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The Apollo 11 moonwalk was not the first show sent from space, but geographically it was the most amazing. Microwave links, satellites and fixed lines transmitted images of Neil Armstrong's footsteps all over the world, from Australia and the United States to Japan and Europe, even in parts of the block. East, in near real time. It was live television more than 200,000 km, using the technology of 1969.
Although the experience of watching this event occupies an important place in the memory of those who have seen it, NASA historians and other space experts, the preservation of this show has provided its own drama.
On Saturday, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, three reels of video will be auctioned at Sotheby's, marketed as "the only records of the historic march on the first generation kept of the first generation "and" the oldest, most accurate and most accurate first video images on the moon.
According to Sotheby's, a NASA intern named Gary George bought the recordings as part of a collection of 1,150 reels at a government-sponsored surplus auction in 1976. He paid them all for $ 217.77. Saturday's auction starts at $ 700,000 and Sotheby's estimates it will sell for more than $ 1 million.
The manner in which these three humble reels have been considered a valuable historical artefact demonstrates the elaborate techniques used to make the lunar landing accessible to the public. The story also involves government mistakes that destroyed other recordings that could have rivaled George for claiming to be first.
Because the lunar module had limited bandwidth, it could send it back to Earth – bandwidth to also transmit voice communications and medical information to astronauts – Westinghouse designed a special camera recording low-speed images, 10 images per second. . These images were transmitted to three tracking stations on Earth, two in Australia and one in California. There, they were recorded on telemetry tapes (also called slow scan tapes or instrumentation tapes). These were the purest records of what the camera had captured on the moon.
But that's not what viewers saw on TV. The standard broadcast rate in the United States was 30 frames per second and not 10. And in 1969, the conversion "actually involved pointing a television camera at a screen capable of displaying that non-standard signal," said Stephen Slater, historian of the space program. archive specialist.
By the time the converted images reached the show's TVs – after microwave jumps and satellites around the world and routing them through Houston – "it was really ghostly," he said. "The quality was really below standard compared to the image that the camera actually recorded."
The slow scan bands were considered the first and clearest records of the landing on the moon. "That's where the television was recorded raw because it came from the moon," said Richard Nafzger, a retired engineer from NASA, who coordinated Apollo 7's television operations at Apollo 17.
But these tapes have probably been lost forever.
In the 2000s, NASA conducted a search for them and concluded that they had almost certainly been reused or erased during a shortage of cassettes at NASA in the early 1980s.
The video recordings of the show that NASA kept in Houston did not prove much better. "During the energy shortage during the Carter administration, air conditioning in almost every government building was off at night and over the weekend," said Bill Wood, chief engineer at the tracking station from California and participating in telemetry research. bands and later for better quality broadcast tapes. The high humidity in the Houston area has caused irreparable damage to the bands, he said.
In reality, these unfortunate events have left Mr. George's recordings on the throne to be called the oldest known recording of the show – by a hair.
They were manufactured at the Manned Spacecraft Center, now the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where a technician selected the best Australian and Californian images to create a feed wire (described by Mr. Slater as "NASA TV") and sent to public. world.
Mr. George's tapes are a recording of the same stream that everyone has seen. But spectators of Neil Armstrong's big jump for the man at home watched a stream relayed by microwaves, coaxial cables and satellites from Houston to television networks, the images suffering a slight degradation at each stage.
The images on Mr. George's tapes have never left Houston.
"It's certainly going to be better," said Paul Vanezis, a documentary producer and director who, as a BBC video assistant in the early 1990s, played BBC recordings on raw footage.
Some video experts have nevertheless raised questions about the terminology used by Sotheby's in its marketing. Mr. Slater, archive producer of the recent documentary "Apollo 11," said that there are many other "first-generation" recordings of the show. That's right, according to an accepted definition of the term. According to Mr. Vanezis, any recording directly from one signal, as opposed to another tape, would be considered the "first generation", including the tapes kept in the archives of the BBC, the CBS and maybe other networks.
"The BBC recording is a first generation recording," said Vanezis. "This is not a good record" – Europe was the last corner of the world to receive transmission – "but it's still a first-generation record."
Cassandra Hatton, vice president and senior specialist at Sotheby's, said that comparing the proposed cassettes to other copies, such as those of the BBC or those of CBS News Archives, was "totally useless" and that the "first generation" label always applied.
"All the other cassettes made afterwards were made after the rebound signal and each time the signal was degraded," she said.
Nevertheless, the intricacies of what makes these unique bands have created enough confusion for that On July 8, NASA published an article stating that the cassettes at Sotheby's are not the lost cassettes, some publications have been reported inaccurately.
(Sotheby's, who has a detailed history of the transmission of the moon landing and video tapes on his website, does not claim that they are the lost tapes.)
Provenance is another selling factor. Ms. Hatton pointed out that the tapes were made in Houston. They came to Sotheby's in their original box with the labels and receipt that Mr. George had received when they were purchased from the General Services Administration. The proprietary agency is listed under the NASA Johnson Space Center name.
Mr. George, a 65-year-old retired engineer living in Las Vegas, has kept the tapes in temperature-controlled storage facilities.
And now that he's getting older, he thinks it's time to take advantage of his discovery of surplus sales.
"Most of the people who were alive and were able to watch this video originally on July 20, 1969, are the ones who really appreciate it," he said.
Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed to the report.
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