Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida last week. The Apollo 11 astronauts who were the first to land on the Moon 40 years ago, have urged Americans to set their sights on Mars.
Forty years ago today, two Americans touched down on the moon and walked upon its surface. Now, NASA's trying to do it again with Constellation, an ambitious project to return humans to the moon by 2020.
But if NASA could do it in the eight years between President John F. Kennedy's 1961 speech that led to the historic first lunar landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, some wonder why it is so difficult to go back. By 2020, 16 years will have passed since NASA launched its new moon-bound vision in 2004. For one thing, the goal this time around is significantly expanded from last time.
"This is much more than flags and footsteps," said John Olson, director of NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate Integration Office. "We're going for a sustained human presence in space."
Rather than visit the moon for hours or days at most, Constellation astronauts will embark on missions that could last months. They will need new tools and technologies for living on the moon, and must construct semi-permanent habitats on the lunar surface. Besides the challenge of designing these systems, NASA must build a spaceship than can transport all the extra supplies.
Rocket science
NASA's current rockets and space shuttles aren't capable of surpassing low-Earth orbit to reach the moon with the amount of gear required for a manned expedition.
"The amount of rocket energy it takes to accelerate those kinds of payloads away from Earth doesn't exist anymore," said Jeff Hanley, NASA's Constellation program manager. "It exited in the Apollo era with the Saturn V. Since that time this nation has retired that capability."
NASA is developing new rockets, called Ares I and Ares V, for the return trip to the moon. These will be larger and taller than their Apollo-era Saturn counterparts, and will be able to carry significantly more weight.
The Constellation plan calls for these new rockets to surpass the Saturn vehicles in capability, but to do it on a budget.
"We want to do it cheaper, and we want to do it safer," Hanley told SPACE.com. "That's a pretty tough prescription for NASA to meet."
And on top of those challenges, Constellation plans to go farther than the moon: The lunar voyages will be a staging ground to prepare humans to journey to Mars.
"The complexity of leaving Earth's orbit, we understand that," said Frank Peri, director of NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program at Langley Research Center in Virginia. "But getting back to the moon is not trivial, staying on the moon is not trivial, and going on to Mars is even beyond that."
Fiscal challenges
While engineering a return trip to the moon won't be easy, some experts say the biggest hurdle for Constellation is money. NASA is spending $35 billion to build Orion and the Ares I.
"The technologies that we need to do the job are largely in hand," Hanley said. "In terms of the challenge, it's really a fiscal challenge - the amount of money that the nation can afford to spend."
During the Apollo years NASA's budget was almost five percent of the federal budget. Now, it's less than one percent.
"We understand the technologies that will be necessary, but it's going to take an investment to do that," said Roger Launius, space history curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. "That's the rub."
During the 1960s, many Americans felt the expense of Apollo was justified because of its importance to national security during the cold war. Today, some people question whether human space exploration is as valuable.
"There are not compelling publicly-held reasons for doing this," Launius said. "Without a rationale that everybody understands and can buy into, it's a very hard sell to get the resources to do it."
NASA maintains there are a host of good reasons for going back to the moon. In addition to the lunar science that can be learned, and the thrill of human exploration, many of the new technologies could have applications on the ground. For example, advances in high-efficiency batteries, energy storage systems, and closed loop environmental control and life support could benefit people back on Earth, Olson said.
"Despite the fiscal challenges and the tough times that we currently are experiencing, we need to go do this because of the economic benefits, because of the positive impact on people in our society," Olson said. "It truly is a worthy goal."
Forty years after astronauts first set foot on the moon, SPACE.com examines what we¹ve done since and whether America has the right stuff to get back to the moon by 2020 and reach beyond. For exclusive interviews and analysis, visit SPACE.com daily through July 20, the anniversary of the historic landing.
Original Story: 40 Years After Moon Landing: Why Is It So Hard to Go Back?
