Here’s How Hackers Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos While Working From An Abandoned McDonald’s

No longer bearing the famous huge letters of “McDonald’s” on its roof, this building now goes by the name “McMoon’s.” Its windows, meanwhile, are adorned with the skull and bones symbol, which is a piece of iconography closely associated with hackers nowadays. And when you go inside, you won’t find any burger grills.

Instead, you’ll see a small gang of people beavering away at what looks like something scientific and furtive. But given their hacker ethos, there are no secrets here. The workers share their results with anyone who wants them, without expecting any recompense for their time and labor. Even when they’ve given plenty of both.

One of the gang’s leaders, Keith Cowing, told Wired magazine why he was sited in the old McDonald’s in 2014. He said, “I had a choice between the barbershop and this building – we didn’t really care what sort of building they gave us, we just didn’t want to pay for it. The surplus folks at NASA Ames where all the old computers and stuff go, they love us because we come over and make all the old stuff work.”

The gang started as a small affair, but it’s since grown. Now the facility houses specialists who turn old materials that would otherwise just gather dust into new digital forms. And the McDonald’s has turned out to be the perfect location. After all, it’s purpose-built to be able to deal with chemicals that pose hazards.

One of the things the hackers have taken a great interest in are photos of the Moon. You see, since its mission from the 1960s onwards, NASA has taken a lot of pictures of the natural satellite. One of the ways it’s done this in recent years is by utilizing the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched in 2009. But in the late ’60s there were other Lunar Orbiter programs – and they produced some stunning images, even by today’s standards.

The Lunar Orbiter missions were needed because you can’t just throw a person into space and let them land in some random place on the Moon. No, you have to be sure that the landing spot is safe. But how can you do that? Well, what you do is send up orbiters to photograph the Moon and survey it for good spots. So, NASA sent five.

In August 1966 the first orbiter went up to photograph a strip around the Moon’s equator, largely on the side facing the Earth. It took hundreds of high-resolution pictures. Lunar Orbiter II (LO II) had the exact same mission and launched a few months later, though it was shorter and took fewer photographs.

With some good sites identified by LO I and II, the next step was to take a closer look at 12 of them. LO III took off in February of 1967, bringing a full suite of photographic equipment along with it. It narrowed the field down to eight potential sites for the Apollo landing, while it also took a long look at the dark side of the Moon.

Next, in May 1967 came the fourth lunar orbiter. This had a wider remit, looking to cover most of the near side of the Moon and some of the far side. After running round the Moon six times, it started filming, and 30 circuits later the orbiter had photographed nearly all of the Moon’s nearer face. Clearly, it was tough, since it was hit by a couple of small meteorites without diverting from its mission.

The fifth orbiter went up in August 1967. It took even more pictures of the potential sites for the Apollo landing and other places of scientific interest. It span round the Moon 69 times, snapping more than 170 photos. When its mission finished on August 18, it brought an end to the lunar orbiter program.

The orbiters didn’t bring their pictures back to Earth. Nope, they actually developed the film themselves. And yes, they did use 70mm film. Once developed, they sent scans of the negatives back to Earth. The scanning was at a very high resolution, much finer than anyone was using commercially at the time.

The signals carrying the pictures were beamed back towards the home planet. They were intercepted by three sites across the globe and recorded for future study. The sites weren’t all in the United States, although one was in California. The other two were in Spain and Australia, making it a true worldwide effort.

When the three stations received a transmission, they recorded it to tape – but these weren’t just regular tapes! They actually needed special drives to be read, which were about the size of refrigerators. And obviously, you couldn’t buy these things at your local Best Buy. No, they’d set you back a cool $300,000, even back in the 1960s.

The resolution of the pictures was so high that it was claimed by one person that you could make them as big as an advertising board without a drop in quality. NASA’s engineers made prints of the images and found them so unwieldy that they had to use a church for hanging space. The pictures came out at more than five feet tall and a foot across.

Why did the images need to be of such super high quality? Well, the idea was that they could be expanded to an enormous size – more than 50 feet tall – without losing too much detail. Then the astronauts could literally walk over the photographs and see where they might land on the Moon.

So, that’s what happened. NASA’s engineering staff placed the pictures all over the ground. Then, the astronauts and their colleagues went shoeless and scrambled around on top of them. The pics were so fine and detailed that the astronauts were even able to scrutinize them with magnifying glasses. This was how the top sites for a Moon landing were identified.

Lunar Orbiter IV’s great achievement, as we noted, was to fashion a whole picture of the Moon’s near side. The orbiter snapped a series of photos, which were then put together to display the whole thing, from pole to pole. When laid in a mosaic, all these pictures took up 45 feet by 40 feet of floor space.

