Art Pottery, Politics and Food
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
 
SPACE RAIDERS OF THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM

From our Rusting City on a Hill department comes news that NASA has misplaced 700 boxes, each storing four 14" reels of aging 2" videotape, containing the historically and scientifically important video and telemetric record of the Apollo flights to the Moon.
According to an excellent report and a NASA bureaucrat quoted on Space.com:

"The tapes are not lost as such, which implies they were badly handled...We are confident that they are stored at Goddard Space Flight Center [in Greenbelt, Maryland]…We just don't know where precisely..."

As a space-crazed 14 year-old, I religiously audio taped Walter Cronkite's iron pants coverage of the 1st Moon landing from the portable TV in my model kit rocket and poster draped bedroom while creating a time capsule, which I still possess, containing those sound recordings along with related issues of TIME magazine and my hometown newspapers.
Not surprisingly, considering the weakened state of our crony-packed government, it seems somehow par for the course that unlimited federal manpower and resources would fail in their sacred duty to secure the first generation record of America's greatest technological triumph while effectively covering plump bureaucratic tushies when news of this failure appears in the press.

Image: Apollo 17-NASA, Raiders of the Lost Ark-Paramount
- posted by Sean @ 1:13 AM
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