The Apollo 11 Moon Landing

On July 16, 2009 (the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's launch), NASA published the findings of a three-year internal search led by senior video engineer Richard Nafzger of the Goddard Space Flight Center. The search concluded that the 45 reels of original one-inch slow-scan telemetry tape from Apollo 11 were degaussed and reused in the early 1980s, during a period when NASA's Landsat program faced a severe shortage of data tape. The original tapes were not found. NASA's final report notes that the best surviving visual record consists of the converted broadcast-format videotapes and Super 8 film shot of a monitor in Australia, which were restored and released in 2009. This is NASA's own finding, entered here as NASA stated it, including the loss.

Apollo 11 launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins toward the Moon.

In 1960, Wernher von Braun's Army Ballistic Missile Agency rocket-development team was transferred into NASA, and von Braun became the founding director of NASA's newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He served as chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that carried the Apollo missions, including Apollo 11, to the Moon.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created by statute: the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (Public Law 85-568, 72 Stat. 426), signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on July 29, 1958. The Act's own text describes its purpose as "to provide for research into problems of flight within and outside the earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes."

On March 9, 1955, Walt Disney's Disneyland television series aired "Man in Space," a program on spaceflight. Wernher von Braun -- at the time still with the U.S. Army's Ballistic Missile Agency, five years before joining NASA -- appeared alongside Willy Ley and Heinz Haber as a technical consultant on the program's rocketry and spaceflight content. This predates NASA's creation by more than three years.

Jack Parsons was one of the founders, in 1943, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech (grown out of the GALCIT Rocket Research Group he had helped form in the 1930s). Starting in mid-1945, science-fiction writer and U.S. Navy officer L. Ron Hubbard moved into Parsons's home in Pasadena and the two became close friends, engaging together in ritual magic practices through early 1946. In February 1946 Parsons and Hubbard formed a business venture, Allied Enterprises; the partnership collapsed within months when Hubbard left with a large share of its funds. This association is documented; it is not a NASA record and predates NASA's creation by more than a decade.