NASA releases partially restored Apollo 11 moonwalk video.

It does suck that the original tapes are lost. But mistakes are made every day, especially in a huge organization like NASA. Didn't a Mars lander crash because some scientist forgot a decimal or messed up the metric conversion? At least NASA tried to clean-up the footage that they do have. That's pretty cool of them.

I read about the search for the tapes about two years ago. Here's a link to the story of the two men hunting for the footage. Interesting read.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/30/AR2007013002065.html

For those interested in the technical side of the video broadcast, here's some info.

Television pictures of the Apollo 11 landing were sent directly to Earth from the surface of the Moon using the Lunar Module's antenna and power supply. This placed a restriction on the amount of bandwidth that could be transmitted. Apollo 11 was thereby limited to using a black-and-white, slow-scan TV camera with a scan rate of 10 frames-per-second at 320 lines-per-frame. In order to broadcast the images to the world, the pictures had to first be converted to the commercial TV standards. In the US, this was the EIA standard of 30 frames-per-second at 525 lines-per-frame. The pictures transmitted from the Moon were displayed on a 10-inch black-and-white monitor and a vidicon camera was pointed at the screen and the pictures were scanned at the EIA standard. A number of peculiar image artifacts were seen on the images. One set of artifacts was produced by sunlight reflecting off the astronauts and the LM onto the TV camera's lens. These reflections produced the ghostly effects perceived by the public. Other prominent artifacts were the result of spots burnt into the monitor screens from which the optical conversions were produced.

 Apollo 11 was only a first step in what was to be increasingly ambitious missions, thus it was lacking in some capabilities. Among these was the ability to transmit high-quality TV pictures. Later missions, starting with Apollo 12, had enough time in the schedule to permit the astronauts to erect large freestanding dish antennae. This increased the amount of bandwidth that could be transmitted, thus allowing complex color TV pictures to be sent directly to Earth
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It's pretty impressive that people were able to see a live broadcast from the Moon. Even if it was low-res. Now-a-days local news reports can barely do a live broadcast from a few blocks away without technical difficulties. lol
 
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So the guys who didn't bother to preserve the footage of the first time we traveled to another world were also reponsible for being detail-oriented enough to safely send men to the moon...in retrospect, maybe they should have faked it.
 
I'll stop being skeptical when I see nice clear HD footage from there.
I doubt I'll ever see such a thing.

I remember in the 80s I was in an edit session for some NASA folks. They had exterior footage of apallo that was veeery cool. It was awesome to see the lil jets keep it on course and such. I asked em what craft it was shot from and it really shortened the session.
Today we litter space with debris with everything from pieces that fall off of crafts to satellites we can't retrieve. Heck, I work for a beer company that uses a hunk of metal in space as a means of communication when they all have email. We're evolving, but not very fast.
The US has always wanted and claimed world dominance. Being first to put a flag on a rock in the dark was a maessage they felt did that. Today, we put more money into war than into space exploration. Kind of tells me where we've been and where we are going.
 
Interesting perspectives. NASA does what it can, with the money it's given (and what they're told to do doesn't ever match the funds that are provided, and that money is always ready to be taken away at a moment's notice by some committee, half-way through a project).

The statement about "NASA doesn't have enough sense..." riles me.

The following is an opinion from someone who knows a bit about it.

<opinion>
There has never been funding to keep legacy equipment in a useable condition. Not as museum pieces which are mere shells of what they originally were mind you, but as production-ready, staffed, working large-scale-systems (so that you can retrieve old, previously obtained data), nor anywhere to safely store ancient legacy unused equipment or data, but there IS a requirement to dispose of it. At every Space Center, there is a lot of legacy data that has to make room for new data (the growth rate is... can I say it... astronomical). Keeping legacy equipment around to read that data is not an option anymore. Not without Congress specifically providing funding to do so. All I can say is, it's not as simple as some might imagine or suggest.
</opinion>

If that offends... then so be it.
 
