The three original 2″ videotapes showing the astronauts on the lunar surface during Apollo 11, purchased by an engineering student as part of a lot of more than a thousand reels in 1976 for just over $200 have now sold at auction for $1.82 million.
The auction house, Sotheby’s, did not say who purchased the tapes. Hopefully whoever has intends to release the visuals, since it appears the quality is better than what we presently have.
An evening pause: In honor of the fiftieth anniversary.
The astronauts plant the American flag, after they had unveiled a plaque on the lunar module with the words, “We came in peace for all mankind.”
This was an American achievement, accomplished because our free and competitive society gave us the resources and trained talent to make it happen. We did it for all mankind, in good will, but we did it, no one else.
It is time that we as well as everyone else do it again.
Click for full image.
In celebration of Apollo 11: Continuing the theme of yesterday’s cool image, where I noted how little of the Moon we have really seen, today’s cool image gives us a breath-taking glimpse of one such untouched region, the Montes Carpatus region.
The photograph to the right, reduced to post here, was released by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team in March 2018. From the release:
Volcanic rocks are our best window to the deep interior of the Moon, and the Montes Carpatus has no shortage of volcanic landforms: lava flows, pyroclatic deposits, rilles, and more! Lavas are formed as the mantle begins to melt, so by sampling volcanic rocks of various ages from regions across the Moon scientists can reconstruct the range of compositions and processes over time. The Montes Carpatus formed as a result of the giant impact that formed the mighty Imbrium basin, the mountains are actually the raised rim of the basin.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. If you had told anyone involved in that mission that fifty years later no significant further manned exploration of the Moon had yet occurred, they would have scoffed.
It is a terrible condemnation of my generation, the generation that followed Apollo 11, that we did nothing grand like this. I challenge the generations today to reach higher, and do better.
An evening pause: In honor of the fiftieth anniversary.
Neil Armstrong takes the first steps on the Moon. Note his focus is almost entirely on describing what he sees and experiences. He is doing this for two reasons, first to provide knowledge of the Moon to the world, and second to provide engineers as much information as possible for future missions.
This focus explains why the first thing he does is to get a contingency rock sample, just in case they need to leave the Moon quickly.
Note also that when Buzz Aldrin joins Armstrong on the surface, he is as professional and calm, proving that the way he has been portrayed by some recent movies as as undisciplined jerk is simply a slander. He would not have been picked for this mission if he really behaved that way.
He wanted to be the first, and lobbied to get that chance. After the decision was made he got down to work to make the mission a success.
For a different view of these same events, watch this video.
An evening pause: In honor of the fiftieth anniversary.
Note the calm tone in all the voices, even when something is not quite right. To do really great things, one must not let one’s emotions run the show. You need to be cool-headed and focused on the task at at hand. If only today’s adult generation, especially in the world of politics, would do the same.
Just before Armstrong brings Eagle down, you will hear a voice say “60 seconds,” then “30 seconds.” That is mission control telling him how much time they estimate he has before he runs out of fuel.
Below the fold is the same last few minutes of the landing, produced by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team using its high resolution images to recreate a simulation of what Armstrong saw in his window. Remember, the view in the original 16mm film was out Aldrin’s window.
An evening pause: In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11, today’s evening pause shows the moment when the lunar module Eagle undocked from the command module Columbia. Though this video includes communications with mission control at the start, the actual undocking occurred on the back side of the moon, when the astronauts were out of touch with the Earth.
Near the end of the video, after they have reacquired communications with the ground, you can hear a recitation of a long string of numbers. This is mission control providing the astronauts the numbers that had to be uploaded into their onboard computer so that it could correctly fire the spacecraft engines at the right time and for the right duration.
Continuing this week’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission means we get to look at another cool image from the Moon. The photograph on the right, reduced to post here, was released by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team in 2016.
