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NASA's new restored footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing

Lisa Katayama at 9:26 am Thu, Jul 16, 2009

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To honor the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA has just released these brand new restored videos of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic first steps on the moon. The space agency is working with Lowry Digital in Burbank to restore tapes from the July 20, 1969 moonwalk &mdash the project in its entirety will be completed in the fall, but they're offering a sneak peek at some of the iconic moments, like Neil Armstrong (above) and Buzz Aldrin (below) taking their first steps on the moon, starting right now. These clips show side-by-side comparisons of the footage stored in the NASA archives vs. the never-seen-before newly restored footage. Stay tuned for more reporting about the "lost" Apollo 11 tapes and an interview with Buzz Aldrin on BBG on Monday. Below, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin raising the American flag on the moon's surface: Footage courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

I'm a contributing editor here at Boing Boing. I also have a blog (TokyoMango), a book (Urawaza), and I freelance for Wired, Make, the NY Times Magazine, PRI's Studio360, etc. I'm @tokyomango on Twitter.

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  • noen

    Hey! You ever try to cost out keeping those aliens frozen? The paperwork alone will kill ya!

  • Anonymous

    “Glad they finally found the tapes”…. they were in Stanley Kubrick’s garage all along………
    baaa baaa black sheep

  • yex13

    Did they stop making new videotape in the late 60′s or was it so expensive that they absolutely had to record over the Moon landing and the first Super Bowl?

  • Anonymous

    The “original” doesn’t look like tape at all. You can see the white spots from a kinescope film of the original transmission.

    The TV networks, CBS, NBC and ABC probably have video of the landing they recorded from the NASA feed.

    I wonder why NASA went back to a kinescope to make this version rather than the networks’ video tapes?

  • Anonymous

    This is getting better all the time. First they manage to somehow lose the schematics for the lunar landing module. And now, as for the original tapes showing the landing, they say they accidentally taped over them….?

  • Sork

    First!!!

    Yes they were the first on the moon.

  • Anonymous

    If you think the first moon landing was faked, then all of the moon landings were faked.

  • stupidjerk

    Fake.

  • Anonymous

    40 years of technological evolution and they managed to make it more blurry?

  • Brainspore

    Is Armstrong still first on the moon in this version or does Greedo beat him out the door?

  • InsertFingerHere

    I can still see the strings.

    I heard that the tapes still exist, but they were recorded on a special tape format, very fine quality. The units used for playing back those tapes no longer function, and the tapes are slowly degrading.

  • eti

    Anyone made the joke yet that this happened on the 20th of “Jew lie”?

    No? OK. Never mind.

  • craniac

    Buzz Aldrin twitters about BoingBoing:

    http://twitter.com/therealBuzz/status/2541519961

  • Takuan

    the Klan are moon landing deniers? Makes sense.

  • Fiddy

    Yes, NASA recycled the Apollo 11 tapes because they couldn’t afford to purchase new tape for an ever-growing amount of satellite data. NASA Management made a prudent business decision because the cost of archiving this material probably far exceeded the savings they would achieve by recycling it. Some may feel this was the wrong decision, but I’ll bet the person who approved the action was commended for his/her thriftiness and eco-friendly genius. Remember that the mantra was “Reduce/Re-use/Re-cycle” to keep the planet green and healthy. They probably received a bonus as well.

    TV stations have been doing this for decades because it was too expensive to archive old shows that they never imagined anyone in the future might want to watch, and videotapes could be used over and over and over again. As a video editor in the late 1980′s and 1990′s, needing lots of 3/4″ tapes for off-line editing, I grabbed a bunch of old cooking shows and infomercials on U-Matic cassettes from an audio/video warehouse that sold them to me for $1 each. It was a very common practice, and no, I never bothered to watch the shows before recording over the old material.

    Now that the digital revolution has made storage of this stuff cheap and plentiful, it’s not so much of a problem anymore.

  • willy

    heh…. summer reruns.

  • cinemajay

    These are wonderful! Glad they finally found the tapes.

  • jahknow

    yeah dude, LBJ and/or Nixon totally had them fake it

  • stupidjerk

    If we went to the moon, we would be marketing all the cheese. Come on, put two and two together…

  • retropc

    @#6 stupidjerk:

    The moon landings were real – the US govt invented Wisconsin to explain the cheese. Do you think Milwaukee really exists?