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NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it
NASA handout of US astronaut Edwin E. 'Buzz' Aldrin Jr standing on the moon on July 20, 1969. The Apollo 11 astronauts who were the first to land on the Moon 40 years ago, have urged Americans to set their sights on Mars.
WASHINGTON – NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.
In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.
But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.
The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.
"There's nothing being created; there's nothing being manufactured," said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who is in charge of the project. "You can now see the detail that's coming out."
The first batch of restored footage was released just in time for the 40th anniversary of the "one giant leap for mankind," and some of the details seem new because of their sharpness. Originally, astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Earth's first moonwalker shows the visor and a reflection in it.
The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a monthslong project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done. But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder; Buzz Aldrin following him; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; and the planting of the flag on the lunar surface.
Nafzger said a huge search that began three years ago for the old moon tapes led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. His report on that will come out in a few weeks.
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 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.
How did NASA end up looking like a bumbling husband taping over his wedding video with the Super Bowl?
Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.
Outside historians were aghast.
"It's surprising to me that NASA didn't have the common sense to save perhaps the most important historical footage of the 20th century," said Rice University historian and author Douglas Brinkley. He noted that NASA saved all sorts of data and artifacts from Apollo 11, and it is "mind-boggling that the tapes just disappeared."
The remastered copies may look good, but "when dealing with historical film footage, you always want the original to study," Brinkley said.
Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, said the loss of the original video "doesn't surprise me that much."
"It was a mistake, no doubt about that," Launius said. "This is a problem inside the entire federal government. ... They don't think that preservation is all that important."
Launius said federal warehouses where historical artifacts are saved are "kind of like the last scene of `Raiders of the Lost Ark.' It just goes away in this place with other big boxes."
The company that restored all the Indiana Jones movies, including "Raiders," is the one bailing out NASA.
Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., noted that "Casablanca" had a pixel count 10 times higher than the moon video, meaning the Apollo 11 footage was fuzzier than that vintage movie and more of a challenge in one sense.
Of all the video the company has dealt with, "this is by far and away the lowest quality," said Lowry president Mike Inchalik.
Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video. Historian Launius wasn't as blown away.
"It's certainly a little better than the original," Launius said. "It's not a lot better."
The Apollo 11 video remains in black and white. Inchalik said he would never consider colorizing it, as has been done to black-and-white classic films. And the moon is mostly gray anyway.
The restoration used four video sources: CBS News originals; kinescopes from the National Archives; a video from Australia that received the transmission of the original moon video; and camera shots of a TV monitor.
Both Nafzger and Inchalik acknowledged that digitally remastering the video could further encourage conspiracy theorists who believe NASA faked the entire moon landing on a Hollywood set. But they said they enhanced the video as conservatively as possible.
Besides, Inchalik said that if there had been a conspiracy to fake a moon landing, NASA surely would have created higher-quality film.
Back in 1969, nearly 40 percent of the picture quality was lost converting from one video format used on the moon — called slow scan — to something that could be played on TVs on Earth, Nafzger said.
NASA did not lose other Apollo missions' videos because they weren't stored on the type of tape that needed to be reused, Nafzger said.
As part of the moon landing's 40th anniversary, the space agency has been trotting out archival material. NASA has a Web site with audio from private conversations in the lunar module and command capsule. The agency is also webcasting radio from Apollo 11 as if the mission were taking place today.
The video restoration project did not involve improving the sound. Inchalik said he listened to Armstrong's famous first words from the surface of the moon, trying to hear if he said "one small step for man" or "one small step for A man," but couldn't tell.
Through a letter read at a news conference Thursday, Armstrong had the last word about the video from the moon: "I was just amazed that there was any picture at all."
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I know this has been put on YouTube before but I could'nt resist it. It's one hell of a whack! Apollo 11 astronaut and second man on the moon lands a sweet punch on someone who thinks the Moon Lan...
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On the Net:
NASA restored video: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11.html
NASA audio from the lunar module and command capsule:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission(underscore)pages/apollo/40th/apollo11(underscore)audio.html
NASA's replay of the Apollo radio in real-time minus 40 years:
