Editing Openai/67c4e193-e008-8008-8d82-c239519e3d5a (section)

==== Apollo 7 – First Crewed Mission (Earth Orbit) ====

Mission Data: Apollo 7 (October 1968) was the first crewed Apollo flight, an Earth-orbit mission testing the Command Module. During Apollo 7, a wealth of telemetry (spacecraft system data, biomedical data, etc.) was downlinked to Mission Control and recorded. Apollo 7 also transmitted the first live television from an American spacecraft, using a slow-scan black-and-white cameraapolloartifacts.com<ref>{{cite web|title=apolloartifacts.com|url=https://www.apolloartifacts.com/press_related_items/#:~:text=The%20slow,with%20320%20lines%20of%20resolution|publisher=apolloartifacts.com|access-date=2025-12-06}}</ref>. This TV signal was converted in real time to broadcast format and recorded on standard video tapes for the public broadcasts. As with later missions, the raw telemetry (including the slower-scan TV feed and all engineering data) would have been recorded to 1-inch data tapes at tracking stations as a backup. However, none of those Apollo 7 telemetry backup tapes are known to have been kept. NASA’s later investigation into Apollo tapes found no Apollo 7 reels in the archives – the Apollo-era telemetry tapes in storage had been withdrawn and mostly reused by the early 1980snasa.gov<ref>{{cite web|title=nasa.gov|url=https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/a11/Apollo_11_TV_Tapes_Report.pdf#:~:text=searchers%20never%20found%20what%20they,Apollo%2011%20moon%20landing%20and|publisher=nasa.gov|access-date=2025-12-06}}</ref>. Thus, Apollo 7’s original telemetry recordings appear to have been lost in that purge.

Current Status: No Apollo 7 telemetry tape reels are cataloged in NASA or National Archives holdings today. All that remains are derivative records: the TV broadcasts from Apollo 7 were recorded on broadcast videotape (and those tapes have survived – Apollo 7 TV footage is available in NASA’s media archives in good quality, since it was standard NTSC recording)en.wikipedia.org<ref>{{cite web|title=en.wikipedia.org|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes#:~:text=This%20low,technicians%20and%20others%20at%20SSTV|publisher=en.wikipedia.org|access-date=2025-12-06}}</ref>. The mission’s voice communications and flight data were documented in transcripts and reports. In terms of audio, NASA had analog audio tapes of mission control loops and air-to-ground for Apollo 7, which were preserved. (These were part of the same 30-track audio tape archive used for Apollo 11/13, and likely have been digitized or could be if needed, though the high-priority digitization focused on Apollo 11 and 13.) No special restoration projects have targeted Apollo 7 specifically, but the mission is well documented through transcripts and the preserved broadcast video. Researchers today can review Apollo 7 technical reports and watch the TV broadcasts, but they cannot retrieve any higher-fidelity telemetry data beyond what was extracted at the time, since the original data tapes are missing.