NASA, McDonalds, and the Lost Moon Photos
Littered among the hangers and wind tunnels of NASA's Ames Research Centre is an old McDonalds building. Inside, there's a bunch of computers happily whirring away.
It's the home of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, a team that's trying to restore a bunch of images from analogue tapes, taken by the lunar orbiters back in the '60s. Their recoveries so far include priceless shots like the first photo of a moonrise.
Back when they were taken, the only way to get the images off the tape was from projection screens onto paper. It's a crude method, and even blown up to a huge scale the final product was horribly grainy.
The 'McMoon' team have been working since 2007 to get high-quality digital versions. You'd think that copying images from one medium to another wouldn't be hard, but they've had to basically rebuild a bunch of 1960s tape drives just to be able to start. It's a challenging, if ultimately worthwhile, project.
Cash (Or Priceless Dr Who Episodes) In The Attic
At least NASA hung onto the moon photos, however. Back in the early days of Dr.Who, the BBC didn't see the point in hanging onto already-broadcast episodes. With limited storage space, they decided to junk hundreds of Who episodes from the 60s and 70s to make space for newer stuff.
The practice wasn't unique – series like The Avengers and Dad's Army also didn't get stored. Film was expensive, and the actors' union opposed recording (without copies, actors often had to be re-hired to reprise roles if the broadcaster wanted to re-show an episode).
Despite the official copies going down the landfill, most of the missing episodes have been recovered, thanks to Dr Who fans painstakingly recording clips, or foreign broadcast operations with slightly better bookkeeping than the Beeb.
Most recently, nine lost episodes were re-discovered in Nigeria, at a relay station where film canisters had been gathering dust for decades. Don't get your hopes up, though, there's still a whopping 97 episodes outstanding.
