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NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Video, But Originals Lost
leetrout writes "I attended a media briefing held by NASA at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. this morning where they released restored video of the Apollo 11 mission. The clips released are about 40% of the total footage to be restored by September by Lowry Digital in Burbank, CA. Wired has all the clips. A couple remarkable comments made during the briefing included the opinion from the original footage search committee that the original slow scan footage (stored as a single track on telemetry tapes) has been lost forever as the tapes were likely recycled by the mid '80s (apparently common NASA practice). Also, that someone from the applied physics laboratory was in Australia converting the slow scan directly to video. This differs from NASA's goal of merely broadcasting the event, at which it was successful. Unfortunately, no one knows where those tapes of approximately two hours of footage are located."
One time after a high school band concert where we had made a semi-professional recording. I asked if I could make a copy of it. Most dual tape decks I was used too had the source on the left and the destination the right. This deck was reversed and I ended up recording over the only copy of the concert recording with Rhythm is a Dancer. My band director was not amused. Looking back, it was kinda funny. Maybe someone at NASA did something similar?
It is truly amazing what you can "find" when you have unlimited access to huge amounts of supercomputing power.
;)
The render times are probably really impressive too.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Having a Hollywood studio "restore" the footage is going to provide wonderful ammunition for the conspiracy nuts, as they now get to claim that even if the tapes were real, you have no way of knowing if the restored information is genuine or inserted.
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)
Reminds me of http://wechoosethemoon.org/ which was quite busy today. wayback machine to realtime proceeding of apollo 11 mission
The BBC "recycled" tapes in the '70s and '80s, losing many episodes of well-known programs forever *coughdrwhoandmanyothers*.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I read somewhere else that NASA had a tape shortage at some point, so they recycled the moon landing tapes to store other data.
I wonder if advanced data recovery techniques could recover the previously written data well enough to be useful.
--PM
Its incredible to me that NASA wouldn't think far enough ahead to save these tapes for posterity's sake.
Incredible. One of the defining moments in our history, and they didn't think to hold onto it? The whole goal was to only shoot for live feed?
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Right next to the tape with Nixon's 18.5 minutes.
wasn't some of the lost footage recovered from tapes that Pink Floyd had? I remember a news article (last year?) about some tapes Pink Floyd got from NASA to use in some music videos, which they fished out for NASA from their archives when they heard the originals were lost.
My sig has been answered.
They just threw out the bits where you could see the boom mic.
A story appeared on /. 3 days ago that they were found. WTF? Thanks for getting our hopes up. :(
the Neil Armstrong ADR is especially good, given the problems with the first version.
"Hey folks, Neal 'Moonman' Armstrong here -- I can say Moonman now, can't I! -- reporting live, that's LIVE LIVE LIVE from the surface of the mooooooooon, that's right, the one, the only, the biggest satellite in orbit around the Earth you all know and love, and lemme tell ya, folks, the Earth is looking pretty damn good from here, it's a real crackerjack experience, even in this helluva suit, to be up here, and waving down there at all you fine listeners. Station break and ID comin' up, but I'll be right back atcha with more moon-media-madness, so stay tuned!"
I'm pretty sure that's William H. Macy, though the alternative sound tracks and director's cut are good, too. Gary Sinese doing his "perpetual typecast criminal conspirator on the moon" is pretty good, too, and I will admit the Reese Witherspoon version makes those space suits suddenly look pretty sexy. The Nick Cage one is cool, too, sort of a National Treasure reprise.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Ok so what you're telling me is, the most important event in the history of the human race was taped over?
How convenient. I want to see recent telescope pictures of the moon showing the rovers and the flag.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Anyone who has seen Contact knows exactly what happened.
-David
Not a big deal- they can just record them again. I'm sure CGI can fix the problem of the astronauts being slightly older this time.
My webcomic
The moon must be a boring place to cancel the final missions after the rockets were built, delete the tapes and not even think of going back for 40 years. It's only interesting again as a jumping off point for Mars and maybe the H3 stuff.
We are ready to junk the ISS and are just finishing it now.
Hubble had enough bling-bling to force NASA to get more use out of it.
Mars landers nearly lost funding for the team that drives them around after the official 90 day mission.
I bet we forget about the manned Mars mission 2 months after launch.
Personally, I would rather the funding go to hundreds of unmanned probes and actually learn something rather than spend it all on a pie in the sky manned mission that already seems to lack enough interest to trigger significant funding.