What are we looking at? At first glance it looks like a black & white photograph of The Wave in northern Arizona. What it is instead is the pattern of ejecta laid down across the surrounding terrain immediately after the impact that created relatively fresh Chaplygin Crater. From the website:
The delicate patterns of flow across, over, and down local topography clearly show that ejecta traveled as a ground hugging flow for great distances, rather than simply being tossed out on a ballistic trajectory. Very near the rim lies a dark, lacy, discontinuous crust of now frozen impact melt. Clearly this dark material is on top of the bright material so it was the very last material ejected from the crater.
Below the fold is a wider shot of the entire crater and its surrounding terrain, with the rectangle indicating the region covered by the close-up above The dark crust near the rim mentioned in the quote can clearly be seen.
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An evening pause: On the fiftieth anniversary.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, it is time for another cool image from the Moon. The photograph on the right, reduced to post here, was taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in 2013. It shows a weird crater with concentric features that is found within Apollo Basin, a large 334-mile-wide double-ringed impact feature in the southern hemisphere of the Moon’s far side.
Concentric craters have an inner rim whose formation mechanism is not yet entirely understood, but the concentric mounds may indicate that there is a discontinuity, such as layers with different strengths, in the subsurface excavated by the impact.
Or to put it more bluntly, they really have no idea why this crater ended up looking as it does.
An evening pause: This was originally posted as an evening pause in 2016. I think that today, the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, it is appropriate to repost it. As I wrote then,
Though the video is more than 8 minutes long, the actual events recorded lasted only about 30 seconds, beginning 5 seconds before T minus 0.
What struck me most as I watched this was the incredible amount of complex engineering that went into every single small detail of the rocket and the launch tower and launchpad. We tend to take for granted the difficulty of rocket engineering. This video will make you appreciate it again.
It is also mesmerizing. A lot happens in a very short period of time.
Tonight’s evening pause begins eight days of pauses dedicated to celebrating, and reliving, the Apollo 11 mission. To the Moon!
Link here. I should have posted this link earlier. As I post this the Saturn 5 has just launched.
Pick your moment. They will be showing the mission in real time over the next week.
Hat tip Steve Golson for prompting me.
Correction: If you go to the link you can either choose to watch from one minute before launch, or click on the “Now” button to see the status at this moment fifty years ago.
The image on the right came from the twitter feed of the Daily News in New York. It has since been removed, and it is also possible that it was a prank. Nonetheless, in less than fifty words this modern epitome of today’s journalism gets practically everything wrong about Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon and the first words he spoke.
John Glenn?
“One giant step for mankind”?
The tweet also calls the moon a “planet”, which I can live with since eventually the definition of a planet will include the Moon. Still, an educated person in this context would have used “world” instead.
I can’t imagine the level of incompetent education someone would have to go through to write this and not realize how much of it is embarrassingly wrong. Nor can I imagine how it is possible for everyone at the Daily News to not realize it as well, unless they are equally uneducated.
Tonight I begin an eight day series of evening pauses dedicated to the Apollo 11 mission, showing the key moments, as they happened. Rather than read some bad and often incorrect interpretation of this singular moment in human history, I am going to give you a chance to live it, as I did, fifty years ago.
Hat tip Jeff Bliss for the Daily News tweet. My readers know that I will not have anything to do with Twitter (which likely reduces my webpage traffic and likely my income as well), but I think it is designed to force people to act like a hateful and childish mob. Or exhibit their ignorance, which this tweet does so well.
My ethics will not allow me there. My observations repeatedly confirm for me the wisdom of this decision.
An evening pause: Who says you need computers to create magnificent things?
Hat tip Diane Wilson.
An evening pause: Since it is July 4th, and the news is filled with depressing outrages from ignorant social justice warriors who have no knowledge at all about the just and noble roots that founded the United States, I think it necessary to post this magnificent song performed by Frank Sinatra.
Written and produced in 1945, as World War II was ending, the short film tried to encapsulate in one short song the true meaning of the American experiment. This version below includes the lead-in scene to show the context for the song, as sung in the film. Some might find that opening overly preachy, but in the context of World War II and the recent discovery then of the Nazi death camps, it is heartfelt, real, and quite accurate. Please watch it all, and recognize this is what the United States — now being condemned routinely by leftist hate-mongers — is really about.
