Mycroft
Ministry of Serendipity
Did people go to the moon in 1969? I’m not totally sure, I wasn’t on the moon in 1969. Did they fake going to the moon? No, I’m certain they didn’t.
Because they couldn’t.
Some people say that, in 1969, NASA was incapable of sending a man to the moon, but that they were capable of filming the whole thing in a TV studio. In fact, the opposite is true.
In the last 1960’s they did have the technological capability, an requisite madness, to send three guys to the moon and back. But they did not have the technology to fake it on video.
Video. Not film.
The idea is easy to understand, of course. The US government lie every day and, if they haven’t lied to you already, they just haven’t had their morning coffee yet. So it’s easy to understand why some people might think that the US government lied about sending men to the moon. Especially if you weren’t alive during that period, and you don’t know much about the technology profiles of the day.
The later you were born, the more all powerful “movie magic” seems. Nowadays it would be very easy to fake the moon landing and, by contrast, seem to have forgotten how to do it for real. Which is another story more to do with the geo-politico-military situation of the 1960’s.
But in the 1960’s, it was the other way around.
Ever since the 1920’s, rocket scientists had been trying to improve the performance of liquid-fuelled rockets and their guidance systems. They wanted to go into outer space, and the people who financed such projects wanted better bombs.
By 1942 the Peenemünde Army Research Centre already had a fully function sub-orbital rocket called the Aggregate Fear. Later known, more popularity, as the V2 Rocket.
After World War 2, the German Rocket Scientists responsible for the V2 went to work for two riven superpowers, The US and the USSR, and went to insane lengths to out-do each other on the world stage of Rocket Science. It was a global dick-wagging contest on a scale the world had never seen before, and hasn’t seen since.
Technological progress in the Cold War was mostly a competition in Aerospace, Rocket Science and Weapons Development. That was the kind of engineering people strove to excel in, and it was extremely well-funded and, by the mid-60’s, limited space travel was quite possible.
While all this was happening, video technology had gotten wider. And that was it. Mostly the people behind video, film, and television were still scratching their heads over how to make television and film colour.
Here’s where our story diverges.
In one story, the US government wastes 20 million dollars to send three men to the moon, plant a plaque to say ‘we came in peace for all mankind’, bring them back home and then turn its attention to the summary bombing of Cambodia.
In the other story, NASA - at some point - realises that they simply can’t send men to the moon. So to avoid humiliation, they hire Stanley Kubrick to produce and direct the moon landing telecasts. Because, you know, he did such a great job of 2001.
Years later, once the Apollo astronauts are finally getting medicare, some people on the Internet begin to point out flaws in the photographs taken during the Apollo 11 mission. But when you listen to them, they seem to not know very much about photography, or video, or lighting, or even perspective.
So we should have seen stars in the sky? No we shouldn’t. The camera was set to expose for broad daylight. If they had been exposing for stars, the image would have looked more like this:
The shadows diverge unrealistically across the landscape. No, they don’t. If you shine two lightsources at an object from different angles, you get two shadows.
So this:
Would have looked like this:
If that single light source was even close to the action, you would notice a falloff in brightness across the terrain. But you don’t, because the light-source was 150,000,000km away. Too far away for the Inverse Square Laws to make a difference. Get it?
The problem is that all of these discussions ignore one simple fact: In 1969, it was not technologically possible to fake the moon landing. People forget how primitive video was in 1969. Granted it was an amazing achievement in electronics, but there was a lot they simply couldn’t do.
The pivotal claim for the Apollo hoax theory - without which it all falls apart - is that what people saw on TV in 1969 was slow-motion video footage of people running around in a film studio made to look like the moon.
If it wasn’t slow motion, it couldn’t have happened on earth. Right?
Let’s have a look at how slow-motion works in film and video.
There are two ways to slow motion. The first is that you shoot something at normal speed, and play it back slow, and the other is that you shoot it fast and play it back at normal speed.
The second method is called ‘overcranking’. It looks smoother, and more realistic, but you’re sampling natural motion at a higher framerate.
