http://news.skymania.com/2009/07/apollo-11-moonwalk-video-restored.html

Congratulations!

And that Bill Wood guy, he’s obviously one of “them”.

Sheesh. Sometimes I think you guys wouldn’t see the plain truth if it came up and bit you.

P.S. And I don’t care what new tapes you show me, with today’s computer technology they could easily make a fake to further hide the truth.

I was wondering if you happened to know who the operator of the scan converter was and if he is still alive? I believe his name was Bob, but I’m bot sure. Apparently he wasn’t supposed to have been the one working at the time of the transmission but this changed when the EVA was rescheduled at the last minute.

Regarding the original tapes, I’d like to know your opinion as to whether they exist and what you think happened to them. Having read quite a bit about it, I believe they probably are still around and are at Goddard. They were returned to there some time in the late 1970’s. I believe that the most likely case is that they were never properly cataloged and filed and that they are sitting in one of the many massive, disorganized, collections of tapes at Goddard.

Why do I know this?

I was on duty at the Goldstone MSFN station during the Apollo 11 EVA. Mincom M22 recorders were also used at the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek MSFN stations in Australia. Anyone wanting to read the straight scoop on what was done go to this ALSJ web page: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf

In the event that there are no compatible playback decks in existence, it wouldn’t necessarily be all that difficult to fabricate one. Reading magnetic tape is not that difficult of a problem. It would be an issue of running the tapes over reader heads and reassembling the data. It’s not necessarily an issue whether or not the same standard of reading the tapes is possible. Even if the data pulled off of them is not kept in proper tracking by the machine, that can be done in software.

There are examples of customized tape reading systems built to pull data off of tapes for forensic work. I recall seeing something about a company that had demonstrated retreiving voice off of degraded or erased tapes using a system they built where the tape passed over 12 different reading heads, each one reading a narrow area of the tape. They had suggested they could possibly retrieve audio from the famous Nixon “Tape Gap”

        Robert said:

See this news article from 2006 http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200611/s1779983.htm

That is a bit old, isn’t it? three years and still nothing. I know they did find some apollo era NASA tapes, but they didn’t turn out to be the ones with the video on them. They were from other missions or contained other data. I think we would have heard of it in the past three years if they did.

I’d really appreciate it.

mx5mx5@hotmail.com

Thanks:-)

How do I know? Our computer museum is supplying those special old tape-drives… Stay tuned.