News reports of some ‘long lost’ Apollo 11 footage surfacing in Australia sounded pretty intriguing, with articles about it appearing on several websites this morning. But surely, any of the long-searched-for-and-believed-lost footage finally showing up would have received a bigger fanfare than just a few articles. I checked with NASA Headquarters about this footage, and they told me it actually is the same video that NASA restored and released in 2009 for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.
These restored videos include a copy of a tape recorded at NASA’s Sydney, Australia, video switching center, where down-linked television from Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek was received for transmission to the U.S., as well as original broadcast tapes from the CBS News Archive recorded via direct microwave and landline feeds from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson that had not been viewed for over 30 years.
The 15 scenes that were released represented the most significant moments of the three and a half hours that Armstrong and Aldrin spent on the lunar surface. Two of the 15 are posted here. You can see all 15 at this NASA website, or SpaceVidCast has all the scenes on the their You Tube site.
NASA said last year — when they released this footage — that the some other additional videos they had spent several years searching for were likely taped over several years after the Moon landings by some frugal NASA engineers.
After all these years, I still get a ‘rush’ when I see this footage! I was 15 at the time. My family had traveled to Gardner, Mass. to visit my grandmother and grandfather’s house. Ma let me stay up all night to see this event.. I’ll never forget!