Slashdot Mirror
Has NASA Found the Lost Moon Tapes?
jra writes "For over 5 years, various people both inside and retired from NASA have been engaged in a quest. They were looking for the long-lost original slow-scan video tapes from the Apollo 11 moon landing, which went missing in a record-keeping snafu, covered in unreasonable detail in a Wired article a couple years ago. Well now, according to the UK's Sunday Express newspaper, some tapes may or may not have been found which may or may not be the Apollo video. Apparently — I love the British press — the NASA boffins are a bit put out that it leaked; they were hoping to blow everyone's minds with the scoop themselves."
If someone called ME a boffin, I might be obliged to bandy their knickers a bit.
But this begs the question - can anyone at NASA do the moonwalk convincingly?
Impetuous minds want to know.
That would be great if true. To lose the originals of the greatest technological and exploration achievement event since Columbus is a gut-wrenching thought. (And the existing copies are poor quality.)
Table-ized A.I.
The Sunday Express is hardly our fair isle's most reliable newspaper.
As an Space Program advocate, I certainly hope they find them-- the public needs to trust NASA again; knowing that NASA can keep track of its mission assets would be the very basic start.
Whoever found the tapes (if they really were found) should not feel disappointed about not breaking the news him or herself. It is a shame they were lost in the first place, and finding them is nothing to feel proud about. I cannot imagine loosing my baby in the supermarket and then feeling like a real smart, witty person for finding her two years later.
Aeroespacio.org
The good news is they found the tapes. The bad news is Kim Jong-il has them and wants 20 billion dollars, part of South Korea, and a lock of Michael Jackson's hair.
Table-ized A.I.
It just means that NASA re-shot the moon landing using HD on the Hollywood back lot.
Crucially, they could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.
New facts would never dispel a perfectly good conspiracy theory. Instead, the new facts are evidence that the conspiracy is still on-going.
Up your k1lt!
Wouldn't it be nice if people (such as the summary writer) understood that "may" inherently includes the uncertainty as to whether it actually "does", or perhaps "does not"? Then they wouldn't feel compelled to append the completely redundant "or may not" every time.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
Wired's article is not unreasonable. When a group collectively acts like they have an IQ of 1 they deserve the condemnation. Everyone responsible for the loss should have lost their job and pension. Maybe if NASA had been decapitated then we'd have a better NASA now.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Gimmer Nazi's are too.
Feel the PAIN: http://www.brenz.net/l337Maker.asp
U$3 7|-|1$ L337 5P34|0r3r'$ 70|\|9U3, 0r 70 3|\|9L1$|-| Ph0r 7|-|3 r3\/3r$3.
You do know that having a .asp extension means they are not leet, just babies Microsoft raped.
That's no Moon tape! (But - seriously - if it is, it will be great to see the thing finally in HD, or whatever NASA called "high quality" at that time. :))
Ezekiel 23:20
Apparently someone forgot to tell NASA that they're a government agency and not some kind of mass-media Nielsen-dependent agency that relies on "scoops" and "special announcements". When they find something, they should announce it immediately. Suppose they'd found these tapes on July 21...would they have thought it appropriate to sit on them until July 20, 2019, just to have something special to go with the 50th anniversary?
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
MALWARE WARNING! DO NOT CLICK ON PARENT'S LINKS!
not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
What they aren't saying is that the Sunday Press borrowed them all along, and never returned them.
They didn't even bother to rewind, those selfish jerks.
It's great that these tapes are found (and shocking that they were ever lost). But I find it a remarkable and wholly unbelievable coincidence that they were found just before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
Yeah, no wonder NASA is pissed at it leaking now. Their marketing droids must be furious.
Just a shame the moon conspiracy-believers will claim that "Of course they've found the tapes NOW, now that computers are powerful enough to fake it properly"
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
MALWARE WARNING!
But, does it run on Linux?
