The Missing Apollo 11 Telemetry Tapes

NASA lost the telemetry tapes containing the recording of the raw video data transmitted by the Apollo 11 mission. However, all the data was also safely recorded elsewhere.

Flat-Earthers make a big deal out of this incident to discredit the Apollo mission. In reality:

  1. The only lost data was the raw video before the conversion to NTSC for TV broadcasting.
  2. Only the raw data was lost, but there are other recordings of the same footage.
  3. Apollo missions other than Apollo 11 were not affected.
  4. There is no lost video that has never been seen.
  5. NASA discovered high-quality recordings of the same video.

In the Apollo 11 mission, the video was transmitted using the SSTV method, and on Earth, the signal was converted into NTSC for television broadcasting. And some quality was lost during the conversion process.

In the late 90s, several still photographs were discovered that showed the visually superior raw SSTV transmission. It sparked the interest to find the original tapes that hold the SSTV data, but they were unable to find them. They did, however, discover the best visual quality videotapes and Super-8 movie taken off a video monitor showing the SSTV transmission.

Unlike the arguments we hear from flat-Earthers, the tapes were nice to have but not really necessary. The tapes do not contain the “technology” that was “deliberately destroyed” or other conspiracy nonsense we hear from them.

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