Empirical Earth · We Went to the Moon — the Landings Were Real

The “erased tapes” — backups lost, evidence intact

The claim

“NASA erased the original moonwalk tapes — the evidence is gone.”

What is true

The erasure is real and NASA-documented.

What is measured

About 45 reels of raw slow-scan telemetry, backups of a signal already received and rebroadcast live worldwide, were degaussed and reused in the early 1980s during a tape shortage. The footage the world saw was never on them alone, and the restored moonwalk plays today.

What would show this is wrong

showing the 1969 transmission could only have been received and recorded at a single NASA-controlled site, with no independent station, network or rival nation able to receive it as it happened.

Sources

  1. The Apollo 11 missing tapes. The original one-inch reels holding the raw slow-scan television telemetry (recorded at Goldstone, Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes) were used as redundant backups. link
  2. The erasure and the 2009 restoration. NASA video engineer Richard Nafzger’s investigation confirmed the raw telemetry reels had been erased and reused. For the 40th anniversary, NASA and Low link
  3. The live worldwide broadcast and independent reception. The slow-scan signal was converted to broadcast TV at the ground stations in real time and relayed live to an estimated 600 million vi link
  4. Apollo television: the Unified S-Band budget and the 320-line format. The Apollo Unified S-Band link carried voice, telemetry, biomedical data, ranging and television within a 3 MHz allocati link
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