Before reviving a zombie spacecraft, Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing traveled to the past to rescue a trove of early moon photographs that otherwise would have been destined for oblivion.

They did not actually time travel, but that might have been easier.

In the past couple of months, Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing have popped into the news for re-establishing contact with a 36-year-old spacecraft, NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer-3, or ISEE-3, which is quickly approaching Earth after a long trip circling the inner solar system. NASA retired ISEE-3 in 1997 and then dismantled the transmitter for talking to it, but most of the systems on the craft remain operational. A shoestring effort led by Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing got back in touch with ISEE-3 in May, although last week they ran into possibly insurmountable problems trying to fire the thrusters and change its course.

Mr. Wingo, an entrepreneur and an engineer, and Mr. Cowing, the editor in chief of the NASA Watch website, had confidence that they could decipher decades-obsolete NASA equipment, because, as Mr. Cowing said, “we’ve done this before.”

The earlier project involved 1,500 magnetic tapes and a couple of old, broken tape drives. In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five robotic spacecraft, the Lunar Orbiters, to photograph the moon’s surface to help find safe landing sites for the Apollo astronauts. The tapes, which recorded the original high-resolution images, and the tape drives ended up in the garage of a former NASA employee, and Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing embarked on a quixotic mission to retrieve the images.