That's the thing about the boy that cried wolf, it became hard to believe him. Our government is not exactly famous for being honest. Your are right, those sites do little for the conspiracy believer.
Again, I'd have to see some proof to buy it and everything I have looked at in detail leans toward bad hoaxing. I was cleaning up apollo footage long before it was advertised as being so on yahoo. The more I looked, the more disappointed I was.
It's as easy as flying a 40 year younger craft and some HD gear up there if they wanna recruit new beleivers.
Again, I'll not see this in my lifetime.
 
grinner said:
That's the thing about the boy that cried wolf, it became hard to believe him. Our government is not exactly famous for being honest.
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In formal debate that's a tactic known as poisoning the well. It's usually intended to attack the source of the information, rather than address the veracity of the information itself.

grinner said:
Your are right, those sites do little for the conspiracy believer.
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Same as a site designed to shake a true believer's faith in anything, is unlikely to succeed - true believers are frequently not amenable to appeals to physical evidence (moon rocks, emplaced laser reflectors, visual and audio recordings, etc) or expert testimony (after all, what would multiple PhD-holding engineers and astronomers know, compared with some random untrained guy with an IP connection?)

grinner said:
Again, I'd have to see some proof to buy it and everything I have looked at in detail leans toward bad hoaxing.
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Making you more discerning than the legion of professional physicists, engineers, photographers and astronomers who support NASA's version of events? If you say so.

grinner said:
I was cleaning up apollo footage long before it was advertised as being so on yahoo. The more I looked, the more disappointed I was.
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What were you looking for?

grinner said:
It's as easy as flying a 40 year younger craft and some HD gear up there if they wanna recruit new beleivers.
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Naw, that would be dismissed as a hoax too, by people predisposed to that sort of thing.

grinner said:
Again, I'll not see this in my lifetime.
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I don't know. I'm hoping both that we go back, and that you live long enough to see it and plenty besides.
 
ugafan said:
it looks like the other astronaut isn't wearing a backpack.
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Nothing unusual here:

awesome-watchmen-viral-images-01-800-75.jpg
 
Sad Max, you would make one fine lawyer. I mean that as a compliment.
You don't argue or take things personal. You state facts and show respect to who you are educating on your point. I like that, sir. I just wanted to say that. IN a world of internet camandos, you are a good man.
 
grinner said:
Sad Max, you would make one fine lawyer. I mean that as a compliment.
You don't argue or take things personal. You state facts and show respect to who you are educating on your point. I like that, sir. I just wanted to say that. IN a world of internet camandos, you are a good man.
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Wow, thanks.

I try to avoid being an a$$hole, with varying degrees of success...
 
well I see you succeeding at it all the time. You are a gentlman and a scholar, kind sir. Truth is, if we were all like you, there would not be war.
Hows that for a compliment!?
 
I'm glad this stuff can be discussed here with some logic and civility... because the only thing that ever turns me off on any site, including this one... is when people bail on logic (and it happens a lot)... the Mythbusters show did a lot to address many of the conspiracy guys' issues... and I enjoyed feeling "convinced" through some ground-level science (even though these guys aren't really scientists)...

The only area I ever have had an issue on this stuff is in LOGIC ISSUES... such as lost plans (blueprints) for the rover... now the accidentally dubbed original tape... the fact that it's SO hard to go there now vs. then... and things like the van allen belt.

Aside from those logic issues... it's pretty straight forward. If somebody tosses the logic issues aside in order to make points (no matter what the debate)... I lose interest.

This was alright... but I still think that the mishandling of the tape is illogical... and really scary in regards to high-level incompetence.
 
I understand why it's so hard to go there now, and why many don't understand why we can't just re-do Apollo. It really has got nothing to do with "lift" which was the driving technology for the Apollo program. The problem has to do with sustained living within the environment, and rules that weren't in place then, but are now. The funding/cost of doing the same thing now, with the range and man-mission safety rules as they are now, and with the intention of staying not a few hours or days to collect rocks, but months at a time (and eventually building an "outpost"). This stretches the limits of current technology. Payloads to be lifted are higher, and everything has to be reused, in order to support extended stay (urine, sweat, ... other things).

