Comments on: NASA unveils lunar image recovery project

Called the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, the initiative is designed to take thousands of 1960s-era analog images and convert them into digital ones.

[solitare_pax]

Lets see - we spent millions of dollars to sent people and probes out into space, but we don't have the money set aside to develop a long-term solution for archiving, retrieving, sharing and examining this data as it comes in? Its not just the lunar missions - the Viking mission tapes were nearly lost because they threw out the 7-track tape reader needed to read the old reels. What other information have we lost while they dub around for another decade to replace the shuttle?

[sythara]

Its because sertain president and congress cut the funding after the missions were complete. That is how the world of finance works in the Gov't. Some congress have "other priorities".

[BigGuns149]

This is also an important story for virtually every government agency that needs to retain data for 40+ years. Data retention isn't cheap. I remember a story that PC Mag did for their 20th anniversary issue where they had to find ancient hardware to read some ancient backup tapes they had used to store the data from the older issues. Had they waited 40 years like NASA they would have been in the same situation having literally a handful of people having the knowledge to retrieve the information nevermind finding the hardware.

Provided that the schematics to build the reader is well documented there should be no reason that you can't have an engineer go back and build a new reader even if every known reader for said medium has been lost or destroyed. The problem is that in many cases a lot of these early technologies weren't documented very well either because no one foresaw anyone being interested in the data after a few years or the designs were so proprietary that few copies of the designs were ever made and hence the few existing copies were easily lost.

[Galaxy5]

I'm really bummed I missed this talk - I was set to go, but got busy at work.

These recoveries from old video tape are really amazing. I'm glad that after some initial missteps with this historic information that NASA is showing the fruits of its labors.

[TogetherinParis]

40 years? I'm glad we've had no civil wars and the NASA tapes have been kept safe from harm.

[snailsnail]

Fascinating stuff...
"there is only one person on Earth who has the expertise to work with the playback heads needed to process the original tapes"...
anybody else think those 14 months (and, presumably, preceding years) could have been better used to train a couple of other people up to take on the task?