Live data from Hacker News

Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

reuters.com

61–70 of 102 posts

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#61
post #53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""It was inconvenient for this administration that climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made. NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administrati…

> NOAA provided Rep. Smith with all the data, methods, and explanation he requested but has refused to hand over the communications of its scientists, which it regards as protected. I'd better hope so.

Ridiculous, a government agency with individuals paid for by the American tax payer is not willing to release to the American public internal communications.

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#62

Has 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/expe...

The Mythbusters did! Pretty neat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmVxSFnjYCA

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#63
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not perhaps. They were hi-def slow scan video. Wikipedia: "When the Apollo TV camera radioed its images, the ground stations received its raw unconverted SSTV signal and split it into two branches. One signal branch was sent unprocessed to a fourteen-track analog data tape recorder where it was recorded onto fourteen-inch diameter reels of one-inch-wide analog magnetic data tapes at 3.04 meters per second."

I wonder if anyone other than NASA was picking up the direct broadcast from the Moon? I've got to imagine the Russians at least would be doing that.

Possibly but did they have state of the art 3-meters-a-second tape drives to store the signal on?

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#64
post #60

Two 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 recordi…

Actually 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.

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#65
post #50
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mr. 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…

"""It was inconvenient for this administration that climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made. NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administrati…

You have an agency that releases an update to its modeling capabilities, from which based on the update, a change is made to the forecast that eliminates a political hat upon which an argument is being made. If you release the model, the data, the before and after results, and all of the information, you do not know why and what prompted the change. Internal machinations what they are, the previous Michael Mann situation where we have people admitting: "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Nothing externally hinted at any issue, but when an internal machination occurs, the public facing data may not be enough.

As an aside, please stop downvoting me for these posts, I am not trying to defend for or against climate change, just pointing out that a reason for suspicion could exist. If you disagree with my internal machination comment, please witness EPA and Pebble Mine, Lois Lerner and her IRS hijinks, and the former Secretary of State on the origins of the Benghazi attack, all of which were forward facing items that looked fine, but internal machinations showed suspicious activity.

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#67
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You'd think an organization as important as NASA wouldn't have to worry about budget cuts year after year.

Are the people handling the tapes personally worried about budget cuts, or does NASA have separate jobs for separate concerns?

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what, the Soviets and the Chinese decided to go along with it?

Who cares what they think? I hate that the argument for a moon conspiracy is defended by the opinion of other states. In fact, Chainman Mao had an unofficial policy of denying the moon landing out of shame. Russia isn't a trustworthy nation and the US could have have a quid-pro-quo with them, say not bringing up their 100+ deaths at Nedelin or lost cosmonauts if they didn't make hay about a faked mission. The reality…

> Who cares what they think?

They're one of the biggest holes in the conspiracy theory. State-level actors with much to gain by proving it to be a fake, the technology and know-how to do so, and nothing much to lose by revealing it.

> Russia isn't a trustworthy nation and the US could have have a quid-pro-quo with them...

In the height of the Cold War? Not bloody likely.

> Their position would be more rational if they denied all space missions.

Some do.

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#69
post #65
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""It was inconvenient for this administration that climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made. NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administrati…

You have an agency that releases an update to its modeling capabilities, from which based on the update, a change is made to the forecast that eliminates a political hat upon which an argument is being made. If you release the model, the data, the before and after results, and all of the information, you do not know why and what prompted the change. Internal machinations what they are, the previous Michael Mann situa…

Meanwhile the globe is already 1C warmer than it was before industrialization as Lamar Smith faffs about with emails and is doing everything in his power to cast doubts on the fact that we need to do something about this, much less should already have implemented stronger emissions standards 30 years ago. We're already past the point of "too late," climate science is about damage control now while Smith pisses around denying anything's wrong in the first place. It's time to dig your head out of the sand and move forward. What's Smith doing about that, I wonder?

I more-or-less agree with your points about downvotes.

Re: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits (2009)

#70
post #51
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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 organ…

> 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 ;)

Especially suspicious when accounting for the sorts of technological developments that have taken off since then -- lots of sending packets to screens of various sizes, not very much human exploration. /s
Post reply on HN