Question about the moon landing footage storage fire in 1969

I was reading up on the Apollo 11 stuff last week and found out that the original high quality tapes of the moon landing were supposedly destroyed in a fire at the Goddard Space Flight Center. But here's what gets me. They say the fire happened in the late 1960s, yet NASA kept broadcasting the same footage for years without mentioning it. My dad worked at a TV station in Chicago back then and he says they got new copies of the footage regularly, which seems weird if the originals were gone. Also, the story about the fire only really came out in the 2000s, like 30 years later. Has anyone else dug into this and found a clear timeline of when that fire actually happened versus when they first told the public?

2 comments

2 Comments

diana_bell742d ago

Oh man, that timeline is exactly what bugs me about this whole thing. I remember reading somewhere that the fire was actually at the Goddard facility in 1969, but the official story about the tapes being destroyed didn't get pushed until decades later. If your dad was getting fresh copies in the 70s and 80s, that tells me NASA had to have had backups somewhere, maybe even the master tapes themselves. Why would they keep quiet about losing them unless they didn't actually lose them? It's like they sat on the real story until everyone forgot what the original footage looked like, then quietly changed the narrative. The timing of that 2000s reveal feels too convenient, like they waited for a generation to pass so nobody would remember the exact details.

amy3021d ago

Honestly, @diana_bell74 you're hitting on the same stuff that got me looking into this. I found that the fire story kept shifting dates every time someone new wrote about it, which made me dig into old NASA newsletters on archive.org. What worked for me was tracking the broadcasting schedules, like your dad's experience with the tape copies, because those records are harder to fake than official statements. Tbh, the whole thing feels like they realized the originals were wiped or reused and just made up the fire story later to cover it.