Well, it turns out the rumored and much-hoped-for recovery of the original Apollo 11 EVA video is not to be. After much searching and investigating, those involved have reached the inescapable conclusion that the tapes were likely over-recorded with material from later Apollo missions.
While instances of wedding videos being wiped-out by careless husbands recording football games have been sitcom fodder ever since the rise of Betamax, this is in a class by itself. Damn! Erasing the original video data from Apollo 11? Waaaaaah!
As someone who has been responsible for a rather large videotape inventory for the past couple dacades, though, I can actually understand how it could happen. Whenever an organization has conflicting pressures of needing to constantly make new recordings while at the same time not being able for budgetary reasons to purchase new recording media, there are strong pressures to re-use recording media one would rather preserve. It kinda sucks, but in the day to day world archiving things sometimes is a secondary concern... if it's even a concern at all.
And - to be perfectly honest - I don't think the REAL importance of the Apollo 11 landing will be realized within the lifetimes of those of us who experienced it. I mean, sure, we all knew it was "important", but I don't think we fully realize that 1,000 years from now Apollo 11 will probably be the only thing people will remember and/or care about from our era in history. Had we known, we would have taken better care to preserve the original tapes.
At least the search has been made to find the best surviving tapes so they can be cleaned up and preserved for the future. They do look much improved, and I appreciate the hard work of those doing the preservation, but "if only"...
And that makes me wonder about the future preservation of digital media. Back in my day, taking pictures, for example, required an investment in film and processing and the number of exposures you could take was, relatively speaking, highly limited. When you got your stack of 24 exposures, you had a physical artifact you were more likely to hold onto and store in a safe place. Now, you can store a gazillion images on a single memory card with great ease. But will they just get deleted and forgotten? Will it be a matter of "Oh. well, taking pictures is so effortless now..." it seems more a matter of instant gratification rather than a question of preserving things for the future. But we'll see. Just a word of advice for those of you young 'uns with digital pictures/video/recordings... make sure to back up your stuff and save it for the future. You never know what will be important to someone someday.
In other news, this 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 is a groove-fest for space nerds like me. I'm totally digging the streaming audio from NASA in which they're playing the Apollo 11 mission audio in real time (plus 40 years). AWESOME!!!
"I don't think we fully realize that 1,000 years from now Apollo 11 will probably be the only thing people will remember and/or care about from our era in history"
ReplyDeleteOnce again John, you're completely underestimating the amazing and timeless work of Brittany Spears.
"Now, you can store a gazillion images on a single memory card with great ease. But will they just get deleted and forgotten?"
There's another angle to that problem. Sure, storing data on our current optical or magnetic discs is infinitely less stable than painting on rocks in the south west.
The second problem is that even if this data survives a couple of decades, will we have the outdated/legacy hardware and software to access it?
Try this experiment. Set the date on your computer ahead 20 years. You'd be surprised how many applications no longer work. Thus, even if we find a working PC to access our data in 40 years, the PC will not be able to access it.
Of course you'll think that the new software we buy will be able to access those old files. Nope. Here's just one example to the contrary. Every time Microsoft releases a new office suite it drops support for prior file formats. I remember when I switched to Office 2000 I could no longer access all of my documents I created in an earlier version of Microsoft Works. I had to download an app to convert them.
Here's another example, back in the late 90s I used an electric typewriter that stored your documents on discs. Guess what, I have absolutely no way of accessing those discs. Every single paper I wrote in college on that device is lost.
I predict that in 40 years, this current period in history, the 90s through the 00s, will essentially be blank.