*They're in the garage with the dead hardware.
*via Tim O'Reilly, who presumably owns no giant extinct NASA tape drives, but is a marvel at tweeting endangered newspapers.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-lunar22-2009mar22,0,1783495,full.story
(...)
When the clerk came in to ask about the Lunar Orbiter tapes, she didn't hesitate.
"Do not destroy those tapes," Evans commanded.
She talked her bosses at JPL into storing them in a lab warehouse. "I could not morally get rid of this stuff," said Evans, 71, in an interview at her Sun Valley home.
She had no idea what she was letting herself in for. The full collection of Lunar Orbiter data amounted to 2,500 tapes. Assembled on pallets, they constituted an imposing monolith 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6 feet high.
The mountain of tapes was just part of Evans' new burden.
There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.
Evans scoured salvage lists for a castoff FR-900. As a member of the federal government's Trash Evaluation Board, (((must be an interesting group))) she was privy to everything being thrown away from government institutions.
One day in the late 1980s, she got a call from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida: "We heard you're looking for FR-900s. We've got three of them. Where do you want us to send them?"
Having already stretched her bosses' goodwill at JPL by storing the tapes there, she reluctantly agreed to take the drives herself. Evans stored the three tape drives from Eglin and a fourth she got off a salvage list – none of which worked – in her own garage.
There they sat, for two decades.
"I was stuck with these drives," Evans said. "I couldn't get rid of them."
Space junkie's help
Evans applied regularly to NASA for funding to repair the drives. She was turned down every time. One NASA center estimated it would cost $6 million to restore the drives and digitize the tapes.
Finally, in 2005, retired and increasingly doubtful that the historic images would ever see the light of day, Evans gave up on NASA and went public.
She submitted a paper to a lunar conference stating her plight. Her plea ended up on a blog (((!))) frequented by space buffs, where it caught the attention of Dennis Wingo, a kind of space junkie extraordinaire.
Author, designer and dreamer, Wingo is well-known in the private space world, the community of activists trying to show that private enterprise can explore space more effectively and cheaply than the government.
"I have been working in lunar exploration for 20 years," Wingo said. "I knew the value of the tape drives and the tapes."
Wingo went for a second opinion from his friend Keith Cowing, who worked for NASA for several years and now operates the NASA Watch website, which frequently aims slings and arrows at space agency administrators. Cowing agreed that they had stumbled on a treasure trove of space history.
One evening in April 2007, he and Wingo pulled up to Evans' home with two rented trucks and loaded up the dirty, dusty and broken FR-900s.
Three hundred miles later, they pulled up to the gate at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, probably the only NASA institution that would even consider admitting them and their pile of junk.
Ames Director Pete Worden offered space in an abandoned McDonald's that in the heyday of the lunar program had been called "McMoon's."
The tape drives were installed where customers once ate fries. Behind the counter, where employees had flipped burgers, stood the massive wall of tapes.
Wingo, who has an engineering physics degree from the University of Alabama, knows his way around a computer. But repairing the FR-900s was beyond him. It was also beyond almost everyone else they tried.
Finally, they heard about an old Army vet, Ken Zin, who knew machinery and happened to work at Ames repairing video equipment....