But that means NASA would have had to shoot it on film, using high-speed film cameras. Why? Because in 1969 there were no high-speed video cameras. And there wouldn’t be until 1973. The electronics just didn’t exist.
Some people did have a magnetic disk recorders which could capture normal speed video and play it back in slow-motion, however. It was called the AMPEX HS-100. They used it sports-replays and you could record about 30-seconds of normal speed video and play it back at 10FPS for a total of 90 second of slow-motion footage.
Now I shall use 10FPS as our model, because that’s what they used on the Apollo 11 mission. They had a non-interlaced slow-scan TV camera especially made for that mission. Later missions would use regular NTSC video cameras running at 29,97 FPS (which would be three times harder to fake, by the way).
Bear in mind that when people today watch documentaries about the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, they’re only seeing highlights. Snippets of video footage from the most interesting or memorable moments of those events. But in 1969, 600 million people - such as my father - were all staring at a continuous lunar telecast that went on for a long time. If you ask your parents or grandparents, they’ll tell you that it was actually pretty boring some of the time.
16 Minutes into the EVA, they turn on the video camera. Four minutes later you get the ‘one small step’ speech, then they put the camera onto a tripod and proceed about their business. Then they climb back into the lunar module and the whole thing is over. By this time the video camera has been running 143 minutes in total.
So if we’re going to fake this on video and play it back at 1/3 speed, we only need to record about 47 minutes of continuous live action video on disk.
Well that’s a lot more than the 30 seconds the AMPEX HS-100 was able to hold.
But...nasa is special. Maybe they had a big disk recorder, right?
Well how much bigger would it need to be? Ninety-Five times bigger? I’m not sure. Government agencies are powerful, of course, but they’re not limitless.
Then again, they are NASA. Perhaps they did have some special method of overcranking video in 1969 for 143 minutes. Maybe they had high-speed electronics that the rest of the world didn’t have, and never knew about?
This would, of course, contradict the claim that the navigation computers of Apollo 11 were too slow. You can’t have it both ways, you can’t be fast and slow at the same time.
So wouldn’t it just be easier to shoot all this on film? In 1969 we already knew how to overcrank film, and for Apollo 11 we’d only need to shoot at 30FPS and play it back at 10FPS.
So what would we need to do in order to achieve this?
We’d shoot on 35mm. This would reduce film grain (that’s what Kubrick would have done).
Now at normal speed 35mm runs at about 90feet per minute. But since we’ll be shooting at 30FPS, we’ll be needing 1,112 feet per minute. We need 47 minutes of original film, so that would be about 5,300 feet of film.
But the problem is that there’s no such thing as a 35mm film magazine that can hold 5,300 feet of film.
Volkswagen, maybe?
But if we shoot 1000 foot loads, you could film the whole thing and store it in five magazines.
So we’ll have to splice. We don’t want to see the splice marks where we put the reels together, because that will alert people to the idea of our fake footage. And since we’re shooting for TV we’ll need to do it in 133 aspect ratio (for the 1960’s) and not 185. Which means we’ll also need to cut A and B rolls with our negatives.
Then we’ll need to print them onto a 5300 foot fine-grained interpositive, then cut an answer print in the film lab.
And then when we’re finished, we’ll need to make sure that everyone who works in the lab dies in mysterious, yet horrible, circumstances.
Now we just need to find a custom-designed telecine that can transfer our 5300 foot answer print to video at 10FPS. Pin registered, of course.
How hard could it be?
Then you need to be certain that in all that splicing, and printing, and transferring, that none of the most common film-artefacts have managed to get onto our giant print. No base scratches, no emulsion flakes, no gate weave, no grain, and not one single fleck of dust.
Because any one of those things would instantly betray the fact that this was a hoax.
Okay so we do that. And then we do it again for five more lunar missions. Only this time we’re using NTCS, so we have to play back at 30FPS, which means we have to shoot at 60FPS, which needs twice the torque, eight times more splices to keep clean, and four times more of a chance that the film will break in the camera.
Do you think that, maybe, it would be just easier to go to the moon?
Because they couldn’t.
Some people say that, in 1969, NASA was incapable of sending a man to the moon, but that they were capable of filming the whole thing in a TV studio. In fact, the opposite is true.
In the last 1960’s they did have the technological capability, an requisite madness, to send three guys to the moon and back. But they did not have the technology to fake it on video.
Video. Not film.
The idea is easy to understand, of course. The US government lie every day and, if they haven’t lied to you already, they just haven’t had their morning coffee yet. So it’s easy to understand why some people might think that the US government lied about sending men to the moon. Especially if you weren’t alive during that period, and you don’t know much about the technology profiles of the day.
The later you were born, the more all powerful “movie magic” seems. Nowadays it would be very easy to fake the moon landing and, by contrast, seem to have forgotten how to do it for real. Which is another story more to do with the geo-politico-military situation of the 1960’s.
But in the 1960’s, it was the other way around.
Ever since the 1920’s, rocket scientists had been trying to improve the performance of liquid-fuelled rockets and their guidance systems. They wanted to go into outer space, and the people who financed such projects wanted better bombs.
By 1942 the Peenemünde Army Research Centre already had a fully function sub-orbital rocket called the Aggregate Fear. Later known, more popularity, as the V2 Rocket.
After World War 2, the German Rocket Scientists responsible for the V2 went to work for two riven superpowers, The US and the USSR, and went to insane lengths to out-do each other on the world stage of Rocket Science. It was a global dick-wagging contest on a scale the world had never seen before, and hasn’t seen since.
Technological progress in the Cold War was mostly a competition in Aerospace, Rocket Science and Weapons Development. That was the kind of engineering people strove to excel in, and it was extremely well-funded and, by the mid-60’s, limited space travel was quite possible.
While all this was happening, video technology had gotten wider. And that was it. Mostly the people behind video, film, and television were still scratching their heads over how to make television and film colour.
Here’s where our story diverges.
In one story, the US government wastes 20 million dollars to send three men to the moon, plant a plaque to say ‘we came in peace for all mankind’, bring them back home and then turn its attention to the summary bombing of Cambodia.
In the other story, NASA - at some point - realises that they simply can’t send men to the moon. So to avoid humiliation, they hire Stanley Kubrick to produce and direct the moon landing telecasts. Because, you know, he did such a great job of 2001.
Years later, once the Apollo astronauts are finally getting medicare, some people on the Internet begin to point out flaws in the photographs taken during the Apollo 11 mission. But when you listen to them, they seem to not know very much about photography, or video, or lighting, or even perspective.
So we should have seen stars in the sky? No we shouldn’t. The camera was set to expose for broad daylight. If they had been exposing for stars, the image would have looked more like this:
The shadows diverge unrealistically across the landscape. No, they don’t. If you shine two lightsources at an object from different angles, you get two shadows.
So this:
Would have looked like this:
If that single light source was even close to the action, you would notice a falloff in brightness across the terrain. But you don’t, because the light-source was 150,000,000km away. Too far away for the Inverse Square Laws to make a difference. Get it?
The problem is that all of these discussions ignore one simple fact: In 1969, it was not technologically possible to fake the moon landing. People forget how primitive video was in 1969. Granted it was an amazing achievement in electronics, but there was a lot they simply couldn’t do.
The pivotal claim for the Apollo hoax theory - without which it all falls apart - is that what people saw on TV in 1969 was slow-motion video footage of people running around in a film studio made to look like the moon.
If it wasn’t slow motion, it couldn’t have happened on earth. Right?
Let’s have a look at how slow-motion works in film and video.
There are two ways to slow motion. The first is that you shoot something at normal speed, and play it back slow, and the other is that you shoot it fast and play it back at normal speed.
The second method is called ‘overcranking’. It looks smoother, and more realistic, but you’re sampling natural motion at a higher framerate.