Now, now, that's not true. You could say that a crack whore is all about giving bareback blowjobs to playas, but that's just the public facing activity to fund the underlying goal.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"oh it is just the moon tapes... no one will want them"
Doubtful
So a collection of acid heads and stoners could tape and preserve thousands of Grateful Dead shows.. all while stoned off of their asses... and then manage to keep and distribute the tapes they made for 30 years ( in good quality mind ya), whilst NASA spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Apollo program and then LOST and/or RECYCLED the tapes?
Bullshit. This doesn't add up, and I am a space junkie.
There is no way that the tapes were lost by accident....
"If we could send a man to the moon, why can't we send a man to the moon?"
NASA -2
Is this thing on? Check. Check.
THAT'S RACIST.
Darn directors cuts! I *liked* the old version where you could see the Vaseline blur under the LM, and Armstrong shot first.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The BBC "recycled" tapes in the '70s and '80s, losing many episodes of well-known programs forever *coughdrwhoandmanyothers*.
Much as the BBC should be smacked about with a blunt instrument for wiping, they at least have the defence that these were low-budget productions that were seen as ephemeral in nature at the time and of no obvious use. (Legal agreements meant that they couldn't be retransmitted, and there wasn't a home video market as such).
NASA spent billions (in *60s money*) getting the first human being to walk on the moon- which would have been an obviously massive historical event even before it happened- yet thanks to some beancounting jobsworths and bureaucrats, rather than being treated as a valuable historical document and archived as they should have been, the high-quality originals have been lost.
This both defies belief and is all too believable; but that doesn't make it any less of a disgrace.
After initial jubilation, I was right to be sceptical about that the Sunday Express's accuracy (they were the ones who broke the- incorrect- story that the original tapes had been found).
Anyway, getting this digitally tarted-up version of the existing footage instead is a $50 consolation prize after being incorrectly told that you'd won a million on the lottery. Even if the image quality is good, the reprocessed footage still likely won't look as good as the original slow scan would have, and it certainly won't have the same veracity.
And that's the most important thing. They lost the damn originals, and regardless of how good the remasters *look*, they're not the damn originals.
You'll excuse me if I don't feel like breaking out the party poppers at NASA's DVD-age PR fluff hyping the remastering of their crappy fourth-generation footage as a minor success instead of the non-reversal of a massive loss of historical material.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
When something of high value goes missing it's usually due to theft rather than incompetence.
Look - they have a 2020 timetable to go back. It seems as if they have some technical hurdles to surpass ... as if they had never gone to the moon before.
Had the original tapes been found, they would have been subject to analysis. This "loss" was to be expected under the circumstances.
I never thought I'd be a moon doubter, but if you watch the newly released footage carefully it does seem fishy.
You know it guys, it happens all the time...
The tapes are "lost" to us, but not to some rich fucker. Like some famous painting that gets "lost."
Someone just needs that "first class" feeling while the rest of us are in coach, because happiness is fucking elusive.
Consider who was President at the time of the Apollo 11 landing, and then realize that it's unsurprising that there is a 2-hour gap in the tapes. ;^)
--
Toro
I wasnt even born then and seeing that footage still makes me feel like a child.... What a crown jewel of human ingenuity.
Good-bye
The Russians could have gone to the moon in roughly the same era, they chose not to. They had good enough tech. The main reason, aside from the cash and internal squabbles on building the necessary ultra heavy lift engine, was they were concerned about radiation and the van allen belt. They had already lost some cosmonauts and had a hard time keeping that a secret, they didn't want to chance the possibility of cooking their guys and having the whole world find out about it, because moonshots obviously are big prestige issues and a lot of the earlier space race *was* a space race, national "face" was very important to both the USSR and USA. Their scientists just estimated it was too risky, US scientists thought not so much. Their leaders starting with Khrushchev wanted the lunar mission for the political reasons, the military wanted it obviously, the scientists wanted a more logical and slower approach, with the resulting clusterfuck making any lunar progress a no go for them.
So, they went to space stations instead, and had the first one, in fact the first several, the various salyut series, then mir. Most of their earlier ones only stayed up a short time, or didn't even make it to orbit, but they have always been more interested in a permanent manned presence in orbit than the US. The first module for the ISS was Russian as well, and they have consistently supported it with (the eventually debugged and now suitable for purpose) workhorse rockets. And they will be supporting it when the US stops, and hopefully maybe they, with maybe the help of everyone else besides NASA, will reverse the decision to de orbit the hundred BILLION dollar ISS just a short time after it has finally been "finished".
Personally, I would love for the rest of the world to tell NASA to fug off and give them some comeuppence, and I am a USian, just can't stand NASA much for all the blunders they have made over the years. They have had a lot of success obviously, their robotics missions, the cheap stuff where they let the engineers do things, but wasted just huge chunks of time and resources and cash on busywork dumbass projects (ie, the shuttle)(the "wisdom of the committee" compromise non-solution).
