Yes. Yes you should have. Then you wouldn't have dumped the original moon landing videos into the degaussing bin to "save money." Yeesh.
Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits
| Reuters
The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on
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You know the conspiracy types are going to be all over that, talking about how this is proof the moon landing never happened.
Seriously though, how does that happen? Back in the day, someone was going to miss a new episode of MASH so they thought, 'what the heck! I'll just use this video tape right here. Not like anything important is on it.'
+Marty Shaw yep, saving money!
+Marty Shaw A combination of a cash-strapped space agency, and a lack of thinking of things in historical context. I don't think the article says when this happened, but picture some guy in a post-Moon Program NASA being told to bring boxes of tapes for degaussing so that they could be used for other purposes. The idea that someone might actually want some of those materials used as part of live broadcasts wouldn't necessarily occur to them.
Which is one reason I'm a pack rat — or, rather, one excuse I use for being a pack rat. Some day I'll be famous, and by God they'll be able to see my 2nd Grade report card and know how early I was prodigy!
But I digress …
To be fair, we've lost a lot of history to this type of attitude across all industries and level of government.
The linked article was written in 2009. The CT had their run at it years ago.
The thing is, even if we had the original tapes, they wouldn't do us any good. It's not like they were VHS and would fit into any machine. They were a proprietary thing that played on on specific type of machine that existed only at NASA.
+Michelle Norton Agreed — it's not just a NASA thing by any means.
+Bill Dezell
(1) It never fails to amaze me how easy it is to miss the date ("Somebody just shared it so it must be new news!"). I'm certainly guilty of that here.
(2) True enough on all counts. Indeed, the CTs called shenanigans even when they thought the footage was original.