Forty years ago today the Apollo 11 spacecraft launched, which would take Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. Check out an incredible collection of photos from the mission here.
In conjunction with the anniversary of one of the greatest feats of mankind in the history of the world, NASA has also admitted that they apparently used up all their collective brain power on the moon missions and stumbled around like drunk fratdaddies in the late '70s and '80s. You see, they announced today that they are refurbishing copies of the moon landing tapes - taking out a lot of the grain and restoring detail using Hollywood film enhancement techniques. But not from the original tapes, you see. Because those don't exist anymore.
"NASA lost its original moon landing videotapes and after a three-year search, officials have concluded they were probably erased.
The original videos beamed to earth were stored on giant reels of tapes that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with 13 other channels of live data from the moon. In the 1970s and 1980s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes and erased about 200,000 of those tapes and reused them. That's apparently what happened to the famous moon landing footage."
I find it unconscionable that someone at NASA wouldn't have thought, "hey - here's perhaps the most valuable video footage ever. Perhaps maybe we should archive this in a safe place and, you know, NOT erase it."
Somebody better lose their effing pension over this.
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