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Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)
- klaustopher 11y agoThis post is from 2009
- dang 11y agoThanks, added.
- tonylemesmer 11y agoLink to the restored videos mentioned in the article: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11_hdpage.html http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11_hdpage.html
- Raed667 11y agoSounds like the best way to hide any editing done to the original tapes. puts foil hat on
- simonh 11y agoIt's ok, you can take the foil hat off. The broadcast from the moon was relayed live to TV stations across the world. The tapes they're talking about were just NASA's recordings of that direct broadcast. So there never was any opportunity for the tapes to be edited like that, because they didn't sit in the chain between the cameras on the moon and the broadcasts everyone saw on their TVs. Fortunately other news organisations (and probably governments) also taped the broadcast as well, hence we still have recordings available. In fact, it was technologically impossible to record the entire live broadcast on a single tape because tapes with enough capacity didn't exist until many years later. Therefore a faked broadcast from tapes would have had visible transitions as they switched from tape to tape. These transitions would have been visible on the taped copies of the broadcast which the currently available recordings derive from.
- shultays 11y agoI refuse to believe your logical explanations
- simonh 11y agoKeep the faith, man! Of course the taped copies we have now must have been recorded on multiple tapes. So are the transitions on them from switching tapes to record the broadcast, or are they actually the transitions from the original faked broadcast? If the original broadcast was faked and broadcast from tapes, you'd expect to see both types of transitions in the modern copies!
- rdudek 11y agoThanks! This is another great explanation of the vent that I can use against those who think moon landing was fake. In the past, I always told folks that landing occurred during Cold War and USSR was watching closely. If this was faked, Soviets would love nothing better than to discredit the US worldwide.
- icehawk219 11y agoThis video[0] on Youtube does a good job explaining the whole "video technology didn't exist" part that most people, myself included, don't realize. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU
- rdudek 11y agoThanks. That is a great video.
- kiiski 11y ago> Therefore a faked broadcast from tapes would have had visible transitions as they switched from tape to tape. In other words you're saying that one should believe NASA landed on the moon, because broadcasting a fake recording would have been technologically too difficult for them? I don't doubt that they landed on the moon, but I'm not quite convinced about that logic ;)
- ifdefdebug 11y agoHere is the original recording of the moon landing. Besides clear evidence for editing, if you watch carefully you will find even more strong evidence for the fake. For instance, the sun light reflected from the space craft is in the wrong angle! https://youtu.be/7JDaOOw0MEE?t=4m46s https://youtu.be/7JDaOOw0MEE?t=4m46s
- xyclos 11y agoat least it wasn't rickroll.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoEveryone knows that angles on the moon are different due to the gravity difference!
- Zuider 11y agoOf course the moon landings are fake. The moon is still up there, isn't it? And wouldn't people have complained of a strong smell of cheese if it actually had come down? Unless it landed in France, that is. I think the French are hiding something.
- GTP 11y agoThey erased one of the most important historical documents of our time, that was a very bad mistake.
- creshal 11y ago> The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed -- magnetically erased -- and re-used to save money. You'd think an organization like NASA can plan their budgets a bit better than that.
- hanniabu 11y agoYou'd think an organization as important as NASA wouldn't have to worry about budget cuts year after year.
- GTP 11y agoYou'd think an organization as important as NASA would have chosen better which tapes were suitable to erase and which not.
- dijit 11y agothat's employee time, thus, money.
- coldpie 11y agoThe House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is chaired by Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas who denies climate change science and is currently busy wasting gov't time and funds harassing NOAA scientists. It's all going to be fine... it's all going to be fine...
- Agustus 11y agoMr. Smith does not deny climate change science, he is a skeptic, not the same. As a congressman, he is afforded the roles of his position to investigate corruption or suspicions of corruption, which in this case includes an agency using taxpayer dollars avoiding the release of information to a committee. The NOAA situation is one where the agency should openly share data with the committee and Mr. Smith would go away, by stonewalling, the agency does not help the cause of science or dissipate suspicion of obfuscating results.
- huhtenberg 11y agoMore background - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes
- clockworkelf 11y agoNothing crazy about doubting the moon landing with 1960s technology. Watch the Aulis production based on the book Dark Moon.
- NameNickHN 11y ago> We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if you are ever going to use them -- we are going to keep them' The really couldn't figure out by themselves that they shouldn't throw away the visual evidence of one of the most important events in human history?
- liw 11y agoWait, what? NASA had tapes with missing Doctor Who episodes?
- westi 11y agoThat is what they recorded the Moon Landing on ....
- karlkatzke 11y agoI think at the time, most folks at NASA expected moon landings to be commonplace within a decade.
