Hacker News Reader

Comment by iJohnDoe | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the information. Very helpful.

My conspiracy side thinks NASA wants the opportunity to review the high resolution photos and video before they are revealed to the public.

View on HN

To be fair, NASA _is_ probably reviewing the high res imagery before releasing it, but for a much more mundane reason than any conspiracy theory. A lot of contractors worked on Orion. NASA is responsible for not accidentally leaking any trade secrets that may be visible in imagery.

If the fundamental delay to NASA releasing images is leak of proprietary data, that is a pretty good argument against the continued existence of NASA as a public agency.

Why? Public Agencies work with private parties and individuals all the time. This brings constraints on what they can do with information.

There is an enormous spectrum between "we cannot release some proprietary data from COTS components" and "we cannot release images without approval from our vendors".

(Not that I am convinced that this is the real reason why NASA is not releasing images quickly.)

Waiting for approval from vendors is a big difference from NASA reviewing the photos themselves, which was the original claim

I would find such a delay unacceptable for a public agency. Anything visible in the photos should be releasable.

No conspiracy or funniness to be had. ITAR is the main limiting factor to releasing images/videos at this point. Next is the download rate and the high res images are not high priority since operations can be run using lower resolution. We all need to remember mission success is the highest priority. We will get the good stuff we want, just not immediately.

>ITAR is the main limiting factor to releasing images/videos at this point.

Pictures of the moon fall under ITAR?

Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems.

That's not true. Everyone knows that Coppola forced them to shoot on-site.

Coppola: If I'm going to make a fake moon landing video it's going to be the best damn one ever created. We're shooting on site, and that's final!

I believe someone did the math and supposedly showed that it would have been cheaper to actually land on the moon than fake it with what they had available at the time.

It used to be Kubrick

They have to paint out by hand the wires that enable the astronauts to walk like they're in low gravity. This takes time.

Automation is their friend. Just "hot pink" those wires and batch the process =P

"That's no moon. That's the set Stanley Kubrick built to film the fake moon landings."

Gotta edit out the decepticons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com