The Apollo 11 “Fiber Optic Lie” That Wasn’t
December 18th, 2009
|
| Share |
It’s amazing how hard conspiracy theorists will dig, looking for anything they can cling to as evidence of their pre-conceived notions. Here’s a video which claims to prove the Apollo Program was a hoax because of the mention of “classified fiber optics” in the Westinghouse Lunar Television Camera manual.
Now the reality:
When Westinghouse was asked to design a television camera for the Apollo program, they faced a difficult technical problem. In addition to having to transmit the images within a relatively narrow portion of the spacecraft’s bandwidth, they had to create a camera that would work in the extreme lighting conditions of the moon. With no atmosphere to defuse light and provide some indirect illumination, the conditions could be extremely bright out in the open and extremely dark in shadows. This required a camera with very high dynamic range, but at the same time, the camera had to be as simple and free of adjustment as possible. Astronauts would be too busy with other things to adjust the settings on the television camera during operation.
These requirements exceeded commercial video cameras of the day, but it turned out Westinghouse did have a camera tube that would be perfect for the job. The only problem is that the technology that would make this high dynamic range, automatically-adjusting camera possible was being used as part of a military project to develop low-light television cameras for remote surveillance and weapon guidance work. As the Vietnam War increased in intensity, the US military was turning to advanced low-light optics to help locate the enemy in the dark. Because of this, the technology was classified at the time.
Westinghouse was able to get permission to utilize this classified military technology in the lunar television camera. Specifically, it was something called the “secondary electron conduction” tube, a specialized variety of vidcon tube that was the bleeding edge of military imaging technology of the day. The classified system was more or less hidden in plain sight, as it was built into the lunar television camera but never really acknowledged to the public as being a classified system. Of course, only a handfull of people would ever actually handle or use the television camera and even fewer would ever open it up to service it, so the secret was fairly safe.
As mentioned in the article “TV’s Longest Remote”:
Westinghouse supplied a lot of battle-hardened electronic gear to the Pentagon, including some small black and white television cameras for use on ships and helicopters. Westinghouse also had something that many companies didn’t at the time—a facility for fabricating custom integrated circuits solely for use by the company.
And to make the hand even more attractive, Westinghouse had created a very special television camera pickup tube; one that could run circles around conventional image orthicons and vidicons in terms of size, sensitivity, S/N and lag. This was the secondary electron conduction, or SEC, tube. It had an outstanding dynamic range and was so sensitive that, without stretching the truth too much, it could make pictures of the proverbial black cat in a coal bin at midnight.
And there was one other thing unique about this specialized television system – it used a “fiber optic face plate.” Yes, a fiber optic-based optical adapter that channeled the light from the camera lens into the image sensing tube. In 1969, the same year that the mission was launched, Westinghouse got permission to file for a public patent on the design. The patent, which was granted in 1971 can be seen here. Believe it or not, although the widespread use of optical fiber for high band width communications has only been widespread since the 1980’s, fiber optic technology has actually been around for much longer than that.
And there you have it. A lot less to this whole story than some might want to believe.
It just keeps getting lamer.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 4:28 am and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Just LAME, Misc, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, Space, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
December 18th, 2009 at 6:18 am
Then why do I still not have internet over fibre? Clearly it was a conspiracy to not only lie about man landing on the moon but keep me from getting useful bandwidth too!
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 6:54 am
In all seriousness, I don’t understand how to make the leap from “NASA used classified technology” to “Man didn’t really land on the moon”. Even if I turn my brain off I just can’t work it out.
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 7:43 am
[Other] Matthew said:
Don’t even try Matt, it’s a good way for rational people to hurt themselves.
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
[Other] Matthew said:
You do, at least part of it. All the major internet backbones run over fiber these days. But I do realize your question is why not have fiber all the way to your home and not copper. The answer is that it’s expensive, not so much for the actual material cost, but fiberoptic cable is more expensive and labor intensive to work with and has more expensive fittings. Crimping and interconnecting fiber is a much more involved process than with copper. Coax and twisted pair you just strip and put a compression fitting on.
In any case, you don’t actually need fiber to get pretty damn good internet speeds. You can get a good gigabit of bandwidth over well sheilded twisted pair and you can get several gigabits over a dedicated switched coax connection. Of course, the way its currently setup it doesn’t get you that. Unfortunately, it’s partially the issue of a legacy system
In the US, Verizon is the one company that has pioneered fiber to the home, and in doing so has been able to achieve some pretty blazing speeds. Japan and South Korea also have infrastructure-level fiber to the home in the big cities. Eventually we may see it become the global standard, but as things stand, we’ll probably continue to see copper being the primary means of delivering content to the end user. That doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of room for improvement using copper, though.
