Talk:Apollo 11 Moon Landing (1969 Original Footage)/@comment-24.34.46.232-20140222055249

There's a major inaccuracy in this article. The "originals" of this lost footage did not travel to the Moon, and wasn't in Super-8 format. In fact, Super-8 can't even be erased, as it is a film format (not magnetic tape).

One of the most important challenges for spaceflight is finding ways to reduce the weight of the payload, and never was that more important than during the Apollo program. Every bit of mass you landed on the Moon's surface and returned to Earth would need to be accelerated a total of more than 41,000 miles per hour. So even a tiny reduction in weight would save large sums of money in the form of the rockets and spacecraft that carry it. Because of this, the astronauts used compact slow-scan television cameras and transmitted the signals back to Earth. The equivalent weight in Super 8 film would be much heavier, plus if the mission had a cratastrophic failure they would lose a lot of potential evidence of what happened.

When those SSTV signals were received they were immediately written to large magnetic tapes. At the same time, the signals were converted and sent to television stations for broadcasting. The recordings we have are indeed from that converted signal, but the missing tapes with the unconverted (and therefore best-quality) were magnetic spools containing SSTV signals.