[QuadList] Stan Lebar of Apollo 11 camera, telemetry tape search passes/Search final report

[Ted Langdell]

As Ed noted yesterday...

Stan Lebar, whose team of Westinghouse engineers developed the camera  
that let us see the first steps by Man on the Moon passed away last  
Wednesday.

Lebar was 84, and while battling cancer several times, began a search  
for the telemetry tapes from the Apollo 11 moon landing.

These tapes would have yielded much higher quality slow scan motion  
images from the Westinghouse camera than recordings made after the  
slow scan pictures were converted to the US  broadcast television  
standard.

When that search proved fruitless, Lebar and Dick Nafzger—NASA's man  
in charge of Apollo 11's television side—turned their attention to a  
digital clean up and improvement of the quality of images from 2" Quad  
broadcast tapes and kinescopes gathered from a variety of sources.

As the 40th anniversary of the first moonwalk approached, Lebar was  
interviewed by his son Scott, who is an editor for the Sacramento "Bee."

http://www.sacbee.com/325/story/2035735.html

"Just imagine," Lebar said during a phone call to his son, "if you had  
video of the Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock. Wouldn't you want to  
see that? Wouldn't you want that for everyone? That's what this is,  
and we're trying to preserve it for history and future generations."

Lowry Digital in Burbank did the digitization and enhancement.

NASA held a news conference July 16 to announce the work being done by  
Lowry and show some clips of what could be expected.

Scott Lebar wrote: "Before the release, he said, "For me, that's like  
the last piece of the puzzle, and I've done what I felt was important.  
To pass on the best version of the telecast for posterity that will be  
shown and viewed for hundreds of years into the future.'"

Lebar saw a DVD of the completed work on Monday, Dec. 21, just two  
days before he passed, Nafzger told the Annapolis, MD "The Capital"  
newspaper.

Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) members saw clips of the  
work-in-progress and heard a description of how the material was being  
processed in August at the AMIA Reel Thing XXII held at the Academy of  
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:
http://www.amianet.org/events/thereelthing/abstracts09.html#eva

Stan Lebar lived in a suburb of Washington, DC. The NBC owned station,  
WRC-TV has a website story published Monday about Lebar:

http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local-beat/NATL-Live-From-the-Moon-Stan-Lebar-Lunar-TV-Camera-Creator-Dies-80194342.html

with links to a story of his passing in the newspaper serving  
Annapolis, MD, near where Lebar lived in Saverna Park.

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/top/2009/12/26-17/Stan-Lebar-engineer-synagogue-founder-dies.html

Setting the record straight was something Scott Lebar says his father  
was trying to do, whether by improving what we see of the Apollo 11  
moonwalk, or keeping the historic record accurate.

I had the opportunity to exchange a few e-mails with Stan Lebar this  
summer, as he tried to correct the distribution of erroneous  
information contained in a post made by a video recorder collector to  
a VTR collector's list.

The misinformation was that he had modified an Ampex VR-660 2" Helical  
video recorder to record the slow-scan images produced by his team's  
camera—something that I'd passed on to the AMIA List by reposting  
(with permission) on Dec. 27, 2007.  When contacted about the error, I  
made an effort to correct on this list and elsewhere.

To be clear: Lebar had nothing to do with such a thing, but NASA had  
hired a company to make just this kind of modification.

As reported at the bottom of page 14 of the final report on the data  
tape search
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/A11TapeSearchReport.pdf

they returned to search more boxes at the Washington National Records  
Center.

"In one dusty box, they uncovered a Goddard Teletype message  
indicating that NASA had hired the Applied Physics
Laboratory (APL) near Baltimore to modify another tape recorder-an  
Ampex VR-660C that used two-inch magnetic tape-to handle the slow-scan  
television signals received only at the Parkes tracking station.  
Nafzger had no knowledge of this experimental program even though he  
was in charge of the Apollo 11 television ground-support effort."

More detective work led them to the man who had done the modifications  
to two VR-660C's, and had used them at the Parkes tracking station in  
Australia to record the slow-scan signals.

