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.'"

Comments

Headline

[Adrian Lopez]

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."

Re:Can we....

[Anonymous Coward]

We should have a -1 - Lives with parents mod.

Lost Tapes

[retech]

After the 2nd season, I found it boring. And honestly NASA, tapes? Use a dvr if you're going to record Lost.

Re:Greatly improved quality?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Glad to hear that

[juanergie]

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?

Re:Glad to hear that

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidence. The search kicked off at least seven years ago, when an ex-Honeysuckle Creek employee discovered an old tape in his garage. It was sent for analysis, in the hope that high resolution video of the Apollo 11 landing could be recovered. The tape turned out not to be of the moon landing. It did prompt people to ask "what happened to the originals", and kicked off a serious search. It turned out that NASA has misplaced their own copies.

Copies of the telemetry tapes (hundreds of them) were eventually discovered in the basement of the Physics building at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. They had been placed in the Uni's care by an Australian scientist (Brian O'Brien) who had run an Apollo experiment. He had the tapes as a record of the data from his own experiment, but by luck the telemetry stream includes everything, including the video. It turns out that Curtin Uni thought they weren't that important, on the basis that if they were important, NASA would have already had copies.

Re:Greatly improved quality?

[WeblionX]

They pointed a TV camera at a monitor displaying the SSTV footage so it would be compatible with TV broadcasts, hence lower quality.

Decade of the remakes?

[Hurricane78]

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.

In answer to your question

[sir_eccles]

No, it won't convince any of the idiots who think we never landed on the moon. No amount of evidence ever will.

Re:In answer to your question

[The_mad_linguist]

Oh, we definitely landed on the moon, just not when NASA claimed.

Apollo 13 was the only mission to actually get there.

NASA intentionally delayed ...

[PPH]

... release of the high resolution version until the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format issue was settled.

Future preservation plans?

[mjallison]

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?

Now, In the Background, Aliens Waving

[curmudgeon99]

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

Re:Greatly improved quality?

[arthurpaliden]

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.

More Anniversary Coverage

[necro81]

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.

Re:Greatly improved quality?

[Shakrai]

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.....

Wired has a great article about the loss...

[flux4]

...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.

Re:Cool, any UFOs?

[dzfoo]

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.

Re:if you believe.. they put a man on the moon..

[arthurpaliden]

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.