|
WE PUT A MAN ON THE MOON, BUT (D'OH!) NASA CAN'T FIND THE VIDEOTAPE |
|
After schmoozing his way into the stacks and sifting through boxes for months, Lebar found evidence that more than 140,000 tapes from the Apollo era had been checked out of the Records Center between 1979 and 1985 and sent back to the Goddard Space Flight Center. But from there, Lebar fell straight into a black hole.
"It's so black! You can hardly see it. Light just falls into it." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams At Goddard, there was no record of where the footage had gone.
"Is it some kind of Galactic hyper hearse?" -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams So the tape hunters hit the phones and the Net, scouring the globe for Goddard retirees who might recall the boxes. It didn't go well. "We're dealing with memories here," Nafzger says, "and those are pretty frail." Goddard's deputy director, Dolly Perkins, admits that there's no central administrator or database to track what comes into and out of NASA. It's the domain of each NASA facility to "make decisions about what's valuable or not," Perkins says. That means the boxes can come out of the Records Center and sit in someone's office forever -- or be decommissioned and trashed. Then Wood got a good tip. Some of his sources recalled sending 14-inch magnetic reels to a storage area in a building called Goddard Corporate Park. "I thought I'd hit the mother lode," Wood says. He was wrong. Wood soon discovered that storage facility had been closed for years. "Nearly all the stuff that was there was destroyed," he says. Then he hesitates. "I need to be careful here. Would you cross out the word destroyed?"
"Doy. Doyo!" -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams It was also possible that the tapes were "degaussed" -- erased so they could be used again, a fairly standard practice at the time. In short, no one knows what became of these priceless minutes of historic footage. It's a sad and confusing result, fitting for NASA. Once, the moon landing seemed like the prelude to all our sci-fi fantasies made real. The manned conquest of the solar system would surely follow. But budgets and ambitions have been scaled back so drastically that even the precious data logged during the golden age of space exploration may be lost forever.
" ... the end of history itself." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams Part of the problem was Cold War secrecy: Many key technological innovations of the space program were purposely destroyed so they would never fall into the wrong hands ...
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams but most of the loss can be attributed to more mundane issues, like poor record keeping, outdated storage systems, and mortality. In 1999, Joe Miller, a USC neurobiologist investigating microbial life on Mars, asked to see tapes from the '70s Viking probe -- only to discover that NASA hadn't maintained official archives. "The programmers who knew the format had died," Miller says. (Luckily, the original investigators had saved hard copies.) In October 2006, Lebar and Nafzger visit the Data Evaluation Lab. It's about to be shut down as a cost-cutting measure. Floor tiles are missing, gutted computers are everywhere, and intestine-like coils of electrical cables burst from the ground. "Anything hot in here?" Nafzger asks as he steps gingerly over a wire, his necktie flapping against his short-sleeved button-down shirt.
"DISASTER AREA: BANNED. Boy being meets girl being beneath a silvery moon which then explodes for no adequately explored reason. Many worlds have now banned their act altogether." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams They show me the analog recorder, the last link to the original data. This device was slated for the scrap heap as well. But thanks to the persistent pestering of the old Apollo vets, the device and the facility will be spared for the duration of the search. Nafzger is holding out hope that the tapes will surface.
"A sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence ..." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams If and when they do, they'll be looped through the machines -- and history, once and for all, will be properly preserved. In the meantime, he'll keep firing up the recorder every couple of weeks to make sure it still functions. "If you don't allow it to work once in a while," Nafzger says, "it will die." Halfway across the world in Australia, Mackellar is keeping the faith. "I've prayed for the tapes to be found," he confesses in a late-night email. "Obviously, I would like to see the better TV image -- and I know that those who worked hard to get the pictures from the moon would be delighted to see what they have missed all these years. But I'm praying for something more than that -- that somehow this whole thing may help the men and women who think about this to reflect on their own mortality. The tapes won't last forever -- and neither will our lives on this earth."
"UNDERGROUND: THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!" -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams NASA now officially acknowledges that the tapes are missing and has given Nafzger permission to spend part of his workday searching for them. They may yet turn up: Scores of reels of telemetry data from lunar-surface experiments were recently uncovered in a basement at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. In the meantime, the agency considers Apollo 11 a job well done. "We, as citizens, will be disappointed if we cannot find the tapes," Perkins says. "But NASA met the requirement of the mission."
"A party of young conservatives from Sirius B." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
|
