Was It All Imaginary?
48 years after the accomplishment of sending three men onto the moon, 6% of the United States still believes the entire event was all a hoax.
This theory has been debunked many times by factual science and detailed observations. However, the answer to a more specific question can easily dismiss an argument that’s been going on for decades – did NASA have the technology to fake a moon landing during the 1960s in the first place? One argument these hoaxers made a claim about is that the video footages of the moon landing were slowed down tapes of people walking in normal gravity, according to Ryan Whitwam who works for geek.com. However, a camera with that capability was not invented at that time. There are two ways to make slow-motion videos – the common way of decreasing the speed of regular recorded videos, or a method called overcranking.
Overcranking is when you film in high speed, then slow it down so it looks normal and smoother. Since the live videos of Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the moon were smooth, they must’ve used a high-speed film camera to fake everything, right? Well, there’s one problem. They had no high-speed film cameras to begin with to film hour long videos. Even if people used the regular method of making slow motion videos, there’s still a flaw in that idea. They had magnetic disc recorders that could get 30 seconds of normal speed videos and slow it down to 90 seconds if the video was filmed in 10 frames per second (fps). Here’s the kicker – there are 143 minutes worth of footage.
Unless NASA had buckets and buckets of magnetic discs, there’s no possible way they could’ve done this. Not to mention that future space missions ran on 30 fps, which would be three times harder to film. Many theorists say that the crew filmed the whole event in a Hollywood studio. However, according to a document titled “Did NASA Fake the Moon Landing?” in the Galegroup database, the astronauts were wearing reflective gold helmets that were wide-angled. If they were in a studio, it would’ve reflected the entire set-up, such as the lighting and cameras. That’s why in movies such as the 2001 “Space Odyssey,” astronauts in the film wore clear white armor to avoid these errors.
In today’s world, we can easily allow realistic reflections, but that wasn’t the case during the 1960s since they didn’t have the capability to do that. They also didn’t have any microcomputers, digital image processors, or 3-D animation softwares to create sci-fi scenes. “People forget how primitive video technology was,” as S.G. Collins said. “A Man On the Moon” by Andrew Chaikin goes into details about the technology used to make Apollo 11 possible.
Your average cellphone has more computing power than the spacecrafts used to send people to the moon. They used the Saturn V rocket, which was about 363 feet tall and weighed over 6.2 million pounds. The Saturn V computer guided the rocket into Earth’s orbit automatically, which is pretty impressive. They also had something called the Primary Guidance, Navigation, and Control System, also known as PGNCS. It says what it’s used for in the name, and in case it ever fails, they have a back-up system called the Abort Guidance System.
As Collins previously said, “America had the technology to strap three men to a rocket and then land them on the lunar surface. What America didn’t have was the filmmaking technology to convincingly fake that event.” Nobody can say for sure if the moon landing was real, as none of us except the supposed astronauts have stepped on its surface. However, we can use the sources we have and the obvious evidence to prove it certainly wasn’t fake instead of making naive assumptions. In the future, we can use the data we’ve received from these missions, so let’s go beyond our reach and touch the stars.
