Apollo 11 Hoax?

[John Simkin]

The main reason is that it helps to discredit those carrying out research into the real conspiracies.

A conspiracy to discredit conspiracy theorists........ Wow!

I would have thought it pretty obvious by my postings that I do not think everything is a conspiracy. People who believe every conspiracy are more of a problem than those who do not believe in any conspiracy. As a historian I believe people should look at the evidence available in an open-mind.

[Evan Burton]

Okay,

Re the first claim - it could well be true. The Kiwis also have good claims to have beaten the Wright Brothers:

http://www.billzilla.org/pearce.htm

Now, the 'lost tapes'. A lot of the tapes are telemetry, but there are hopes that some are from the Slow Scan TV (SSTV). The SSTV was the 'original' broadcast but because of the format (number of lines and the scan rate), they had to be converted for transmission via regular television. This conversion process reduced the clarity of the video. The following has examples of the clarity of the different formats, and gives a good technical explanation if interested:

http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/tapes/index.html

If the tapes are found, are they still usable? That's a big unknown. There are several factors, but the most important is how the tapes have been stored. If the boxes containing the tapes have been stored in poor conditions, the tapes may well be unusable. Even if stored in controlled conditions, some degradation may have taken place. The tapes store their information through magnetic encoding, just like a VCR video tape. These days we have DVDs, but some of us have VCR tapes in the cupboard. I have tapes I haven't played in 10 or more years. The magnetic properties can 'leach' through to the adjacent tape when not played for years. Experts recommend that tapes are played or fast forwarded and rewound at least once a year.

Even so, we may still have excellent quality tapes... if we have a machine that can play them. What happens if you have a Betamax tape but only a VHS player? Can you just put the Betamax tape into a VHS cassette and play it? Nope, they are the same size but they are different formats (the data encoding process) and the VHS machine won't play the Betamax tape.

So we might get the tapes but there is only one machine left that can play them... and that is being decommissioned by NASA. Or is it? I know that a request had been made to place the machine into preservation storage, so it could be used if the tapes were found. I'm unsure if this happened, but I'll check when I meet up with the guys from Honeysuckle Creek during the Apollo 40th Celebrations; they were the people who were there and they have been leading the search for the tapes, etc.

Lastly, as reported the Express article is incorrect. I have been told to expect an announcement soon regarding the discovery of improved quality pictures of the Apollo 11 moonwalk.

Lastly, the overall point made by Tom is correct: don't just accept being told something; research the matter yourself. Check sources, etc. Satisfy yourself as to the veracity of statements being made. Where you do not have sufficient technical knowledge to properly evaluate claims, go to sources of education such as universities, etc. Ask the people who are qualified as to their opinion.... but don't just take one opinion. That is like reading just one media source. Ask as many qualified people as you can. If they all agree, then you can have some confidence in their opinions. If they disagree, then you'll need to investigate why they disagree.

[Terry Mauro]

APOLLO 11 ASTRONAUT BUZZ ALDRIN CALLS FOR MANNED FLIGHT TO MARS

TO OVERCOME GLOBAL ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

July 4 (LPAC) - Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man

to walk on the Moon, said in an optimistic July 3 interview with

Britain's {Daily Telegraph}, "Given the backdrop of the ailing

world economy, space exploration could offer younger generations

much-needed goals, and I think we need to look quite a way down

into the future to inspire our young people with that greatness."

Aldrin continued, "America helped to take the world to the Moon

40 years ago, and America certainly can help lead the world in

the direction of Mars." He added that setting up habitation on

the surface of the red planet was a "wonderful objective for

humanity."

The {Telegraph} asked Aldrin for his views on global

warming. Aldrin said he was skeptical of climate change theories

specifying, "I think the climate has been changing for billions

of years, and if it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not

in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and

depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is

today."

[William Kelly]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...bzpw0gD99FPS2G0

NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it

By SETH BORENSTEIN (AP) –

WASHINGTON — NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.

In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.

But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.

The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.

"There's nothing being created; there's nothing being manufactured," said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who is in charge of the project. "You can now see the detail that's coming out."

The first batch of restored footage was released just in time for the 40th anniversary of the "one giant leap for mankind," and some of the details seem new because of their sharpness. Originally, astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Earth's first moonwalker shows the visor and a reflection in it.

The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a monthslong project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done.

But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder; Buzz Aldrin following him; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; and the planting of the flag on the lunar surface.

Nafzger said a huge search that began three years ago for the old moon tapes led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. His report on that will come out in a few weeks.

The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

How did NASA end up looking like a bumbling husband taping over his wedding video with the Super Bowl?

Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.

Outside historians were aghast.

"It's surprising to me that NASA didn't have the common sense to save perhaps the most important historical footage of the 20th century," said Rice University historian and author Douglas Brinkley. He noted that NASA saved all sorts of data and artifacts from Apollo 11, and it is "mind-boggling that the tapes just disappeared."

The remastered copies may look good, but "when dealing with historical film footage, you always want the original to study," Brinkley said.

Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, said the loss of the original video "doesn't surprise me that much."

"It was a mistake, no doubt about that," Launius said. "This is a problem inside the entire federal government. ... They don't think that preservation is all that important."

Launius said federal warehouses where historical artifacts are saved are "kind of like the last scene of `Raiders of the Lost Ark.' It just goes away in this place with other big boxes."

The company that restored all the Indiana Jones movies, including "Raiders," is the one bailing out NASA.

Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., noted that "Casablanca" had a pixel count 10 times higher than the moon video, meaning the Apollo 11 footage was fuzzier than that vintage movie and more of a challenge in one sense.

Of all the video the company has dealt with, "this is by far and away the lowest quality," said Lowry president Mike Inchalik.

Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video. Historian Launius wasn't as blown away.

"It's certainly a little better than the original," Launius said. "It's not a lot better."

The Apollo 11 video remains in black and white. Inchalik said he would never consider colorizing it, as has been done to black-and-white classic films. And the moon is mostly gray anyway.

The restoration used four video sources: CBS News originals; kinescopes from the National Archives; a video from Australia that received the transmission of the original moon video; and camera shots of a TV monitor.

Both Nafzger and Inchalik acknowledged that digitally remastering the video could further encourage conspiracy theorists who believe NASA faked the entire moon landing on a Hollywood set. But they said they enhanced the video as conservatively as possible.

Besides, Inchalik said that if there had been a conspiracy to fake a moon landing, NASA surely would have created higher-quality film.

Back in 1969, nearly 40 percent of the picture quality was lost converting from one video format used on the moon — called slow scan — to something that could be played on TVs on Earth, Nafzger said.

NASA did not lose other Apollo missions' videos because they weren't stored on the type of tape that needed to be reused, Nafzger said.

As part of the moon landing's 40th anniversary, the space agency has been trotting out archival material. NASA has a Web site with audio from private conversations in the lunar module and command capsule. The agency is also webcasting radio from Apollo 11 as if the mission were taking place today.

The video restoration project did not involve improving the sound. Inchalik said he listened to Armstrong's famous first words from the surface of the moon, trying to hear if he said "one small step for man" or "one small step for A man," but couldn't tell.

Through a letter read at a news conference Thursday, Armstrong had the last word about the video from the moon: "I was just amazed that there was any picture at all."

On the Net:

NASA restored video: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11.html