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
[Other] Matthew said:
I don’t either. The only thing I can make of it is that NASA and their contractors “lied” to the public when they said that the television camera was made from commercial components, when the truth of the matter was that it also contained some non-commercial components that were reserved for classified military use.
This seems like a stretch and it isn’t much of a “lie” because for one thing, I doubt most of those in NASA outside of the television camera design and operation department were even aware of this fact and secondly the fact that this was omitted from all the literature except for some internal stuff on the camera is not really a lie, so much as a “lie by omission.” It’s likely that in order to get clearance to use the military-grade technology, Westinghouse was told not to publicize it.
Anyway, I know some people think that the idea that “your government has lied to you” is something that can’t be tolerated. Of course, if it’s something that really matters or something devious that the government is up to, that’s one thing, but the fact that the government may be a little deceptive or tight lipped when it comes to military technology is not something I consider unreasonable. Yeah, they lied about the existence of stealth aircraft in the 1980’s, but they did for good reason, because if they came out and said what they had it would have totally compromised the program.
On another note, the tube that was used in the camera was “classified” but not “top secret” or even close. Almost all military developmental stuff is classified by default, but that only means it’s privileged information, not that it’s the highest order of privileged and critical information. If they let Westinghouse file a regular patent on it in 1969 then it was clearly not considered a super-secret kind of thing by that time (Not that it even matters in any way)
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I’m kinda glad the no-moonies made this claim, actually, because it led to this debunking which in turn provided some really AWESOME information about that camera! Very very cool stuff!
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Calli Arcale said:
A really great read on the technology of the camera and the sensors used can be found here:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat7.pdf
It seems that the tube this was developed from was actually a two-stage tube with a variable image intensifier that used the fiber-optic element. It’s like the grand-daddy of modern night vision scopes, but this one wasn’t developed exclusively for night use, hence the high dynamic range and auto-gain.
Another interesting thing: it states in the PDF that the media releases clearly stated that the SEC tube was used in the camera. it was pretty much out in the open, but the one thing that they never mentioned was the significance of this or that it was the same tube used in classified military systems. The project manager said “We did not bring to attention the classification”
There’s more great info in there as well. To keep the camera small and energy effecient, they produced some customized integrated circuits, including some of the first multi flip-flop and gate arrays used in this kind of an application. It was used to allow for very low power internal switching and control.
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
drbuzz0 said:
A truly fascinating read! One thing that I find a bit disturbing though, is the description of how the images were handled from later Apollo flights. They were beamed from Spain to a satellite to a receiver station to a video processing lab to Houston and then to television stations. There had to be a lot of quality loss there!
If they didn’t bother to archive the Apollo-11 tapes, I’d say it’s hopeless that any of the other missions have tapes that are not recorder after all the reprocessing and retransmitting. What a travesty to our history that they went to such effort to build such an amazing system and never even cared enough to preserve the best copies of the events so that they could be enjoyed in the future.
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Looks like your website is under attack from supernatural forces…
First of all: Nostradamus demolishes “atheism”
__________________________________________________ __
wait, wait…
I forgot something…
you little ****s even talk about me….
GOATS ON FIRE….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssFaIhJkLsk
LIBERATION!
Sing from the rooftops:
“Atheism is dead!”
http://www.conspiracycafe.net/forum/index.php?/topic/25104-atheist-apocalypse/page__pid__117856_
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK50So-yYRU
BYE BYE ATHEISM
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Looks like your website is under attack from supernatural forces…
First of all: Nostradamus demolishes “atheism”
__________________________________________________ __
wait, wait…
I forgot something…
you little ****s even talk about me….
GOATS ON FIRE….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssFaIhJkLsk
LIBERATION!
Sing from the rooftops:
“Atheism is dead!”
http://atheiskeptihumanist.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=90
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
drbuzzo
you’re a DEAD MAN….
http://www.forumgarden.com/forums/conspiracy-theories/49602-atheism-dead.html
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
http://www.unfacts.org/factsforum/viewtopic.php?p=25533&sid=084c3587e732bed1bbb96bf6b18ee916
SUPERNATURAL FORCES WILL ANNIHILATE YOU…
your commentary on NOSTRADAMUS will cost you your LIFE…
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
The only reason I am keeping the above comments approved and posted is so that they can be seen and verified as being posted here when I contact the Montreal and Quebec Providential Police departments. I hope everyone understands. I’m not deleting it so that it can be kept up as it is to be seen as evidence.
The postings are from a person who is very disturbed and mentally ill. Also, he appears to not be very intelligent. He is believed to be afflicted with a narcissistic personality. His threats and psychotic actions have been brought to the attention of the authorities before, and I’m hoping that if I report them it will just make it clear how disturbed this person is. If the police get enough individual reports against someone, they’re likely to eventually realize that action needs to be taken.
This person probably needs to be declared functionally insane and incapable of understanding reality to the degree necessary to live freely in society.
