Page 87 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

on the night of July 20, 1969. What the TV viewers didn't know is that they weren't seeing the best
images.

The astronauts actually beamed higher-quality footage back to Earth, but it was only seen by a small
number of people at three tracking stations.

Those original images were recorded and put into storage - somewhere. Now, a small crew of
retirees, space enthusiasts, and NASA employees are searching for a Moon landing that the world
has never seen.

Houston, The Image Is Degraded

One of them is Stan Lebar. On that historic night, he was 44 years old and sitting in Houston's
Mission Control Center building. His team at Westinghouse Corporation had spent five years
designing a TV camera that would work in the harsh lunar environment, and he was waiting to see
whether they had pulled it off.

When the lunar module touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, Neil Armstrong radioed in,
"Houston, uh, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Moments later, Mission Control asked
Buzz Aldrin to power up the camera: "Buzz, this is Houston, radio check and verify TV
circuit-breaker in."

As the camera powered up, Lebar and his colleagues in the TV lab finally saw a signal. It was just
a line on a screen, but it meant the camera was working.

"That's when we opened the champagne bottles," he recalls.

As the first images appeared on a screen in Houston's main mission-control room, the flight
directors were thrilled. But back in the TV lab, Lebar says the mood had changed.

"What disturbed us is when we saw the imagery, we knew that something had gone wrong," he says.

For hundreds of millions of people watching, the picture was truly amazing; it was, after all, live
footage from the Moon, some 240,000 miles away. But it was hard to make out what was what in
the dark, fuzzy scene. The astronauts' legs were ghostly as they came down the ladder.