- [Astronaut] Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
All engines running.
Lift off.
We have a lift off 32 minutes past the hour.
Liftoff on Apollo 11.
(rocket engines roaring)
- 50 years ago,
the world witnessed an unprecedented milestone.
An impossible achievement.
The manifestation of human curiosity,
technology, and sheer force of will.
Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon
in an event broadcast live to over 500 million people.
A small camera, strapped upside down to the Apollo 11
Lunar Module, transmitted this incredible moment to Earth.
In stark black and white at 10 frames per second.
The seven pound Westinghouse SSTV space camera
was a technological feat.
But, there was a problem.
The space camera couldn't broadcast in the right resolution
or frame rate for television.
So, in order to show the world this momentous occasion
engineers at NASA tracking stations
took the lunar signal,
displayed it on a 10-inch video monitor,
and used TV cameras to literally film the monitor.
This recording, with different contrast, brightness
and resolution was broadcast worldwide.
However, the original, raw, high resolution stream
was also recorded onto one-inch telemetry tapes
as a backup.
Those historically valuable tapes were stored away
until the early 1980's.
Which is when NASA completely lost track of them.
That's right, NASA lost the original recordings
of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
Well, maybe lost isn't quite the right word.
The original tapes were most likely reused, or overwritten,
with low resolution satellite imagery
for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Because they were running out of tapes.
Gone.
Seemingly, forever.
(radio static)
- But that's not the end of the story.
In 2006, NASA announced they were going to try to track down
any original high-resolution copies.
The search team was headed by Richard Nafzger,
a former NASA engineer who oversaw
the original Apollo 11 broadcast,
along with Stan Lebar, the man who designed
the original Westinghouse lunar camera
and other key figures involved in the 1969 broadcast.
In an article by Wired, the team described the process
of hunting through four million boxes
at the Washington National Record Center.
These records are not organized, not digitized,
and not efficiently cataloged.
Thousands of boxes were destroyed by a sprinkler system.
140,000 tapes from the Apollo era
were checked out and never returned.
Some of the places that they were sent
had their contents destroyed, erased,
or simply degraded through bad storage.
- The records clearly showed
that there was an inescapable conclusion
that this team has reached, and that is
that these 45 tapes were included
in the several hundred thousand that were pulled out,
re certified, degaussed, and put back into the network.
The slow-scan recordings are no longer.
- Yes.
The original lost Apollo 11 tapes
are most likely overwritten, outdated satellite imagery.
But that didn't mean they came up with nothing.
Their search resulted in unmuddied, high resolution copies
from the original broadcast recordings.
For the first time in decades,
new, high-resolution images and video
were available to the public,
never before seen quite like this.
- [Armstrong] That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.