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NASA Has the Lost Tapes
The Shuttle launch may have been delayed by two days, but NASA has better news to report. caffiend666 writes "As speculated a few weeks ago, NASA has found and is starting to restore the lost Apollo 11 tapes. A Briefing will be held July 16th at the Newseum in Washington to 'release greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk... 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.'"
Yeah, what's the big deal? Just set up the studio and make the tapes again!
Excellent! I wonder if there's any evidence of UFOs. Glad they were able to grab the images off the tape, and I look forward to looking at it, and meeting our new alien overlords.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
n/t
actually now go around and start yelling at the top of our lungs "THEY FOUND THE TAPES!!!!!"
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Umm, according to the technical specifications NASA itself published, the SSTV only had two modes -- 320 was the only mode used during the mission. The other mode, operating at 1280 lines, was never engaged according to mission reports from Apollo 9, 11, 13, and 14, which were the only ones to use a module capable of scanning higher than 320 lines (standard TV).
Where, pray tell, did these tapes come from if the machinery was never enabled to run in that operating mode?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Initially I thought the headline read "Nasa Has Lost the Tapes", and I almost believed it. "What? Already? They lost them again? Those idiots! ... oh wait."
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
... has finally made this possible.
ohhhh lizabeth... theres no water....
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
"We've lost the tapes." "No, sir, we've found the tapes after all."
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
After the 2nd season, I found it boring. And honestly NASA, tapes? Use a dvr if you're going to record Lost.
Check in the Ark next to the dead alien in the jar. And you think they'd listen to me.
Clearly the first moonwalk was done by Michael Jackson, we saw it live on television
but why do they find the lunar tapes a few days before the 40th celebration of the Lunar mission (Apollo 11).
Is this a coincidence or PR?
Aeroespacio.org
How about "NASA has Found the Lost Tapes"? Right now the title tells me that NASA is in ownership of the tapes, but just can't find them.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Ahem
I tried to go once, but it turned out that the tickets are $19 bucks.
Is it worth the price?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Now even this great movie of fiction gets a remake? Or will it just be a weak director's cut, to prepare for the lauch of the sequel "Mars mission"?
I hope it will have better props this time. They were pretty unrealistic, and clearly retouched (or 'shopped in 2009 speak) in that old movie.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Our new junkie alien overlords seem to be asking for 10% of our children.
They can have my wife too, I insist.
GD
I am especially excited about these tapes because I lived through the first moon landing. I'll never forget where I watched it. In a motel room in St. Louis with the girl (at that time) of my dreams.
No, it won't convince any of the idiots who think we never landed on the moon. No amount of evidence ever will.
... release of the high resolution version until the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format issue was settled.
Have gnu, will travel.
*puts on tinfoilhat*
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
yeah fuckin right... they just made some CGI footage and couldnt filter it properly to make it look like TV from the 60s since they never actually went to the moon and then made this crock of shit up as an excuse...
And..you know this ..how? Oh well, never mind.
Just wait six months and they'll have the special director's edition EVD with 10 extra minutes and a "making of" featurette.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_(TV_series)
Heck, even I have those!
That's one small step for a space agency, ...
NASA is under orders to retain all data from planetary missions, including lunar missions. Once the data as been recovered, what are NASA's plans to archive and prevent the data from being lost over the next 40, or 400 years? How will they plan on making the data available to general public?
What's with the little extra verb?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
This is one nice and juicy little factoid. Consider how much mythology lives around these hidden tapes. There was no way for Nixon to be implicated in their tampering...
It's a neat mythology: if you believe the Moon Landing was faked, a hoax, then the soon-to-come high-def photos of the moon should answer that by showing the trash we left behind and that should still be there, the Lunar Landers. And if the landings are proven by the images to have actually occurred, then those same people can migrate to the idea that alien presences on the Moon were airbrushed out. Terrible tragedy it is for NASA that so many of their moon photos have obvious smudge marks over certain details. It would be nice to find out if those were alien ruins, waving aliens or just machine malfunctions
NASA doesn't have any lost tapes. If they have found them, they are by definition not lost anymore. I bet there are dozens of tapes that are lost because nobody knows their location but these tapes are not one of them. Correct headline would be "NASA has the found tapes". Sounds redundant? In the human mind that may be the case but if you think about it long enough, you can only come to this conclusion. Being lost is quite a fleeting and interesting feature and has no doubt been studied by filosophers around the ages.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I was hoping there would be more episodes to watch before the sixth and final season begins. I always knew they were probably taping during the strike!
Harold
The NYTimes has devoted its Tuesday Science section to the Apollo 11 anniversary. A feature piece tries to convey just what it was like that summer of '69, and the landing's backdrop of the Cold War. Another tries to list some of the impacts on popular culture of the time. Yet another tries to compare the Apollo effort to what it'll take to get back to the Moon and on to Mars.