- irixusr 11y agoThe crazies, maybe. I hope not most NASA folk; there really is no way for lunar landings to have been common using chemical propellants and disposable rockets. Even today alternatives are mere speculations. So either our NASA dreamer was a poor engineer, or a nut job willing to nuke Earth to visit a lifeless rock. Which is not a bad thing: given the immensity and ludicrousness of the Apollo accomplishment, I think NASA had quite a few nutjobs!
- Agustus 11y agoIn Apollo 13 the movie, there is a scene where the NASA representative is walking politicos on a tour: JIM LOVELL - I'm slated to be the commander of Apollo 14 sometime late next year. CONGRESSMAN - If there is an Apollo 14... Now, Jim, people in my state have been asking why we're continuing to fund this program - now that we've beaten the Russians to the Moon. [1] The chasm between what NASA wanted, pilots down, was to keep on its trajectory, but the politicians saw monies to tender. [1] https://sfy.ru/?script=apollo13 https://sfy.ru/?script=apollo13
- mariuolo 11y agoThe problem is they became interesting only decades later, when the ability to actually watch them arrived with hdtv. It's a real shame, but not many organisations are that farsighted.
- NickHaflinger 11y agoHas any of the conspiracy theorists ever considered pointing a laser at the moon to detect the retroreflectors that were left their by Apollo 11. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/experiments/lrr/ http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11/expe...
- saalweachter 11y agoInconclusive experiment; retroreflectors could be deployed by unmanned probes.
- NickHaflinger 11y agoHow about the conspiracy theorists funding a probe, sending it to the landing site and taking samples of the human waste product the astronauts allegedly left there. Back on earth they can do a DNA comparison with the surviving relatives. They can make a movie out of it and call it "first poop in the moon".
- ejolto 11y agoInconclusive experiment; poop DNA destroyed by solar and cosmic radiation.
- jharger 11y agoWell something pooped there!
- andrewflnr 11y agoPoop could be deployed by unmanned probes.
- Zuider 11y agoThey would hardly have pooped in the open, would they? Not very private. Probably squatted down in a convenient crater where the moon-poop would be protected from radiation.
- ommunist 11y agoAnd now Russia plans to established its ground base on the Moon by 2040. History is not without the sense of irony.
- zerohm 11y agoThere is also a pretty fascinating story about the effort to save and restore the photo mapping of the moon from an abandoned McDonald's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_Image_Recovery_P...
- nzp 11y agoTwo issues with the article. It is my understanding that the lost tapes are raw data feed S-band recordings. That signal contained both the TV signal and the telemetry which was normally sent via S-band. Upon reception the TV signal was split from the telemetry and recorded to standard TV tape and broadcasted using a Telecine like method. So, the "original" TV recordings do exist, as the existence of restored recordings suggest. What is gone is the telemetry mixed with the TV signal. Secondly, they didn't erase those tapes because of money savings, or at least not just because of it. It was a supply issue. In the late '70s, early '80s, the manufacturer of those tapes suffered production problems due to the replacement of a substance used in the tapes, if I remember correctly it was whale oil or something like that. The production needed to be scaled back up with the new process, and in that time there was a severe shortage of that particular type of data tape, so NASA had to recycle old tapes.
- jacobushi 11y agoActually the original signal was low frame rate, high resolution. So it's more than your description says. A special video monitor with long afterglow phosphorus was recorded by an NTSC camera. Imagine what modern signal processing could have done with that original slow scan signal recorded in raw to these tapes. Alas, it's lost like tears in the rain.
- peter303 11y agoUntil there was cheaper paper, old books made of papyrus or goat skin would be scraped or bleached and recycled. A Single page of goatskin might be months farmer wage. Especially if the book was from a no longer popular language or subject.
- tertius 11y agoSo they recorded the moonlanding on goatskin? All jokes aside, I see your point, but applying it to the moon landing is a little far fetched.
- matheweis 11y ago>> A Single page of goatskin might be months farmer wage. > I see your point, but applying it to the moon landing is a little far fetched. Not at all, in the 1970's those tapes easily cost a month's of an average workers wages. It would make perfect sense to re-use them to save a bit of money, especially if you were doing it at scale and didn't realize you were about to erase the master copies.
- tertius 11y ago> especially if you were doing it at scale and didn't realize you were about to erase the master copies. I agree with this. Negligence of this level, though, is indescribable.
- mturmon 11y agoTrue. There's even a word for it, "palimpsest".
- pstuart 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest Just learned by reading Gore Vidal's autobiography of the same name.
- jcslzr 11y agoDoes people still believe we went to the moon on 1969? 1969! tvs did not even had remote controls!