How NASA lost moon pictures

Here's one for the "We never went to the moon" conspiracy theorists to chew over...

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.



Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We are working on the assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told the Herald. ... But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible... "There will only ever be one first moon walk."

Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard." ... "We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.

Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings. The format used by the original pictures beamed from the moon was not compatible with commercial technology used by television networks. So the images received at Parkes, and at tracking stations near Canberra and in California, were played on screens mounted in front of conventional television cameras.

... "The quality of what you saw on TV at home was substantially degraded" in the process, Mr Sarkissian said, creating the ghostly images of Armstrong and Aldrin that strained the eyes of hundreds of millions of people watching around the world. - SMH

They couldn't convert the video signal with all the money they had? If the Apollo video was fake, and I'm not saying it was, but *if* the first step on the moon took place on a sound stage, then they'd want to send out a low quality image so you wouldn't see the walls or cables in the background. A fake video could have been fed to these dish stations and then broadcast from there around the world.