Restoring Images of the Space Age : Archives: Mt. SAC’s media services director plans to preserve and transfer old NASA films to videotape. After duplication, the tapes will be available to the public.

They are among the defining images of our age.

Men in jumpsuits goofing around inside a padded chamber during airborne zero-gravity experiments.

Lunar dimples growing to craters, closer and closer and closer, in the moments before the Eagle landed.

The Apollo 13 crew aborting a moon landing with a cool, “OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem,” and then working ingeniously to save themselves from disaster.

We’ve seen these scenes again and again, whole or in pieces, and still we never get sick of them. They are like national home movies: evocative, sometimes amateurish, nationalistic, corny even, but so familiar that it would be a crime to throw them away.

Which is exactly what Scott Linder thought when he learned that officials at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., planned to dispose of a library of agency-made films as part of a budget cutback. The center had been one of only a handful of repositories of NASA films made for the public, and the only one on the West Coast.

So Linder, director of media services at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, persuaded Ames to give its collection--about 120 films in all--to the school. He plans to restore them, fill in gaps, copy them onto videotape and, most important, keep them available for public use through a lending program.

The job won’t be easy.

To put together a comprehensive collection, Linder will first have to locate copies of perhaps hundreds more NASA films scattered among the other film centers, including the National Archives, and make prints. Some of the films being transferred from Ames have been run through so many classroom projectors over the years that they are badly in need of repair.

As an archivist, Linder will have to research some questions: Who shot which films? How did they achieve certain effects? What did NASA have in mind in producing films on everything from UFOs to affirmative action in the agency?

The films reflect eclectic interests. Subjects include earthquakes and pollution, as well as the typical space fare. The production quality is inconsistent, ranging from very good to quite awful.

“The early ones resembled military training films, which is what they were,” Linder said. “As you go on, the production values show. They’re highly watchable. Just as a motion picture, it’s good stuff.”

In “Mars--Is There Life?”, for example, NASA appears to mix footage from the Viking lander with studio film to speculate on how Mars formed and whether it could have sustained life. The special effects fall short of award-winning, but the film is a cut above the horn-rimmed, talking-head variety that science classes used to get.

From its birth in 1958, NASA was a prolific film producer and, although no one kept count, estimates of the number range from 400 to 500. During the heyday of agency filmmaking, NASA had up to four full-time producers on staff, some of whom wrote scripts, though the actual filming usually was hired out to outside directors and crews.

Although NASA still films shuttle launches and some other projects, the agency has turned to video for the limited number of mass productions it does now, according to Thomas Jaqua, who heads NASA’s motion picture and photo section in Washington.

Byron Morgan, who lives in Venice after working some 20 years as a NASA film producer, said it was a scandal that the agency stopped making films nearly a decade ago because of the expense. Morgan recalled a great rush to produce a lot of films in the years of NASA’s infancy to get the word out and lobby the public--and, indirectly, Congress--on the need for the expensive national space program.

NASA films won more than 300 international awards. Filmmakers eventually grew to experiment with special effects and music--a film on Apollo 7 used music from the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”--in an effort to make them entertaining, not just instructive.

For a generation of Baby Boom youngsters who grew up listing astronaut high among desired oc cupations, it is hard to watch the moon-landing film, “The Eagle Has Landed,” without remembering the TV you were watching at the time, or the taste of space food sticks or Tang.

Tom Clausen, an education specialist at NASA’s Ames center, considers “Houston, We’ve Got A Problem,” showing the Apollo 13 crew huddled for air in the lunar lander after an oxygen tank explosion in the main spacecraft, “as good a documentary as you can get.”

Moon footage, however, is surprisingly poor. It was shot at slow speed in order to cut down on the amount of film carried on the burdened spacecraft. The results are images that seem not quite real and, Clausen said, that are of such low quality that they are next to worthless for movie audiences.

The films nonetheless are consistently fascinating social artifacts, reflecting everything from the nation’s Cold War anxieties--NASA was formed in response to the stunning launch of Sputnik--to hairstyles of the time to the agency’s recent efforts to recruit women and minorities.

Overall, though, the films emphasize NASA’s scientific bent. In cold contrast with Life magazine’s larger-than-life treatment of the original seven astronauts, they are portrayed in a NASA film on the 1963 Friendship 7 flight as just another machine “component” as they are spun, tumbled, taught to breathe, and measured again and again during training.

The college’s film collection will eventually serve two purposes, Linder said. As an archive, it will, if Linder is successful, maintain all of NASA’s public films under one roof, which may be a first, outside of the National Archives in Washington.

And once copied onto videotape, the films are to be loaned to anyone who would like to borrow them, continuing their current role as an education resource. Mt. San Antonio College aeronautics professors had been borrowing the films from the Ames Center regularly for teaching. Linder said it probably will take three months or so to tape the films on hand.

In any case, he said, it will be enough just to have preserved the films. “We have grown up with this footage,” Linder said. “This is the stuff.”