Not lost?
Nasa continues to believe it will find the lost records of the Apollo 11 mission.
Even science has a summer slump. More and more results then flood the media, which otherwise hardly find their way into reporting. With the series "Summer Hole Today" we would like to present a selection to you. Yesterday various news agencies reported that the American space agency has been searching for a year in vain for magnetic tapes with the original recordings of the first moon landing - among other things, they are also missing the historical ones Statement by astronaut Neil Armstrong when entering the moon on 20. July 1969: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Accordingly, Nasa currently only has several copies of the television broadcasts of the time, but they are of poorer quality than the originals. Given the technology now available, Nasa had planned to show the better original version to the public.
Two of more than 2,600 boxes of records that were first kept in the Washington National Archives after 1969 and then returned to NASA in the late 1970s are missing. However, the authority had not explicitly reclaimed the two boxes that are now missing. Also in these boxes are the Apollo 9 telemetry tapes, leading NASA engineers to believe that most of the footage related to the Apollo missions may be in these very boxes.
According to Nasa, the original recordings are probably still in the Goddard Space Flight Center, which then reclaimed the tapes, but they do not rule out another location either, so that the search will be continued for the time being. It remains to be seen whether a small sloppiness will turn into a great loss for mankind.
