Santa Claus in brown shorts (aka The UPS Guy) dropped by today with a box from Amazon. On any other day I'd have been oohing and ahhing over "First Man", the first authorized biography of Neil Armstrong.

But it was the five boxed DVD sets, 3 discs per box, double-layer discs, for a total of 100 gigabytes of video and miscellaneous that set my heart a palpitatin'.

100 gigabytes of what? you ask? From the NASA archives, by way of Spacecraft Films:

"Gemini: A Bold Leap Forward"
"The Mighty Saturns: Saturn I and IB"
"The Mighty Saturns: Saturn V"
"Apollo 8: Leaving the Cradle"
"Apollo 11: Men on the Moon"

I've seen forty years of various documentaries about the early space program, but I've never seen anything like this. Most of these discs contain one or two medium-length videos woven together out of archival material, and the rest is a fascinating grab-bag of smaller clips I've never seen before.

Like Neil Armstrong taking his first step on the Moon, from above, in grainy color from a 16mm movie camera looking out a LM window:

We'll always remember it in grainy black-and-white TV, but it turns out that there are other views.

They effectively leveraged DVD multi-angle capabilities on disc 2 of the Apollo 11 set, which covers surface operations (and reportedly use multi-angle well in other places, like launches with all those pad cameras). The space-to-ground audio track and the TV transmissions form the base, but you can switch to the LM 16mm view and various handheld movie clips and still images...all in sync. The second audio track contains the post-mission debriefing, in which Buzz and Neil provide the narration. Considering the permutations, you could watch that disc a dozen times and not see it the same way twice.

Here's a still from a movie camera inside an SI-B tank, showing fuel gurgling out the bottom:

They also use still photos effectively. Here's VonBraun aboard the Vomit Comet:

Gemini control panel:

Gemini crew walkout (video):

One reason I extracted a bunch of still images from the video stream (aside from my desire to show off) was to check the quality. The box alludes to high-definition scanning, and what I found was the video is all at 720x480, which is low-end for HDTV, high end for broadcast (NTSC). I'll split the difference on that claim. In any case, a lot of the old footage is from 16mm cameras or on stock that's deterioriated, so I doubt that it would've been possible to get significantly more quality by presenting the DVDs in higher resolution, and in any case that'd cause compatibility problems with most consumer video gear. I'm viewing the DVDs on a high-resolution plasma display on my computer, and they do look fine, even full screen.

The brown-robed Santa Claus dropped by only a little after noon today, so the above is based on a happy couple of hours sampling the discs. I'll be spending the next several weeks sitting down and watching the discs one by one. First step is to make backup copies--I don't intend to lose this material to accident. It's interesting to note that the discs aren't encrypted like most commercial DVDs. That, coupled with the fact that the vast majority of the source material is in the public domain, tempts me to want to make use of the material, but really I know better. Despite my wishful thinking, I consulted Mary Anne about the copyrights, and she confirmed what, deep-down, I already knew: Spacecraft Films added tremendous value by spending the money to digitize the old film, and to assemble it and add spiffy features like multi-angle, and they do indeed have a legitimate copyright. Oh well...still, it would've made one hell of a Web site, wouldn't it?

Collections like this are arriving just in the nick of time. NASA's been fretting for years about the deterioration of its archives, but hasn't been able to get or free up any money to do the necessary restoration and digitization. They've requested proposals from private industry several times to do it for them, but this, to my knowledge, is the first large-scale private effort to preserve the NASA archives. Their Web site lists four more recently-release boxed sets (oh my aching wallet!), and they're apparently in final production on the Mercury set now. Way to go Spacecraft Films!

And maybe it's a good thing I can't share the wealth with you. If a few Zoners pony up to buy the DVDs, and a million other space enthusiasts buy the discs, Spacecraft Films will be encouraged (and funded) to keep on digitizing and preserving NASA's priceless collection. Free enterprise in (or at least at the periphery of) space exploration--support it!