NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Video, But Originals Lost 173
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."
Computing power (Score:5, Funny)
The render times are probably really impressive too.
Armstrong Shot First (Score:4, Funny)
Darn directors cuts! I *liked* the old version where you could see the Vaseline blur under the LM, and Armstrong shot first.
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They say the new footage completely changes the tone of the moon landing.
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Is that the one where you can clearly see Neil Armstrong sticking the finger up as he decends from the Lander?
An interesting PR problem (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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True... So we will have to continue linking to the mythbusters episode until they shut up
(they won't, of course)
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I'm still wondering what the conspiracy theorists say about the retroreflector experiments that have been conducted daily since Apollo 11. Considering the difference in reflectivity between the moon's surface and the retroreflectors, surely there have been some attempts to explain it.
Re:An interesting PR problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The conspiracy nuts will say the reflector on the moon just proves there is a man made object on the moon, it doesn't prove it was actually physically placed there by a person. It could have been dropped on the moon by an unmanned rocket, for example.
Re:An interesting PR problem (Score:4, Insightful)
"The lasers are bouncing off crystal formations... duh!"
The laser retroreflector defense will only work if you have proof that there was no retroreflection happening BEFORE Apollo 11. Since you can't prove that, you can't prove that the retroreflection that's happening now is of man-made origin. In short, it's only circumstancial evidence.
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Actually the best way to stump the "it was made in a studio" chumps is asking a simple question:
"Seeing how the Soviet Union was the US' biggest enemy at the time, why didn't they score a major PR coup by claiming and providing data showing, that the modules never landed on the Moon?"
In fact, the Soviet Union acknowledged that the US put men on the moon. But hey - they were probably in on it too?
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Hmmm.... Very good. Let's see...
"That's why they had all those communist blacklists and purges in Hollywood. They needed to get rid of all of the Russian spies and Soviet sympathizers so that they could build their top secret sound stage."
Either that, or the "They were in on it." tack, as you say.
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The sound stage bit doesn't work. The Soviets were tracking the lunar module on its way to the moon and landing there.
They didn't say "we believe them" they said "we saw them land".
Being in on it though ... a bit more plausible, but then you'd have to make the Cuban missile crisis a staged conflict. And obviously they've been keeping up charades ever since as the US hasn't lifted the embargoes on them.
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I am sure it was simply a coincidence that the soviets launched an unmanned probe to the moon the day or two before the Apollo 11 launch.
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The Soviets *never accused us of NOT having landed men on the moon*.
Would they not have, if there was any way at all they could prove it?
(This is my favorite argument here, which I stole from some other poster on the earlier thread...)
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Want to see a techie get his panties in a bunch? Tell him the moon landing was a hoax.
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They will, but only after Mythbusters actually land on the Moon.
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Sure you do: just go back to recordings made before these were remastered. (Same thing we do with Star Wars, I guess.)
Although I suppose the conspiracy nuts could always claim that earlier recordings were modified after-the-fact by NASA using the same sort of ray that is neutralized by tinfoil hats...
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There are no good originals. That's the point. The originals are missing, believed wiped. This is stuff telerecorded off of a TV set with far too much dirt on the image.
You also need to remember that early recordings tend to get gummy. The way this is fixed is to bake the tape. You then get ONE shot at recovering the data from it, after that the tape is destroyed. I don't know if they needed to bake the masters, the article doesn't say. If they did, though, then there is nothing you can go back to.
Finally,
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No, that isn't true at all. First off, tapes from 1969 shouldn't need to be baked. It was when formulations changed in the mid '70s that it became a problem. I've heard that t
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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.
The iPhone Armstrong uses to communicate with Collins (pictured drinking new Pepsi, wearing a Snorg-tee whilst playing on his DS), that's inserted ...
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Especially after the news of June 28 2009: NASA finds missing moon-landing-tapes. [express.co.uk] and all conspiracy theorist cringled... "oh no, what will I do now?"
A month ago, NASA announces "We've found them!", now they say "oh, they were erased (and it took us a month). But we restored a the thing you've already seen for you!"
Conspiracy theorist have something to do with their time once again.
I for one am waiting for the next headline: "the real moontapes leaked, torrent here", with yeti's UFO's and chuck norris,
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Exactly, and now having this great story, and losing the originals, that might have contained something some expert could have been able to contest as having been faked in some studio, now we really will never know, because they now admit to having been remastered.
Nasa site? (Score:2, Interesting)
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heh, I did that with space simulator in the 90s. And then did one to mars.
Turns out, it's boring.
