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Hope (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be great if true. To lose the originals of the greatest technological and exploration achievement event since Columbus is a gut-wrenching thought. (And the existing copies are poor quality.)
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Also, despite the incompetence, subsequent colonization of the New World has resulted in something substantially useful (the US GDP alone is over $13 trillion!
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a "few" random spinoff technologies? Funniest thing I've ever read. Thank you sir!
Re:Hope (Score:5, Funny)
a "few" random spinoff technologies? Funniest thing I've ever read. Thank you sir!
And quite ironic. Unless he wrote his response on a machine without miniaturised electronics - diesel typewriter perhaps.
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Re:Hope (Score:5, Insightful)
He was one of the best navigators in the business at the time, and had a very experienced crew. It's just that he was missing a few pieces of the puzzle. On his second mission, he used his knowledge of celestial mechanics and eclipses to fool some island tribes into thinking he was a god, saving his crew from torture or starvation.
Further, Neal Armstrong was once quoted as saying he felt they had a 50/50 chance before the trip. Many things did almost go wrong on the first flight, including an overloaded computer and insufficient landing fuel. Luck, skill, and experience overrode those. Apollo 11 was hardly a sure thing.
They were *all* gamblers.
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Re:Hope (Score:5, Insightful)
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If it wasn't, they'd probably just turn around, head back, and we'd never hear about it in history books. The crew was getting edgy near the end of the trip because they were running out of enough supplies to turn back without a shore-stop, but they kept seeing plant debris in the water that suggested shore was near. If not for the debris, they would probably have turned around a bit sooner and simply gave up, barely making
Re:Hope (Score:5, Informative)
Ironically, Neal faced a similar decision. The computer was signaling an unknown overload and they were also running tight on landing fuel as he spotted some large boulders he wanted to avoid. He could have called to abort the mission, using the ascent engine to return to moon orbit. In fact, "abort" would have been the "right" decision in my opinion based on what was known at the time.
He gambled that the computer was still returning useful info despite the overload[1], and that he could manage his way to a landing on short fuel. I remember him saying afterward that even if he ran out of fuel, he was close enough to the ground for a "bounce" landing while jetting around the boulders, and thus mostly ignored ground-control's warnings. (The main ground announcer even joked about ground control "turning blue" just after landing because of the late landing.)
He was possibly thinking he might never get a second chance, and thus took on excessive risk.
[1] (It turned out the computer was still sufficient despite the overload, but they didn't fully know it then because they didn't know the cause yet. The cause turned out to be an extra un-docking service that they accidentally left on that wasn't needed for landing.)
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Neil Armstrong was there to take that risk. (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, "abort" would have been the "right" decision in my opinion based on what was known at the time.
Unless you are Neil Armstrong. There is a reason he was picked to go on that mission. He starts out as a combat jet pilot over Korea, brings back a totally shot up bird.
After taking a bit of time to get some additional education, he winds up as a test pilot... flying all sorts of exotic craft. He makes his way into NASA, and there, he makes a quick decision that saves a tumbling Gemini spacecraft. Then, he's ejecting from wildly unstable lunar lander proxy craft.
Pretty much his whole career, Armstrong flew a bunch of crazy aircraft in a bunch of dangerous situations and proved himself as having a knack for making the right decisions, and quickly, because of crunch time.
He gambled that the computer was still returning...excessive risk
I think its fair to say that with his track record, he didn't take excessive risk -for him-. He was the best flyer NASA had, and he was doing his job.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's when you pull the central strip of the slide rule too far and it pops out, then you have to try and a) find it and b.1) put it back in b.2) the right way round b.3) the right way up. Not easy with the coke bottle glasses which all engineers wore in those days.
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It is just as relevant today in realtime mission-critical operations.
When you write realtime code on a realtime OS you design your application so that it can get a certain amount of work done in a certain amount of time. It is critical to the operation of the machine that those tasks get done exactly on time or sooner (or maybe not even sooner). As a result, you don't use some OS and language that just runs random tasks at random times and that at any given time you have no idea what is running. Instead
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Tell that to IT job positions, someone gave them Columbus's old map and they carried on in the search for India from the place where Columbus had stopped.
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...stealing from other peoples history and legend to create their own.
I dunno what you're Tolkein about.
