AS Neil Armstrong prepared to take his “one small step” onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander’s door clicked on to capture that first human contact with the lunar surface. The ghostly images of the astronaut’s boot touching the soil record what may be the most iconic moment in NASA history, and a major milestone for mankind. Millions of television viewers around the world saw those fuzzy, moving images and were amazed, even mesmerised. What they didn’t know was that the Apollo 11 camera had actually sent back video far crisper and more dramatic—spectacular images that, remarkably, only a handful of people have ever seen. Only in recent years was the agency reminded of what it once had—clean and crisp first-man-on-the-moon video images that could be especially valuable now that NASA is planning a return trip. About 36 years after the tapes went into storage, NASA was suddenly eager to have them. There was just one problem: The tapes were nowhere to be found. What started as an informal search became an official hunt through archives, record centres and storage rooms throughout NASA facilities. Many months later, disappointed officials now report that the trail they followed has gone cold. Although the search continues, they acknowledge that the videos may be lost forever. “When we sent our camera up on the mission, everything about it was a first and a big unknown,” said Richard Nafzger, an engineer who was involved in the original transmission of the Apollo 11 images to Earth and is now part of the search to find them. “We might discover the tapes tomorrow, or we might reach a point where we have to say we can’t go any further. Right now, I would have to tell you their fate is pretty much a mystery,” he said of the tapes. Stanley Lebar, who had been in charge of developing the lunar camera, is also involved in the search. He can recite all the understandable reasons why he and his colleagues did not give the tapes the attention they deserved back in 1969—they were cumbersome, a highly specialised format that appeared to have limited value in the pre-digital age. “We all understood the importance of this event to history, to posterity, and so we all should have made sure those tapes were safe and secure,” said Lebar, 81. “I ask myself today, ‘Why the heck didn’t you think that way back then?’ The answer is that I just assumed that NASA was going to do it. But, unfortunately, that was a bad assumption.” Missions subsequent to Apollo 11 had video quality that was greatly improved. Apollo 11 had an unusually configured video feed. It was transmitted from the moon to ground sites in Australia and the Mojave Desert in California, where technicians reformatted the video for broadcast and transmitted long-distance over analog lines to Houston. A lot of video quality was lost during that process. The missing tapes are now something of an embarrassment to NASA, which last August put Goddard Space Flight Center’s deputy director, Dolly Perkins, in charge of the search. She is overseeing the hunt for the tapes and, perhaps more important right now, for memos and directives that might yield clues to their fate. “Typically, when we record at a ground site, we don’t preserve data tapes.” she said. “But here there is some indication that we didn’t destroy the tapes but stored them for some period of time.” But as Perkins well understands, there is a difference between the “mission perspective” and the historical and social value of these particular tapes.—Marc KAUFMAN / The Washington Post
