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Russian Official Calls For "International Investigation" of the Apollo Program

Posted by samzenpus on from the this-looks-like-a-job-for-jupiter-jones dept.

MarkWhittington writes: According to a Tuesday article in the Moscow Times, a spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee named Vladimir Markin suggested that an international investigation be mounted into some of the "various murky details surrounding the U.S. moon landings between 1969 and 1972." Markin would particularly like to know where some of the missing moon rocks went to and why the original footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing was erased. Markin hastened to add that he is, of course, not suggesting that NASA faked the moon landings and just filmed the events in a studio.

2 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Buzz Aldrin, paging Buzz Aldrin by istartedi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Will Buzz Aldrin please pick up the white courtesy phone? We have need of your your services.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  2. Re:The tapes were re-used by imidan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It is suspected that the tape was re-used due to NASA's tight budget and they couldn't afford more tape.

    Not just budget concerns. There was also a big problem in the 80s when commercial whaling was outlawed. The tape that NASA had used to record a lot of data involved whale oil in its production somehow. When whaling went out, whale oil went away, and companies that made data tape scrambled to replace it with something. They came up with synthetic alternatives, but because they didn't have much time to test, they discovered after it was already in use that the new stuff basically turned into glue after sitting on a shelf too long, which ruined tapes. So the old whale oil tapes became valuable for re-use, since you could depend on them not gluing together and losing all of your data. So that's another reason why NASA taped over a lot of irreplaceable data.

    At a conference last year, I spoke with a NASA guy who was working on recovering a lot of old lunar data. He told me about the whale oil angle. He also said their best find at that point had been a whole palette/palettes of the whale oil tapes that had been sent from one NASA group to another to be copied over, but had been misplaced in a warehouse during transit, and just sat there ever since.