Re:Hope (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah, smart guy? What about about Jack Klompus's astronaut pen? It writes upside down...
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Re:Hope (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hope (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, *puhleeze*, let's not start that thread again; we just did it last week. :-)
We do this EVERY week.
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One Giant Screwup for Mankind (Score:2)
Wired's article is not unreasonable. When a group collectively acts like they have an IQ of 1 they deserve the condemnation. Everyone responsible for the loss should have lost their job and pension. Maybe if NASA had been decapitated then we'd have a better NASA now.
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It's possible that nobody was formerly responsible. The TV camera thing was kind of a last-minute decision because of concerns over weight, and thus no formal media archiving procedure was set up for it. The whole landing was kind of a rush-job to meet the deadline, and thus such "afterthought" details kind of fell through the cracks.
Re:One Giant Screwup for Mankind (Score:5, Informative)
It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable, and 'formally' has an unrhotacized schwa. Since the following syllable begins with an apical consonant that also includes velar articulation, the rhotacized schwa tends to lose its rhotacization due to anticipatory reduction. With this one feature lost, the two words become homophonous. In many (all?) non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation, Australian English, etc., the two words are already homophonous.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable...
O rly?
FYI (Score:3, Informative)
The Sunday Express is hardly our fair isle's most reliable newspaper.
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A last minute search instead has scientists in Western Australia dusting off several boxes of 'lost' NASA tapes which record surface conditions on the Moon just after Neil Armstrong stepped into space history on 21 July 1969.
After addressing Earth, the American astronaut set up a package of scientific instruments, including a dust detector designed by an Australian physicist. The data collected by the detector was sent back to ground stations on Earth and recorded on magnetic tapes - copies of which are as rare as [i.e. not the same as] the 'misplaced' original video footage of the 1969 touchdown.
Anyway, I was very happy when I first read this report. Having considered it again, the fact it's in the Sunday Express makes me slightly worried; although I don't believe that they'd fabricate something like this outright, it's possible that they might have got the facts wrong and/or overstated them. Plus
If [my emphasis] the visual data can be retrieved, Nasa is set to reveal them to the world as a key plank of celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the landings next month.
Hope it goes well.
Either way, it's truly gobsmacking that NASA spent countless billions (in *19
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...and then finally, for archival, this was stored by pointing a 16mm film camera at a monitor.
No, that was for transmission, the second step in the chain after reception. The Apollo 11 camera had 10fps, and
as there was no easy way to do real-time frame rate conversions in the 1960s, the solution was to point a camera at a
display [wikipedia.org] at Honeysuckle Creek Station [wikipedia.org] in Australia.
This filmed-from-a-display feed is the only source of Apollo 11 video we know today.
The lost tapes supposedly contain a direct recording of the 10fps video stream from the lander.
good news bad news (Score:3, Funny)
The good news is they found the tapes. The bad news is Kim Jong-il has them and wants 20 billion dollars, part of South Korea, and a lock of Michael Jackson's hair.
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RAAAAIIIIIINNNNN! Colbert shakes fist....
Conspiracy theory (Score:3, Insightful)
New facts would never dispel a perfectly good conspiracy theory. Instead, the new facts are evidence that the conspiracy is still on-going.
Up your k1lt!
May "or may not" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wouldn't it be nice if people (such as the summary writer) understood that "may" inherently includes the uncertainty as to whether it actually "does", or perhaps "does not"? Then they wouldn't feel compelled to append the completely redundant "or may not" every time.
It wasn't expressed with a high rate of accuracy.
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True, but possibly unimportant. (Score:4, Interesting)
If there's data on them, it's data that was lost from some mission or other. There are plenty of missions (such as the Venus landings) where a bucket of extra data spools could provide massively valuable scientific data, even to this day.
Now that the moon has been (at least partially, if not fully) mapped in high-def, and a host of other probes have been sent to collect all kinds of other data, moon tapes would be really more interesting from a historic standpoint. Nothing wrong with that, especially as staggering achievements tend to wake public interest and open the money taps, but from a scientific standpoint there must be huge numbers of reels of tape that would actually be of greater value to NASA.
