Here is my letter to the Sydney Morning Herald regards this article:

To the Editor

Your highly misleading headline "One Giant Blunder for Mankind - How NASA Lost Moon Pictures" has done a great disservice to a group of Australian and US Apollo tracking station veterans involved in a new search for better Apollo 11 EVA images.

Whoever wrote the headline and introductory paragraphs mangled John Sarkissian's remarks to SMH reporter Richard Macey and sensationalized a serious search for better versions of that historic telecast received at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in the ACT and through the giant Parkes Radio Telescope.

First of all, we are not looking for missing Apollo videotapes. We are looking for special raw data recordings that contain unconverted slow-scan television, recorded as a backup in case of an equipment failure or a video circuit outage during the Apollo 11 EVA. Since there were no problems converting the slow-scan signals to NTSC video, there was no need to use the backup telemetry recordings. These were shipped to GSFC were they were placed into storage for several years.

There are NO missing Apollo videotapes. All of the mission television broadcasts are available in many different formats including DVD's that contain every second of every Apollo television broadcast.

Since your misleading headline has kept this mangled story number one on the most read roster on the SMH web site, you need to post a correction with the story and directing web visitors to the web page that tells the true story about the search for better Apollo 11 television pictures: http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/tap... or http://tinyurl.com/g7edh

Regards

Bill Wood
Retired Apollo tracking station engineer
Barstow, CA USA