You Won't Believe What NASA Lost!
The original tape recording of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969 in
which astronaut Neil Armstrong says his famous line, "One small step for man, one
giant leap for mankind," is missing. It wasn't stolen--nothing as nefarious
as that. It's just lost. As in can't be found. Anywhere. <A HREF="http://portal.compuserve.com/wrap/linker.asp?floc=wn-cx&ref=http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/exploration/mmb/19jul_seaoftranquillity.html">Find out why Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin couldn't sleep on the Moon's Sea of Tranquility. </A>(NASA
Web site) Reuters reports that NASA has "misplaced" the recording and can't
find it after a full year of searching. A Smithsonian researcher told CNN's
"American Morning" that there is a good chance it has been stored in some
government warehouse that looks a lot like the last scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
But where exactly is a mystery. "We haven't seen them for quite a while.
We've been looking for over a year and they haven't turned up," NASA spokesman
Grey Hautaloma told Reuters of the missing tapes, which also contain data about
the health of the astronauts and the condition of the spacecraft. And it's not
just the tapes from that one voyage. Some 700 boxes of tapes containing the
transmission from all the Apollo lunar missions are missing. "I wouldn't say
we're worried--we've got all the data. Everything on the tapes we have in one
form or another," Hautaloma assured Reuters.
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