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Obligatory (Score:2)
That's no Moon tape! (But - seriously - if it is, it will be great to see the thing finally in HD, or whatever NASA called "high quality" at that time. :))
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But - seriously - if it is, it will be great to see the thing finally in HD, or whatever NASA called "high quality" at that time. :)
It's not HD; actually, according to the Wired article, the video is a mere 320 lines, 10 frames per second. (There wasn't enough bandwidth for a full NTSC-quality signal).
Even so, *if* these are the tapes of the original moon landing, then it'll let us see it in much higher quality than we could originally.
"Scoop" ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently someone forgot to tell NASA that they're a government agency and not some kind of mass-media Nielsen-dependent agency that relies on "scoops" and "special announcements". When they find something, they should announce it immediately. Suppose they'd found these tapes on July 21...would they have thought it appropriate to sit on them until July 20, 2019, just to have something special to go with the 50th anniversary?
Re:"Scoop" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
If only we lived in a world where government agencies got the funding that they needed regardless of current taxpayer whim. In one example, if NASA drops in popularity then they become an easy target for Senators looking to make a name for themselves as budget cutters.
Thus any scoops or special announcements that they can come up with help keep them popular in the taxpayer's eye and help keep the budget cutters away.
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Re:"Scoop" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with all sorts of things the government does; can I have my money back too? I'm not a big fan of the military; if you want to develop new fighter jets, use someone else's money please. And why is my money being used to operate the patent office? Or the courts that adjudicate patent disputes?
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What they don't tell you (Score:3, Funny)
What they aren't saying is that the Sunday Press borrowed them all along, and never returned them.
They didn't even bother to rewind, those selfish jerks.
Promotional material (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, no wonder NASA is pissed at it leaking now. Their marketing droids must be furious.
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>But I find it a remarkable and wholly unbelievable coincidence that they were found just before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
Hey, would *you* check the time capsule?
I've see quite a few 'shops in my time... (Score:2)
Just a shame the moon conspiracy-believers will claim that "Of course they've found the tapes NOW, now that computers are powerful enough to fake it properly"
May or may not be? (Score:3, Funny)
Vroomfondel, is that you?
So, Is There Hope...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sunday Express article "fiction", says NASA (Score:3, Informative)
NASA has yet to release a formal statement, but one of their spokespeople is describing the Sunday Express's article as "fiction" [twitter.com]. Whether this means the Apollo 11 tapes haven't actually been found, or the way they were found is completely made up, is anyone's guess, but it shows the risks of taking a tabloid newspaper's breakthrough discovery which doesn't name any of its sources at face value.
Story's false (Score:5, Informative)
Bob Jacobs [linkedin.com], the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA, says the story's fiction [twitter.com].
(via Phil Plait [discovermagazine.com])
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Hopefully they also added the explosions and giant space worm I keep asking for. I thought of a green 3-breasted moon-babe, but realized that may be over-doing it.
Re:Boffins? (Score:5, Funny)
That's why people call you pervert ;)
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Besides, wouldn't losing lots of video be something more likely to happen to a Took than a Boffin?
Re:We have had the videos *all along* you IDIOT (Score:5, Informative)
MALWARE WARNING! DO NOT CLICK ON PARENT'S LINKS!
not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling
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I'd love to help by meta-moderating, but I can't afford the risk. Until
Re:NASA's credibility (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't, actually, agree with that in this case. As several people point out when asked to justify the cost of the moon program, we didn't pay for the *hardware*, that was incidental.
We *paid* for *the knowledge we got by using the hardware*. Now, while, admittedly, this bit of lost knowledge is not as important as the *warehouses full of 7-track tape with data from {Voyager,Pioneer} that has never even been read* since being written, mush less converted to DVD/BD, and made available to the public -- because reading it requires machining new headwheels for the only *two* remaining drives which can read it (do you sense a pattern here?)... it's still important, and I think it would be a bit shortsighted to say "ah, hell, it's only the pictures from the vacation".
Watching that happen created a whole new generation of engineers.
It's not completely unreasonable to think that if they did find it, and they do release it -- oh, say, at the 40th anniversary celebration on 18-Jul at the Kennedy Center -- that seeing the coverage on the net, or on TV, might not inspire that 1 or 2% of teenagers left who aren't too cynical to care about *anything at all* into wanting to go to space...
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