I also may or may not have found tapes which may or may not be the Apollo videos.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Curiosity killed the cat, it appears to be MacOS compatible. It is your standard launch a bunch of browser windows and play nasty stuff type thing.. Also tries to launch your mail app.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Those links open a lot of windows even in firefox, and emails and chatzilla if you have it, don't even click on them.
Do your part and report the site to google,
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/
Vroomfondel, is that you?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
...so which studio was this filmed in?
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
so the malware I got... a bunch of text overflowed my screen and I had to RTFA!
You insensitive clod!
So, Is there hope for finding the missing Dr Who episodes?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
... in the Universal Pictures studio vault, mis-labeled as a Michael Jackson video.
Have gnu, will travel.
If there's data on them, it's data that was lost from some mission or other. There are plenty of missions (such as the Venus landings) where a bucket of extra data spools could provide massively valuable scientific data, even to this day.
Now that the moon has been (at least partially, if not fully) mapped in high-def, and a host of other probes have been sent to collect all kinds of other data, moon tapes would be really more interesting from a historic standpoint. Nothing wrong with that, especially as staggering achievements tend to wake public interest and open the money taps, but from a scientific standpoint there must be huge numbers of reels of tape that would actually be of greater value to NASA.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"...some tapes may or may not have been found which may or may not be the Apollo video."
You're really going out on a limb there chief. I may or may not have decided that you may or may not have your head up your ass.
I'd like to hire the finders to find the TV remote.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm going to assume that whatever you're going on about here is a posting that someone has already deleted...
Nope, it is the post titled "We have had the videos *all along* you IDIOT (Score:-1, Troll)"
The link in the sentence a "Remember the Australian who had them in his archive [nimp.org] for over thirty years?" is malicious.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
... in HDTV!
I really hate the term Boffins. A word like that hardly encourages people to strive to engineer a better life for us all.
Ok, it's too late and I'm right about to hit the sakc so I've no time to read up on things, but as far as I remember, there are already better versions of the Apollo 11 video footage than the popular one making the rounds. The missing tapes are the recordings of the raw signal from the spaceship. This is not NTSC and it takes a custom machine to read data off the tapes. This machine, if it still exists and is functioning, can playback the video and the better quality copies were made off of this screen. The live broadcast (and poor quality copy) was made in a different way that degraded the quality further. Even so, of course it's great if they found the recordings. If they dedicate to build a new tape machine they could even digitize the signals and process them which should make for the best quality version of course. Nevertheless, it's completely innane to think this has any bearing on any stupid conspiracy theory. There are already excellent video (well, excellent as far as the technology was capable of back then) from later missions, as well as 16mm film footage from the data acquisition cameras. This footage will still be superior to Apollo 11's, even with the best of reconstructions.
"Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
Ah: -1, Troll. So I wouldn't have seen it, since I'm cruising at +3. Got it. Silly me. Tnx
NASA has yet to release a formal statement, but one of their spokespeople is describing the Sunday Express's article as "fiction". Whether this means the Apollo 11 tapes haven't actually been found, or the way they were found is completely made up, is anyone's guess, but it shows the risks of taking a tabloid newspaper's breakthrough discovery which doesn't name any of its sources at face value.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Thanks, I was about to try it anyway, out of a mix of curiosity and MacOS complacency.
Given that this "news" actually appeared across the intertubes in November 06 I find it amusing that the Sunday Express is reporting this now. Just one example: http://www.bloggernews.net/11476
Nasaspaceflight.com is reporting the Slashdot comments on one of it's forums http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=3318.msg428367;topicseen#new there are many NASA insiders and astronauts who comment there. They seem to be skeptical about the whole story.
Bob Jacobs, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA, says the story's fiction.
(via Phil Plait)
But then again, I could be wrong.
The USPTO is fully fee funded. This is in part why they are having funding difficulties as they can not carry over money from year to year.
