by Duncan Lunan

Last Sunday’s article ‘Could people be left without heating and hot water when the RTS signal disappears?’ by Robert Leslie  (ON, December 2^nd, 2024), described how BBC Radio 4’s last two long-wave valve transmitters, using one-metre-high glass valves of a type no longer made, were scheduled to be switched off at the end of June 2025.  When the problem was recognised in 2011 the BBC bought all the ones they could find, ten in all, and when the next one goes, so will the signal, taking with it long-standing coverage like Test Match Special and Today in Parliament.  One can just imagine some relatively young executive saying “Oh, nobody listens to them anyway”, and no doubt there will be a wave of protest when it happens, but if there are no valves left, supposedly not much can be done about it.  They were hand-crafted before and presumably could be again, as Wernher von Braun had to scour the retirement homes of Europe for people who could make the cold-hammered end tanks of the Saturn V rocket which put men on the Moon, but that may not be a suggestion that would occur to said executive.  The real problem is that the electric meters in an estimated 900,000 homes rely on the BBC signal for regulation, and replacement by smart meters is far behind schedule, with serious doubts about whether they can handle the transition in any case. 

It is amazing how fast the technology has moved during my lifetime.  In the first of the BBC Light Programme’s Journey Into Space serials  (1954), after the British spaceship Luna takes off for the Moon and its first stage is jettisoned, the Cockney radio operator is told to contact ‘Control’ for instructions, and replies, “I’ll try, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the shock of the separation broke every valve in the ship.”  (He has to get the instructions because the computer involved is much too large to leave the ground.)   Even when transistors began to take over from valves  (predicted in the Dan Dare story ‘Rogue Planet’, 1957), many engineers thought it would be a short-lived fad.  The initial popularity of transistor radios was due to their portability, not sound quality. because they were saddled with a persistent and irremovable hiss.  The late Prof. Oscar Schwiglhofer, the founder of the Scottish spaceflight society ASTRA, was convinced that valves would make a comeback, and bought some very large ones at auction to save for the day.  As far as I know he never found a buyer or a use for them, and on his death they would have gone to the skip along with tea-chests full of electronic components which he had accumulated.  Had he lived and kept them, they might now be worth something to the BBC, after all this time.

In ‘Burning the Sky’  (ON, 28th April 2024): I described the highly irresponsible high-altitude US nuclear tests of the early 1960s.  “Among the larger-than-expected effects, they revealed that Electro-Magnetic Pulse from high-altitude explosions could cripple advanced electronics.  Soviet designers generally took this more seriously than Western ones, and when a defector landed one of the latest MIG-25s in the West, it was found that its electronics still used valves.  The first reaction was derision, until it was remembered that valves were less vulnerable to EMP.  Whitney Strieber and James E. Kunetka’s novel Warday  (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984 – Fig. 1)  depicts the USA five years after an EMP nuclear exchange. 

Britain, where electronics are taken to be less advanced, has begun on a new campaign of global domination.  Although most cover illustrations show a mushroom cloud, the EMP detonations would actually be too high up for that.”  Even today, few if any non-military electronic devices are armoured against such events.  Given that the ‘Carrington Event’ of 1859 set fire to telegraph stations on Earth, a similarly intense Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun might have similarly drastic effects on today’s devices, unless they were switched off and preferably wrapped in aluminium foil at the time.

But advances in technology can have similar effects without the drama.  In my professional career, since 1970 I’ve progressed from manual typewriters to electric ones  (briefly), likewise to a Commodore 64, then to an Amstrad word processor, a desktop computer and finally to laptops  (three to date).  At every stage, however careful I’ve been, something has failed to make the jump.  Most recently it was my music files, though fortunately I had saved a copy in Google Drive.  But in going from the Amstrad to the desktop, I invested in the necessary cables and other gubbins to transfer everything from the small Amstrad floppy disks to the standard ones.  Not all the transfers worked, and in the acknowledgements in my Children from the Sky  (Mutus Liber, 2012), I thanked the International Correspondence Schools, the Computer Department of Glasgow University and Dave’s Disk Doctor Service for retrieving material that would otherwise have been lost.  Even at that, I didn’t discover until too late that another whole disk had failed to transfer, and I lost all the science articles I’d written in the previous ten years.

