What Do Star Trek and Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project Have in Common?

We’re especially happy that William Shatner had these nice words to say about us. You see, we at LOIRP and McMoons have a favorite Star Trek Episode: “City on the Edge of Forever”. As you will recall Kirk, Spock and McCoy go back in time to the 1930s. At one point Spock has to hack his 23rd century tricorder with early 20th century electronics to get data off of it. In our case, we used early 21st century electronics to hack mid 20th century electronics to gain access to 45 year old data. Like Spock and Kirk, we had to do some dumpster diving to get parts. We like to make old things work to explore space. Check out our RocketHub page.

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Thanks To You We’re Ordering a New Head


Thanks so very much for your support. Though we are well short of our goal at this time, we have raised enough money to do the most essential thing that we have to do, which is to order the refurbishment of one head. Tony Korte of www.videomagnetics.com and his great staff of people are a critical part of our overall team. Without Tony there would be no more heads for our FR-900 machine and they have worked with us over the past few years to keep our machines going.
The first tranche of money raised is going to go to Tony to refurbish one head. We need more to finish the project but this will give us our first leg up in moving forward. My latest picture shows the head that your generosity has funded to get refurbished. There is an incredibly delicate and technical art to head refurbishment and the FR-900 is the most technically challenging head refurbish that they do for the old Ampex machines. This is because the FR-900 is not simply a video recorder, it is an instrumentation recorder with higher bandwidth than the commercial video machines. This means that the tolerances are tighter and the accuracy of head alignment must be better than on the video machines. This obviously costs more money.
With your help we can get more of these heads refurbished and pay our people to be able to transfer these images!
Dennis

Please Help Support the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project

“We are looking for people to help us complete the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). We call this technoarchaeology – mining the past to support science in the future.  Between 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five Lunar Orbiter missions to the Moon. Their mission was to photograph the lunar surface to help identify future Apollo mission landing sites.  The spacecraft carried 70mm photographic film which was developed automatically in lunar orbit aboard the spacecraft.  The developed film was then scanned with a light beam and this modulated a signal which was sent back to Earth.” More at RocketHub