The mentally ill idiot’s name is Dennis Markuze (AKA David Mabus) of Montreal, Quebeck. He has gone through a number of ISP’s due to his extreme and violent delusions and the trouble he has caused due to them. He’s a failed used computer salesman who at one time or another was responsible for reselling off-lease monitors. He may still be.
http://theatheistmind.info/2009/09/18/update-on-dennis-markuze/
This site has some of the addresses and phone numbers he has used:
http://whois.domaintools.com/usedmonitorshop.com
Quote Comment
December 18th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
It goes without saying that if you need any help interfacing with La Sûreté du Québec, or the SPVM (Montreal police) over this, you can get in touch with me at any time.
Quote Comment
December 19th, 2009 at 1:46 am
DV82XL said:
Yeah, I’m not sure what department I should contact. I’m honestly not the type normally to try to go to the authorities or make trouble where there’s just a lot of hot air blowing around. I have seen what this guy has sent to others and I’ve gotten email from him. Some are not so veiled. “God has commanded me to kill you and the police can’t help you” is one he sent to PZ Meyers.
What concerns me is that this guy is so out of his mind and seems to be getting worse, he may go to some event and who knows what he’s liable to do. There are various speaking events, lectures series and other things that happen all over the place from time to time, sometimes hosted by a university or a local group. People like Michael Shermer, James Randi, PZ Meyers and so on are frequently at public events and if there were one where he was, the worry is what he might be tempted to do.
I should add that the reason for concern is that there have been some close calls before, as there had been some very disturbed people who were upset about views on psychics turned away from a skeptic confrence a few years ago by security (I don’t know the details, but apparently they were violently off their rocker) and a year ago, an author of a book refuting religion was attacked in Tornoto and received minor injuries before others came to his aid and the attackers ran away. They apparently were screaming prayers and trying to get the devil out of him.
This guy strikes me as such a complete nut that if something isn’t done to keep him under control he’s liable to pull that kind of **** if he crosses paths with something he finds objectionable.
By the way: Hence forth, lets us resume the topic of the lunar television camera, the Apollo mission and the wacky conspiracy and hoax theorists
Quote Comment
December 19th, 2009 at 1:58 am
I don’t really follow the logic of the claim being made. They say “you should be skeptical” that a camera from 1966 would be classified and have fiberoptics? Why? If it had something advanced, it probably would be classified. And what does it matter that it says this? If nothing else, it proves Westinghouse went to a lot of trouble to build a specialized television camera. They wouldn’t need to if it were to be filmed in a studio.
Also, it’s apparently NOT classified anymore, as there’s plenty of information on it.
The only “Lie” that you could make any case for at all is that NASA said the camera was made from off the shelf, public components. True, they were off the shelf, but not all the parts were “public” at the time. I don’t know if you can even call that a lie though, because it sounds like they never really told anyone who didn’t need to know the status of the classified components, so the PR department at NASA, which would have made any statements on it, they probably didn’t even know there was anything in the camera that was classified in any way.
I just don’t see what this has to do with anything. Can anyone please explain the logic here?
Quote Comment
December 19th, 2009 at 2:05 am
SPVM cyber-crime can be contacted at 514 393-1133, La Sûreté du Québec at 514 598-4141.
Sûreté however is likely going to ask you to file a complaint with SPVM because of jurisdictional issues, and SPVM is going to insist that you report it to your local cyber-crime unit first, or at least this is what I gather.
Quote Comment
December 19th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
It goes to show how much effort and development went into the Apollo program. This is fascinating stuff, because they actually created a camera with better dynamic range and gain that existing cameras and at the same time made it so small. Just making it that small alone was an achievement, even if it were not any better than studio cameras of the day.
It’s easy to forget it now, because since the invention of the CCD it has become easy to make video cameras that are tiny, in some cases smaller than a sugar cube, but before that, they needed a scanning electron tube in them and to get descent quality it normally had to be quite large. Add to this the fact that the tube needed high voltage and the circuitry needed low voltage and the need for a sync and sweep. You had to have a HV transformer, a rectifier, oscillators. The TV cameras of the day weighed a good couple hundred pounds at least. Forget about color tv cameras, by the way. Those were really three TV cameras with combined optics, so multiply this all by three.
Before the mid-1970’s, portable cameras just about didn’t exist. When an event was to be broadcast live, they needed to have hydraulic lifts and motorized carts to move the cameras off the tv truck. They were beasts. Most on-scene tv coverage was not live and they didn’t even bother with tv cameras, they used motion picture cameras and then developed the film and telecined it video.
All this effort put into a crowing technical achievement and all these bastards can do is pick through it and find something that they don’t understand so they can take a dump on it. Wouldn’t it be nice if they actually bothered to research it out a bit. Of course if they did, it would destroy their little pet hoax theory.
Quote Comment