But these amazing images weren’t initially shared with the public. No, they were hidden away under lock and key. But why did NASA not make the pictures available? Well, there was a fear that if the Russians saw them, they’d learn about American spy cameras. On top of that, they’d get lots of knowledge about the sites the U.S. was considering for the Apollo landing.

By 1971, however, lots of the images saw the light of day. Having said that, they weren’t given out at the high resolution that made them so spectacular. And what’s more, two years had passed since the Moon landing, so people just weren’t as interested anymore. These grainy pictures, then, just weren’t that alluring.

As for the orbiters themselves, they didn’t come back to Earth. Nope, they ended their days smashed to bits on the Moon. This might seem a waste of what was, in its day, cutting-edge engineering. And hacker chief Keith Cowing certainly agrees that this was the peak of technology at the time.

The hacking team’s leader told technology magazine Wired in 2014, “These guys were operating right at the edge. There’s a certain spy program heritage to all this, but these guys went above that, because those spy satellites would send their images back. These didn’t. They couldn’t. They were in lunar orbit.”

Back in 2005 Cowing – who’d worked for NASA as an engineer – and space businessman Dennis Wingo decided that the pictures shouldn’t just molder away. So, they acted. They weren’t the first people to dig the photos out of storage, but they had a level of capability no one had brought to the job before.

What spurred the duo into action was finding out on the internet about Nancy Evans, a woman who’d worked for NASA. They heard that Evans potentially had the tapes and the Ampex drives that could read them. This turned out to be true, so after visits to Los Angeles and a storage facility in Moorpark, they’d gotten their hands on both. Now, they could get to work.

Cowing told Wired about the state they found the tapes in. He said, “These tapes were sealed for history by somebody who cared, and it was astonishing the condition they were in. So we started buying used parts on eBay, Radioshack – I was sitting at a black tie reception at one point buying something on my iPhone. We just buy and reassemble these things bit by bit.”

Although the tapes may have looked good, the drive wasn’t in great shape and needed to be repaired. That began with giving it a bath. Luckily, given their base inside a former McDonald’s, there was a handy sink for that purpose. Next, they needed to construct a demodulator to get images from the tapes.

To the hackers’ delight, one of the tape heads still worked, which was important because of the potential costs of getting them refurbished. Besides that, they had to cobble together the drives from bits and pieces, but the process worked. It only took a fortnight before they managed to power one up, though more work was still necessary to start extracting images.

To recreate the images is a complicated process. First, a current is fired across the tape by the drive’s heads. The demodulator is fed the current on the other side, which provides a signal. That’s then converted into digital form. After processing, the different images can be stitched together in Photoshop.

Photoshop is needed because of how the images were sent. That is, because they were broken into strips and sent separately in these pieces. But once they were put together in the imaging software, their true majesty could be revealed. Looking at the sharpest of the images would allow you to see the surface of the Moon at a fantastic resolution. 

The first indication that the tapes were in reasonable shape wasn’t actually related to image. Rather, it was a little piece of audio. That’s because every tape had a stretch of chatter from the operator. And hearing it meant that the tapes were in decent shape, even though the video head wasn’t in use.

The next problem was how to demodulate the images. The team had no idea whether the demodulator they had was correct or whether they’d need a supplementary one. But they got a break. One of the tapes seemed to have a demodulated image. If they could snatch this one, it would prove their self-professed “techno-archaeology” had been successful.

The work continued until November 2008, at which point NASA called a meeting with the press. There, the agency announced that it was putting out an image of the Earth snapped in August 1966. After more than 40 years, the fruits of the lunar orbiter mission would finally be shared with the public. And it was all thanks to the hackers.

Up until this point, the team had been receiving a small amount of funding from NASA. But now, they’d shown off their effectiveness with an image said to be “four times the dynamic range of the [original] film image and up to twice the ultimate resolution.” So, the space agency was keen to pay the team for more.

Gregory Schmidt, who worked as deputy director at NASA’s Lunar Science Institute, spoke about the next steps around this time in a 2008 press release. He said, “Now that we’ve demonstrated the capability to retrieve images, our goal is to complete the tape drives’ restoration and move toward retrieving all of the images on the remaining tapes.” With the new money, the effort redoubled.

In March 2009 the team had big news. Their new demodulator worked, as they demonstrated by rescuing an incredible image. When the photo was originally taken back in 1966, Time magazine cited a NASA boffin named Martin Swetnick as saying that it was “one of the great pictures of this century.”

