Hey, maybe NASA took all those original videotapes of the moonlanding and gave them to ABC just to clean house and ABC ended up taping DS over them!
Anyway, it was shocking, especially to me as a "trained" historian, to discover NASA was so cavalier in dealing with the original tapes, but then again, as a trained historian, I see this as nothing new. To this day it is incredible to see how historical preservation of "stuff" has been considered so unimportant. Not to offend anyone here who is more in the math-and-science field, but it just grates me that emphasis has always been placed on those topics and keeping records for all posterity is viewed as nothing. That's how NASA saw it back then. What was valuable was getting the men to the moon; keeping the documentation was only a space-waster. Forty years now it realizes its mistake. But it still goes on. When I lived in other communities across the country I worked as an archivist, creating archives and cataloguing material. Back now in my home town, there are two major national businesses here, one creating and constructing a certain thing I have a huge interest in. One of the part-time workers there told me how all the documents, designs, etc., have just been shoved into acidic boxes and dumped in little utilized corridors, rooms and so-forth. I approached that business with my resume and pressing the need for preservation (emphasizing how important this would be for the company's own research) and all the big-wigs could do was look at me with baffled, glazed-over eyes and say: "Huh?" One of the major CEO's had no concept of what I was talking about and said all that "junk" would just end up in the dump; he saw no need to preserve any of it.
Thank goodness ABC had the sense to preserve DS (more sense than NASA). It's a shame, to this day, so few have that same forsight.
Gerard