Yes, there is also a piece on the hoax-spinners.
When dealing with NASA, there are no "coincidences."
It's not clear to me from the press release if these are really the lost slow scan tapes, or just a really good restoration from 40 year-old tapes of the broadcast, which still suffered from the limited analog conversion problems of that era.
As speculated a few weeks ago, NASA has found and is starting to redact the lost Apollo 11 tapes.
There, fixed that for ya.
...here. Finding the tapes seemed nearly impossible at the time (2007) - the old reel-to-reel machines were dead, whole warehouses were being closed, and the people who were actually driving the recovery effort were mostly Apollo-class themselves - well into their golden years. It reminded me of some of the Library of Congress horror stories, only more desperate and with better special effects. If they do have the footage and can actually decode it, this is an amazing find - I wasn't holding out much hope.
Another cool site is Colin Mackellar's Honeysuckle Creek Tribute Site. Tons of info on the recording, the differences in quality, etc.
Really good news.
Now we will get to see all the dental floss holding stuff up
Instead of doing this themselves they should have just shopped it out to Weta Digital. We would have had it years sooner. Probably higher quality as well.
According to wikipedia the highest resolution I can see there is 256x256, I'm not exactly sure I understand how any greater quality cant be seen on something that small.
don't you mean NASA has finished sanitising the lost tapes?
Can I hire the finders to locate all my missing socks (of a pair) and missing power adapters? Kudos to the finders! I hope they get a big reward (no, silly, not my socks).
Table-ized A.I.
At WWDC this year (the Apple developer conference) they had a lunch speaker whose whole job was recovering video from tapes exactly like these. The resolution you can get from them is amazing, they are equivalent (or perhaps surpass) modern HD video cameras. One example was comparing a video pass over the moon to the same are taken with 35mm film, the result wasn't even close - the recovered video offered far more detail.
I am really looking forward to the footage from this.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not only did we not go to the moon in 1969, when we really tried, we almost killed Tom Hanks...
from the original wired article and interview it was not that they had lost the tapes, they said they had them at that point, it was that they didn't have a machine capable of playing the darn things when they did that article, and were looking for a machine to play them back
wouldn't they be common today?
surely technology has skyrocketed since then.
does anyone really remember what 'state of the art' was in 1969?
everything was overly heavy and large and bulky. The IC had just been mass produced 6 years earlier.
In fact, every major advancement we achieved in any form of technology for the two decades after was due to the moon missions.
I'm just wondering why we haven't gone back? No money? No interest?
Not possible?
They're using their grammar skills there.
wow... nerds apparently have a terrible grasp on humor, i thought the tinfoilhat reference would clear mea of any allegations of flambait, clearly this situation is confimed antecdotal evidence that nerds cannot read.... i _must_ make a submission on this.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
3 Cheers for Packrats!
Table-ized A.I.
Lost is not being used as an adjective anymore in this statement. Lost is now being used as an identifier, a name for, the tapes. The only purpose of calling them the lost tapes is to differentiate them from the other tapes they previously had.
And you know what, this is all completely obvious to anyone who never completed grade school. There's something about how grammar is first taught in elementary and junior school that leads to the kind of delayed-onset petulant pedanticism where someone regaining a "lost tape" is cited as logically inconsistent.
Any normal person makes the map from "lost tape" to "tape that was lost" a hundred times a day in the course of normal social relationships. Even people not regarded as representing the fat part of the Bell curve. Kasparov said some silly things about Deep Blue, but he never went around making absurd comments on language like some kind of cyborg dialed up way past Cmdr Data for propositional logic.
The lost coin is found, the lost sheep regathered, the lost son returns. Except in The Changeling, which is a difficult movie to watch. Had to keep track of fact that "lost son" meant different things to different people in almost every scene. Amazing the mind doesn't completely melt down in the face of so much contradiction. The only character whose mind was completely unclouded by ambiguity was the doctor in the psychiatric ward. I wouldn't risk use of the phrase "lost tapes" in the company of that man. His M.O. was that any ordinary ellipsis or circumlocution was a treasonable psychosis. He'd fit in well here.
Is that this is pretty close to the only video tape we're *going* to see:
if any of the networks are planning anything for the anniversary, they're doing an exceptional job keeping it under wraps.
Damnit; I wish Uncle Walter wasn't sick. He'd just show up and say "let's go", and who at CBS is gonna tell him "No"? They'll just assign him a camera crew and buy him plane tickets.
Anything with "moon" and "high res" in it makes me nervous. NASA should be wary of a detailed goatse hoax.
Table-ized A.I.
