Houston, We Blame the Interns

37 years later, the memory starts to go.

Filing is indeed an arduous task, and even the biggest geniuses on the planet are prone to an organizational mistake every now and then. Well that’s a good thing considering NASA – the biggest geniuses on the planet – have apparently done a poor job of keeping inventory.

For those who belong to a large corporation, you may have to go through an annual inventory project. This is a grueling task by which everyone drops everything for a week long game of Hide-and-Go-Seek, as employees scramble to locate all expensive items that the company holds on their books as “assets.” But here’s why this game isn’t fun. You never get to switch sides. Would YOU want to play Hide-and-Seek when you only get to seek? Why can’t we take turns? Just once I’d like to lease filing cabinet to try and find where I’m hiding instead of the other way around. What am I talking about again?

Right, NASA.

Well, they can put a man on the moon but they cannot put a location sticker on a box. It turns out, as reported by CNN, that over 700 storage boxes related to the famous Apollo missions have gone missing. And who are we to blame for such a gross misuse of brainpower. Aliens? Cosmonauts? Nay. Just some careless games of Inventory Hide-and-Seek. I can totally understand how this happened, though. The folks at NASA spend their days at work surrounded by billion-dollar toys, from space simulators to zero-gravity chambers to that big red button that everyone’s afraid to push. I wouldn’t want to play with 30-year old boxes, either.

However, the biggest problem with the missing boxes is that in one of them is the original magnetic tape recording of Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon. Yes, the grainy, raspy recording of a man in white bouncing around on foreign gray matter has gone missing. So why is this such a big deal, you may ask?

Time takes a toll on the memory.

And as you will remember, the famous first words of our first moon man were extolled as follows, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” And with video and audio documentation, those words should live on without a problem. But what happens when we misplace those treasured source documents? What if the Internet wasn’t around to preserve notable quotables? What would we rely on for historical preservation?

What will come of Armstrong’s misplaced declaration? Sure, we’ve got it right now, but what about in the future? Some encyclopedic scribe might sneeze and pen “That’s one small step for man, one giant jump for mankind.” And then some kid reading it might transcribe “That’s a small step for man, and one big jump for mankind.” While the quote may be flawed, he may get a good grade on his essay and be asked to read it in some public assembly. What if he slips and utters, “That man is steppin’, and man, he can kinda jump, too.” Someone at that assembly tries to recall this at the dinner table by proclaiming, “The man is stoppin’, so hurry up and jump. And pass the rolls.”

Kids 50 years from now will remember Neil Armstrong as the man who famously declared, “Stop that man, he’s eaten all the rolls.”

Man, we gotta find those boxes.