Page 88 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

"So they were saying, 'This is great!'" recalls Lebar. "And the truth of the matter was, it was being
degraded something awful."

Converting the Originals

The images were being degraded because the lunar camera was recording in a format that was
incompatible with commercial-television broadcasts. So the footage had to be converted to the right
format.

Here's how it worked: The lunar camera was sending images to three tracking stations: Goldstone
in California, and Honeysuckle Creek and Pa kes in Australia. At these stations, the original footage
could be displayed on a monitor.

To convert the originals, engineers essentially took a commercial television camera and aimed it at
the monitor. The resulting image is what was sent to Houston, and on to the world.

"And any time you just point a camera at a screen, that's obviously not the best way to get the best
picture," says Richard Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Maryland. He worked with Apollo's lunar TV program, and says that conversion was the best they
could do at the time.

"We're talking 1969. In today's digital world, it's pretty much a relic. But that's what it was," he
says.

The original lunar footage did get recorded - onto 14-inch spools of magnetic tape, along with
telemetry data. And by 1970, the tapes had made their way to a giant government facility known as
the National Records Center in Suitland, Md. Soon after that, records show that NASA brought the
tapes to Goddard for "permanent retention."

A Race Against Time

Fast forward to April 2002. Someone who'd worked at one of the Australian tracking stations finds
a tape in his garage. He thinks it's a copy he made of the original, high-quality footage. It goes to
Building 25 at Goddard Space Flight Center, which houses the Data Evaluation Lab. This lab is full
of giant blue cabinets that hold 40-year-old playback machines.

"This is equipment that would process any tapes we find of the original television," says Nafzger,
who adds that this lab is the only place left that can play NASA tapes from the Apollo era.

It turned out, the Australian tape wasn't the Moonwalk; it was a simulation from 1967. But it made
Nafzger and others keen to find the originals.

Unfortunately, no one has been able to. Nothing suggests that the tapes were moved from Goddard
or destroyed. Yet there's also no record of where exactly they're supposed to be.
[Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5578853]