



Conspiracy theorists, start your engines. On Thursday, 40 years to the day after the Apollo 11 spacecraft began its journey to the moon, NASA released what it called, “newly restored video from the July 20, 1969, live television broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk.” The Associated Press video embedded above includes some of the restored video images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. The French news agency Agence France-Presse put out this selection of iconic images from the mission on Sunday before the new footage was released, and the Armstrong moonwalk is noticeably less clear.

In this video report from the BBC, Richard Nafzger, the NASA engineer who oversaw the television feed during the Apollo 11 mission, discusses the restoration and compares clips of the two astronauts on the moon’s surface before and after the clean-up work was done. According to an A.P. report, Mr. Nafzger, who was involved in the refurbishment, stressed that the footage wasn’t new, just improved: “There’s nothing being created; there’s nothing being manufactured.”

Since, as Reuters reports, “NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing” and then discovered that the video tapes used that day were accidentally erased and reused, the space agency scoured the globe for other copies of the historic transmission. A news release from NASA explained where the original footage came from:

A team of Apollo-era engineers who helped produce the 1969 live broadcast of the moonwalk acquired the best of the broadcast-format video from a variety of sources for the restoration effort. These included a copy of a tape recorded at NASA’s Sydney, Australia, video switching center, where down-linked television from Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek was received for transmission to the U.S.; original broadcast tapes from the CBS News Archive recorded via direct microwave and landline feeds from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston; and kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson that had not been viewed for 36 years.

The A.P. points out that “the restoration company, Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., also refurbished ‘Star Wars,'” which is likely to delight conspiracy theorists. Earlier this week, my colleague John Schwartz reported: “polling consistently suggests that some 6 percent of Americans believe the landings were faked and could not have happened.”

As The Guardian’s David Adam pointed out, many of the conspiracy theories depend on close analysis of the original moonwalk video. NASA’s decision to use a Hollywood production company to clean up that footage will do little to reassure people who insist that they saw incongruous items, like a Coke bottle, in the background when Armstrong made his giant leap.

That said, Mr. Adam’s systematic attempt to debunk several of the leading conspiracy theories does include this footage, which seems more than a little fishy:

Reader comment of the day:

The problem with the various conspiracy theorists you come across is that they start with a solid foundation of ignorance and then speculate from there using very poor logic. Even if you correct their logic you still have their ignorance to deal with which is why it’s impossible to ever change their minds. They’ll only go away when the moon finally becomes a tourist trap and you can pay a space-nickel to get your photo taken next to the Apollo antiques, and the conspiracy nutters will finally all be dead.

My colleague John Schwartz writes in an e-mail: