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NASA reaches its outer limit

The agency, seeing films and TV with space themes as a way to keep public interest in its programs, readily consults on Hollywood projects. But it has pulled back from 'Apollo 18.'

A cracked cosmonaut helmet, footsteps in the moon dust, a mysterious flash of light outside a spaceship window — these are some of the images the Weinstein Co. has released from "Apollo 18," a documentary-style sci-fi thriller opening Friday that the studio is marketing as a movie culled from "found footage" from a U.S. space mission.

"In 1972, the United States sent two astronauts on a secret mission to the moon," the trailer says. "Despite decades of denial by NASA and the Department of Defense, classified footage of the mission was leaked to the media."

To recap: Evidence of a vast, 40-year government conspiracy is allegedly about to be exposed by the movie studio that brought you "Piranha 3D" and "Scream 4."

A number of this summer's openly fictional films — Michael Bay's alien robot sequel "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," Terrence Malick's celestial drama "The Tree of Life," the speculative sci-fi indie "Another Earth" — have wrestled with galactic themes and relied on NASA scientists, materials and imagery. Last year, in fact, the U.S. space agency collaborated on nearly 100 documentaries, 35 TV shows and 16 feature films.

But after initially touting "Apollo 18" as one of its upcoming fiction film collaborations, NASA — which, for the record, says the last manned mission to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972 — has begun to back away from the movie.

"Apollo 18 is not a documentary," said Bert Ulrich, NASA's liaison for multimedia, film and television collaborations. "The film is a work of fiction, and we always knew that. We were minimally involved with this picture. We never even saw a rough cut. The idea of portraying the Apollo 18 mission as authentic is simply a marketing ploy. Perhaps a bit of a 'Blair Witch Project' strategy to generate hype."

With the U.S. space agency at a crossroads — it retired its space shuttle program in July, it's relying on Russian rockets to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station, and it's struggling to find funding and political support for its next mission of sending astronauts to an asteroid in about 15 years — NASA realizes that keeping the public interested in the extraterrestrial is critical to its future.

There was a time when NASA's actual missions — not the "Blair Witch" versions of them — were enough. But without another high-profile NASA project on the runway, working with Hollywood is key.

"It's a wonderful way to reach the public through these huge media means like feature films and television shows, and it can inspire people in an interesting way, and it also can instruct people about what space exploration is all about," Ulrich said.

Sometimes, as with "Apollo 18," attempts at collaboration break down. Another film that the agency refused to work on was the 2000 Warner Bros. bomb "The Red Planet," about making Mars safe for human colonization.

"The science was just so off the wall that eventually we felt, 'You guys go ahead and make your movie.' If there's something that's going to be so misleading to the public that we don't want to participate, then we'll say no," said Ulrich. "The big thing is, we want to make sure we're not misleading the public completely. So if all of a sudden there's a change in what was shot or a change in the storyboard, they're supposed to inform us."

But the boundaries are often expansive. Consider "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," which Paramount Pictures rereleased in Imax theaters on Aug. 26. It proposes an alternative reason for the 1960s space race — that it was triggered by the discovery of an alien spaceship that had crashed on the moon.

Last October, NASA allowed director Michael Bay to film key scenes on one of its shuttle launch pads at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin appears in a cameo scene in the film opposite lead robot Optimus Prime.

"With the shutting down of the shuttle program, [NASA] were very interested in the timing of our movie and showing some of the positive aspects of the space program as they're winding down," said "Transformers" producer Ian Bryce. "Our movie shooting there didn't have anything to do with the shutdown, but they viewed it as being helpful and as maintaining their visibility at this time."

NASA has made some more formal gestures of outreach to Hollywood. In December, the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge hosted a workshop for filmmakers called NASA 101, in which astronauts and scientists addressed producers and screenwriters on subjects such as robotics, astrobiology and Mars.

"We don't know if people are going to go out and write scripts on this stuff, but we felt it was important to tell people this is where we are with space exploration," Ulrich said. In one session about the look, smell and feel of space, astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson described her view from the panoramic shuttle window as akin to sitting "in a bowl full of stars."

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/01/entertainment/la-et-nasa-holly
wood-20110901

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Recording of Russia's lunar gatecrash attempt released

Dramatic and previously unheard recordings of the moment the Russians tried to gatecrash the American's Moon landing in 1969 have today been released by The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics.

The recordings were made in the Control Room of the famous Jodrell Bank Observatory, where astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell and colleagues were listening to transmissions coming from the moon.

They were buried in the archives until astronomers at Jodrell Bank started researching material to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings.

In July 1969 the telescopes at Jodrell Bank were tracking the American's Eagle Lander carrying astronauts onto the surface of the Moon.

At the same time Jodrell Bank scientists were also tracking the unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 15, which was trying to land on the Moon, collect samples of lunar soil and rock and then return to Earth to scoop the US Apollo 11 mission.

The data captured by the Lovell radio telescope revealed this rocket orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on 21st July - just a few hours before the Americans lifted off from the Moon's surface.

In the newly released recordings, which were made over three days in mid-July of 1969, Sir Bernard Lovell - founder of the Jodrell Bank Observatory and the man behind the famous Lovell radio telescope - can be heard narrating events. Transmissions from the Apollo 11 astronauts can also be heard in the background.

Sir Bernard notes a change in the orbit of Luna 15 to take it closer to the US landing site and later reports a rumour from a 'well-informed source in Moscow' that the craft is about to land.

People in the Control Room can then be heard exclaiming 'it's landing' and 'it's going down much too fast' as they track Luna 15's final moments before it crashes.

A voice is later heard saying: "I say, this has really been drama of the highest order."

Read an interview with Sir Bernard Lovell in The Times newspaper about the events captured in these recordings.

http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/news/2009/luna15-apollo11/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/5737854/Russian-spacecraft-la
nded-on-moon-hours-before-Americans.html

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Originally posted by whozit:
This story has been done TOO MANY times, there's a reason it taked in theaters. I'll wait for it to come to cable, and even then I'll tilt back a few drinks to watch it.

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Great script, great acting, great lighting, great sound, great props, great directing, great editing, great budgeting, great marketing. Excellent movie all around, but the Ritalin/caffeine/tobacco/pacifier addicts demand more explosions and "giant moonster rabbit" slashers to avoid attention deficit.

"Apollo 18" used a moon stage in an old paper recycling factory with "hundreds of truckloads" of lunar simulant, and "hanging mural" backgrounds or CGI backgrounds by a Russian animation company. The rover was custom made in Canada. LEM was the same prop used in the movie "Apollo 13". The steampunk Russian LK lander was built on site in Canada. Interior LEM video was shot with a $200 GoPro SD camera with extra blurring to simulate NASA's $50-million hi-res Westinghouse cams (also with lots of extra blurring added on purpose).

NASA's "advisor" to "Apollo 18", Gerry Griffin, a/k/a "NASA's most important asset" and former Director of the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Deputy Director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and Flight director during the real Apollo 13, used his government welfare dole to extort the movie from straying too far into conspiracy, revealing too many secrets, or failing to perpetrate official myths. For example, Griffen showed them how to fake lunar gravity using wires and a harness -- removed by CGI in post production -- no radio delay from Earth to moon, no stars in space, and no shots of rocket exhaust from the LEM, just like the real Apollo. Despite the writer's and director's commentary with obligatory suckup to NASA, "Apollo 18" successfully proves how easy it was for NASA to fake a moon landing on a $5-million budget...and how stoopid NASA thinks sheeple are:

MOVIESONLINE.CA: "The True Story The Apollo 18 Movie Was Based On. The Apollo 18, 19 and 20 flights were cancelled by NASA and never happened. To sum up NASA's stance is Apollo 18 / 19 and 20 did not happen.

SPACE.COM: "'Apollo 18' Offers Conspiracy Theory, to NASA's Surprise. The premise does begin in fact. NASA originally planned an Apollo 18 mission to the moon (along with Apollo 19 and 20), but those flights were canceled in 1970 due to budgetary constraints. The studio has been pushing the "reality" aspect of the film, going so far as to offer up a "famous scientist and researcher of UFO phenomena," Stanton Friedman, for interviews. 'People ask why was there no Apollo 18 mission,' Friedman said in press materials. 'I ask, what happened to Apollo 18 and Apollo 19? They were both paid for and astronauts were trained. What happened to these missions?' Friedman hasn't been allowed to view the film yet, according to the Los Angeles Times, but said he's open to the possibility that the Apollo 18 mission did occur and that NASA's been covering it up. NASA provided the producers with public domain footage from the actual moon missions and even allowed them to use its official "meatball" logo on the actors' spacesuits. But the space agency said it had no formal involvement in the film. Initially, NASA officials didn't realize the moviemakers planned to portray the story as a real-life exposé. 'We were always under the impression it was fictional -- it was basically never touted as anything but fictional, said Bert Ulrich, NASA's liaison for multimedia, film and television collaborations. 'Apollo 18' isn't the first suggestion that America's manned moon missions did not go as planned. Ever since the first lunar landing in 1969, some have insisted the moon achievement was a hoax. 'There are a handful of stories that are cyclical, and among them are the moon conspiracy theorists,' Jacobs told SPACE.com. 'It seems that no matter what you produce, they just don't believe it.' In choosing how to respond to the 'Apollo 18' marketing campaign, NASA was wary of severing a relationship with the filmmakers. 'We were hesitant to back out because of concerns that that would feed into the marketing of conspiracy theorists,' Jacobs said. 'We were in a difficult situation.'"

L.A. TIMES: "NASA reaches its outer limit - The agency, seeing films and TV with space themes as a way to keep public interest in its programs, readily consults on Hollywood projects. But it has pulled back from 'Apollo 18.' 'Apollo 18 is not a documentary,' said Bert Ulrich, NASA's liaison for multimedia, film and television collaborations. 'The film is a work of fiction, and we always knew that. We were minimally involved with this picture. We never even saw a rough cut. The idea of portraying the Apollo 18 mission as authentic is simply a marketing ploy.' But the boundaries are often expansive. Consider 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon,' which Paramount Pictures rereleased in Imax theaters on Aug. 26. It proposes an alternative reason for the 1960s space race -- that it was triggered by the discovery of an alien spaceship that had crashed on the moon. Last October, NASA allowed director Michael Bay to film key scenes on one of its shuttle launch pads at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin appears in a cameo scene in the film opposite lead robot Optimus Prime."

Suspension of Disbelief?

"Film Recovery" - The only film used by Apollo were still photos. "Apollo 18" is the only Apollo mission to actually take lighting for a camera (flashes in the crater). Apollo video was broadcast live then recorded on computer tape on Earth. "Apollo 18" took extra videocams and transmitters to make sure NASA could watch the astronauts eaten alive while eating popcorn in mission control (or Darth Cheney's basement lair at the Pentagon - yes, Dick Cheney ran the Vietnam Wars during Apollo). BluRay has alternate happy endings and deleted scenes to explain recovery of film and the DOD package. Perfect excuse for a sequel, as the profitable "Alien" franchise proved.

The only FAIL on this movie is the preposterous idea that humans can ever walk on the radioactive Moon and survive, then return safely to the Earth in a tin can without steerable rocket motors that actually turn on. But then again, it's science FICTION -- an oxymoron for morons. Hermit crabs are more likely to exist under the pressurized surface of the Moon, drinking expedient water and insulated from the deadly gamma radiation, as NASA admits is required for astronaut survival. We're still waiting for Capricorn Two, or a Capricorn One on the MOON this time. At least the movie didn't have spacecrab rocks marked with the letter "C", a lesson NASA needs to learn. Funny how NASA employees constantly allege "off the record" there really was a secret Moon program, using technology "far superior" to the crappy Apolloscam (Russian cannon fodder), "So quit saying we never went to the Moon!"