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project went from strength to strength, eventually retrieving 2,000 of the images. Cowing noted that these included “an image taken a quarter of a… million miles away in 1966. The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken.”

Cowing also explained the significance of the team’s work more broadly. He told Wired, “We’re reaching back to a capability that existed but couldn’t be touched back when it was created... It’s like having a DVD in 1966, you can’t play it. We had resolution of the Earth of about a kilometer [per pixel].”

It was an historic effort, as Cowing acknowledged. He said, “We’re the first people out of a generation or more to see this. No human eye had ever seen this. All they saw was something that had already been through one generation of copying. We’re seeing something one order of magnitude more precise right on the screen.”

And not only was the technology advanced for the day, it still hasn’t been beaten. The hacker continued, “A lot of the images they’re taking today, our imagery from 1966 and ’67 has sometimes greater resolution and greater dynamic range because of the way the pictures were taken. So sometimes you look into a shadow in a picture that [a more modern lunar observer has] taken, and you don’t see any detail – with ours, you do.”

All in all, Cowing felt he was simply completing the mission. He said, “Back then they just had to engineer stuff elegantly so that it worked. We feel that we’re completing the Lunar Orbiter 1 through 5 missions. They never formally submitted their stuff for the archives, so we’re doing it.” These images are also verifying some of the earliest — and strangest — accounts of moon missions.

Buzz Aldrin’s revelations about his Moon trip in a 2016 interview centered on one of the color shots taken on the mission by Neil Armstrong. In fact Armstrong took all of the still photos on the Moon’s surface for the simple reason that he was the one wielding the camera. The many famous shots he got were captured with a high-performance Hasselblad.

Of course, the astronauts captured a whole gallery of extraordinary images from this first manned Moon-landing expedition. That’s hardly a surprise given the momentous accomplishment of those two men setting foot on the Moon. For example, there’s the amazing shot of Aldrin standing by the Stars and Stripes, saluting his country’s flag flying improbably on the Moon’s surface.

A single photograph of Aldrin’s bootprint in the moondust is another unforgettable shot. Then there’s what’s known as the visor image. In that picture of Aldrin facing the camera we can actually clearly see Armstrong in reflection in the former’s helmet visor. Also visible in the reflection is the lunar landing module, Eagle.

Indeed, one of the many topics Aldrin addressed in an interview staged at the Science Museum in London, England in 2016 was the photography from the Moon mission. And as he answered questions he let slip what we might seem to be a rather startling admission. He went so far as to say that an aspect of the moon landing had been “so well staged.”

Aldrin and Armstrong’s successful landing on the moon – with Michael Collins in orbit in the return vehicle – was actually the fulfillment of a commitment made by President John F. Kennedy back in 1961. He’d told a joint Congressional session that America would land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Sadly, Kennedy had been dead for nearly six years by the time this dream came true. Nevertheless, it was a stirring example of American ambition and know-how.

This high-level commitment to expand the U.S. space program came in the context of the Cold War. This conflict between the U.S. and her allies and the Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union was a clash of ideologies which sometimes spilled onto the battlefield; one such example was the Korean War. Aldrin actually fought in Korea as a fighter pilot, flying on 66 missions and bringing down two enemy MiG jets.

Another Cold War front on which the opposing sides competed was the Space Race. By the time Kennedy had announced the intention to travel to the Moon, the Soviets had twice already stolen a significant march on the Americans in space exploration. In 1957 they had launched the first orbiting satellite, Sputnik. Then in 1961 the first man into space had been the Russian Yuri Gagarin. It was clearing that the U.S. was lagging behind in this Space Race.

The presidential pledge led to an acceleration of NASA’s space program, with the Gemini missions running through the 1960s. In fact, Aldrin was one of the astronauts who flew on Gemini XII, the project’s final mission in 1966. In less than two years, the program had perfected various operations and maneuvers that would be essential to a future Moon-landing project.

The next step in the plan to put a man on the Moon was NASA’s Apollo program. It did not get off to the best of starts. The three-man crew that was to launch aboard Apollo 1 were all killed when a take-off practice drill in January 1967 went disastrously wrong. But by October 1968 things were back on track.

The next crewed mission, Apollo 7, successfully launched with its three-man crew and orbited the Earth 163 times. This mission was notable as the first American spaceflight to transmit live TV pictures back to the public. The next Apollo missions, 8, 9 and 10, moved closer to the ultimate goal of landing on the Moon.