Maybe they were "gutted" because they were so fucking stupid they couldn't be trusted to do things like SAVING THE ORIGINAL TAPES!!!
Holy Cow. I've read through this whole thread and see people trying to rationalize how NASA could have done something so monumentally stupid. Let's just all save some time and recognize the real reason --
THEY WERE STUPID, INCOMPETENT MOTHERFUCKERS.
NASA has betrayed an entire generation that entrusted them to safeguard the legacy of the tremendous efforts of a nation to push the frontiers of mankind to another world. NASA FUCKED IT UP and robbed future generations of humanity of their heritage. There is no excuse WHATSOEVER for that, and the significance of this utter disgrace should not be glossed over or diminished with bureaucratic understatement. NASA has also spit on the legacy of John F. Kendedy, proving that the only thing important to them about landing on the moon was the money they could get.
To be quite honest, NASA should be gutted again. They've got to use Russian built rockets to get the European and Canadian parts up to the space station, they don't know the difference between the metric system and the english system, they kill astronauts by the half-dozen, and interplanetary projects are handled at JPL. And if that's not enough, realize that the guy they put in charge of finding the tapes is the SAME SOB THAT LOST THEM.
"Houston, we've got a problem...And it's us."
I hope the shuttle gets back safe.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Looks like NASA did what the BBC perfected decades ago
My web domain.
Because only select entities were allowed to keep the copies or display them, the works they considered "so valueable" that they and their siblings being pirated cost the world quadrillions each year, were destroyed because they couldn't be arsed letting go of it.
THIS is why copyright of 5-10 years IS ENOUGH.
After 10 years there would still have been people who had copies they'd taken. The originals could be opened up and left for someone else to keep or transfer, rather than be destroyed because storage costs whether you're making money from the work or not.
After 95 years or life+75 DVDs will be unreadable. VHS would be rusted. People will have cleared their homes out several times.
10 years.
Tops.
If you haven't made your money by then, you suck.
As for the five years trying to get a publisher, use an NDA. They NEVER expire, so are better than copyrights. They also have higher penalty costs than copyright has against a corporation.
NASA still has the originals for Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, & 17. (13 of course didn't get to land on the moon). They're at the Johnson Space Center's Informational Resources Directorate's video vault in Houston. http://www.physorg.com/news74962441.html/
...I don't see any conspiracy theorists tryng to discredit the other five landings.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Some years ago I read an article on baseball stadiums, which is actually relevant in terms of possibly explaining why NASA would view the tapes of the original moon landing as expendable. Essentially the article said that in the USA in the 1960s everybody was obsessed with tearing down the old to make room for the new. This started in the 1950s but really got going in the 1960s. One example of it was that many American cities (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Houston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Atlanta and probably others) built giant "multi-purpose" stadiums to house both baseball and football teams. Old baseball only stadiums were often torn down (Forbes Field) or moved (Crosby Field - mostly moved to Kentucky) to make way for what were eventually called "cookie cutter" stadiums that all looked identical and were meant to house everything from baseball and football to concerts and motocross rallies. These stadiums ended up being "jack of all trades, master of none" offering bad viewing for all sports. But that was how things apparently were in the 60s. Throw out the old to make room for the new. So when you have an entire society that seems to be dedicated to the belief that you can only make progress by destroying the past and building on top of it, yes, I can certainly believe that NASA in such a climate considered the films to be worthless and not worth keeping.
"I want to see recent telescope pictures of the moon showing the rovers and the flag."
And I want to see gnat's testicles at 200 yards using only official "Austin Powers" glasses.
Both of us are likely to be disappointed.
"Look - they have a 2020 timetable to go back. It seems as if they have some technical hurdles to surpass ... as if they had never gone to the moon before."
What is it you think they're planning? If they were going to stuff astronauts back into a 1960's LM-5, attach it to a Saturn V, and recreate the original shot, what would be the point?
They're going to do it again, but with vastly different technology. That means all sorts of technical issues will need to be sorted out, lest we have an Apollo 1 on our hands because we shortcircuited the process "since we did it 4 decades ago".
'The tapes are "lost" to us, but not to some rich fucker. Like some famous painting that gets "lost."'
In retrospect that makes complete sense. Thank you.
The blame should go to the guy who put it in the same warehouse as the Crystal Skull.
what's worse is the fact that i'm now a troll for this shit? what a bunch of shit.
"original footage search committee"?
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