These same issues have to be solved prior to a Mars mission. It's not enough to just lob something back at the Moon and say we've gone back. We have to build the foundation of being able to travel back and forth, live there and learn how to extend the travel time safely for the astronauts (radiation shielding, extended duration in weightlessness, how do you address medical emergencies, etc), and learn how to either manufacture what we need there, lift it out of orbit cheaply, and/or reuse what we take with. It's not a small problem. It's multiple incredibly difficult technical problems, for a very small price tag that usually gets smaller with many more "requirements" slapped on in areas that do not provide any support to the overall goal of building that foundation.

Remember, that after Apollo 17 (the last Apollo mission), the technology-base that supported the Apollo program was de-funded, and NASA was instructed to do something entirely different. The companies that supported the Apollo program re-tooled, and also pushed technology into a different realm, for an entirely different purpose. Some of those same contractors/companies have gotten bigger, some have folded, some have changed their production base entirely to support military contracts in lieu of aerospace contracts.
 
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muonwave said:
I understand why it's so hard to go there now, and why many don't understand why we can't just re-do Apollo. It really has got nothing to do "lift" which was the driving technology for the Apollo program. The problem has to do with sustained living within the environment, and rules that weren't in place then, but are now. The funding/cost of doing the same thing now, with the range and man-mission safety rules as they are now, and with the intention of staying not a few hours or days to collect rocks, but months at a time (and eventually building an "outpost"). This stretches the limits of current technology. Payloads to be lifted are higher, and everything has to be reused, in order to support extended stay (urine, sweat, ... other things).

These same issues have to be solved prior to a Mars mission. It's not enough to just lob something back at the Moon and say we've gone back. We have to build the foundation of being able to travel back and forth, live there and learn how to extend the travel time safely for the astronauts (radiation shielding, extended duration in weightlessness, how do you address medical emergencies, etc), and learn how to either manufacture what we need there, lift it out of orbit cheaply, and/or reuse what we take with. It's not a small problem. It's multiple incredibly difficult technical problems, for a very small price tag, that usually gets smaller, with many more "requirements" slapped on in areas that do not provide any support to the overall goal of building that foundation.

Remember, that after Apollo 17 (the last Apollo mission), the technology-base that supported the Apollo program was de-funded, and NASA was instructed to do something entirely different. The companies that supported the Apollo program re-tooled, and also pushed technology into a different realm, for an entirely different purpose. Some of those same contractors/companies have gotten bigger, some have folded, some have changed their production base entirely to support military contracts in lieu of aerospace contracts.
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Very well put.

In other words, as we use in our schpiel of explaining this to the general public, NASA's Constellation program isn't just going to the moon - it's doing the work of three different programs - the Space Shuttle, taking us to low-Earth orbit, Apollo, in taking us to the moon, and an entirely new mission of taking us to Mars and beyond. So the challenge lies in building a single team of vehicles (Ares I and Ares V rockets and the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle) that will allow us to go to all three places, because each destination has very different requirements.

Now, whether or not Constellation is the right way to go is currently being reviewed by the Obama administration and the Augustine Commission. And those findings should be released in the near future.

So we'll see what happens.
 
dopeyname101 said:
Very well put.
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Thanks.

dopeyname101 said:
In other words, as we use in our schpiel of explaining this to the general public, NASA's Constellation program isn't just going to the moon - it's doing the work of three different programs - the Space Shuttle, taking us to low-Earth orbit, Apollo, in taking us to the moon, and an entirely new mission of taking us to Mars and beyond. So the challenge lies in building a single team of vehicles (Ares I and Ares V rockets and the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle) that will allow us to go to all three places, because each destination has very different requirements.
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Essentially, yes. Also, those missions independently will very probably cost four to ten times what's been allocated to do those tasks, with the exception of the LEO (Low Earth Orbit) mission capability, which the previous administration mandated to replace the STS (Shuttle Transportation System). At best, with the funding provided, we'll be able to develop some of the minor supporting technologies and manufacturing base, to at least learn what the actual technology base has to be. We're doing something never previously done before (as always), and giving best-guesses for when current technology tips to the point of usability, manufacturing capability and capacity. We've been funded to figure out how to do it - which all of the above encompasses, but haven't really been funded to "do it". That would be an entirely different scale.
 
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