Fortunately, most of those were ‘Space Notes’ news items and no great loss.  But around that time, I remember an article or editorial in Analog on the same subject as this, which noted that since the US Census Bureau began storing results electronically, already there was one year whose data could be read only on a computer in a museum in Israel, and another whose data could not be read at all.  Much of the 1960 census was almost lost within 20 years because it could only be read with a Univac machine.  The last repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope had to be delayed while NASA scoured the nation for a radiation-hardened IBM 360 to substitute for the primary one aboard. 

At the time when the problem was recognised, NASA already had warehouses full of data from previous space missions, all over the USA, which had never been examined, much less disseminated.  In a situation where all government spending has to be approved by Senate and Congress every year, as a Constitutional requirement, Senators and Congressman have been  reasonably happy to vote money for space missions, particularly if the contracts brought money and employment to their states, but they’ve always been reluctant to finance the unglamorous business of analysing the results.  Particularly in the early days, very often the scientists concerned have had to be satisfied with partial data, extracts or summaries, because there was no money for the detailed processing.  Now we have much faster and more sophisticated computers, that information can be scanned, digitized and processed, and because it’s still valuable there is a project to do just that.  It was announced that space scientists were delighted to have access to it at last.  But it’s low-priority, low-budget, and it’s taking a long time – and a recent article by Keith Cooper, the editor of Astronomy Now, reveals that it isn’t going nearly as well as hoped.  (‘Inside NASA’s archives: Meet the team restoring astronomical history’, Space.com, online, November 25^th 2024.)

The mammoth task has been assigned to the National Space Science Data Center Archive (NSSDCA), at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Centre in Maryland.  First reactions from the scientific community were enthusiastic, particularly from the space scientists, because years’ worth of data from spacecraft travelling between the planets could potentially be retrieved.  But according to David Williams of the  NSSDCA, “What’s surprising is how much of this information is either lost or at least not in a condition that anybody can use it in.  We’ve got tons of photography, reels of film from various missions, a lot of microfilm and microfiche. We’re slowly working through it.”  But until the mid-to late-1980s, there were no rules on how to archive data, and some researchers didn’t archive their data at all.  Starting around the time of the Magellan Orbiter’s radar mapping of Venus in 1989, rules were established and enforced,  One success was the retrieval of a comparison between Magellan mapping of the volcanic Alpha Regio plateau and radar mapping by the former Arecibo radiotelescope on Earth  (Fig. 2).  The information is now being used in planning NASA’s VERITAS Venus mission, the first since Magellan, which is scheduled for launch in the 2030s.

Other stories are much more depressing.  All that remains from the Mariner 4 mission is a microfilm of its photographs of Mars  (Fig. 3).  It’s not particularly valuable, because Mariner 4 took only 22 images, and although only 4 of them were published in the media at the time, a full set of them was published as an appendix to Robert S. Richardson’s Mars  (Allen & Unwin, 1965).  What is missing is all the data acquired by the spacecraft between Earth and Mars, and beyond it up to an encounter with a meteor shower, on the first deep-space mission since Mariner 2’s discovery of the Solar Wind.  Even worse, the results of the biology experiments on the Viking landers were transferred to microfilm which has vanished without trace.  As the argument about whether the Vikings detected life continues, neither side can now back up their case with access to the 1976 data, and with circumstantial evidence mounting that it may have been seriously misinterpreted, calls are already starting for the Viking experiments to be repeated with up-to-date instrumentation. 

