WASHINGTON - NASA is raiding the National Archives to learn how to get back to the moon.
The effort offers an intriguing paradox. While the space agency recently awarded a $3.9 billion contract to Lockheed Martin to build a 21st century lunar vehicle, it has been digging through old boxes in a Texas storage facility to resurrect the 1960s-era blueprints for the Apollo spacecraft.
"They are requesting a lot of stuff," said Rodney Krajca at the National Archives regional center in Fort Worth, Texas.
The new Orion spacecraft will perform essentially the same tasks as the original Apollo command and service modules: Get a team of astronauts to the moon and back safely.
The 40-year-old blueprints are helping a new generation of engineers pick up where their predecessors left off when the Apollo program was canceled in the 1970s.
Michael Braukus, a NASA spokesman, said the agency's engineers are reviewing the Apollo drawings to gain knowledge "that will help us minimize cost and increase efficiency."
The same federal agency that safeguards original copies of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights also keeps the technical documents created by the army of professionals who designed and built the Apollo spacecraft.
The Apollo collection is stored in 170 boxes measuring one cubic foot apiece. And each box is packed with carefully folded paper diagrams.
Some of the boxes contain stacks of 3-by-5-inch "aperture cards," each of which features a drawing and printed information. But the cards can't be read without a pre-digital-era viewer -- old-school technology that the National Archives doesn't have.
Rummaging through the bins at NASA's request has been a fascinating journey of rediscovery, Krajca said.
"You may have 1,500 drawings in one box," he said. "We tried to run one through a map copier. It was a diagram of a control panel for the Apollo spacecraft. I think it was close to 20 feet long. It was a great drawing of all the instrumentation the astronauts used in the capsule."
The research has been complicated by the fact that the collection isn't indexed.
Archivists have more than a dozen lists that NASA officials sent along with the documents in the early 1970s. Some of the lists are 50 pages long and filled with columns of numbers and titles.
"It is not the easiest thing," Krajca said. "If you said, 'I want a lunar module drawing,' over time I could find it, but it is not something I can run and find quickly."
Precisely what NASA plans to do with the documents remains something of a mystery.
Individuals involved in the space-age archeology project didn't respond to requests for comment, and NASA press officers declined to make agency personnel available for interviews.
It is possible the agency is growing more sensitive to negative publicity about its Apollo artifacts as it moves forward with plans to build Orion and a new series of launch vehicles dubbed "Ares."
Recently, NASA managers scrambled to respond to reports that the agency had lost the original tapes of the historic 1969 moon landing, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The tapes eventually were found.
Before that, there were reports the civilian space agency couldn't find the blueprints to the immense Saturn rockets that lifted the heavy stack of Apollo modules into space.
"There is an urban myth about the Saturn rocket blueprints being lost," said Stephen Garber, a historian and Web curator at NASA headquarters in Washington. "That's not true."
NASA's current plans anticipate the new Orion spacecraft will be ready to carry six astronauts to and from the International Space Station no later than 2014, and up to four astronauts to the moon no later than 2020.
Contact Wheeler at lwheeler@gns.gannett.com