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Comment by ehsanul | Hacker News Reader

After three years of searching for the Apollo 11 tapes, NASA concluded that the footage of the first manned moon landing is probably lost forever.

How come I never knew that Apollo 11 footage was lost?

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Actually, I thought I remembered seeing last summer that the tapes were recovered in Australia. I searched and found this article:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/110442/WORLD-EXCLUSIVE-N...

"... The revelation of the loss only came two years ago. Dr O'Brien says there is no indication as to when exactly the tapes were lost, but he guesses that it was "way, way back". When Dr O'Brien learnt of the tape loss, he was contacted by Guy Holmes from data recovery company SpectrumData, who offered to try and get hold of the information. Mr Holmes has kept the tapes in a climate-controlled room since then, and it was only when he stumbled upon a 1960s IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive at the Australian Computer Museum Society that his company had the ability to unlock the information. ..."

A more detailed article here, "Fridge-sized tape recorder could crack lunar mysteries", ABC News, Nic MacBean ~ http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm There is a point made in the article by Dr. Harrison (Jack) Schmitt - last astronaut on the moon - that the "dust detector" data collected by Dr. O'Brian is the most significant environmental problem that has to be investigated. Finding the vision tapes while historically significant isn't as important as the data for future missions.

I'm wondering why my comment downmodded; I'd like to know in what way I may have violated community guidelines, so I don't again. I suppose my comment was not useful, is that it?

Yes. Only you know why you hadn't seen the coverage of the lost Apollo tapes. So, your comment was about as useful to the conversation as, "where oh where did I put my car keys?"

Fair enough. I'll keep that in mind for the future.

If his question were taken literally, then that might be a good explanation. But it seems pretty obvious that he is asking why it isn't more widely known that something so important was lost.

Two potentially instructive responses might be "The lost Apollo 11 tapes have been all over the news and everyone except you knows about them" or "NASA only recently admitted this embarrassing fact and it was released on Sunday morning to minimize media coverage."

BTW, I didn't downvote until his comment was briefly at +2; it wasn't a bad comment, just a vague/rhetorical/possibly-paranoid comment I wouldn't want to encourage.

If he had clarified that he was wondering why it hadn't gotten more coverage, I would have pointed out I remembered a bunch of coverage a few years ago -- coverage that even yielded a Wikipedia article, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes>, with a 3+ year edit history.

Instead, he seemed genuinely interested in why someone would have disliked his comment, so I gave a likely answer.

Your comment was off-topic, but given that this kind of a fluffy article I don't think that's a huge sin. Maybe people assumed you were making some kind of moon landing hoax statement?

Well, the quote was from the 404 page, but I can see how it could be seen as off-topic. In any case, it seems the situation has reversed now, so no point discussing this minor point.

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