In 1979, as well as building the Sighthill stone circle, the Glasgow Parks Astronomy Project was working with ASTRA and the Third Eye Centre  (now the Centre for Contemporary Arts)  to create The High Frontier, A Decade of Space Exploration 1969-1979, which was the largest space exhibition held in the UK to date, and the only one to come off out of four, proposed by various organisations to mark the tenth anniversary of the Moon landing  (Fig. 4).  To fill gaps in the exhibition’s coverage, the Scottish Arts Council sent me on a whirlwind tour of NASA centres and contractors  (8 aircraft in 10 days – see ‘Discovery Landing’, ON, July 31^st 2022).  At NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and several other sites, I was given access to microfilm archives of space imagery, from which I could request items which would be printed from cleaned-up digital archives of space imagery, which would be printed straight from the original data, in the form of positive or negative transparencies, at any size required and in amazing detail.  Two were used to create giant blow-ups of Voyager images of Jupiter and Io, sponsored by the Glasgow Herald and now owned by the Museum of Transport.  But the Thatcher government had meantime slashed the funding for the Scottish Arts Council and the Third Eye Centre, and after all the help which NASA had provided, and all my painstaking work of selection, most of the transparencies were returned unused.  

It’s galling to find, after all my years justifying the costs of space research, that so much of the data acquired has been discarded, one way or another, often unscanned and unused.  In the Mariner 4 case, we have the images, but with the loss of the originals they can never be subjected to  modern-day analysis and machine-learning techniques to extract more from them.  I have a nasty feeling that the same may apply to all those microfilm catalogues which I studied in 1979.  To make matters worse, the critical shortage of storage tapes which caused so many to be rewritten in the early 1970s came about because NASA had become subject to the Marine Mammals Protection Act, which forbade the use of any products derived from whale oil – and the only protection for the digital tapes was an example.  An attempted substitute proved to dry out the tapes after only six months, causing them to rip in the tape readers. 

So with reams of invaluable data coming down from the ERTS Landsats  (Earth Resources Technology Satellites, Fig. 5), there was no alternative to grabbing previous tapes and recording over them, apparently without taking time even to see what was on them.  While Keith Cooper agrees that the Marine Mammals Protection Act was ‘quite right’, it’s maybe worth pointing out that when Britain, South Africa and the USA stopped whaling, the Soviet Union, Japan, Norway and Iceland all continued, and perhaps the whale oil product could have been bought in until a better protective substitute was found.  I’m aware that similar arguments are used by importers of ivory and the like  (and the British government still seems reluctant to stop them), but plundering decades of scientific research still seems an over-reaction, when so many other abuses of protected species continued regardless.      

At least the 9000 photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts were preserved, and they have been released for use and reprocessing in Citizen Science programmes – sometimes with dramatic results, though there’s not a UFO among them  (I’ve been through them all).  But while they were on the Moon, the astronauts deployed science packages in all six landing missions.  The Apollo 11 EASEP   was battery powered  (Fig. 6), but all the rest were powered by nuclear isotopes and kept working until they were switched off by Congressional order in 1977.  In my Man and the Planets  (1983)  I called it ‘an almost unbelievable act of governmental vandalism’, but I needn’t have bothered:  all the data was transferred to microfilm, and now they can’t be read because all Landsat data prior to 1979 was originally stored on XEROX computers which no longer exist.  The results of other missions were stored on 9-track recorders which no longer exist either.  The NSSDCA answer is to re-store the unusable data in ASCII  (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which uses numbers to represent characters with no formatting and is widespread in computing and on the Internet, and can be used by any software.  The original sources  (even paper copies)  are preserved and stored at NSSDCA and at Iron Mountain, where they should survive even a direct nuclear attack or electromagnetic pulse.

The parlous state of NASA’s data archives came to light when it was realised that the high-quality images of the Apollo 11 EVA, recorded at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in Australia  (Figs.  7-11), had never been broadcast or disseminated, and when looked for, could not be found.  (Robert Colville, ‘One Giant Cock-up for Mankind’, Daily Telegraph, August 14th, 2016, Figs. 12-13.) 

