Slashdot Mirror
Has Anyone Seen the Moon Pictures?
NASA has received a lot of bad press in the last few years. Now in a stunning move to prove how much they have learned from past mistakes, it appears they have lost the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk. They also seem to have misplaced the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings. Hopefully nobody has taped an episode of "The OC" over them yet.
I guess the difference is that the Beeb never really thought these things were historically important, and hence had poor archiving rules. You'd hope that this was not the case at NASA.
FTA: "But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible."
Is the article honestly trying to suggest that NASA couldn't reverse engineer a format and design a player for it if the original player was lost? I personally find that a little hard to believe. It just sounds like a convenience excuse to create a "give-up searching" date. In my oppinion these tapes are very important to our country's history. It's almost shameful to me to think they could have lost them so easily.
Go America!
I was recently at a meeting in Bethesda at the NIH and heard Don Lindberg, the director of the national library of medicine talk about long term information storage.
After going through all the normal stuff about media degrading and backups, etc -- he made a really interesting point: The only way to really ensure REALLY LONG storage - like tens of thousands of years is to keep having people accessing information. The point he made is that all the storage technology will continue to evolve, and it's only the information we stop accessing that will fall into danger of getting lost.
I thought it was a good point.
Why on earth do we not have access to the original data from the Moon landings? If we did, lots of people would have a copy around. Silly secretive state.
We better hurry and send him back up to redo it.
Table-ized A.I.
NASA isn't an archival institution, so it's not surprising that something like this would happen. If tapes are found, they should be turned over to an organization for which the archiving of printed and recorded material is one of its central missions.
"And I say that with zero emotional attachment. Not believing that we went to the moon doesn't give me a membership in a tinfoil-hat brigade."
Maybe not a tinfoil hat wearer (signifying paranoia, really) but you're a card-carrying member of the club of crazies like Erich Von Daniken, scientologists, Richard Hoagland, and creationists.
Why do supposedly smart people believe such stupid shit?
Indeed the posting of this as "we never went there anyway" even as a joke angers me. You'd think that after almost 40 years someone would spill the beans on the supposed secret? Well guess what, THERE WAS NO SECRET TO BE KEPT and even _if_ there was some way to bring idiots like you back in time, put you on a rocket, and land you on the moon, you'd still claim it was a movie set. There is no educating people like you because you will never admit that humanity is ever capable of doing extraordinary things. You'll attribute the Pyramids to space aliens and the Moon landings to fiction instead of the feats that people are capable of.
It's called denying reality, assuming the worst of everyone, and willful stupidity.
--
BMO
Just imagine the first landing on Mars, and the "lost video" message that will go with it some 100years later...
:)
NASA used a special high quality encoding scheme, which was not widespread in those days. In addtition it was protected by a DRM made by company "x", which went bankrupt some 30 years ago... well we have the file, maybe we could even reverse engineer the DRM, but it's illegal because of DMCA.... Sorry dudes, the recording are lost forever because we need to protect the copyright holder rights
You are having a laugh, right, and trolling us?
I've looked into the arguments that the moon landings are fakes. Every single argument that has been made has been countered, without exception.
For example, no stars in the pictures from the moon? Well, there wouldn't be - stars are very faint, and the exposure time for the film was insufficient to allow them to be seen.
Objects appearing to be over the top of the etched markings on the pictures? That's image-bleed caused by slight over-exposure - a well known photographic problem.
The flag waving? Well, of course it's going to wave when it's being moved around, that's simple physics, and will continue to wave for a while since there's no atmospheric resistance to help stop it.
And so on.
The simple reality is that it would have been harder to convincingly fake the moon landings than to go there.
if these tapes have been in some very rich person's "personal museum" for the last several years, the result of a quiet and large payoff to someone that had access to the archives. Things like this don't just "disappear", they "grow legs".
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.