4 ms·

The ones where we actually did land on the moon?

ethbr1 3y ago
The ones that tried to convince you we didn't land on the moon and faked the tapes, despite people in the know being well aware that the "fake tapes" were actually produced on the moon as part of Operation Nonstop Night. Lone Gunmen forever.
adastra22 3y ago
Yes, the original video recording of the moon landing has been lost. It was broadcast live, but all we have is the grainy, shitty, washed out recording of the national news you see shown everywhere. The actual signal from the moon, which people at Mission Control would have seen, had a FAR better resolution and contrast. It was recorded with basically the best camera they could send, and digitized and returned to earth with a proprietary signal format invented just for this purpose, to ensure the highest possible resolution and accuracy as 1969 tech could provide. But because it was proprietary, for the media event they piped the high resolution imagery into a crummy TV somewhere in Houston, and pointed a run of the mill TV production camera at this little TV screen, as a low tech conversion just for that night. Like a bootleg movie video. Unfortunately the primary recording was accidentally destroyed, and the backups are missing. All we have now is that shitty TV camera recording of a TV screen with terrible contrast where you can barely see anything. It is accurate in that for the billion people watching live, this grainy low contrast video is what they correctly remember seeing. That was the moon landing experience for nearly everyone on earth. But those in Mission Control DID have a nice crisp view, and the rest of us may never get to experience that :(
- hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
  How did they lose that? Sigh...
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    Big reel to reel data tapes didn't have the best labeling and could be stored in cans that might not match the spindle's label. I could imagine it pretty easy for a tape to be stored in a mismatched can and then get sent off to a storage area. The "right" can with the wrong spindle ends up in the archive while the "wrong" can gets sent off to a warehouse or reused or whatever. Apollo was a huge project with a lot of people. All it takes is one person too busy to notice they put a tape in the wrong can.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    It really comes down to “no thought to preserve it”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes
    - Frost1x 3y ago
      >In the early 1980s, NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage and it is likely the tapes were erased and reused at this time. Wow, just wow. That's mind boggling. I actually had no idea. While I get that hindsight is 20/20, it doesn't take too much intuition to realize if you're sharing something worldwide or the rest of the world watched it, you should probably keep the highest quality copy. It's like you filmed Gangnam Style in 8k, downsampled to 720p for YouTube and then threw the original copy away even after you saw the views climbing to 10s of thousands (or in this case, 10s of millions). I've worked in some cash strapped research labs so I get the need to repurpose when budgets are tight but come on. I don't know how expensive the medium was but I would have caused quite a stir about preserving something like this. Hell, I've preserved news broadcasts of work I've been involved with that made it to the news that I have to this day, and that is only significant to me really.
      - adastra22 3y ago
        It may have been accidental. There were storage rooms absolutely filled with data tapes from Apollo. These were mostly recordings of the Apollo science instruments, which were left on the surface and kept broadcasting seismic and other data for years. Of course the first couple of tapes had all the mission data, but it’s likely the people reusing the tapes thought it was just already-processed (and duplicated) seismic data they were wiping. It wasn’t until 2009 that NASA realized the error.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  While obviously the true original would be better, I wonder how closely modern upscaling/de-noising/etc (possibly with AI assistance?) would approximate the lost footage.
- opello 3y ago
  In my fever dream version of reality the success of something like "For All Mankind" would present an opportunity to fund searching for this footage.
  - zaptrem 3y ago
    I read an article a while ago that concluded the tapes were almost certainly reused (overwritten).
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Sadly they stopped looking when they realized that. In actuality, modern equipment could probably read and recover the previous data from the tapes, if the tapes still exist. It is very hard to fully erase data with equipment from that era. Also I wonder if there is some Soviet storeroom somewhere that has a copy? They surely would have been listening in.

The ones that tried to convince you we didn't land on the moon and faked the tapes, despite people in the know being well aware that the "fake tapes" were actually produced on the moon as part of Operation Nonstop Night. Lone Gunmen forever.

adastra22 3y ago

Yes, the original video recording of the moon landing has been lost. It was broadcast live, but all we have is the grainy, shitty, washed out recording of the national news you see shown everywhere. The actual signal from the moon, which people at Mission Control would have seen, had a FAR better resolution and contrast. It was recorded with basically the best camera they could send, and digitized and returned to earth with a proprietary signal format invented just for this purpose, to ensure the highest possible resolution and accuracy as 1969 tech could provide. But because it was proprietary, for the media event they piped the high resolution imagery into a crummy TV somewhere in Houston, and pointed a run of the mill TV production camera at this little TV screen, as a low tech conversion just for that night. Like a bootleg movie video. Unfortunately the primary recording was accidentally destroyed, and the backups are missing. All we have now is that shitty TV camera recording of a TV screen with terrible contrast where you can barely see anything. It is accurate in that for the billion people watching live, this grainy low contrast video is what they correctly remember seeing. That was the moon landing experience for nearly everyone on earth. But those in Mission Control DID have a nice crisp view, and the rest of us may never get to experience that :(

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
How did they lose that? Sigh...
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Big reel to reel data tapes didn't have the best labeling and could be stored in cans that might not match the spindle's label. I could imagine it pretty easy for a tape to be stored in a mismatched can and then get sent off to a storage area. The "right" can with the wrong spindle ends up in the archive while the "wrong" can gets sent off to a warehouse or reused or whatever. Apollo was a huge project with a lot of people. All it takes is one person too busy to notice they put a tape in the wrong can.
- adastra22 3y ago
  It really comes down to “no thought to preserve it”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes
  - Frost1x 3y ago
    >In the early 1980s, NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage and it is likely the tapes were erased and reused at this time. Wow, just wow. That's mind boggling. I actually had no idea. While I get that hindsight is 20/20, it doesn't take too much intuition to realize if you're sharing something worldwide or the rest of the world watched it, you should probably keep the highest quality copy. It's like you filmed Gangnam Style in 8k, downsampled to 720p for YouTube and then threw the original copy away even after you saw the views climbing to 10s of thousands (or in this case, 10s of millions). I've worked in some cash strapped research labs so I get the need to repurpose when budgets are tight but come on. I don't know how expensive the medium was but I would have caused quite a stir about preserving something like this. Hell, I've preserved news broadcasts of work I've been involved with that made it to the news that I have to this day, and that is only significant to me really.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      It may have been accidental. There were storage rooms absolutely filled with data tapes from Apollo. These were mostly recordings of the Apollo science instruments, which were left on the surface and kept broadcasting seismic and other data for years. Of course the first couple of tapes had all the mission data, but it’s likely the people reusing the tapes thought it was just already-processed (and duplicated) seismic data they were wiping. It wasn’t until 2009 that NASA realized the error.
MostlyStable 3y ago
While obviously the true original would be better, I wonder how closely modern upscaling/de-noising/etc (possibly with AI assistance?) would approximate the lost footage.
opello 3y ago
In my fever dream version of reality the success of something like "For All Mankind" would present an opportunity to fund searching for this footage.
- zaptrem 3y ago
  I read an article a while ago that concluded the tapes were almost certainly reused (overwritten).
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Sadly they stopped looking when they realized that. In actuality, modern equipment could probably read and recover the previous data from the tapes, if the tapes still exist. It is very hard to fully erase data with equipment from that era. Also I wonder if there is some Soviet storeroom somewhere that has a copy? They surely would have been listening in.