The final report says the octogenarian engineer told them that:

At the time, no one asked him to make a dupe of the tapes; so he did  
not.
Whether he packed the tapes and personally delivered them to APL, he  
does not recall.
However, he distinctly remembered seeing the tapes at APL after his  
return from
Australia.
APL Tapes Found
In early January, the APL Archivist called Nafzger to say that she  
found five two-inch
videotapes, along with some 16mm films.

Before team members could play the tapes, though, they had to find a  
VR-660C. Wood
found a company in California that agreed to ship its legacy machine  
to Goddard.

(TL notes:  That was Richard Diehl, webmaster of http://www.labguysworld.com 
)

After it arrived, Nafzger loaded the tapes and lived yet another deja  
vu experience. Although
he confirmed that the tapes had been previously recorded in a format  
consistent with a
VR-660C, the two-inch tapes were blank and the film contained  
unrelated television
footage.

Although a search for the VR-660C recordings at the National Archives  
and the WNRC
has yielded nothing, Nafzger, Wood, Lebar, and other members of the  
Goddard search
team are hopeful that APL will one day find them in its holdings. If  
APL finds the
recordings, NASA will be ready: it is maintaining its capability to  
playback and view one and
two-inch tapes if they are ever found.

So what happened to the tapes that launched the search in the first  
place... and consumed much of Stan Lebar's attention in the last five  
years?

As reported this summer and discussed here, the searchers concluded  
that the Apollo 11 moonwalk instrumentation tapes and thousands like  
them had been removed from storage, bulk erased, checked for whether  
they could be certified for re-use, and then re-recorded with Landsat  
satellite data.

But why?  Because of Sticky Shed:

Pages 12-13:

By the mid 1970s, the magnetic-tape industry had begun using a  
synthetic product to
apply magnetic oxide to tapes. However, the new binder proved  
troublesome. After only
a couple years, many of these tapes became unusable because the oxide  
would stick to
tape heads and strip off when the tape was played back, a condition  
known as "Sticky
Shed Syndrome."

By the early 1980s, NASA was experiencing a critical shortage of  
magnetic tape. The
Associate Chief for Goddard's Network Procedure and Evaluation  
Division recalled
someone from Goddard's Network Logistics Depot calling him to request  
additional
recycled magnetic tapes to make up for procurement shortages caused by
manufacturers failing to meet NASA's minimum quality specifications

On January 8, 1981, the Network Operations Division (Code 850)  
reported: "Landsat
magnetic tape requirements have increased substantially over the  
originally provided
projections for 1981. Recent increases of 10 reels per day for DOMSAT  
and 50 per day
by the Image Processing Facility have severely strained both new and  
recertified tape
supply systems." Furthermore, the report said that Goddard's magnetic- 
tape
recertification facility had added a third shift to recertify Landsat  
tape.

The report's final pages observe that:

Though NASA certainly understood the historic significance of
man's first steps on the moon, it did not anticipate the ability to  
digitize the
unconventional television signal into high quality video 40 years later.

Among other data, they recorded an unconventional television signal,  
which had to be
converted and repackaged to make viewable-and only then with significant
degradation.

"They were telemetry tapes; it's as simple as that," Nafzger said. "NASA
has always backed up mission data and that's the role these tapes  
played. In all
honesty I don't think they would have passed the test," he added. "The  
technology didn't
exist to do anything with them other than what was already done at the  
time they were
made."

The final paragraph states:

While current leaders can do nothing to reverse decisions made 40  
years ago, they can
redouble their efforts to make sure historically important recordings  
and paperwork find
a permanent home within the National Archives, particularly now as  
they prepare to take
the Nation back to the moon.

The pictures from the next moonwalk could be live in HD.  Regardless,  
by what processes and procedures are these images and sounds going to  
be preserved?

That's another story.

Ted

Ted Langdell
flashscan8.us
Main: 	(530) 741-1212
Cell: 	(530) 301-2931
ted at flashscan8.us

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Ted Langdell
Secretary

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