starcloud wrote: 
The launch was scheduled for June 18, with impact about Oct. 8.  The San Francisco Examiner suggests that the true target is an extraterrestrial colony on the moon.    Was it actually launched?  I dunno.

(William Randolph Hearst lives!)

*edit*  On-schedule launch apparently reported by Fox News video.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
It's too bad.  Quite the impact.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
Bloody NASA. Probably some stoopid national security wanker thing.

 Welly wrote: 
Apparently "....one giant leap for mankind" doesn't extend to sharing film of someone, and you know who you are, whacking the Moon being made available in "your country" because of "copyright restrictions". Grrr.

 Welly wrote: 
son of a ...

 starcloud wrote: 

Yep, they posted video here.

Anyone know if this has happened yet?
June 17, 2009 | NASA's mission to bomb the Moon

NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet. The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target - a crater close to the Moon's south pole. Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.

Although it's about Mars, the movie "Capricorn One" is available for rental.  That's actual footage of real actors in Hollywood or somewhere, preserved quite nicely.

 Atman wrote: 
Easy to tell, in the original there were no space aliens or explosions (well except for the Apollo 13 one).

 meower wrote: 
maybe yes, maybe no... non?

 Zep wrote: 

NASA's Apollo 11 Partial Restoration HD Videos

The "...One Small Step" video is of Neil Armstrong climbing down the lunar module ladder to the lunar surface. The video compares existing footage with the partially restored video.

Looks like they have some restored.  I think there was over 3 hrs of live coverage.  I think CBS might have a taped copy of their broadcast.

 meower wrote: 
You  gotta admit Spielberg's touch on the new Hi-def vids of the 'Moon shot' are pretty goshdarn good! It's real hard to tell where the studio shooting and the mattes overlap. I guess with all the newfangled CG tech they got now...

 zipper wrote: 
Absolutely.

 hobbitt wrote: 
Amazing. After forty years, it's too easy to forget how brave those three were.

Now if they could just find the first couple Super Bowls.

boston.com has some gorgeous photos from the Apollo 11 moon mission: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/remembering_apollo_11.html

 Zep wrote:
Well, they have remade a lot of the other things from that era. Let's just hope they do better than McHale's Navy and Bewitched. The special effects are much better now too. This time we could have some explosions, and maybe a big chase scene.Have Ben Afflec and Matt Damon done anything together lately?

 Zep wrote: 

that's cause it never really happened. 

Not sure where this belonged, as it pertains to space, conspiracy theories, and history, as well as a generous helping of WTF.  So I put it out here all by itself.

"To the Moon, gentlemen!"

"The Moon!"

Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon.

The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank, California-based Lowry Digital, will be released in September. The preview is available at www.nasa.gov.

NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.

Since then, Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking for them.

The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed — magnetically erased — and re-used to save money.

"The goal was live TV," Nafzger told a news conference.

"We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if you are ever going to use them — we are going to keep them'," he said.

They found good copies in the archives of CBS news and some recordings called kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson Space Center.

Lowry, best known for restoring old Hollywood films, has been digitizing these along with some other bits and pieces to make a new rendering of the original landing.

Nafzger does not worry that using a Hollywood-based company might fuel the fire of conspiracy theorists who believe the entire lunar program that landed people on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972 was staged on a movie set or secret military base.

"This company is restoring historic video. It mattered not to me where the company was from," Nafzger said.

"The conspiracy theorists are going to believe what they are going to believe," added Lowry Digital Chief Operating Officer Mike Inchalik.

And there may be some unofficial copies of the original broadcast out there somewhere that were taken from a NASA video switching center in Sydney, Australia, the space agency said. Nafzger said someone else in Sydney made recordings too.

"These tapes are not in the system," Nafzger said. "We are certainly open to finding them."