One Small Step For Duh...

Have you ever seen the classic Harrison Ford movie "Raiders Of The Lost Ark?" If so, you're no doubt very familiar with the final, iconic scene of that movie, in which a faceless government employee pushes a wooden crate containing the fabled Ark of the Covenant through a warehouse... surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of similarly nondescript crates... to be lost forever in a sea of bureaucracy.

Well, we can't confirm this... but rumor has it NASA has now sent some of its best and brightest to that very warehouse, hoping that rare videotapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing might be contained somewhere therein, as well.

"It's the whole history of the entire mission, of everything that went on," said retired NASA camera manager Stan Lebar of the missing moon tapes. "They're not lost, it's just we haven't gotten to the next step yet."

The person placed in charge Tuesday of that "next step" is Richard Nafzger, who is heading the team now searching the sprawling Goddard Space Flight Center -- the facility that originally misplaced the tapes -- hoping to stumble upon the more than 13,000 very important recordings.

The rare videos show footage far more detailed than the now-famous images broadcast from Tranquility Base in July 1969. Recorded at 10 frames per second, the images on the tapes are reportedly so sharp, viewers can see Neil Armstrong's reflection in Buzz Aldrin's visor.

The tapes have never been shown to the general public -- in fact, no one except a few NASA technicians have ever seen the images in all their glory. Nafzger says the tapes were shown to technicians in Australia... but as televisions required 60 frames per second for broadcast, each image was shown six times, which resulted in blurred images and "ghosting."

"The quality ... is two, three or four times better than we ever saw," Nafzger told the Associated Press.

As you might have guessed, NASA has actually known of the missing tapes for some time... but only recently has an organized search been mounted. That's partly due to NASA's renewed interest in the Apollo moon missions... and partly due to the media picking up on the story.

Lebar had hoped to find the tapes at the National Archives -- where the tapes were originally sent in 1970. After searching that warehouse (which the 81-year-old compared to the "Raiders" facility) only to come up empty, however, Lebar and Nafzger determined the tapes must have been returned permanently to Goddard.

Maybe. If not... well, we suspect the attics of former NASA employees might be next. Or maybe George Lucas has them?

FMI: www.nasa.gov