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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."
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.
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
That's why people call you pervert ;)
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
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It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable, and 'formally' has an unrhotacized schwa. Since the following syllable begins with an apical consonant that also includes velar articulation, the rhotacized schwa tends to lose its rhotacization due to anticipatory reduction. With this one feature lost, the two words become homophonous. In many (all?) non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation, Australian English, etc., the two words are already homophonous.
I don't, actually, agree with that in this case. As several people point out when asked to justify the cost of the moon program, we didn't pay for the *hardware*, that was incidental.
We *paid* for *the knowledge we got by using the hardware*. Now, while, admittedly, this bit of lost knowledge is not as important as the *warehouses full of 7-track tape with data from {Voyager,Pioneer} that has never even been read* since being written, mush less converted to DVD/BD, and made available to the public -- because reading it requires machining new headwheels for the only *two* remaining drives which can read it (do you sense a pattern here?)... it's still important, and I think it would be a bit shortsighted to say "ah, hell, it's only the pictures from the vacation".
Watching that happen created a whole new generation of engineers.
It's not completely unreasonable to think that if they did find it, and they do release it -- oh, say, at the 40th anniversary celebration on 18-Jul at the Kennedy Center -- that seeing the coverage on the net, or on TV, might not inspire that 1 or 2% of teenagers left who aren't too cynical to care about *anything at all* into wanting to go to space...
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.
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.
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