Apollo 11 was launched 40 years ago from Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969, carrying Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.

Four days later, the world watched as Armstrong stepped onto the moon and made his “giant leap for mankind.” Almost everyone on the planet who had access to television watched the first moon landing, back on the night of July 20, 1969.

The lunar camera sent very clear images to three tracking stations in NASA’s DSN: Goldstone in California, and in Australia using the feed coming through Honeysuckle for the international broadcast. At these stations, the original footage could be displayed on a monitor.

To convert the originals, shot using color wheel technology, engineers essentially took a commercial television camera and aimed it at the monitor. The resulting image was sent to Houston, and on to the world. The Australian feed was used for the global broadcast.

Those original tapes were put into storage — somewhere. After NPR reported that the 1969 moon walk tapes were missing, NASA began a massive search to find the original tapes from the lunar camera. NASA concluded that the original footage was probably destroyed during a period when NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reusing them to record satellite data.

Since the raw footage is apparently gone, the team decided to try to find the best of what was preserved in the converted, broadcast format.

Stan Lebar worked at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and led the team that designed and built the lunar cameras used on the Apollo 11 mission. Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., which digitally restores all kinds of old movies, from Disney’s Bambi to the Star Wars trilogy, got the job of restoring the kiniscope footage. Here’s a clip of their digitally remastered footage.

In other news, and after $100 Billion and more than a decade of construction, NASA plans to de-orbit the International Space Station in the first quarter of 2016, forcing it to fall back into the atmosphere, where it will turn into a fireball and then crash into the Pacific Ocean.

NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration, championed by Star Wars advocate Michael Griffin, would return to the moon using massive rockets built by Lockheed and Boeing.

Meanwhile, California-based Space-X has conducted its second successful rocket launch, putting an Earth-observing satellite into orbit for Malaysia. After three failed launches, the company founded by Elon Musk, successfully launched their Falcon 1 launch vehicle late Monday from the Kwajalein Atoll, 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii.

The Falcon 9 Heavy would be capable of lifting over 28,000 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and over 12,000 kg to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO), competing with the taxpayer subsidized commercial launchers like the EELV.

The National Taxpayers Union says the United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin EELV joint venture, “unfairly strands taxpayers with a half-billion-dollar-a-year subsidy.” The cost of the EELV program increased $13.2 billion from the original $18.8 billion, and has been largely covered by taxpayers.

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