Today — July 24 — marks the 45th anniversary of the splashdown of the first lunar landing mission, Apollo 11. The spacecraft, astronauts and moon rocks were flawlessly recovered by the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CVS-12) in the Pacific Ocean, several hundred miles southwest of Hawaii. While 500 million people worldwide watched on their TV sets, only the 2,500 men onboard the ship witnessed the details of this complex yet historically significant operation.
A little later, the U.S. Navy created an internal film to educate other naval personnel about this recovery operation. It was narrated by the Commander of the Apollo 11 Recovery Operation, and CO of the Hornet, Captain Carl Seiberlich.
This film was lost to history until recently when Robert Howard, a videographer in Canada, bought the original reels from a sale on eBay, digitized them and produced a new high resolution video.
You can watch several important snippets of it here:
DVDs of the entire film are now available for purchase from the USS Hornet Museum and Orbit Creative Films.
posted 07-24-2014 12:48 PM
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