One Giant Mistake for Mankind

17-07-2009

LONDON – It should be a time of celebration. 40 years ago, man first walked on the moon but this historical mile stone has been overshadowed by an embarrassing admission on Thursday. NASA revealed that the original video of the live TV Apollo 11 transmission may have been erased in order to reuse the videotape.

The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon. In the ‘70s and ’80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

Representing perhaps the most important historical footage of the 20th century, it’s surprising that NASA didn’t have the common sense to store, backup or create an archive of the original footage for future generations.

Now, a process is underway by a film studio to restore the video by combining multiple video sources containing the transmission from news reels and even camera shots of a TV monitor. You can see the NASA restored video here > http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11.html

If you lose data, don’t rely on Hollywood coming to your rescue. Make sure you’ve given sufficient thought to how to safeguard the data that’s important to you and your business.