Just one thing additional thing I learned from that document: It seems that all existing video is film of CRT screens displaying a live feed of the broadcast signals. So we have the scan conversion, which was lossy, and then the broadcast 60i (or 50i) to film (more lossage and noise), and then film - digital video (as little loss as possible). No wonder the video looks so horrid!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I initially read "Nasa has lost the moon tapes" /. article'
and I was thinking, 'didn't they just find them????' and 'not another old regurgitated
thankfully I read it wrong, I can't wait to see what I never got to see broadcasted live in the first place!
I've been reading about these found tapes for weeks, post the youtube link already!
Yeah,
And to make it really convincing, shoot it in color, and 1080p.
With that quality, everyone can se the details of the moon, and be convinced they actually was there.
"I bet there are dozens of tapes that are lost because nobody knows their location but these tapes are not it."
There, fixed that for you.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
If they have found them, they are by definition not lost anymore.
Well then, I think I've found your marbles!
Beside the large box containing the Arc of the Covenant.
I still dig the moon videos though. It is nice to see what Man can do when driven not by dollars, but by a quest. My how times have changed.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Thanks for the link. Here are a pair of images to show the improvement we can expect, the first from the TV broadcast:
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11_EVA_stills/images/A11TV08.jpg
and the second from the slow-scan video:
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11_EVA_stills/images/A11TV07.jpg
So there's a very impressive improvement in quality, but it's not HD or anything. Although now they have the original tapes, perhaps they can post-process them a bit more and improve the quality further.
Links from this page:
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11_EVA_stills/index.html
In 1969 the Americans first landed men on the moon. Now some people have made names for themselves by saying that this and subsequent landings never happened. Their position is that NASA faked them in order to save face and fool the public. To prove their point they rely on explanations of the reported events using dubious science and lay explanations that any first year science major would and does, laugh at.
However, they always miss or purposely avoid the the one piece of irrefutable proof that it did in fact happen. That is that the Soviet government never refuted the American claims and they were in a unique position to do so. For even after the Americans landed on the moon the Soviets still continued to send orbiters, landers and rovers to the moon.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_planetary_lunar.html
Now if they wanted to get the goods on the Americans all they had to do was to land, photograph or explore with a rover the American landing sights. Just imagine the embarrassment not to mention the the damage to American credibility, at the height of the cold war no less, that such information would generate. Records even show that they never landed or even explored that areas that that American landings happened. So they did not even go and look to make sure because they knew it really happened.
But they did not. They did not use it to pressure the Americans to stop bombing North Vietnam and Cambodia where Soviet military advisers were being killed as a result. They did not use it to pressure the United States to stop sending military advisers to and providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan fighters during the Soviet occupation. They did not use it to stop the Star Wars program of the Regan administration.
In fact they did not even use it to turn the West's attention away from the Soviet Union during the Soviet Coup of 1991 when members of the Soviet government briefly deposed Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and attempted to take control of the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_coup_attempt_of_1991
Which every body knew was the last death throws of the Soviet empire. If they did not use the information then to turn the attention of the American, and world public, inward to their own governments lies and thus corruption and force it to ignore the events in the Soviet Union in order to deal with a damaging domestic and international issue. Then the proof of faked moon landings did not and never existed.
One final thought. After the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian economy tanked. People were selling all kinds of stuff owed by the crumbling state, ships, weapons, artworks and knowledge but nobody ever approached any Western news agency or tabloid to sell them this information. And to say that one would buy it but not publish is foolish. The seller could just keep peddling it until some on did and then it would be old news and worthless until then it would still be worth something.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Filosophers?
Are they the ones that ponder the meaning of very thin pastry?
The moon is cheeze! Everyone knows it is held up by a fat old man. Wait. No. That's Santa. It is held up by a skinny old man. Skinny and tall. Yeah that's it. The moon is cheese, held up by a tall skinny old man.
http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I think they burned down during the filming of Ice Pirates.
I drank what? -- Socrates
If the construction of the Pyramids was possible in 2500 BC.... ...wouldn't they be common today?
Surely technology has skyrocketed since then.
Does anyone really remember what 'state of the art' was in 2500 BC? They didn't even have cranes.
Everything was overly heavy and large and bulky. Most tools were made of wood and stone or copper. The Iron Age hadn't even begun.
In fact, every major advancement we achieved in any form of technology for two centuries after was due to the construction of the pyramids.
I'm just wondering why we haven't built more? No money? No interest?
Not possible?
May the Maths Be with you!
Resistance is Futile
Uh, ummm... because you're an asshole?
Is that the reason?
...are you talking about the same guys that the CIA had no idea were completely broke?
...next you're going to tell me that international politics isn't like a gentleman's wager.
...
Of course, the real reason that the video is so convincing is that it was filmed on a soundstage on the moon.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Another point to use in refuting the "hoax" claims: All the hoax theories seem to center on a perceived difficulty in "deep space" operations. In fact, that's not the hardest part - both the Soviets had US had the spacecraft developed and tested in space that were designed to get to and land on the moon. In reality, the hard part was building a giant rocket that can make it though 100+ seconds of flight. The US demonstrated that part many times in front of millions on eye witnesses...
the one piece of irrefutable proof
You misunderstand what "proof" means. That the soviets could have objected and offered evidence contrary to NASA's claims but did not is not proof of anything. No doubt, it's interesting. And it adds weight to your opinion. But it's not "proof" by any definition of the word.