  • Anonymous

    From what I’ve heard the tapes haven’t been found. It is thought that the tapes were erased by an operator because they couldn’t be played on a normal drive. The “restored” tapes are based on a kinemascope from one of the ground stations–not the original digital data.

  • Anonymous

    Only one response can be made on the internets:

    Fake.

  • kmoser

    Hmmm, the restored footage doesn’t look much better than the original. Oh, wait, that’s because I’m looking at it in low-res on YouTube.

  • Xopher

    Missing a semicolon in — in the post text.

    …tapes from the July 20, 1969 moonwalk &mdash the project in its entirety…

    should read

    …tapes from the July 20, 1969 moonwalk — the project in its entirety…

    And yes, this is a prime example of a Wonderful Thing! I can’t believe NASA taped over the originals…bet it was during the Reagan era.

  • kaosmonkey

    Glad they decided not to put Jabba the Hutt back in.

  • Anonymous

    http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/apollohoax.html

  • nyrath

    No, CinemaJay, they did NOT find the tapes. The tapes were destroyed by being re-used to record satellite data:

    Houston, We Erased The Apollo 11 Tapes
    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106637066

    Makes me angry. NASA has no PR sense at all.
    What we are seeing is the pathetic old low-res TV broadcast footage, cleaned up slightly by computer.

  • Zan

    @#3: They didn’t find the taped. Their conclusion was that they were taped over at some point. This new video is a digital restoration that combines 8mm and 2nd generation tape from NASA, CBS, and Austrailia.

  • Anonymous

    Check out http://www.wechoosethemoon.org a very cool site that follows the experience in real time matched exactly to the timing of the events 40 years ago.

  • Herby

    Make sure to go to NASA’s Vimeo page they have them there in HD.
    http://vimeo.com/user1164979
    Also there Apollo 11 HD Page has them for download. Pretty Sweet.
    http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11.html

  • Spaceco

    If you are feeling the Apollo 11 fever you can also check out a point by point break down of the mission here:
    http://www.spacecoalition.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/7/13/Relive-the-Apollo-11-Adventure-Interactive-Minute-by-Minute

  • Anonymous

    they should just shoot it again…..

  • Anonymous

    You cant just develop this film and I doubt anyone in burbank is restoring the footage. Due to a special recorder that was used, only 4 known players in the world EVER existed to play it back.
    2 of those players were reconditioned to playback the footage
    and is being worked on at the McDonalds on a defunct military base in California.

  • Anonymous

    NASA has a PR sense alright.

    They intentionally obfuscate and conceal the existence of much more advanced secret space program as well as the presence of extraterrestrial biological entities and their craft.

    Just as Buzz Aldrin, Edgar Mitchel and other Ex-NASA employees who have gone on the record to testify to this fact.

    Go ahead and chortle if you like. It feels better than doing the research and accepting that your emotionally charged beliefs about the world and the space program were not exactly connected to “reality”.

    google disclosure project and watch the 4 hours of witness testimony (none of which are backwoods, moonshine drinking rednecks, thank you.)

  • Anonymous

    If you look real close you can see jamie and Adam in the videos

  • tovarco

    How stupid are we folks. Who really believes they accidentally taped over the original tapes. Do you people really believe this?

  • Anonymous

    Apparently somebody found the missing tapes:

    http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/julymoon/

  • Pantograph

    That’s right anon. Here’s video of Buzz Aldrin giving evidence on the truth behind Apollo 11.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=NL&hl=nl&v=ZOo6aHSY8hU

    Had me convinced.

  • Mojave

    What in the holy flying FSM is THIS!?!?!

  • glace neuf

    more secret moon base information please – very interesting!

  • glace neuf

    #16 – AWESOME. i would like to see some more information though, i followed #15′s advice and did find some interesting stuff (including some testimony that seemed pretty solid).

  • jphilby

    “the cost of archiving this material probably far exceeded the savings they would achieve by recycling it.”

    Yeh sure … I’m sure the budget of those guys with the 40-year-old tapes down in Australia is WAAAAY bigger than NASA’s budget. And, of course, the US government is wayshort on archive space, what with all those freezers stuffed with alien bodies.

  • RicRomero

    Bah. Now Michael Jackson…HE could moonwalk.