Thanks to Twitter, I was alerted this week to a recent LA Times profile of a woman who restored old NASA files detailing its 1966 scientific missions to the moon using the Lunar Orbiter. The story of what happened to that data is a truly epic tale and one that might interest many in the IT and storage industries.
According to the story: “NASA was so preoccupied with getting an astronaut to the moon ahead of the Soviets that little attention was paid to the mountains of scientific data that flowed back to Earth from its early space missions. The data, stored on miles of fragile tapes, grew into mountains that were packed up and sent to a government warehouse with crates of other stuff.
And so they eventually came to the attention of Nancy Evans, a no-nonsense woman with flaming red hair that fit her sometimes-impatient nature. She had been trained as a biologist, but within the sprawling space agency she had found her niche as an archivist.”
I won’t spoil the story–it’s really worth reading all the way through–but I will say that it involves an old McDonald’s that used to be known as “McMoon’s,” an army vet who first learned about repair fixing tractors on his family farm, and a whole lot of searching for old computer parts. Enjoy!
