3 ms·

How did they lose that? Sigh...

giantrobot 3y ago
Big reel to reel data tapes didn't have the best labeling and could be stored in cans that might not match the spindle's label. I could imagine it pretty easy for a tape to be stored in a mismatched can and then get sent off to a storage area. The "right" can with the wrong spindle ends up in the archive while the "wrong" can gets sent off to a warehouse or reused or whatever. Apollo was a huge project with a lot of people. All it takes is one person too busy to notice they put a tape in the wrong can.
adastra22 3y ago
It really comes down to “no thought to preserve it”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes
- Frost1x 3y ago
  >In the early 1980s, NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage and it is likely the tapes were erased and reused at this time. Wow, just wow. That's mind boggling. I actually had no idea. While I get that hindsight is 20/20, it doesn't take too much intuition to realize if you're sharing something worldwide or the rest of the world watched it, you should probably keep the highest quality copy. It's like you filmed Gangnam Style in 8k, downsampled to 720p for YouTube and then threw the original copy away even after you saw the views climbing to 10s of thousands (or in this case, 10s of millions). I've worked in some cash strapped research labs so I get the need to repurpose when budgets are tight but come on. I don't know how expensive the medium was but I would have caused quite a stir about preserving something like this. Hell, I've preserved news broadcasts of work I've been involved with that made it to the news that I have to this day, and that is only significant to me really.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    It may have been accidental. There were storage rooms absolutely filled with data tapes from Apollo. These were mostly recordings of the Apollo science instruments, which were left on the surface and kept broadcasting seismic and other data for years. Of course the first couple of tapes had all the mission data, but it’s likely the people reusing the tapes thought it was just already-processed (and duplicated) seismic data they were wiping. It wasn’t until 2009 that NASA realized the error.

Big reel to reel data tapes didn't have the best labeling and could be stored in cans that might not match the spindle's label. I could imagine it pretty easy for a tape to be stored in a mismatched can and then get sent off to a storage area. The "right" can with the wrong spindle ends up in the archive while the "wrong" can gets sent off to a warehouse or reused or whatever. Apollo was a huge project with a lot of people. All it takes is one person too busy to notice they put a tape in the wrong can.

adastra22 3y ago

It really comes down to “no thought to preserve it”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes

Frost1x 3y ago
>In the early 1980s, NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage and it is likely the tapes were erased and reused at this time. Wow, just wow. That's mind boggling. I actually had no idea. While I get that hindsight is 20/20, it doesn't take too much intuition to realize if you're sharing something worldwide or the rest of the world watched it, you should probably keep the highest quality copy. It's like you filmed Gangnam Style in 8k, downsampled to 720p for YouTube and then threw the original copy away even after you saw the views climbing to 10s of thousands (or in this case, 10s of millions). I've worked in some cash strapped research labs so I get the need to repurpose when budgets are tight but come on. I don't know how expensive the medium was but I would have caused quite a stir about preserving something like this. Hell, I've preserved news broadcasts of work I've been involved with that made it to the news that I have to this day, and that is only significant to me really.
- adastra22 3y ago
  It may have been accidental. There were storage rooms absolutely filled with data tapes from Apollo. These were mostly recordings of the Apollo science instruments, which were left on the surface and kept broadcasting seismic and other data for years. Of course the first couple of tapes had all the mission data, but it’s likely the people reusing the tapes thought it was just already-processed (and duplicated) seismic data they were wiping. It wasn’t until 2009 that NASA realized the error.