Your taxes do not fund the USPTO and have not for a few years.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
...for knowing too much - the truth. It's amazing that there's more media about some lost tapes, that are absolutely fake to begin with - there aren't even stars in the clips because they couldn't properly fake those too at the time in a way that wouldn't be detectable later on and used as proof so they left them out entirely. Holy hell batman if you can't see a mile wide hole in that you should uninstall asap., than the lost lives of all the people silenced for knowing the truth about the alleged missions to the moon, some even scheduled to testify about it? Innocent people have been murdered too many times for knowing the truth about things our government wishes to hide and this is just one of them. Why do people tolerate others silencing the truth? Why is slashdot going to silence me and keep removing my posts?
...know something about the limitations of the Apollo computer (for example, 2048 words of RAM). "Overloaded" makes a lot of sense in that context, actually.
Do some reading and join them.
(You can see the hardware itself at the Computer History Museum.)
you had me at #!
The footage is fake as a 3 dollar bill and all 700 boxes of it are conveniently missing. America, the only thing here that is missing is the truth. The government doesn't want you to have the truth because the truth is we've never been to the moon. The truth is that the missions/film are fake. The truth is that innocent people, including wives and children, have been murdered to cover it up. Do your research.
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cus.gus@hotmail.com
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
I don't think of myself as a conspiracy nut, and I'm kinda on the fence with the moon landing stuff (ie. it could be an extravagent coverup I guess) but why can't someone just show me a recent freakin picture of the shit they left on the moon.
The Japanese launched that orbitor about 2 years ago, and so did someone else I believe. Satellite type deals which orbit the moon quite closely with supa-dupa high res cameras aboard. Just take a fuckin picture of the moon buggy already, god dammit!
What about these telescope thingo's we have on earth, diameters of like 12 football fields that can see shit in other galaxies, but we can't point that fucker at the moon at just once...
In fact, "abort" would have been the "right" decision in my opinion based on what was known at the time.
Unless you are Neil Armstrong. There is a reason he was picked to go on that mission. He starts out as a combat jet pilot over Korea, brings back a totally shot up bird.
After taking a bit of time to get some additional education, he winds up as a test pilot... flying all sorts of exotic craft. He makes his way into NASA, and there, he makes a quick decision that saves a tumbling Gemini spacecraft. Then, he's ejecting from wildly unstable lunar lander proxy craft.
Pretty much his whole career, Armstrong flew a bunch of crazy aircraft in a bunch of dangerous situations and proved himself as having a knack for making the right decisions, and quickly, because of crunch time.
He gambled that the computer was still returning...excessive risk
I think its fair to say that with his track record, he didn't take excessive risk -for him-. He was the best flyer NASA had, and he was doing his job.
This is my sig.
Either way, it's truly gobsmacking that NASA spent countless billions (in *1960s* money) on the moon mission and yet were so damn careless with their source data
The mission was a publicity stunt. The data didn't matter to them as much. Send a few guys there, bring back some moon rocks, keep a few pictures around... all done. Plus, you have to keep in mind that many at NASA thought we would have a lot more people on the moon now than we do...
This is my sig.
I disagree with all sorts of things the government does; can I have my money back too? I'm not a big fan of the military; if you want to develop new fighter jets, use someone else's money please
A lot of people would agree with you.
This is my sig.
I tried watching some of the original episodes with the first doctor and found them unwatchable. Not sure when it finally got better, maybe the third doctor...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Please, just read at -1. Slashdot moderation is completely broken anyway, and some of the best, but most nerve-touching commends can be found there. And, as is evidenced by your little faux-pas, it's usually still at least useful to the see the -1 comments. I know it's patented, but you can do your own moderation with the PgDn key.
Back when Buzz was in action, he and his fellow astronaughts couldn't answer elementary environmental questions from their 1st and only press conference after returning from their alleged visit to a moon. Come so many years later, each and every one of them can put details to each of their money-making books published; details that a savant and remote viewer would be unable to describe. Perhaps none forgot about the video of a couple recent years that was uncovered that shows that rear capsule window being removed of its light-bending trick?
