Posted on 08/13/2006 10:31:14 PM PDT by seacapn
The original film footage of astronaut Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, one of the most important artifacts of the 20th century, has been lost.
The television broadcast seen by about 600 million people in July 1969 is preserved for posterity, but the original tapes from which the footage was taken have been mislaid, most likely in NASA's vast archives at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
The footage could transform our view of the moon landings, offering images far sharper than the blurred, grainy video shown around the world. It also could lay to rest the conspiracy theory that the landings were faked on a Hollywood soundstage.
Despite its iconic status, the television footage was the equivalent of a photocopy of a photocopy. It came from a camera that had been pointed at a black-and-white monitor on Earth. The image on the monitor, in turn, had been stripped of much of its detail.
To make sure the transmission would make it back to Earth, the images sent from Apollo 11 were recorded at 10 frames per second, and had to be converted to 60 frames per second in order to be broadcast. In the process, much of the detail was lost.
Stan Lebar, now 81, was in charge of the images from Apollo 11. What he saw was so blurred that he initially thought something had gone wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I watched the launch of every one of the Apollo missions from the visitor's site 3 miles from Pad 39-A. That was real. Later I worked at KSC as a lowly computer operator during my college days. I met, spoke and worked peripherally with two of the moon-walkers: John Young (Apollo 10 and Apollo 16) and Gene Cernan (Apollo 10 and Apollo 17). They were impressive, no-bullshit individuals. Given a choice between believing what these men said they did, and had ample evidence to confirm they did, or believing that history's most massive conpiracy involving a decade of effort and millions of people was and is still being successfully maintained, I'll go with John and Gene.
I believe it would actually be easier to land on the moon than it would be to pull off the world's most audacious conspiracy. It wasn't like people weren't watching everything NASA was doing. This was the Vietnam era for Christ's sake. Do you think if the news media could have blown the cover on such a fraud they wouldn't have done so?
One thing I've noticed is that those who believe the conspiracy weren't alive during that time. They didn't live through the events. They weren't there. It's too bad the conspiracy-theorists have ANY credibility. They are fools.
Apollo landed on the moon.
Forget it. They landed.
I never said otherwise. I just asked, how do you know?
I know because I know many of those in the program and I knew them then. I knew what they were doing, and sometimes better than they knew what they were doing.
I'm sure that the reels are sitting right next to the "Lost Saturn V rocket blueprints".
Hoagland is concerned with the loss of the mag tapes because they may show objects on the horizon that shouldn't be there.
In one shot you can see the wires being used to fake up 1/6 gravity /sarc.
That beings up an interesting point. If the landings were a script read in a soundroom, with Buck Rogers models on strings, they sure got a lot more material than could be shown in a hundred full length feature films. Maybe too much for 1000 full length feature films. Whoever wrote all that screenplay was far beyond human if that's what went down.
Well since it was faked anyway........
"That's one small step for mankind, I mean, one small stepford man, um, damn, can we start over?"
Next time maybe they will have professional actors instead of professional test pilots and engineers.
Besides, most were engineers or test pilots, people who are not known for idle talk.
I have a friend who used to do major league play-by-play. Some games were dubbed onto large reel-to-reel tapes - the type able to handle a multi-hour game without changing tapes. He recently wanted these converted to a newer medium but finding anyone who could work with the old tapes was a more daunting challenge than I would have thought.
Even if you convert them to CDs, the CD technology (so I'm told) is already on its way out.
If it was truly lost, it will soon turn up on eBay.
Yeah. Who has a tape machine capable of reading these 1" mag tapes? Last one I saw was 20 years ago. Most are in the landfill by now.
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