The Apollo 11 missing tapes were those that were recorded on telemetry data tape from
Apollo 11's slow-scan television (SSTV) broadcast in its raw format at the time of the first
Moon landing in 1969 and afterwards lost.
The data tapes were used to backup all transmitted data (video and telemetry).
In the early 2000s, a team of retired NASA employees and contractors attempted but failed
to locate the tapes.
However, recently released records revealed that a Pittsburgh collector held over 300
data reels and two NASA computers from the Apollo missions.
These recordings could have been linked to previously unknown information on space exploration,
but NASA insisted on the script's destruction.
Why did they request this?
Could they be preventing the world from comprehending specific realities about space, or are they
hiding a very crucial secret?
Join us as we investigate the missing NASA Apollo tapes discovered in a garage and demanded
to be burned by NASA.
When Neil Armstrong prepared to take his one little foot onto the moon in July 1969, a
reinforced video camera concealed beneath the Lander's door was activated to catch the
historic moment.
The chilling images of the astronauts' boots impacting the ground capture what may be the
most iconic moment in NASA history, as well as a significant turning point for humanity.
Millions of television watchers across the world were surprised and even intrigued by
the fuzzy shifting pictures.
They were unaware that the camera on Apollo 11 had returned dramatic and sharper video,
magnificent photos that few people had ever seen before.
Despite the fact that the televised photos were of poor quality, the landing was such
a triumph that NASA Engineers who examined them understood what the general audience
was missing.
The wonderful original Moon tapes were promptly kept and lost.
The agency was only recently made aware of the importance of its Archive of clear, sharp
first-man-on-the-Moon video footage, which may be especially essential now that NASA
is planning a return mission.
NASA was keen to retrieve the tapes 36 years after they were placed in storage.
However, the recordings were nowhere to be found, which was not the only concern.
What started as a casual enquiry turned into a formal search of NASA's archives, record
centers, and storage facilities.
After a significant amount of time, the officials are dismayed to report that the track they
had been following is no longer there.
Despite their ongoing attempts, they accept that the videos may be irretrievably lost.
Fast forward to 2015, only a few weeks before Christmas, when NASA learns of an exciting
discovery.
Two massive computers and 325 magnetic data reels from the Apollo space flight era, which
launched the first humans to the moon, were discovered in the basement of a deceased Pennsylvania
man's home.
The over 40-year-old relics from NASA's Goddard space flight center and jet propulsion laboratory
had worn out, but they were still in serviceable condition.
Except for their prior owner, no one knew what was on them.
The antiques were given to the man's friend who is a metal scrapper, and the man who claimed
he wanted to do the right thing by returning the items to the agency did so.
Pioneer 8 and Pioneer 9 were two space missions that sent satellites into solar orbit in the
mid-1960s.
The Helios A probe flew 46.5 million kilometers from the sun, a record-breaking perihelion
distance at the time.
Other recordings mentioned the more well-known Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes, which were
in charge of providing the first detailed images of Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s.
According to one story, several former NASA researchers believe the latter is missing
data that has yet to be discovered.
Staff at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, worked over the next
five months to try to extract information from the data reels.
Motherboard's initial knowledge of the probe came from the OIG report on NASA's officer
of inspector general, which it obtained by making a request under the Freedom of Information
Act.
These exact papers were also covered by ARS Technica.
The name of the final owner of the recording has been redacted in the OIG report.
Goddard archive has searched for significant evidence while reviewing whether any missions
had data gaps with scientists.
For example, NASA confessed in 2006 that it most likely recycled 45 tapes containing the
original video of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's July 20, 1969 moonwalk.
NASA is still haunted by the Apollo 11 recording blunder.
"I should add that I keep using "Apollo" as an example of what we would consider historically
significant only because of the Apollo tape loss issue a few years ago," a Goddard employee
whose name has been removed wrote to colleagues in April 2016.
Because they were unable to uncover any labels indicating Apollo content, there is some doubt
about the legitimacy of the data on the tapes.
Copies were regularly made for the objectives of data extraction and utilization, as well
as for backup purposes.
"If you only have one tape of the data and it's destroyed by a tape drive, demagnetized
by a buffer, or has coffee spilled on it," says Larry Kellogg, a retired NASA systems
engineer who worked with Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 equipment.
As a result, it is usual practice to create several backup copies."
A total of 215 reels were left unlabeled, owing to the fact that labels were usually
removed before tapes were scratched or reused.
NASA believes they are blank.
Magnetic tape was an expensive recording medium at the time; therefore, NASA regularly overwrote
reels to save money.