As we know Aldrin, along with Armstrong and Collins, were the astronauts for the Apollo 11 mission. Armstrong was the mission commander and Collins was the command module pilot. This command ship was the spacecraft that would return the three astronauts back to Earth. Aldrin was the pilot of the lunar module. It was down to him to land it on the moon’s surface – and return safely to the command module.

Powered by its 363-foot-tall Saturn V rocket, Apollo 11 took off from Cape Kennedy in Florida on July 16, 1969. It was one of four sections that made up the spaceship with the other three being the command module, Columbia, the lunar module, Eagle and a service module. Hundreds of thousands had gathered at the base, today known as Cape Canaveral, to watch the three astronauts blast off into space.

Once the spacecraft had left Earth’s atmosphere it headed for the Moon, using the thrust of the last of the three sections that made up the Saturn V rocket. The first had launched them from the ground and remained there while the second had powered them through the stratosphere. They were on their way.

Less than three hours after launch came a crucial part of the mission – the separation of the Apollo modules from the Saturn V rocket. The Columbus module also had to separate from the lunar module Eagle to maneuver the two into the correct configuration. The two parts of the spacecraft then successfully docked back together, and set off towards the Moon. A little more than two full days of space travel later, the astronauts were in lunar orbit.

By now it was the morning of July 20, and Aldrin and Armstrong clambered into Eagle, leaving Collins on his own in lunar orbit. The pair prepared to start flying the lunar module down to the Moon’s surface. They’d circled the Moon nearly 12 times and it was time to start their descent to the surface.

The first step to the Moon landing was to maneuver the lunar module from a standard orbit to an elliptical one that would bring them as near to the surface as 50,000 feet. At that point, the astronauts used Eagle’s engine to start the final controlled descent. At 500 feet from the Moon’s surface, Armstrong switched the craft to manual control.

At last, the lunar module landed. Armstrong announced this in his immortal message, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” The original flight plan had called for a four-hour rest break before Aldrin and Armstrong prepared to leave their capsule. However, once on the surface they quickly began to make ready to emerge.

In fact, the preparations to leave Eagle took nearly four hours. Finally, a little short of 110 hours after leaving Earth, Armstrong stepped onto the rocky terrain of the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. He now radioed another message which has become a central part of the Moon landing story. “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” In the heat of the moment he actually forgot the “a” which he’d intended to include.

About 20 minutes after Armstrong had disembarked from Eagle, Aldrin followed him down the small ladder to step onto the Moon’s surface. Armstrong had already set up the TV camera so that the hundreds of millions of viewers on Earth could witness these extraordinary events on the Moon. The two astronauts now began to explore the lunar landscape around Eagle, spending about two-and-a-half hours outside before returning to the lunar module.

In the end, the two astronauts spent nearly 22 hours on the surface of the Moon before taking off to dock with Columbus. During their time outside Eagle, they’d taken many outstanding photos, a number of which are published again and again in the press and online. And some of those who claim that the Moon landings never happened use so-called anomalies in the photos as evidence to support their contentions.

Self-styled “Moon truthers” have repeatedly used the photos taken by Armstrong to try and prove that the entire Moon landing mission was staged. One example of this is an image that shows shadows on the ground which are apparently not parallel. Those that question the truth of the Apollo 11 mission say this indicates the use of studio lighting. But experts roundly reject this allegation.

The website of London’s Royal Museums Greenwich quotes the words of Professor Anu Ojha, the British National Space Academy’s director. Speaking about the parallel shadows claim, he explained, “This is on the surface of the Moon, but we can reproduce this effect any time we want to on Earth. You have all seen this phenomenon yourself, where, because of perspective, parallel lines appear to be non-parallel.”

Ojha continued, “If you are trying to reduce onto a two-dimensional plane a three-dimensional situation, you can make lines do all sorts of weird things. Artists have been using this for centuries.” And he goes on to debunk another Moon-landing trope involving a photo. In this claim, “truthers” say that photos from the Moon mission which include the sky show no evidence of stars, proving that the astronauts were not really in space.

However, the explanation for the lack of stars in the photographs is really quite simple. When the shots were taken, it was daytime on the Moon. The light of the Sun means that stars are not visible. Another claim relates to a picture in which the Stars and Stripes is visible and apparently ruffled by a breeze. The conspiracy theorists say that there’s no wind on the Moon, proving the photo is a fake.

But the truth is that the flag has a stiffening pole set along its top. And the apparent wrinkles in it are easily explained. Ojha nails it with, “All the wrinkles are there because it’s literally been screwed up for four days en route to the Moon.” And as he says, “We find ourselves awash in an ocean of information online… The only tools we have to navigate through this maelstrom are the critical-thinking skills that we are trying to develop in people as scientists.”