Somebody needs to tell NASA there really was an Apollo 18 with Russians in it -- the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project launched on July 15, 1975, starring astronauts Thomas P. Stafford, Vance D. Brand, Donald K. "Deke" Slayton, Alexei Leonov, and Valeri Kubasov. "Apollo 18" showed astronauts AFRAID of dying by loss of air pressure, something the "real" Apollo astronauts ignored while running, dancing, jumping, singing and falling down on the "moon". No rocket exhaust, no time delay, soldier-astronauts who complain about the Department of Defense lying to them for homicidal "controlled experiments..." Maybe the real reason NASA allegedly refused to cooperate with "Apollo 18" is it was TOO real? The "real" NASA footage in "Apollo 18" looks more fake than the fakes. Did the movie writers know there was already an Apollo 18 with Russians, or were they ignorant of that, as NASA allegedly was? Should this have been named "Apollo 19"? Does NASA think alien robots are "more real"? NASA's media liaison, Bert Ulrich, was careful not to have a heart attack like NASA spokesman Brian Welch, who gave up trying to debunk Fox news and wanted NASA to produce a video proving humans walked on the Moon. Even the "Apollo 18" commentary asked how Apollo "flew to the Moon in a coffee pot" using "archaic technology"?

BTW NASA says there's too much gamma radiation on the Moon for space crabs to survive, 48,000 pounds of missing Apollo videotape was found at McDonalds and decoded by computers in a chickencoop, after this movie was released NASA SWAT raided Dennys looking for Neil Armstrong's missing moon rock, "Tricky Dick" Nixon actually wrote a speech about dead Apollo astronauts as used in "Apollo 18", and JFK got his head blown off "back and to the left" after warning about secret societies and his veto of Nixon's Operation Northwoods. Good grammar requires capitalization of names for REAL planets and moons, and dictionaries define a lower case "moon" as a movie set. Good thing for NASA and Hollywood that most Amerikans are dumb as space rocks found in Antarctica.

LONDON TELEGRAPH: "Russian spacecraft landed on moon hours before Americans. A previously unheard recording of a Russian spacecraft attempting to beat NASA's Apollo 11 in 1969's race to the moon has been released. The recordings from Jodrell's Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 - just a few hours before the Americans lifted off. Sir Bernard notes a change in the orbit of Luna 15 to take it closer to the US landing site and later reports a rumour from a 'well-informed source in Moscow' that the craft is about to land. People in Jodrell's control room can then be heard shouting "it's landing" and "it's going down much too fast" as they track Luna 15's final moments before it 'crashes'. The recordings have been released by The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings."

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: "One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures. Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard. 'We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went,' SAID John Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes radi otelescope. Many people involved had retired or died. Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings."

SPACE.COM: "Tale of the TV tapes: Apollo 11 mission archive mystery unspools. Scads of the tapes were produced -- and now a search is on to locate them. But Apollo 11 is a memory rewind -- now over 37 years old. Nobody is quite sure just how much longer the original slow-scan tapes will last... that is, if they haven't already been erased. Making it tough to track down the whereabouts of the data, many of those involved in the archiving of the tapes have since moved on, retired or passed away, 'taking their corporate memory of where the tapes are with them,' John Sarkissian, operations scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's (CSIRO) Parkes Radio Observatory in Parkes, Australia, said. A small independent group of Australian and U.S. Apollo tracking station veterans have embarked on a new search for the Apollo 11 tapes. 'There's a lot of old data that we don't seem to have,' suggested Philip Stooke, Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Geography in London, Ontario, Canada. 'I think more Apollo-era science data is missing too.' Hard at work on an atlas of lunar exploration, Stooke told SPACE.com that he was personally looking for images of the Moon taken by Explorer 49, a NASA radio astronomy mission that settled into lunar orbit in 1973. The probe carried a panoramic camera to monitor the deployment of its booms. 'It seems that the science data were preserved...but not those images,' Stooke said. The entire lunar data hide and seek saga that's alive and well here in the U.S. is being repeated in Russia too. 'I work with people in Moscow who are trying to recover old lunar data,' Stooke added."