NASA or the BBC? (Score:5, Informative)
The BBC "recycled" tapes in the '70s and '80s, losing many episodes of well-known programs forever *coughdrwhoandmanyothers*.
Fifth-rate consolation prize (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [slashdot.org] (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.
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That's kind of how I feel about this whole thing as well. I was all excited initially that these were copies of the original tapes, and now, that doesn't seem to be the case. How tragic that the only original witness is now lost forever. You would think they would place a higher value on the telemetry tapes. And then to admit "recycling" the tapes. Wow. You think a few billion could buy you a couple of extra tapes....
In NASA's defence, it would certainly seem to them at the time that landing on the moon was
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Sounds like work to me.
When the project is the pet-project of the CIO it will have an 8-figure annual budget. Money will be availble for even the most trivial task and every need is taken care of.
Then the project is a "success" (maybe it really is, maybe in name only), and everybody is happy with it. Of course, tons of money is available for the launch and transition and training, and everybody marvels at how nicely things go.
Fast forward two years - the system is supported by three guys in 20% of their t
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Incredible (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Incredible (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah! And Neil shot first!
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Re:Incredible (Score:4, Funny)
Basestar.
I am so ashamed of you.
Re:Incredible (Score:5, Insightful)
While it does seem incredible today, those were very, very different times.
People were far more concerned and enamored with "seeing" an event than how they might see it again. Heck, most people didn't even have colored TVs at that time, and because so much was live broadcast, if you wanted to see something like the moon landing, you planned for it.
Gone are the days of just savoring the moment and keeping the memory alive.
Re:Incredible (Score:5, Insightful)
On a related note people restoring and cleaning and analyzing old masters and paintings by students of old masters find they were recycling the canvases. Many layers of paintings, some by great old masters, are washed over and painted again.
philosophical rant
Strange, when an object is too close to you in space, it appears bigger than same size object at a distance. But when it is very close to you in time, we don't think it is any big deal. Only later we realize how big whatever that thing was.
Re:Incredible (Score:4, Insightful)
people restoring and cleaning and analyzing old masters and paintings by students of old masters find they were recycling the canvases. Many layers of paintings, some by great old masters, are washed over and painted again.
They probably didn't know they'd be considered *quite* as important as they are today (very high, even if one doesn't consider the obscene millions some paintings sell for as their true "worth".)
The major historical nature of the moon landings would have been glaringly obvious even before they happened.
It was The. First. Damn. Man. On. The. Moon.
I think you're cutting NASA way too much slack- and patronising the people of 40 years ago too much. Old 60s episodes of Doctor Who- bad loss in retrospect, but *almost* understandable in the context of the time (ephemeral, low budget, non-established medium, not reusable).
First man to ever land on the moon- that's blatantly important by itself. The fact they spent billions of dollars to get there you'd think was an added impetus. 40 years doesn't make *that* much difference to people's judgement.
Even if the cost of storing the footage was relatively high, it would have been trivial in comparison with what NASA spent on the programme overall. And even more trivial given its priceless historical and non-repeatable nature.
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I would even say that the amount of money, in relation to it being some of *the* defining moments of the whole freaking 5 billion year old earth's history, is as close to irrelevant as you can get. (Heck it could just as much have happened, that money was never invented, or something like that.)
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Ok, but they thought that by now, we would have a base on the moon, and people could go see themselves the original moon landing.
And if we hadn't wasted resources elsewhere (movies, sports, fashion, war), and let these things consume us, we may have just done that.
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Ok, but they thought that by now, we would have a base on the moon, and people could go see themselves the original moon landing.
No, they couldn't see the original moon landing. They could see *the site of* the original moon landing. It's not comparable at all- they're both important, but very different.
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That's good. Makes me want to add more documentation of, and comments to, my source code.
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But for us, with stars in our eyes, Appolo 11 was THE biggest physical achievement of Homo sapien
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Apollo-era reference. The young'ns might not even know what you are referring to if they slept through the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird at school.
I guess I did better than NASA. I _still_ have a few home-developed B&W photos of the landing I took of the B&W TV my parents got me for my bedroom. Immensely disappointing.
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I don't think it is "incredible" in the sense of "impossible to believe". It's all to easy to believe.
You see the people of the US (as a whole) lost interest in the whole thing once we'd done the Moon once or twice. NASA didn't even have the money to buy mag tapes for the satellite data they were collecting, which anybody with half a brain would see is worthwhile once you'd went through the trouble of putting a satellite up there. Now how many people would understand that cataloging conserving digital me
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It's *always* easier to get CAPEX money than OPEX money, so you budget the tape library into the buy. Unless it's too big. Or takes too long to fill...
