Dennis Wingo: This is way cool for us. Notice that in the upper left there is a LED readout. That readout is accurately reading the proper date in 1966 for this particular tape. After several years of messing around trying to recreate a NASA time code reader we found one for $50 on Ebay. Jacob Gold and Ken Zin got it to work.
Keith Cowing: We used to tease people and refer to our tape drives as the “Stargate”, the “Reactor”, The “Time Machine”, or the “Warp Drive” on Twitter when we were testing (and also to enhance Pete Worden’s reputation for cutting edge stuff). Now we can show what the Star Date was when a certain tape was recorded. In this case the tape being played back was originally made on day 340 of 1966 – or 6 Dec 1966 – at 11:57:43 GMT. This tape was created when the images from Lunar Orbiter II were being sent back to Earth.
With regard to Stardates and time machines, we were especially happy that William Shatner had these nice words to say about us during our crowdfunding project earlier this year. 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 and go back in time.
Of course we also like the episode “Tomorrow is Yesterday” when the Enterprise travels back in time (they do that a lot) and have to grab magnetic tape and film footage that shows the Enterprise (i.e. a UFO) in the skies of the 1960s. They also have a fight in the tape storage room (we don’t).
