[MSN] Tape of 1st Moon Landing Missing

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Tape of 1st Moon Landing Missing
Tuesday, August 15, 2006; Page A02

The government has misplaced the original recording of the first moon 
landing, including astronaut Neil Armstrong's famous "one small step for 
man, one giant leap for mankind," a NASA spokesman said yesterday.

Armstrong's moon walk, seen by millions of television viewers on July 
20, 1969, is among the transmissions that NASA has failed to turn up in 
a year of searching, spokesman Grey Hautaloma said.

"We haven't seen them for quite a while. We've been looking for over a 
year, and they haven't turned up," Hautaloma said.

The tapes also contain data about the health of the astronauts and the 
condition of the spacecraft. In all, about 700 boxes of transmissions 
from the Apollo lunar missions are missing, he said.

"I wouldn't say we're worried -- we've got all the data. Everything on 
the tapes we have in one form or another," Hautaloma said.

NASA has retained copies of the TV broadcasts and offers several clips 
on its Web site. But those images are of lower quality than the 
originals stored on the missing magnetic tapes.

Because NASA's equipment was not compatible with the TV technology of 
the day, the original transmissions had to be displayed on a monitor and 
reshot by a TV camera for broadcast.

Hautaloma said it is possible the tapes will be unplayable if they are 
found because they have degraded significantly over the years -- a 
problem common to magnetic tape and other recordable media.

The material was held by the National Archives but returned to NASA 
sometime in the late 1970s, he said.

"We're looking for paperwork to see where they last were," he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com