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Its incredible to me that NASA wouldn't think far enough ahead to save these tapes for posterity's sake.
You can thank Congress for that one.
NASA Program Manager: Hi, Mr. Congressman, can we have a few thousand dollars to buy tapes so we can record the data from the Voyager flyby of Jupiter?
Congressman: What happened to all those tapes we bought you in the late 60s?
NASA Program Manager: We used all those on Apollo.
Congressman: Here's 25 bucks. Go down to K-mart and buy a bulk eraser.
It's on a shelf (Score:5, Funny)
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Pink Floyd (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Pink Floyd (Score:5, Informative)
ah, times when i wish /. had an Edit Comment option. or something like google's goggles.
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Are you kidding? Can you imagine how that would be abused? Answer: HILARIOUSLY.
1)Post Epic Troll.
2)Let a few responses build up.
3)Replace Epic Troll with deeply insightful post.
4)
5)Profit
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ah, times when i wish /. had an Edit Comment option. or something like google's goggles.
The goggles... they do NOTHING!
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Lost? Sure... (Score:2, Funny)
I thought they were found... (Score:3, Insightful)
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And a few weeks before that, speculation that they hadn't actually been found! And a week before that, rumour that they had been found!
A few weeks from now, someone will "discover" the actual tapes.
And a week after that, they will discover they are the actual tapes, but already overwritten with other stuff.
Hey, do you like Ping Pong? It's fun. :D
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Yeah...
and that story's my fault. I bought what the UK tabloid was smoking, and didn't fact check it first.
How I *could* have fact-checked it, will remain undiscussed...
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I love the remaster! (Score:2, Funny)
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
Missing Two Hours of Footage (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone who has seen Contact knows exactly what happened.
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Yeah, I'll never get those two hours back.
Something isn't quite right... (Score:2)
I never thought I'd be a moon doubter, but if you watch the newly released footage carefully [youtube.com] it does seem fishy.
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I haven't seen the new footage, but are there really fish on the moon?
-dZ.
Oblig. cheap joke (Score:2)
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
Still stirs up strong emotion (Score:2)
History repeats itself (Score:2)
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Only the original Apollo 11 tapes are lost! (Score:2)
Possible explanation as to why this happened (Score:3, Interesting)
Tape shortage (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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Those tapes are gone. If they were recycled then we won't know whisch tapes it's on, assuming the one they reused wasn't destroyed.
Re:Tape shortage (Score:4, Insightful)
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God, we heard that phrase so many times in so many contexts. And every time I heard it, I threw up a little in my mouth.
Re:Tape shortage (Score:5, Insightful)
If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we store the damn tapes of the event properly?!
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I can't tell for sure from your comments, but I get the feeling that you worked there. Is that true? Were you an astronaut?
Cheers,
Stupid Motherfuckers (Score:2)
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 genera
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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.
Why is that bad? Ah, I see, they're still paying him while he's searching. Small mistake here.
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The term "English System" is commonly used [purdue.edu] to refer [engineeringtoolbox.com] to the Imperial System [economicexpert.com].
So, try again, bureaucrat.
And worst of all (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's much harder to do in today's environment of politically correct science and point-and-click engineering.
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"Dude, it's not like we can't just go to the moon again!"
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It will be glorious!
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and I think we have enough female astronauts to have a women only lunar mission.
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It looks like these idiots tried to do that with the restored footage by displaying it in the wrong aspect ratio. I really hope it is what I think it is, Wired screwing up, and not NASA.
People(my parents), displaying 4:3 content stretched to fit a 16:9 screen because they want to use the whole screen, drive me batshit!
Re:Tape shortage (Score:5, Funny)
"Dude, it's not like we can't just go to the moon again!"
I assumed they dismantled the film studio after the first one ...
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Yes, but Michael Jackson loaned them a replica sound stage.
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Ok so what you're telling me is, the most important event in the history of the human race was taped over?
Well if it was to tape the Superbowl then I don't see the problem.
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My uncles and my father all watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing *LIVE*. As they were in Australia they were getting the feed slightly before the U.S did. I have no doubt that the moon landing happened but the three of them have all told me the same strange story about when they watched the moon landing.
I can't say exactly when, but they heard Armstrong, a man known for his calm under pressure, say in
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WTF are you talking about? How will the unmanned probes cause us to 'actually learn something' when the data will be withheld until it is lost and all that remains is the summary of the data in the form of press releases ("it is a bit chilly here", "no little green men so far")?
Can't we get the IRS to supervise NASA? You try telling the IRS that 'oh, every copy of that information got wiped by mistake' and see what happens.