went to Smithsonian and asked if they had any shots of rocket ships travelling. He said, 'well, we can give you highlights of the moon shot.'

 

"A week later a delivery came to my film studio in Los Angeles with the can of film. When I opened it up I was gobsmacked because instead of getting a couple of minutes I got nearly half an hour of a complete film. So I took a couple of shots out of it and cut it together with the Dark Side of the Moon demo for the Floyd. But I was so busy I never got a chance to finish it and the film just went into the vaults.

 

"I didn't think another thing about it until a few nights ago when I was watching television and it came on the news. And I thought 'I have got that stuff'."

 

Although former and retired NASA employees and Australian-based researchers have spent several years trying to find the missing tapes, NASA announced last week that it was launching a formal search.

 

"We have been searching for several years and have looked in all the obvious places," said Mr Sarkissian. "Now NASA has requested information and they will go over the paperwork trail.

 

"There were lots of films and highlights released at the time but the Clifton film is interesting because it came from the Smithsonian. We did get reports from former employees that some of the missing tapes were sent to the Smithsonian. It may be a possible basis to find the missing tape."

 

According to Mr Clifton's business partner, Dr Drew Thompson, their film of the moon landing contains images never released to the public. The pair have launched their own search of the Clifton vaults looking for documentation associated with the canister that is emblazoned with the NASA brand.

 

"There is definitely stuff here that people have not seen before," said Dr Thompson.