VideoFromSpace
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2020
13:09 · 1.4M views · Jan 29, 2013
A filmmaker explains why the Apollo moon landing footage could not have been faked in a studio, based on the video and film technology of the late 1960s. He walks through the limits of cameras, frame rates and effects of the era.
HN points to it as a concise, technically grounded rebuttal to moon-hoax claims.
3 comments from Hacker News
My favorite response to moon landing conspiracy theories is the counter point that we didn't have the technology to fake the live footage. It was actually easier to go to the Moon than it was to fake it, given the video technology at that time. There's a great YouTube video about this. this video
This video goes through why the video technology at the time simply wasn't even good enough to enable faking the moon landing. Even if they wanted to. this video
An interesting angle I learnt recently that I hadn’t considered on why the landings weren’t faked: they didn’t have the camera technology to do it. Apparently camera tech at the time for slow motion (for the movement in low gravity) made the ~hour long takes essentially impossible. I hadn’t realised that the recordings were single takes, but to slow down to quarter speed, maintaining ~30fps broadcast quality, would require 120fps cameras that didn’t exist, and more continuous tape recording than was possible by several orders of magnitude. We really were in the very early days of video/TV technology, and it wasn’t until these technologies improved and we collectively forgot how they were that the theories really started to get going. this video