The best that could be done was re-processing of the 3rd-generation images  (described as ‘a photocopy of a photocopy’), which improved the contrast but not the detail  (‘Clear as Moonlight:  NASA Releases Restored Footage from Apollo 11 Mission’, Fig. 14). 

That, and the US Census stories above, gave me the idea that when it was found, it might only be compatible with the ICL 1900 computer at Templeton’s Carpets on Glasgow Green  (Fig. 15), hooked up to the Jacquard loom formerly used to produce special orders for high-quality carpets. 

Before he became Technical Supervisor of the Glasgow Parks Astronomy Project, the late John Braithwaite had worked in the effort to save Templeton’s from liquidation, and had told me fantastic stories about the situation there  (imagine a major company actually run like NASA’s pre-1980 data storage), including the computer and the loom, neither of which now exist in reality.  John gave me the basic facts for my story, which I wrote after his untimely death in 2012.  More detail would probably have improved it, but ‘you never know the minute’, as they say.  The story ‘Many Small Steps for a Man’ appeared in the first collection of my space-travel stories, From the Moon to the Stars, published by Other Side Books in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11  (Fig. 16). 

It was accompanied by a full explanation and an illustration by Sydney Jordan for a Daily Express supplement called ‘Lunar Express’, published five days before the landing  (Fig. 17).  The Moon boots or galoshes shown were actually jettisoned before closing the Lunar Module hatch, partly to save weight on the ascent but also to minimise tramping Moon dust into the cabin.  It was more of a problem in later missions, when the astronauts became covered with it.  At the View from Earth 1984 seminar in Big Bear Lake  (see ‘Challenger Liftoff’, ON, August 7^th 2022), Pete Conrad reported that Dick Gordon wouldn’t allow Alan Bean and himself back into ‘his nice clean Apollo spacecraft’  (Apollo 12)  until they’d stripped completely.  That left very little time before the scheduled jettison of the Lunar Module, and as he did so, it occurred to him that if the hatch seal failed at that point, he might be leaving this world in the same condition whereby he’d arrived in it.   

The BBC’s record is no better than NASA’s, with a long history of erasing both radio and TV recordings to reuse the tapes.  Much of Play for Today and Comedy Playhouse has gone, for a start, including the first episodes of Are You Being Served?, Dad’s Army and Steptoe and Son, plays by major authors and first appearances by future stars.  Almost all of the BBC science fiction has gone, including A for Andromeda  (introducing Julie Christie)  and the original radio versions of Charles Chilton’s Journey into Space serials, which stimulated the creation of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop.  As Chilton said when interviewed about it, “Yet they’ve kept every recording of the Boat Race, and they’re all exactly the same – In, Out, In, Out.”  The first two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment survive only because they were an experiment in video recording, and lost stories and episodes of Doctor Who keep turning up in odd locations around the world..  For a minor personal example, I’m often asked for film of the Sea King helicopter completing the Sighthill stone circle in 1979, but Reporting Scotland hasn’t kept it.  Sometimes things survive by chance:  there are stories ‘for which the world is not yet prepared’ about how the late John Mason got his hit record Strings of Scotland, the first of the Fiddlers Rallies which he arranged and conducted for so many years;  and how the BBC got its abridged BAOR versions of Journey into Space.  Listening to the bootleg tapes  (oops, I gave it away), one intriguing and nostalgic element is how Radio Luxembourg breaks in from time to time, from 208 metres nearby.  And every episode ends with the first minutes of Friday Night Is Music Night, still going strong on Radio 3 and unchanged when I last heard it.  There’s little need to keep recordings of that one because its format is the same every time.

Duncan’s two collections of his space-travel stories, From the Moon to the Stars and The Other Side of the Interface  (Other Side Books, 2019 and 2021), are available from the publisher or through Amazon.  All but 3 of Duncan’s 10 books to date are on Amazon, and the first three can still be found on eBay.  Details of them are on Duncan’s website, www.duncanlunan.com .  

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