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Comment by NameNickHN | Hacker News Reader

> We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if you are ever going to use them -- we are going to keep them'

The really couldn't figure out by themselves that they shouldn't throw away the visual evidence of one of the most important events in human history?

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I think at the time, most folks at NASA expected moon landings to be commonplace within a decade.

The crazies, maybe. I hope not most NASA folk; there really is no way for lunar landings to have been common using chemical propellants and disposable rockets. Even today alternatives are mere speculations. So either our NASA dreamer was a poor engineer, or a nut job willing to nuke Earth to visit a lifeless rock.

Which is not a bad thing: given the immensity and ludicrousness of the Apollo accomplishment, I think NASA had quite a few nutjobs!

In Apollo 13 the movie, there is a scene where the NASA representative is walking politicos on a tour:

JIM LOVELL - I'm slated to be the commander of Apollo 14 sometime late next year.

CONGRESSMAN - If there is an Apollo 14... Now, Jim, people in my state have been asking why we're continuing to fund this program - now that we've beaten the Russians to the Moon. [1]

The chasm between what NASA wanted, pilots down, was to keep on its trajectory, but the politicians saw monies to tender.

[1] https://sfy.ru/?script=apollo13

Why people blame politicians that accurately represent people's views? If you have a bigoted, stupid, awful politician who's popular without fraud or dishonest competition practices in general, may be you should blame education, may be the media, but the politician himself is just doing his job — representing the people. The bigoted, stupid, awful people.

I am not blaming the politician, just noting the chasm in the NASA projections and what the politicians are pivoting on.

To some extent what you say has merit. But remember we are a republic, we elect people to lead us. They are not meant to raise only to the level of the average person. At least they were not until maybe the last 20 or 30 years.

It is true the main blame for our policies rests with those continuing to elect them. But those actually representing us and making the decisions are responsible also.

It takes about as much energy to get into orbit as it does to fly from NY to Japan. So, regular trips to the moon could end up fairly cheap even with chemical rocks.

The OP was referring to NASA's shot term (ten year) delusion. Flying a rocket to the moon is orders of magnitude more expensive that couldn't have been matched by chem rockets (and weren't, even for the very generously funded ICBM projects)

I think that even if you expected them to become commonplace, you would realize what a momentous event in history the first landing would be.

Not to mention, if you are given a task that requires use of the same type of tapes and are not offered any funding to procure unused ones, then you will have no choice but to record over them. As a government employee, I see this as the most likely scenario.

Documents don't usually preserve themselves. Paper lasts a long time if left in an attic or a closet but can be lost if the wrong person "cleans up". Electronic documents are much more fragile. Media decays or otherwise becomes unreadable. If data is saved in proprietary formats and the reader hardware or software is lost, then it's much the same as degaussing.

IIRC a large set of moon landing data was lost when somebody set the tapes down on a heater and left them there too long.

Not moon-landing related, but Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), the very first group to use a Roland TR-808 drum machine, was unable to read the original masters because they were recording using a cutting-edge digital format for which there are no readers.

Preserving digital data for the long term is hard.

Disclaimer: Library and Info Sci degree with archives coursework.

Yes. Even if the tapes had not been erased, it would have been difficult if not impossible to get it back after that amount of time.

About 5 years ago I helped a team migrate a bunch of data from ~30 year old 9-track tape reels. Obtaining and restoring hardware that was even capable of reading the reels was hard enough (we are talking spending thousands of dollars purchasing zero-warranty equipment from sketchy places on the 'net that had a few sitting in some dusty corner of their warehouse).

We also had to write our own software to read the tapes until an error occurred; reset the drive, retry reading from that spot again, and so on, and then concatenate all of the chucks together.

Most of the reels were eventually readable this way, but there still ended up being a not insignificant number that were given up on after several failed attempts.

Wait, what? NASA had tapes with missing Doctor Who episodes?

That is what they recorded the Moon Landing on ....

It's easy to forget just how little attention is paid to preservation if there isn't a person dedicated to it. This is why libraries, especially the Library of Congress, are incredibly important. Archivists are important. Historians are important. We need to be reminded of that, or we'll make the same mistakes over and over.

My suspicion is that everyone involved just assumed it was someone else's job to take care of that. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the person who degaussed the tapes did so with the thought, "sure someone has backed this up."

They could have just found another soundstage and reshot everything, surely, unless they got rid of the props and shooting script as well. But i'm certain I saw some of the props reused in the Outer Limits and Star Trek.

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