Buzz Aldrin ought to just go retire and stop threatening anyone with contrary assumptions. All him and his wealthy buddies to to nay-sayers is threaten them to a visit with The Company. He should be ashamed of himself, because nothing he's done has improved space travel as the progress of private experimenters that have endured the coerced eye of NASA that steals their patents and does more to hinder research than help.
*snicker*
No they didn't lose the tapes... They're right here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy8S9VQ8OhY (vid of Michael Jackson)
blog.idigitall.com
Browsing at +2 helps me filter out all of the racist / pornographic trolling which sets off the word filter where I work.
/. gets a better filter for spam comments, I'm staying well into the high mod bracket.
I'd love to help by meta-moderating, but I can't afford the risk. Until
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
When you deliver a shipment of fail so large as misplacing the tapes of a moon landing it's reasonable to go into some detail as to how it happens, in an effort to embarrass those responsible... in the hopes of reducing the chance that it will happen again.
The people paid for that moon landing, and the records, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"The government doesn't want you to have the truth because the truth is we've never been to the moon"
The fact that we have, indeed, been to the moon can be verified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_Experiment
"I don't think of myself as a conspiracy nut, and I'm kinda on the fence with the moon landing stuff (ie. it could be an extravagent coverup I guess) but why can't someone just show me a recent freakin picture of the shit they left on the moon. The Japanese launched that orbitor about 2 years ago, and so did someone else I believe. Satellite type deals which orbit the moon quite closely with supa-dupa high res cameras aboard. Just take a fuckin picture of the moon buggy already, god dammit! What about these telescope thingo's we have on earth, diameters of like 12 football fields that can see shit in other galaxies, but we can't point that fucker at the moon at just once..."
We can see other galaxies because galaxies are really big relative to their distance.
For instance, Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, and 220,000 light years across. That means it's about 11.36 times further away than it is in diameter.
The moon is about 384,403 km from the earth, core to core. The buggy would be what... 10 feet across? 3280.8399 feet per kilometer, take a little bit off for surface to surface... so let's say 1 billion, 250 million feet, just for fun.
That means it's 125 million times further away than it is in size. Point being, resolving a tiny object placed there when you have a 40 year old estimate of landing location is problematic even from orbit around the moon, and completely impossible from the earth. At least today.
"When you deliver a shipment of fail so large as..."
We already have a perfectly serviceable noun - "failure". Turning "fail" into a noun is not an improvement for the language. It's just further degredation of rules that are already disintegrating. Is English not already sufficiently buggered up for you?
some people were suspicious that Osama would magically be captured right before the 2004 election..
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Curiosity killed the cat, it appears to be MacOS compatible. It is your standard launch a bunch of browser windows and play nasty stuff type thing.. Also tries to launch your mail app.
Another cat here. Wow- that was quite a ride.
I'm running OS X 10.5.7 on Intel w/latest Safari 4. This thing also fired up iChat, created many blank emails, and- most worrisome- launched Terminal. Yikes- time to pay attention to that "don't run as admin" advice.
There were over a hundred open Terminal windows by the time I regained control. Four different types of Terminal screens:
==== 1 ====
login: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
[Process completed]
==== 2 ====
login: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
[Process exited - exit code 1]
==== 3 ====
Could not open a new pseudo-tty.
==== 4 ====
Trying 1.1.1.1...
==========
Any opinions on how bad this was?
And the worse news is theat the autopsy report states that jackson was completely bald
Holy crap, who has that kind of time???
Please, just read at -1. Slashdot moderation is completely broken anyway,
Not as badly broken as trying to read a website with 8-12+ threads a day, with each one usually well over a hundred comments. Never mind the absurd 800 comment monsters (gave up on politics./. a *long* time ago).
Your advice worked in the good 'ole days of /. when we were a smaller and *relatively* more well-behaved group... but no more.
Filter at +1 or higher, and kill the ACs, your sanity will thank you.