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Apollo 11 TV Tapes Go Missing
Richard W.M. Jones writes "On July 21st 1969, Honeysuckle Creek observatory brought us the first TV pictures of men on the moon. The original signals were recorded on high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes. What was released to the TV networks was reduced to lower quality commercial TV standards.
Unfortunately
John Sarkissian of Parkes Observatory Australia
reports that 698 of the 700 boxes of original tapes have gone missing [warning: large PDF] from the
U.S. National Archives.
Even more worryingly, the last place on earth which can actually read these tapes is scheduled to close in October this year.
The PDF contains interesting comparisons which show that if all you've seen are the TV pictures from the landing, you really haven't seen the first moon walk in its full glory."
The only inconvenient thing here is that the conspiracy theorists are going to go absolutely nuts over this.
Student Manager - Take control of your education!
Uh... maybe it would be nice to find them, take them to the place that can read them, and COPY THEM ONTO SOME OTHER MEDIA? I dunno, just a thought.
I'll bite.
You don't lose 700 boxes, you lose the little piece of card/database entry which tells you which of the 100000 identical boxes are the 700 you are interested in.
It's been said that future generations will regard the next few decades as a dark age, where the culture lost most of its common heritage. This will supposedly come about because so much audio and video is mouldering away (sometimes literally), locked in vaults where it will rot before anyone can recover it. While such factors as copyrights much longer than the physical life of the archival media are likely to contribute to this, the loss of these tapes is an example of another cause.
Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't. Will Neal Armstrong be the Lief Ericson of the 26th century, and some one from the Chinese, Indian or Nigerian space program get all the credit, because they kept thir records?
Who is John Cabal?
There is lots of evidence that we landed on the moon (900 pounds of moonrocks being a good part of it). But to say, "I know we landed on the moon 'cause I saw it on my Tee Vee!" is ridiculous.
Considering the low resolution television images that came back, it would have been very easy to fake it.
Quick! Convert them to HD-DVD, er, Blu-Ray, er...
Funny, but this brings up the debate about distribution, copyright, and file sharing.
Just think. If these recordings were digitally transferred and uploaded somewhere like http://archive.org/ (which I believe they belong), then we would have access to these things basically forever in the best quality that they could be.
As Linus has said, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
Well, times have changed and p2p is arguably better than ftp.
TV may be low resolution, but there were several things you could see that still would have only been possible in an airless environment and a substantially lower gravity. Many of those scenes could not have been faked in a studio, even today, let alone in 1969. While one may try to argue that they were faked with photorealistic animation, that leaves the nasty problem of actually GETTING photorealistic animation.... in 1969. Oh... but that creates yet another conspiracy: that NASA and the government had more computing power available to them in 1969 than modern movie studios with huge render farms have today. And it just gets worse from there... one has to keep inventing more extravagant and obviously contrived excuses about why we can't possibly find any evidence for the truth while simultaneous suggesting that all the evidence that might contradict their theory is "obviously" planted which just goes to further "prove" the conspiracy. (insert rolling eyes expression here).
It's about on par with a Jehovah's Witness trying to say that the geological evidence for an old planet was just put there by God to test our faith.
Any attempt at a rational discussion with a conspiracy theorist quickly devolves into a flurry of conjecture and hypothesis with no logical foundation. Occam's Razor be damned.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'