You'd have to be an idiot to put out live information of the moon landing when the goal was political (an attempt at a peaceful cold war pissing contest.) We'd have "lost" or simply falsely reported a disaster; not sent out video or audio of men screaming to death as their eyes pop out on camera.
To make us look technologically superior, we'd surely play it safe if not enhance some things... Some legit skeptics on the moon landing conspiracy side do not deny it happened, but they claim some of the images and events did not happen as NASA said they did. Some idiots take that info and use it for their stupid claim it was all fake (completely ignoring the USSR had the means to verify it and would have loved to prove to the world we lied instead of admitting we did in fact do it.)
Ever since FOX NEWS ran a show with some ignorant but reasonable sounding claims, and a few actually interesting questions-- there has been a large number of complete idiot skeptics (fox news viewers are largely idiots afterall...)
Wow, you're right! I never thought of this before. This must mean...they were IN ON IT! Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I've already started writing a book about how the Soviets were party to this massive deception.
-Somebody stole this sig.
They can't reshoot it without Michael Jackson
how long until
That is that the Soviet government never refuted the American claims and they were in a unique position to do so. For even after the Americans landed on the moon the Soviets still continued to send orbiters, landers and rovers to the moon.
Unless... the soviet missions were all fake...
The existence of a USSR manned mission to the moon wasn't well know, and the fact that it even existed was kept secret. I think the USSR counter strategy after the failure of their own manned moon vehicle on the ground and the success of the US moon program was to abandon a manned mission to the moon completely and downplay the significance of a man moon landing. The race for space was a big deal, propaganda wise, and each side championed its victors. In the US, it's the moon landing, in the USSR it was being the first in space and in the 80's it was the MIR space station. I don't think that many people in the US know who Gagarin was in the same breath that not many people in the (ex-)USSR know what the Apollo program was.
Anyway, how do you know that the conspiracy in the US that the US never landed on the moon wasn't kick-started by the USSR anyway? :)
His company can make it better!
mkilpatric, to all the mysterious people, I am the folded dollar.
Oh, those Russians, eh! Within a week of Pons and Fleischman, the Russians were claiming wild success with Cold Fusion, and didn't rebut the theory until many Western scientists (including DOE) challenged the data and dumb and dumber recanted the results.
So the proof that the Americans landed on the moon is not anything affirmative, but rather that there is no negative proof? Meaning, as long as the Russians didn't make a fuss, we can therefore know with certainty that the Americans actually made it to the lunar surface?! So, in other words, if you can fool the Russians, then there's no further proof required? Star Wars, anyone? A crappy PowerPoint presentation from the Whitehouse and the Russians thrown in the towel! So we know that THEY can't be easily fooled!
And, what of the Lunar Landing? The Russians would certainly have exposed that! That is if you believe that the Russians could launch even a turd ball into space. What a joke! Have you seen Sputnik? It's like a soccerball covered with tin foil and four straws stuck into it. Actually, that's what it is. My great uncle, the Nobel Laureate, Ivan Tobedumbkov, attended the Moscow Institute of Applied Physics and Chemistry where he chummed around with the early Soyuz rocket scientists who would hide the vodka distilled in their dorm room inside of an old soccer ball and sneak drinks on weekends by inserting straws into holes in the leather.
So we can know that we landed on the moon because there's no way we could fool the Russians. That's really reassuring!
ITEM 1 - NASA RELEASES PRELIMINARY RESTORED APOLLO 11 VIDEO â" GSFC (NEW) To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, NASA released partially restored video of a series of 15 memorable moments from the July 20 moonwalk. The source material for the restoration project is the best of the available broadcast-format video. Lowry Digital, Burbank, Calif., is significantly enhancing the video using the companyâ(TM)s proprietary software technology and other restoration techniques. The video is part of a larger restoration project that will be completed in September and provide a newly restored high definition video of the entire Apollo 11 moonwalk. The completed restoration will provide the public with the highest quality video of this historic event. (Video shows the partially restored footage of the Apollo 11 astronauts taking their first steps on the moon and other scenes of significance. NASA plans to release the fully restored Apollo 11 video later this fall. ) TRT: 22:00 Super: NASA Center Contact: Rani Gran, 301.286.8955 HQ Contact: John Yembrick, 202-358-0602 For more info: www.nasa.gov/apollo40th
If I was in their position, I wouldn't even bother. Ever heard of extremophiles? If it's possible here, it's possible out there. Pure logic. If the government doesn't want you to know, you're not going to.