According to Keith Cowing, a former NASA space biologist and editor, as well as a NASA watcher,
the labelled reels could have been copies of copies of copies.
"I'll bet they're not original with these many tapes."
But it's unimportant," he said, "since I heard someone has a collection of these missions'
data."
Many facts of the investigation remain foggy due to privacy exemptions, and the identities
of all people involved, including the collector, have been redacted.
The motherboard, on the other hand, confirmed that the tapes were later destroyed.
According to NASA Goddard's Supply and Equipment management branch office, "all magnetic data
tape reels were picked up by the agency recycler, UNICOR, on the 9th of February 2016."
"GSFC received a certificate of destruction from the UNICOR processing facility on June
9, 2016," it stated.
NASA's procedural guidelines, which outline processes for the identification and destruction
of possible artefacts, dictated their disposal.
According to one NASA archivist who examined the artefacts, retrieving their data would
have been prohibitively expensive.
Even then, it was probable that nothing could be saved from the reels due to their extreme
moldiness.
The NASA rejected computers were left at the men's Pittsburgh house.
Someone close to the collector instructed the metal recycler, "Please convince NASA
these objects weren't stolen," alleging that they were supplied to him by a nearby IBM
location.
"NASA takes record retention very seriously, so when we learned about these former NASA
assets.
NASA conducted a new inspection in 2015-2016," according to a NASA spokeswoman.
"NASA determined that the magnetic tapes were in all likelihood erased prior to their original
disposition," the researchers added.
Furthermore, the tapes were heavily contaminated by mold.
After considering these facts, the agency concluded that the magnetic cassettes had
no inherent or informative value to the agency.
However, if the dates on the tapes are correct, they correspond to a period in NASA history
when hundreds of data reels were destroyed, abandoned, or repurposed.
As a result, several of NASA's older missions had data gaps.
According to the study, the US General Accounting Office GAO reprimanded the agency in a 1990
report to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for neglecting to archive
potentially critical data.
According to reviewers, NASA never submitted required data for 18 of 263 key science missions
between 1968 and 1987 to an archiving facility.
NASA projected that 30 to 59 percent of flight data from the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 missions
was archived at Goddard's National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC), the agency's permanent
repository for space science mission data—a level of archival effort the NSSDC characterized
as "good."
According to the GAO report, one NASA data user "released thousands of tapes because
he could not afford continued storage and was reluctant to raise the retention issue
all the way up to the Goddard director," and "authorized the destruction of every other
carton of tapes."
in order to salvage some of them.
When explaining why so much data had not been kept, NASA noted a lack of written agreements
between itself and researchers, as well as insufficient procedures for the archiving
of some data.
Since then, the agency has partnered with the National Archives and Records Administration
to implement a new records management system that strictly restricts what material can
be deleted.
NASA later converted Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 MDRs, which were in bad condition at the
time, to Optical CDs for modern use, and the old MDRs were discarded.
Kellogg, however, couldn't tell whether the Pennsylvania collection contained MDRs without
seeing the reels.
One possible, albeit speculative, match could be the lost data from the Pioneer 10 Jupiter
encounter, which provided us with unprecedented photographs of the Gas Giant and its moons
on December 4, 1973.
In 1980, NASA found that Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were slowing down in interstellar space
and deviating from their planned trajectories—an event now known as the "Pioneer anomaly,"
and attributed to heat forces pushing the spacecraft backward.
Decades later, in order to study the phenomenon, a team of researchers got Pioneer MDRs from
Kellogg, who had cloned the information onto a modern computer.
However, a review of the archives revealed that nine days of Pioneer 10 MDRs from 1973
were missing.
Data for these days was never transcribed from original MDRs to Optical CDs, according
to NASA transcription records.
"Maybe someone wanted to see if they could get the data used for making the image of
Jupiter and generate an image using newer software," Kellogg speculated.
"We couldn't confirm that.
You just have those flashes of memories of something that might have been said several
years back and you are not sure it wasn't a dream."
NASA made no mention of the missing Pioneer 10 tapes in its inquiry but did praise the
"heroic effort" to recover data from the anomaly.
When asked if NASA evaluated the missing recordings during its audit, a spokesman simply stated
that Pioneer was thoroughly discussed.
The least intriguing aspect of this narrative is how someone managed to amass so much NASA
stuff.
NASA often auctioned off surplus items during the 1970s and 1980s.
Technology got obsolete, funds ran out, or there simply wasn't enough room.
Some objects are still in private collections today, while others were reused as scrap.
Other times, staff and contractors took materials that would have been destroyed otherwise.
This was very common during the Apollo Era.
Let us know what you think NASA is trying to hide in the comments section below.