Submission + - NASA put a man on the moon then lost the videotape
sr0tu writes: "Wired has published a story "One Giant Screwup for Mankind" on the search for the missing Apollo 11 moon tapes.
The goal of the Apollo 11 mission wasn't merely to get a man on the moon. It was to send back a live television feed so that everyone could see it. Not long ago, Stan Lebar who had developed the camera that could capture the most memorable moment of the 20th century learned why the footage had looked like mush: The transfer and broadcast had degraded the image badly, like a third-generation photocopy. "What the world saw was some bastardized thing," says Lebar, now 81. "Posterity deserves more than that."
Now Lebar and a crew of seasoned space cowboys are trying to get that original footage and show it to the world. There is just one problem: NASA has lost the tapes."
The goal of the Apollo 11 mission wasn't merely to get a man on the moon. It was to send back a live television feed so that everyone could see it. Not long ago, Stan Lebar who had developed the camera that could capture the most memorable moment of the 20th century learned why the footage had looked like mush: The transfer and broadcast had degraded the image badly, like a third-generation photocopy. "What the world saw was some bastardized thing," says Lebar, now 81. "Posterity deserves more than that."
Now Lebar and a crew of seasoned space cowboys are trying to get that original footage and show it to the world. There is just one problem: NASA has lost the tapes."
