NEIL’S MISSING MOVIE CAMERA

Mounted behind the right forward window of the lunar module Eagle, this slightly battered 16mm movie camera (below) captured some of the most significant events in human history. It provided a unique close- up view of the hazardous Moon landing, during which Neil Armstrong had to steer away from boulder fields in order to prevent his craft from being ripped apart.

It recorded the steps taken by Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down on to the Moon’s surface, and their activities once they were there, such as planting the US flag.

Incredibly, the camera went missing for 43 years and was only rediscovered following Neil Armstrong’s death in 2012. Searching through a closet in her late husband’s study in Cincinnati, Ohio, Armstrong’s widow Carol found a white bag. Opening it, she discovered a collection of strange lamps,

clamps, power cables, wrenches, utility brackets... and the camera.

Carol spread the items on the carpet of her living room, put a tape measure around two sides of the collection to indicate their individual sizes, and then took a photograph of the whole lot.

She sent it to Allan Needell, then curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. ‘He immediately knew what they were,’ says Teasel Muir-Harmony, the current curator. ‘It was Armstrong’s “McDivitt purse”.’ These storage bags were named after Apollo 9 commander James McDivitt, who had recommended there should be small bags aboard Apollo spaceships in which pieces of equipment in regular use could be stored. ‘The film from the camera was brought back to Earth in 1969 but it was thought Armstrong must have left the camera itself on the Moon,’ says Teasel. ‘To discover, after all these years, that he hadn’t was

extraordinary.’