Three hundred miles later, they pulled up to the gate at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, probably the only NASA institution that would even consider admitting them and their pile of junk.
Ames Director Pete Worden offered space in an abandoned McDonald's that in the heyday of the lunar program had been called "McMoon's."
The tape drives were installed where customers once ate fries. Behind the counter, where employees had flipped burgers, stood the massive wall of tapes.
Wingo, who has an engineering physics degree from the University of Alabama, knows his way around a computer. But repairing the FR-900s was beyond him. It was also beyond almost everyone else they tried.
Finally, they heard about an old Army vet, Ken Zin, who knew machinery and happened to work at Ames repairing video equipment.
Zin was a jack-of-all-trades who'd grown up on a farm in the Central Valley, repairing tractors and dairy equipment. In the Army, he'd graduated to fixing top-secret cryptograph machines. He sat down with Wingo and the rest of the team. "Can you make that thing run?" they asked him.
"Yeah, I can make it work," Zin replied.
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A long rebuild
It turned out to be a lot harder than he expected. "I hadn't seen that type of stuff for 40 years," he said.
Wingo, Cowing and Zin worked into the night with student volunteers, cannibalizing the tape drives to get one machine working. "We felt a sense of urgency," said Greg Schmidt, deputy director of NASA's Lunar Science Institute at Ames.
They had managed to get $100,000 from NASA for their project, and decided they would focus their efforts on the Earthrise picture.
The drives kept breaking down. Rebuilding the demodulator that converted the electronic signals into images proved particularly difficult. When they couldn't find parts at warehouses, they dug through rusted rocket shells at Ames' junkyard to perform what Zin called a "wrecking yard rebuild."
They had been at work for three months when Schmidt got a call from Wingo one afternoon. "You'd better get over here."
After 42 years, Cowing gazed again at the image of Earth rising above the lunar landscape.
"When that picture came up, I had tears in my eyes," Cowing said.
Unlike the picture that the public had seen, this version had twice the resolution and four times the dynamic range.
It "was breathtaking," Schmidt said. "It felt like looking into the past."
