One Giant Screwup for Mankind

NASA managed to put a man on the moon and broadcast the event live to half a billion people on earth. The footage wasn't great, but we were glad to see it anyway. It turns out that the images from the moon to the earth were pretty good, but when they were relayed to NASA and then to broadcast TV, the quality degraded. However, the earth receiving station in Australia recorded the signal in rather good quality. But where is that tape? Stan Lebar, who was in charge of the original broadcast in 1969, and Apollo video engineer Dick Nafzger went searching.
After schmoozing his way into the stacks and sifting through boxes for months, Lebar found evidence that more than 140,000 tapes from the Apollo era had been checked out of the Records Center between 1979 and 1985 and sent back to the Goddard Space Flight Center. But from there, Lebar fell straight into a black hole. At Goddard, there was no record of where the footage had gone. So the tape hunters hit the phones and the Net, scouring the globe for Goddard retirees who might recall the boxes. It didn't go well. "We're dealing with memories here," Nafzger says, "and those are pretty frail."

Personally, I think they should look in the big warehouse next to crate that holds the Ark of the Covenant. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

(image credit: Flickr user evalin)

Update: We may see those original tapes yet. -Thanks, Ivan!

Um, this article is from 2007. The tapes have been found and some of the high quality footage is already on YouTube.

World Exclusive: NASA Finds Missing Moon Landing Tapes
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/110442/WORLD-EXCLUSIVE-NASA-finds-missing-moon-landing-tapes

I seem to remember boingboing ran a few of them recently as well.
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This made me think of an excellent movie I need to see again, but can't remember the title. It's about that Australian receiving station and the moon landing, starring Sam Neill. Anyone?
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@Johnny Cat - My first reaction was Capricorn One, but that was with James Brolin. The only thing I know of with Sam Neill was a TV Mini-Series called Space.
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