Ojha takes a coolly analytical approach to the claims of the “Moon truthers”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone is so dispassionate in their reactions. One of those who can become irritated and even angry is Buzz Aldrin. When he was confronted by one Moon-landing denier, Aldrin’s temper boiled over altogether.

The man in question was Bart Sibrel, 37 at the time of the incident, standing 6'2” tall and weighing in at 250 pounds. It’s worth noting that the much-smaller Aldrin was 72 when the episode happened in September 2002. The astronaut had been falsely enticed to visit a hotel in Beverley Hills, California purportedly for an interview with a Japanese TV channel.

But when Aldrin arrived at the hotel he was confronted by Sibrel, a notorious conspiracy theorist. Sibrel demanded that Aldrin swear on the Bible that he had really traveled to the Moon, a stunt he had pulled with other Apollo astronauts. But this time he got an answer he probably hadn’t anticipated. Aldrin punched him in the face.

Afterwards, Sibrel was good enough to tell Florida-based newspaper the St. Petersburg Times that, “I was very surprised that he hit me. I thought it was very foolish of him to do it in front of two video cameras. He has a good punch. It was quick, too. I didn't see it coming.” Beverly Hills police decided to treat Aldrin’s punch as an act of self-defense and no charges were laid.

However, February 2016 found Aldrin in a much more affable mood as he was interviewed before a live audience at an event staged in London, England. The venue was the Science Museum and the interviewer was Brian Cox. He’s a popular science TV presenter and particle physics professor at England’s University of Manchester.

During the interview, Cox and Aldrin came on to the topic of an especially well-known photo from the Apollo 11 mission, the visor picture, which we mentioned earlier. You’ll recall that it’s an image of Aldrin standing in the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility with a clear reflection in his helmet visor of Armstrong taking the picture.

Cox is clearly blown away by this singular image. In YouTube video footage recorded at the event, he says, “it’s probably the most famous picture from the surface of the Moon, I would say.” But he goes on to highlight a widespread misconception about the photo. “Many people say that’s Neil Armstrong,” Cox says to Aldrin, “but in fact it’s you with Neil in the reflection.”

And Cox goes even further in his praise for the image, adding, “It’s probably the most iconic picture in human history.” Aldrin then elaborates on the story of the helmet image. “Neil’s such an excellent photographer,” he generously points out. “See, I was walking along like this,” he continues, as he waggles two fingers to mimic a man walking.

Aldrin recalls, “Armstrong said, ‘Hey, stop!’ So I stopped and looked at him and he took the picture right away. You can identify that I was moving just a little. But people ask me about it – because it’s so well staged – and we call it the visor picture because the reflection in the visor shows the landing craft and the white-suited astronaut, Neil, who took the picture.”

Aldrin goes on to say, “People have asked me why is that such a perfect and iconic picture and I’ve got three words. Location, location, location.” That quip raises a hearty laugh from the audience. It’s easy to suspect that this may be a line that Aldrin has used before. Over the years he’s had every opportunity to become an accomplished public speaker, after all.

Now, that single phrase, “it’s so well staged” of course can quite easily be taken out of context and used as fuel for the delusions of the conspiracy theorists.Indeed, the British tabloid newspaper The Daily Express headlined a July 2020 article with “‘It was so well staged!’ Buzz Aldrin’s Moon landing confession revealed after 50 years.”

If you rip Aldrin’s words from their context at that Science Museum interview, you could claim that he’s admitting that the entire Moon mission was faked on a sound stage somewhere. But you’d have to be steeped in the delusions of conspiracy theory to believe that Aldrin was admitting to the preposterous tale that the entire Apollo 11 mission, from start to finish, was entirely faked.

In fact, Aldrin fell victim to the conspiracy theorists’ fantasies in earlier years. According to the fact-checkers at Snopes, the prank website Huzler published a piece in 2014 asserting that Aldrin had admitted to the fakery of Apollo 11. Huzler claimed to quote Aldrin’s words, “Apollo 11 was not real, none of it was. I am ashamed to say this but I cannot hide it any more, it was a set-up, like the ones they use in Hollywood films.”

Enthusiastic “Moon truthers” started spreading these supposed words of Aldrin’s on social media, apparently completely failing to notice that Huzler is a self-proclaimed prank site. So those that believe the Moon landings were a hoax, were themselves embarrassingly hoaxed. And if you believe that the Moon landings never happened, don’t mention it to Buzz Aldrin – unless you enjoy being punched in the face.