Lost Apollo 11 Moonwalk Tapes Restored (VIDEO)

After a three-year search for the lost Apollo 11 tapes and an exhaustive six-year restoration project, digitally remastered footage of the historic Moonwalk is almost complete, hanks to the efforts of a dedicated tape restoration team, the enhanced footage surpasses the quality of the live broadcast that stunned an international TV audience on the day of the historic event in 1969.

A five-minute highlights reel (below) exhibits a number of the Moonwalk’s most remarkable moments including Neil Armstrong’s descent onto the lunar surface; the raising of the ‘Stars and Stripes’; and the famed phone-call between astronauts Scott Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and President Nixon.

“What we have now is the clearest record of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk TV for future generations,” said Colin Mackeller, an Apollo 11 historian who edited the footage and was a member of the restoration team.

On the day of the Moonwalk, three tracking stations – NASA’s Goldstone in California, and Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes Observatory in Australia (featured in 2000 movie The Dish) – were tasked with recording the live footage transmitted from the Moon. The images were captured by a single small video camera, attached to the lunar module, but the camera used an unusual format, slow-scan television (SSTV), which is incompatible with commercial television broadcast.

As a result, the SSTV transmission had to be converted in real-time into a standard broadcast signal before being sent to the NASA flight centre in Houston for distribution to the TV networks.

As Armstrong began his descent of the ladder, problems with equipment settings at NASA’s Goldstone which had its settings wrong and resulted in a dark, blurry picture being televised worldwide. While technicians in America rushed to rectify the problem, Australian networks acted quickly by switching to the clearer feed coming from Honeysuckle Creek. Having seen the Australian feed, Houston switched as well, just in time for the world to see the indelible image of Armstrong stepping down onto the Moon’s surface.

Some of the best footage of the 1969 Moonwalk. This film was lost in Australian archives for many years and was badly damaged when found. ( Mackellar’s highlights reel begins with the original dark Goldstone footage but a few second in it switches to the Honeysuckle Creek picture to show a much clearer image of Armstrong on the ladder.

When the Apollo 11 Tape Search and Restoration Team was formed in 2003, the intention was to track down the tapes onto which the unconverted SSTV was first recorded. It was hoped that with modern conversion techniques a picture could be produced that hadn’t been degraded by the accumulative effects of conversion and satellite transmission.

However, a three-year search for the SSTV tapes proved fruitless. It transpired that NASA had taken all the original tapes and erased them for use on subsequent missions. Resigned to the fact that the original SSTV tapes were lost forever, the restoration team set about tracking down the highest quality footage among the converted recordings of the first broadcast.

Another painstaking search followed, but within several years an astonishing number of long-forgotten tapes had been amassed from various archives. While the more badly degraded tapes would require extensive restoration work – including the only video from Honeysuckle Creek of Armstrong descending the ladder – the team had cause to celebrate.

Once the best footage had been pieced together, NASA contracted a specialist film restoration company to enhance the degraded black and white film and convert it into its current digital format.It is anticipated that the full two and a half hours of restored footage will soon be made available to the public.

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The Apollo 11 mission was the first manned mission to land on the Moon. It was the fifth human spaceflight of Project Apollo and the third human voyage to the Moon. Launched on July 16, 1969, it carried Mission Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, Jr. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon, while Collins orbited above.

The mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s, which he expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/a…

Michael Collins: “… The Saturn V rocket which put us in orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked flawlessly … We have always had confidence that this equipment will work properly. All this is possible only through the blood, sweat, and tears of a number of a people …All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all of those, I would like to say, ‘Thank you very much.’”

Buzz Aldrin: “… This has been far more than three men on a mission to the Moon; more, still, than the efforts of a government and industry team; more, even, than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown … Personally, in reflecting on the events of the past several days, a verse from Psalms comes to mind. ‘When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is man that Thou art mindful of him?’”

Neil Armstrong: “The responsibility for this flight lies first with history and with the giants of science who have preceded this effort; next with the American people, who have, through their will, indicated their desire; next with four administrations and their Congresses, for implementing that will; and then, with the agency and industry teams that built our spacecraft, the Saturn, the Columbia, the Eagle, and the little EMU, the spacesuit and backpack that was our small spacecraft out on the lunar surface. We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft; who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those craft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11.”