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.

Comments

Not alone

[15Bit]

The BBC does exactly the same. They've lost vast numbers of TV programmes over the years. Every so often an episode of Dr Who, Hancock's Half Hour or Steptoe and Son turns up in the basement of some guy who used to work there.

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.

Yeah, right...

[Ninwa]

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!

Re:Yeah, right...

[Detritus]

The format isn't a big mystery, it's IRIG 106 if anyone cares. The problem is that as part of the continuing budget crunch at NASA, made worse by the need to scrounge money from the existing budget for new tasks like a Shuttle replacement and going to Mars, many activities and facilities are being cut or eliminated. The lab that can handle these old tapes, the Data Evaluation Lab at Goddard, has lost its funding. That means that it will be closed at the end of this fiscal year. The equipment goes into storage or is surplused. The people have to find other jobs or be laid off or retire.

Building a recorder from scratch would be insanely expensive. These recorders cost anywhere from $50-100K when they were new and being manufactured in quantity.

It's easy to say that "they" should keep and maintain the hardware, catalog and store the tapes in climate controlled warehouses, and do all the other things needed to preserve the data for future generations. That doesn't pay the bills. Just storing a tape can cost a dollar or more a year. That doesn't sound too bad until you realize that a single spacecraft can easily generate tens of thousands of tapes. Another problem is that at $100-200 for a new reel of tape, there has always been a large incentive to recycle and reuse tapes for current missions.

the NLM and really long term storage

[drDugan]

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.

Re:the NLM and really long term storage

[kfg]

I focused on the Time Capsule seminar. I'm getting sick and tired of historians telling me I shouldn't be using my things, because it will destory their future historical value when:

a)The stuff only exists to be used in the first place. Don't use stuff and there won't be any stuff to preserve.
b)Much of the value in historical artifacts comes from examining their wear patterns. Used stuff is usually more historically valuable. Unused stuff simply commands a higher price from collectors, which usually has the side effect of making the artifacts . . .less available to historians.

KFG

Should have been in the library of congress

[hrvatska]

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.

Re:Parent post is moronic.

[Trogre]

There is no educating people like you because you will never admit that humanity is ever capable of doing extraordinary things.

Or maybe they just believe that, you know, the US was unable to get a person to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. Nothing to do with aliens, pyramids, evolution or creationism, just that they couldn't and didn't do it.

As for myself I don't believe that, having seen sufficient evidence to convince me 99.9% that humans did in fact go to the moon in 1969 but that doesn't make it 100% absolute fact and it sure as blazes doesn't make anyone who disagrees with me an idiot.

Otherwise I'd be no better than the tinfoil hatters who partake in conversations with their fingers in their ears.

Re:Parent post is moronic.

[Lord Kano]

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.

If they're crazy for thinking that the government is always lying to us, you're foolish for believing that the government never lies to us.

The government that brought us the Tuskeegee experiment, non consentual testing of psychotropic drugs or exposing retarded children to radiation is capable of damned near anything.

LK

Re:Parent post is moronic.

[Ihlosi]

Or maybe they just believe that, you know, the US was unable to get a person to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. Nothing to do with aliens, pyramids, evolution or creationism, just that they couldn't and didn't do it.

Why of course the US wasn't able to get a person to the moon. That's why they borrowed all those German rocket scientists, who were out their jobs anyway after launching rockets at London became unfashionable.

Re:Parent post is moronic.

[famebait]

that doesn't make it 100% absolute fact

Nothing can ever be proven to be. The is goes wihtout saying for everything. It's when you start to adamantly believe the less likely scenario that you have some backing up to do, and the arguments for fakery are all pathetic at best.

Now, it is beyond any doubt possible to send stuff to the moon. It's just a question of applying known physics and technology, doing lots of tests, and spending a helluva lot of money. Faking it and keeping it secret until now would probably have cost much more than just going fpr real, so even bother?

Re:Parent post is moronic.

[bmo]

"Or maybe they just believe that, you know, the US was unable to get a person to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. Nothing to do with aliens, pyramids, evolution or creationism, just that they couldn't and didn't do it."

We didn't just magically build a rocket and magically get to the Moon. And Shepard's and Gagarin's flights didn't magically appear either - they were based on 35 years of liquid fuel rocket science started by a geeky guy at his aunt's farm, name of Goddard - perhaps you've heard of him. By 1969, you're talking about 45 years of liquid fuel rocket engineering. Sure, engineering problems cropped up in designing something big enough to get to the Moon but they weren't insurmountable and by that time we had already figured out life support, multiple stage rocketry, reliable engines, computers, and the navigation systems needed to get from here to there and back.

Can you even grok what it would take to pull off a hoaxed moon landing? You need to fool the entire Federal government, thousands of engineers, the entire US Navy, and all the people at places like Lockheed _including their investors_. And throughout all of this, you have to make sure that possibly thousands of people who know "the secret" that they will never talk, even on their deathbeds.

And then you have to fool all the scientists with rocks that can't look like anything found on Earth.

It's just simpler to go to the moon and back. It's like "looking busy" at your employment - it's actually easier to do real work than to fake it.

Even the government most capable of pulling off propaganda by faking a moon landing decided against it. The Soviet Union was a much more closed society and Star City was off limits to foreigners. They were ahead of us, and even got to the Moon before us with robotic probes. The entire far side of the Moon is full of Russian names! They could have staged a landing, and nobody would have been the wiser in the West until the fall of the Soviet Union two decades later. Yet they didn't. Why? BECAUSE IT WAS A STUPID IDEA.

The fact is, the original poster is _just like_ those who believe in pyramid building aliens and creationists because they deny logic, history, human nature and plain evidence of reality. They are uneducable dolts.

--
BMO

Re:That's because we probably didn't.

[Archibald Buttle]

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.

Re:Parent post is moronic.

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

You're the one being stupid. Very few things in life are absolutely certain. Sure, it doesn't affect our daily lives that much but understanding it is philosophy 101 (check out Descartes -- a master of controlled paranoia).

I can prove with 100% certainty that dropping a hammer on top of your head will cause you to experience pain.

Did you know there are people who do not experience pain at all? It's extremely rare, but they do exist. So I'm inclined to say you are wrong... Then again the articles and documentaries I've seen of the subject might be fake, so I just can't be absolutely sure.

it would not surprise me

[v1]

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".