But that means NASA would have had to shoot it on film, using high-speed film cameras. Why? Because in 1969 there were no high-speed video cameras. And there wouldn’t be until 1973. The electronics just didn’t exist.
Some people did have a magnetic disk recorders which could capture normal speed video and play it back in slow-motion, however. It was called the AMPEX HS-100. They used it sports-replays and you could record about 30-seconds of normal speed video and play it back at 10FPS for a total of 90 second of slow-motion footage.
Now I shall use 10FPS as our model, because that’s what they used on the Apollo 11 mission. They had a non-interlaced slow-scan TV camera especially made for that mission. Later missions would use regular NTSC video cameras running at 29,97 FPS (which would be three times harder to fake, by the way).
Bear in mind that when people today watch documentaries about the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, they’re only seeing highlights. Snippets of video footage from the most interesting or memorable moments of those events. But in 1969, 600 million people - such as my father - were all staring at a continuous lunar telecast that went on for a long time. If you ask your parents or grandparents, they’ll tell you that it was actually pretty boring some of the time.
16 Minutes into the EVA, they turn on the video camera. Four minutes later you get the ‘one small step’ speech, then they put the camera onto a tripod and proceed about their business. Then they climb back into the lunar module and the whole thing is over. By this time the video camera has been running 143 minutes in total.
So if we’re going to fake this on video and play it back at 1/3 speed, we only need to record about 47 minutes of continuous live action video on disk.
Well that’s a lot more than the 30 seconds the AMPEX HS-100 was able to hold.
But...nasa is special. Maybe they had a big disk recorder, right?
Well how much bigger would it need to be? Ninety-Five times bigger? I’m not sure. Government agencies are powerful, of course, but they’re not limitless.
Then again, they are NASA. Perhaps they did have some special method of overcranking video in 1969 for 143 minutes. Maybe they had high-speed electronics that the rest of the world didn’t have, and never knew about?
This would, of course, contradict the claim that the navigation computers of Apollo 11 were too slow. You can’t have it both ways, you can’t be fast and slow at the same time.
So wouldn’t it just be easier to shoot all this on film? In 1969 we already knew how to overcrank film, and for Apollo 11 we’d only need to shoot at 30FPS and play it back at 10FPS.
So what would we need to do in order to achieve this?
We’d shoot on 35mm. This would reduce film grain (that’s what Kubrick would have done).
Now at normal speed 35mm runs at about 90feet per minute. But since we’ll be shooting at 30FPS, we’ll be needing 1,112 feet per minute. We need 47 minutes of original film, so that would be about 5,300 feet of film.
But the problem is that there’s no such thing as a 35mm film magazine that can hold 5,300 feet of film.
Volkswagen, maybe?
But if we shoot 1000 foot loads, you could film the whole thing and store it in five magazines.
So we’ll have to splice. We don’t want to see the splice marks where we put the reels together, because that will alert people to the idea of our fake footage. And since we’re shooting for TV we’ll need to do it in 133 aspect ratio (for the 1960’s) and not 185. Which means we’ll also need to cut A and B rolls with our negatives.
Then we’ll need to print them onto a 5300 foot fine-grained interpositive, then cut an answer print in the film lab.
And then when we’re finished, we’ll need to make sure that everyone who works in the lab dies in mysterious, yet horrible, circumstances.
Now we just need to find a custom-designed telecine that can transfer our 5300 foot answer print to video at 10FPS. Pin registered, of course.
How hard could it be?
Then you need to be certain that in all that splicing, and printing, and transferring, that none of the most common film-artefacts have managed to get onto our giant print. No base scratches, no emulsion flakes, no gate weave, no grain, and not one single fleck of dust.
Because any one of those things would instantly betray the fact that this was a hoax.
Okay so we do that. And then we do it again for five more lunar missions. Only this time we’re using NTCS, so we have to play back at 30FPS, which means we have to shoot at 60FPS, which needs twice the torque, eight times more splices to keep clean, and four times more of a chance that the film will break in the camera.
Do you think that, maybe, it would be just easier to go to the moon?
