For the most part, the telemetry 'debate' is one where the conspiracy lovers are just demanding something they know doesn't exist.
The goal of conspiracism is to perpetuate the debate and amplify the perceived importance of the conspiracy theorists, not to actually study history. "They didn't keep every scrap of information," is just one of the disingenuous ways this happens where Apollo is concerned.
It is, in itself, of no use to anyone now. It had a use at the time to give the state of a given element of the missions while it was ongoing. Once those missions were over it was of no use: the data became of purely esoteric interest, so why would anyone need to keep it?
The unspoken premise is that telemetry has general, ongoing historical value. In general, it doesn't. Sure, you preserve a few strips so that people can see how telemetry worked in general fifty years ago. But that doesn't mean you keep the telemetry
tapes forever. These are half-inch wide ten-inch spools that come in a square cardboard box that you can label. You need several running at any given time, because each tape can record only a few channels of data. The tape speed is prodigious, much faster than the 3-1/4 or 7-1/2 inches per second of quarter-inch audio tape. The outcome is a jillion tapes for any given mission, which requires an inconveniently large building to carry them around in. Hence you preserve the tapes until the program ends, and the data are in a more stable, convenient format. You preserve one spool so that people fifty years hence can see what they looked like. And you reuse them in a pinch, if new ones won't work in your machines.
TimberWolfAu's PDFs are a much more convenient format for today's audience, and doesn't depend on expensive, unreadable tapes or degradable paper or archival storage buildings and their ongoing expense. But there's simply little or no technical value and no historical value to preserving all these finely measured variables in
any form, much less the most unwieldy form.
The sticky wicket is the singular case of Apollo 11. For that mission, you can argue that a portion of the telemetry
does have general, ongoing historical value: pristine video images of the lunar surface EVA. Now that premise is also debatable, but it offers support for the simplistic notion that NASA should have cared better for its telemetry. It's one thing to say, "How could NASA have failed to preserve the original telemetry tapes showing Aldrin's PLSS battery current output at 37 minutes into the EVA?" We have the number—it's right there on the photographically preserved strip chart. Therefore it's patently absurd to say the missions can only considered valid if the original (nominally unusable) record has been preserved—one that can only be read by an old, expensive, temperamental, and rare machine, only one working example of which has survived.
But it's another thing to say, "How could NASA have failed to preserve the best picture from Apollo 11 surface television?" That sounds somewhat less absurd. But that answer is that the Apollo 11 video signal was non-telemetry data that was reluctantly convolved with telemetry and therefore (perhaps unwisely) treated the same as telemetry: copy it off the tape as soon as possible and therefore render it into a usable form.
But for non-historian conspiracy theorists, these answers don't suffice. Such "messy" details as design and operational constraints, human error, and unforeseen circumstances don't factor in. The inclusion of historically interesting information in one mission's telemetry sets up the naïve expectation that telemetry per se is historically important. This then forms a simplistic basis for judging the behavior of people who were acting correctly according to the general case, but in the misguided lay judgment have acted "suspiciously." Such is real history.
If it did exist, you can bet they would be jumping through all kinds of hoops to try and discredit it and handwave it away.
Quite likely, as they do for all the records we
do have. In conspiracy thinking, evidence is either suspiciously missing, evidence of a hoax, or faked. This is not a credible approach to historical evidence, and, of course, why serious historians ignore them ("evidence" that they must be onto something).
