#loirp

Hello everyone, 

Something really exciting is happening at my work right now! We have begun crowdfunding for a book we are making based on the original Lunar Orbiter Images. 

We have worked the past few years to recover and re-release the original Orbiter images taken in the ‘60′s. And now that all of the images have been recovered and refurbished we are releasing a coffee table art book with high quality closeup images of the moon! 

This entire project right now is crowd funding based so if you cannot donate please share this post to help us get the word out about this book!

Newly retrieved high-res image taken by Lunar Orbiter 2, 19 November 1966, 06:22 GMT

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) is a project to digitize the original analog data tapes from the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that were sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967. Operating out of "McMoon's" – a now-vacant, former McDonald's restaurant just outside of NASA's Ames Research Centre – LOIRP refurbished and reconstructed four Ampex FR-900 tape drives in order to read the 1,500 tapes that had been forgotten after serving as surveys for manned Apollo landing sites.

Techno-Archaeologists Recover and Digitalize Long-Lost Lunar Orbiter Photos of the Moon

All photos courtesy of LOIRP.

Somewhere in the NASA Ames Base in Silicon Valley is an abandoned now-repurposed McDonald’s. And in this repurposed McDonald’s, now affectionately called McMoon’s, is a team of hacker engineers (or more preferably techno-archaeologists) who are on an earthbound mission to unearth some of the very first images taken of our only natural satellite, the Moon.

These old…

Lunar Orbiter 1 photograph of "earthrise", from 23 August 1966, as initially released by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project in November 2008, along with a chart from 1966 showing the geometry, as well as the fact it was actually earthset as seen from the spacecraft.

The inspiration was that I had been working with some of the lower quality film versions of the Lunar Orbiter images (located here) during the 1980's and found out that the original data had never been directly digitized from the ground station tapes. In 2007 by accident I read a blog where the archivist from Lunar Orbiter was giving away the last remaining tape drives that could read the data. I used to run a television studio in Los Angeles so I knew something about the hardware and so we got in touch with her and she gave us the drives. I have a lot of NASA contacts and since we were looking at going back to the Moon and NASA was building a new spacecraft to map Mars, the stars kinda aligned in our favor to undertake the project.

Beyond that I am a historian of technology. Just think how much better off we might be today if the Library at Alexandria, which had over 200,000 scrolls from all over the world, had been saved from burning. What if we had the design plans for the Great Pyramid, the engineering drawings for Roman buildings, and the brilliant work of Greek mechanical engineers? In our own era, 50% of all movies made before 1950 have been lost, and there was a lot of data that the American taxpayers paid billions of dollars for from the Apollo era, including our lunar orbiter images, that were in danger of being lost. Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat its mistakes and by keeping this original science alive, we are making our contribution for our future.

In some ways gratifying and in some ways maddening. We have had amazing publicity and support in the media and from people all over the world for our project as our data is provided free to the world and provided to NASA for archiving. We have been on the front page of the LA times, our images have been shown to president Obama, been provided in the inaugural swag bags, and we have talked to people all over the world about our project. You would think that we would easily be able to reach our goal as all it would take is 7,500 people putting up $10 dollars. However we are almost two weeks into the project and we are no where near our goal. It turns out that there is a gap between people's interest and enthusiasm for a project and taking that next step to going to RocketHub and putting in the credit card number!  It takes a lot of personal effort in calling people, asking them to actually donate and then leading them by the hand to the site.

Crowdfunding does not just magically happen, it takes hard work and persistence to make it successful.

In reading your tips on how to make a project successful it seems that we are following pretty much the path that your own experience shows to be the case for raising funds this way. 

There is no magic formula for making money appear through donations. The formula is pretty much the same as for any business raising funds. Offer something for the donation that gives a tangible connection. Work hard, call your friends, neighbors, and anyone else that you can think of. Putting out a press release or even favorable publicity is not enough on its own. During the course of your fundraising, especially if the number is in the tens of thousands, you have to work every day to get people to go to the site and actually put in that credit card number.

Le Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) est un projet de la NASA destiné à numériser les images récoltées sur la Lune entre 1966 et 1967 par les sondes spatiales du programme Lunar Orbiter. Depuis le mois de juillet 2008, l’équipe est installée dans un McDonald’s abandonné situé juste à côté du Ames Research Center de la NASA, à Moffett Field, en Californie, depuis surnommé McMoon.

Photos © Mountain View Online et Technology Review