The song begins by asking, “What is America to me?” It answers it clearly in the final verse:
The town I live in
The street, the house, the room
The pavement of the city
Or a garden all in bloom
The church, the school, the clubhouse
The million lights I see
But especially the people
that’s American to me. [emphasis mine]
And that means all the people, not just those who agree with you.
A mid-day pause: Posted by me on almost every Fourth of July since this site was founded, it is time to do it again. From the 1976 movie version of the 1972 musical, 1776. As I said in those earlier posts, “not only did the musical capture the essence of the men who made independency happen, it is also a rollicking and entertaining work of art.”
And as John Kennedy said of himself, ourselves, and these founding fathers. “We stand for freedom.”
A group of far right radicals, some of which had been accused of many crimes against the legal government, today made a declaration that clearly required their arrest for daring to defy the powers-that-be.
From the first two paragraphs:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Without a doubt our country’s corrupt ruling class in Washington finds these words appalling and unacceptable. Some, mostly leftists and Democrats, consider the man who wrote these words evil, and the men who signed it worse.
But then, these fools have never read these words or anything thing else Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers wrote. Or if they have, they weren’t smart enough to understand them.
Happy Fourth of July! And as it says on the Liberty Bell, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
An evening pause: More Americana for this Independence Day week. From 1960s television, The Andy Griffith Show.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An intern who in 1976 purchased more than a thousand surplus 2-inch videotapes from NASA for $218 is now going to auction off three of those reels that show the Apollo 11 moon walk.
Back in 1976, NASA gave 1,150 reels of 2-inch Quadruplex videotape to a government surplus auction. Gary George, a former intern at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, snapped up the lot of them for $218, in the hopes of selling them to news stations to record over for $50 a pop. He never watched them, but because his dad was a space buff, kept three of the tapes marked as “Apollo 11 EVA” (aka Extravehicular Activity, better known as a spacewalk). When he eventually watched the tapes, he realized that he had one of three surviving copies of one of the greatest feats of human ingenuity, the July 20, 1969 Moon landing. Now, those videotapes will be auctioned off to the highest bidder when Sotheby’s will mark the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by putting the tapes up for sale on July 20th, at a starting bid of $700,000.
“I had no idea there was anything of value on them,” George said in an interview with Reuters. He started to get suspicious in 2006, after NASA admitted they had lost the tapes, and believed they could have been in the 2,614 boxes of Apollo mission tapes that were sent to a storage facility in late 1969. George got in touch with video archivist David Crosthwait in California, who had the necessary equipment to view the vintage tapes. In December 2008, George played the reels and quickly realized what he had been storing over the last few decades. He contacted NASA about the reels but “an agreement could not be reached,” according to the auction listing, and off to the auction block they go as part of an auction dedicated to Space Exploration.
The saddest part of this story are the tapes George sold to television stations to use to back-up their daily broadcasts. Some of those tapes probably contained historical recordings of the Apollo missions. While I suspect these tapes were not NASA’s only copies, I cannot be sure, which means some of the source material for the Apollo missions was likely lost.
An evening pause: From the short 1936 film, Every Sunday, made essentially as a screen test for the two young future stars.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
The first movie ever made of a solar eclipse, taken in 1900, has been rediscovered and restored.
The film was taken by British magician turned pioneering filmmaker Nevil Maskelyne on an expedition by the British Astronomical Association to North Carolina on 28 May, 1900. This was Maskelyne’s second attempt to capture a solar eclipse. In 1898 he travelled to India to photograph an eclipse where succeeded but the film can was stolen on his return journey home. It was not an easy feat to film. Maskelyne had to make a special telescopic adapter for his camera to capture the event. This is the only film by Maskelyne that we know to have survived.
I have embedded the movie below the fold.
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