THELIVINGMOON.COM: "Lunar Orbiter Tapes Found. Behind the counter of an abandoned McDonalds lie 48,000 lbs of 70mm tape the only copy of extremely high-resolution images of the moon. These tapes were recorded 40 years ago as part of the Apollo program to map the lunar surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward. They have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified as they reveal the extreme precision of our spy satellites. Recovering the data has proven to be very difficult, requiring technological archeology. The only working version of the Ampex tape player ($300K when new) was discovered in a chicken coop and restored with the help of the original designer. The Pirate flag is purely motivational, methinks, for a skunkworks improvising what was thought to be impossible. In this McDonalds, the only copy of that data is about to be resurrected. Erik and I dropped in for a visit after the LUNAR rocket launch at NASA Ames. And yes, the conspiracy continues, with McDonalds' long and sordid history with the Apollo program... The McDonalds is located at Nasa Ames Moffett field which has basically been closed. Moffett Field's facilities available to residents include a pool, post office, golf course, tennis courts, gas station, and several small shops and restaurants, including an on-site McDonald's which closed April 30, 2008."

SCIENCE.NASA.GOV: "RADIOACTIVE MOON - How much radiation awaits lunar colonists? A new NASA mission aims to find out. The surface of the Moon is baldly exposed to cosmic rays and solar flares, and some of that radiation is very hard to stop with shielding. Furthermore, when cosmic rays hit the ground, they produce a dangerous spray of secondary particles right at your feet. All this radiation penetrating human flesh can damage DNA. On the Moon, you might expect the ground, at least, to provide some relief, with the solid body of the Moon blocking radiation from below. Not so. When galactic cosmic rays collide with particles in the lunar surface, they trigger little nuclear reactions that release yet more radiation in the form of neutrons. The lunar surface itself is radioactive!"

NASA.GOV: "Solar System: Sun, Moon, and Earth. Surprisingly, the Moon is a moderately bright gamma-ray source. As Thompson says, 'The only part of the electromagnetic spectrum where the Moon is brighter than the Sun is gamma rays.' Being a cold, mostly inert object, the Moon is utterly incapable of producing gamma rays on its own. But cosmic-ray particles slamming into the lunar surface produce secondary gamma rays."

SPACEDAILY.COM: "No manned spacecraft now exists that can withstand the radiation from the Van Allen belts, through which a craft must traverse to make it to the Moon." March 9, 1998

NASAWATCH.COM: "The men and women of NASA and their contractors can do anything this country wants them to do. NASA has been hindered greatly by ill-advised international alliances and fuzzy program direction. And when this is coupled with the lack of respect -- and sometimes downright hostility -- shown by agency leadership in Washington for the rank and file in the field who must carry out these programs, the situation has been made even worse. NASA's top leadership in Washington says many of the right words when the cameras are running, but it's what they are doing when the cameras are off that worry me. Many of the low- and mid-level people in NASA and their contractors are reaching the end of their ropes. This is due to an insensitive, unfriendly, and disrespectful air that emanates from the highest floor at NASA Headquarters. If we lose the unwavering commitment of a significant number of the low- and mid-level people, NASA will be in even deeper trouble than we see it in today."
-Gerry Griffin, NASA Flight Director during the real Apollo 13 and Apollo 18 moon missions, and technical advisor to "Apollo 18"

"And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. This is the great dragon of chapter 12, Satan or Azazel. He has a number of names, but in each case, he is the king of all the demons, Lucifer, who became Satan."
-Revelation 9:11, Christian Bible, KJV with Forerunner Commentary

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