Tapes containing the original, high-quality transmission of the Apollo 11 moon landing were wiped after being quietly shelved in an unmarked storage area by NASA.
While other recordings of the historic 1969 mission survived, the revelation that at least some moon landing video disappeared has fueled wild conspiracies that NASA has been covering up what astronauts saw or even that the whole mission was faked.
Now, the truth about these ‘erased’ tapes has been revealed by Tim Dodd, better known as the ‘Everyday Astronaut’ on YouTube, who said the lost footage was only a set of backup magnetic tapes containing the raw transmission from space.
Dodd explained that the backup tapes were considered by NASA to be less critical since all the essential data, video, and radio signals were successfully transmitted to Houston and broadcast live on TV.
The backup copies of Apollo 11’s historic mission were mistakenly taped over when NASA reused older magnetic tapes due to a shortage of those specific film reels in the 1970s and 1980s.
Speaking on the Danny Jones Podcast, Dodd said no one at the time anticipated future technology would be able to upscale or enhance the resolution (upres) of the raw footage for better quality, which is now possible today.
However, NASA still possesses thousands of hours of data proving the first moon landing really took place, including lower-quality versions of telemetry data, audio, and video from Houston’s recordings.
Dodd added that the space agency also still has shockingly clear 70 millimeter film from the cameras the Apollo astronauts used on the moon, a grade of film that is still used in IMAX movies 57 years later.
Crystal clear images taken by the Apollo 11 astronauts during the original 1969 moon landing, captured on 70 millimeter film and shared in a 2019 documentary by director Todd Miller
Tim Dodd, known as the ‘Everyday Astronaut’ on YouTube, revealed the fate of the original backup recordings of the Apollo 11 moon footage on the Danny Jones Podcast
Dodd, who creates educational videos about rockets, space exploration, and NASA’s history, broke down exactly what happened to the erased moon landing tapes, starting with how the signal was sent back from Apollo 11 to Earth.
The live transmission from the moon was sent to receiving stations, including one in California’s Mojave Desert, and then split into two feeds.
One feed went to Mission Control in Houston for real-time monitoring, where all telemetry on the spacecraft’s condition, audio and video were recorded.
The video at Mission Control was converted from the moon’s ‘slow-scan’ format to standard NTSC TV format using a ‘kinescope’ method, which means the space agency filmed a monitor with a camera to make it usable on TV broadcasts.
This converted version was what the public saw at home in 1969, which was of lower quality than the video on the magnetic tapes but ‘good enough’ at the time, according to Dodd.
The other feed contained the raw backup, recorded directly onto the large magnetic tapes, which were roughly a foot wide and looked similar to giant cassette tapes.
NASA viewed the tapes as a safety net in case the link between Apollo 11 and Houston failed. During a crisis, the space agency might have needed to analyze raw data to understand what went wrong, but none of that happened.
‘They had the broadcast. It’s not like the broadcast went cold and they lost signal,’ Dodd explained during the February 9 interview.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin unfurl the US flag on the moon in 1969
Neil Armstrong (Pictured) captured on 70 millimeter film before the Apollo 11 mission. This grade of film is still used to produce IMAX-quality movies six decades later
‘They’re like, “It would be great if we had that still, you know, hold on to those tapes. Make sure we have those backups. We had this 45-minute blackout because our dish went down or something.” They didn’t have that,’ he continued.
‘They didn’t imagine a world where we could take and re-scan and up you know up-res the hell out of that footage as well because it would have been a lot cleaner in that raw format.’
Dodd called the claims that NASA deliberately erased the moon landing recordings ‘misconstrued.’
However, the podcaster and YouTube host admitted that skeptics have one difficult argument to counter when it comes to debating whether the moon landings were real – that being the mystery of why the missions stopped in 1972.
Dodd told Jones the real reason America’s moon missions stopped was the massive economic cost of building and launching Saturn V rockets to the moon.
‘I understand the frustration of, you know, we did this thing 54 years ago, and we lost that ability to do it. But we also spent $300 billion in today’s money to get us there,’ he said.
‘We had three other rockets and hardware built and the crew to do so, and we just said, “Eh, not worth it.” Like that’s what I’m frustrated with.’