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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!
Yes we can, however our parents will shout down the stairs for us to shut up.
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
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."
We should have a -1 - Lives with parents mod.
After the 2nd season, I found it boring. And honestly NASA, tapes? Use a dvr if you're going to record Lost.
RTFA.
This is the 320 mode. It's higher quality because the broadcast version was converted to standard TV by pointing a video camera at a screen showing the transmitted version.
Clearly the first moonwalk was done by Michael Jackson, we saw it live on television
the truth is that they had the tapes all along... its just that the technology finally exists to remove all the alien spacecraft from the footage. Now they can show it to us in the alien free form god intended
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
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
They pointed a TV camera at a monitor displaying the SSTV footage so it would be compatible with TV broadcasts, hence lower quality.
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
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.
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.
Just wait six months and they'll have the special director's edition EVD with 10 extra minutes and a "making of" featurette.
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?
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.
Actually, if I remember correctly, all the 'monitors' that you see in the control room were all TV sets. There were only one set of computer monitors with a video camera infront of each one. You saw different data screens by changing channels.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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.
It's higher quality because the broadcast version was converted to standard TV by pointing a video camera at a screen showing the transmitted version.
I knew it! Those NASA bastards exploited the analog hole. Quick, get the MPAA on the phone and have somebody distract NewYorkCountryLawyer so he can't interfere. We finally have NASA right where we want them.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
...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.
You're correct about NTSC not having a set horizontal resolution. Some could display upwards of 400 lines of horizontal resolution, but most TVs were designed with 320 +/- in mind. VCRs were lucky to get past 250; reason most stuff recorded on videotape appears excessively blurry. And one needs to think back to the early computer days in which the display and graphics were designed for existing TV-based CRT screen hardware.
In regards to the vertical resolution, some of the 262 lines are in the overscan area on CRT based monitors leaving about 240 lines viewable.
Ron
If there were life intelligent enough to travel between the stars, do you REALLY think they'd allow an agency like NASA keep it under wraps? Seriously... you grossly overestimate the competence of government. Shit is nowhere NEAR that in control, by anyone.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Why do you think we are of an concern to them? Allegedy - Allegedy - the UFO just sat there at the edge of the crater for a while, then moved off once the astronauts came out. The aliens are not the ones concerned. So why would they be concerned about our ability to use chemical-based engines to reach our first orbital body if the travel between stars?
As for our government control, that Russian hacker who got arrested for breaking tin to NASA computers allegedly had recovered images with alien craft. Now finally the astronauts have started to acknoledge alien contact
Alien moon base
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Unverifiable links by anonymous authors citing anonymous sources are no better than science fiction. At least Isaac Asimov signed his work.
There is jack and shit for evidence of intelligent alien life as of today. I'm sure the Russian hacker THOUGHT he could find images... where is the proof he did? Did he disseminate any of them? Any that cannot be easily dismissed as various atmospheric and interference phenomena? I mean, there are people who still think the moon images were faked, even though there have been extensive experiments and study done on them to verify them.
Oh, and about the astronauts acknowledging (way to use spell-check there, sparky) alien contact? Bullshit. With a capital fucking B. Lying does NOT help your credibility.
Face it. There is no alien life near us, we really did land on the moon, and the government is NOT all powerful and able to keep a secret of that magnitude. Suggesting anything else is pure lunacy.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
3 Cheers for Packrats!
Table-ized A.I.
But, you see, I found Abby Normal's brain more fascinating.
Table-ized A.I.
Already exists - called the Karma bonus
We've sent probes down to the Marianas trench, so why aren't we living in bubbles down there? It's the same sort of question. Basically, because it's 'king hard to do still.
Apollo was *unbelievably* expensive (now adjust for inflation!) to achieve and had ENORMOUS political backing... but well... not very much in terms of science got done (engineering, sure, but science? Not so much). We can now do that science *MUCH* better from, say, the International Space Station, Hubble or the Mars Rovers. There's three reasons where we haven't gone back to the moon. Space missions are primarily about science, not land-grabs, military superiority or other factors. It's the only way to recoup some of the costs (patents, etc.), provide impetus to the people doing it (scientists and engineers) and prove to other nations that your intentions are peaceful.
Sending humans to places adds orders of magnitude to the costs involved in going somewhere (compare cost of one satellite to costs of one manned orbiting mission). Sending a probe, satellite or rover is so much cheaper in comparison, it's silly. And why do you need to send a human? To either say "Look, we stepped here" (Apollo, and Aldrin's recent suggestion to go back to Mars) or to colonise the place (way out of our capabilities at the moment, if not engineering then financial). Look at the problems and costs faced with the ISS... now imagine that it's several MONTHS away and several MONTHS back, even when you manage to get the Shuttle in the air to supply it (which takes months / years in itself). Astronaut ill? Ooops. He's dead. Tool needed for critical repair? Oops, there goes the air pressure before you can get to it.
The Moon landings were not only possible in 1969 but probably earlier if enough money had been thrown at it. Modern satellites, shuttles, etc. really aren't that much more advanced (or, if they are, don't need to be in order to do the same job - most of the tech just makes it safer, more interesting, etc.). It's not a question of technology... it's a question of how do you justify several BILLION dollars of ongoing costs for probably about a decade in order to step next to the footprint on the moon and say "Hey, look what I did?". It worked back in 1969 because of the political backing and finances being MADE available. No chance of that now, unless it comes from joint ventures with NASA, ESA etc. and why would a joint venture want to go back to the moon when Mars isn't "that" much farther out of our reach? Or you could send a dozen probes to various places (Moon, Mars, orbit) for the same price.
BTW: The onboard computer on the Apollo is probably outclassed by a fancy digital watch, or a desktop calculator now. Technology has moved on in orders of magnitude but it still doesn't really help when the only practical way to get thousands of tons of equipment off the ground against gravity is by lighting the end of a huge tube of liquid oxygen/hydrogen (literally TONS and TONS of it)... a gross simplification but that's basically the gist of the propulsion. Simple physics demands a certain amount of acceleration to pull it off (computers can help find an optimal path, but there's still a minimum that you need), therefore a certain amount of thrust, therefore a certain amount of fuel... and fuel prices don't go down much as technology increases, even for simple fuels like this. In fact, it's probably risen by quite a substantial amount because prices of things like metal for its containment, costs of transporting it etc. have risen.
With all due respect, the GP said 'There is jack and shit for evidence of intelligent alien life as of today', and he is entirely correct despite your ranting - there is no evidence of intelligent alien life as of today. None.
No, these are just the "Special Edition" version of the faked moon landing tapes. It was "produced" by Lucas Films, in collaboration with NASA, and contain newly added footage and CGI-enhanced visuals.
They look great, but some have already complained that the new tapes show Buzz Aldrin touching the surface first, which completely changes the character and motivation of the scene.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
RTFA. Or for that matter, RT-previous-FA regarding the missing tapes. They are not claiming that these tapes are high-resolution or higher quality than current TV signals. They are claiming that they are higher quality than the images broadcast 40 years ago, and replayed often since.
The reason is that forty years ago these (slow-scan, lower resolution) tapes were broadcast by pointing a television camera to a display monitor, which was itself a television set. This greatly degraded the picture; but what made it worse was that this was then recorded into videotape through kinescope, losing even more quality in the process. The resulting tapes were all we had, since nobody has been able to see the originals for the last 40 years.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
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
They look great, but some have already complained that the new tapes show Buzz Aldrin touching the surface first, which completely changes the character and motivation of the scene.
I can accept that, but what really ruined the tapes for me was the new extended musical sequence.
The enemies of Democracy are
They can't reshoot it without Michael Jackson
how long until