By Sid Perkins
To view video footage of the newly restored moon walk, click here.
WASHINGTON — At a press conference July 16, the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s launch, NASA previewed digitally restored snippets of the first video beamed from the moon’s surface to Earth. These vignettes, including astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps onto lunar soil, are part of a three-month, $230,000 project to assemble video footage of the moon walk from a variety of sources into “a historical record for future generations,” said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and leader of the effort.
Sources of video for the new project include CBS, a television station in Australia and the National Archives, where some of the video footage has ended up, Nafzger says. He and his colleagues must cobble together video from these recordings because NASA evidently erased its own high-quality tapes. Per NASA procedures at the time, the 45 tapes that contained video of the 3 ½–hour moon walk were kept for just a few years before Apollo program personnel certified that the data wasn’t needed anymore, and the tapes were reused.