Apollo Discussions > The Hoax Theory
Corona and Keyhole satellite imagery and the Apollo Detectives
onebigmonkey:
The AD's latest offering deserves not to be buried in the compendium of their stupidity I've posted elsewhere.
A quick precis:
The always excellent Dave McKeegan and the Apollo detectives have both posted videos addressing the issue of the use of film in satellites, and whether or not they require pressurising to avoid fatally damaging the film beyond use. McKeegan points out that while some satellites used pressurised film systms, many did not. and that the use of pressurisation was not for the welfare of the film. The ADs, on the other hand, have latched on to Discoverer 14 - the first successful aerial film retrieval mission of the Corona program. All parties agree that no pressurisation was involved there.
Discoverer 14 was launched on August 18 1960, and film was recovered the following day in the Pacific after 17 orbits.
The ADs, which in this instance is Marcus Allen, Robert Williams and Jarrah, have found this image taken by Discoverer:
It's of Mys Shmidta airfield in easternmost Russia, a stone's throw from Alaska (the image here is upside down).
Lawks a Lawdy, they cry - look how degraded and terrible the image is, you can't make any kind of detail at all! This, they conclude, can only be as a direct result of radiation and exposure to vacuum, and therefore Apollo films would have suffered the same fate.
No.
The image they've found is terrible, but if they knew a little bit more about the subject they'd know there are better quality ones available, and that the image isn't all of the actual photo.
Fortunately for us, this website:
https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/
has all the declassified images from Discoverer 4 (and many others) available for download. As an aside, I've used theis site to get Landsat-1 images showing matching ice flows visble in Apollo 17's Blue Marble).
Here's the complete image from which theirs is derived:
I've marked on the approximate area concerned - roughly 20 miles square in a swathe covering (at a conservatice estimate) roughly 800 miles long and 100 miles wide.
It's interesting to note the footprint of that image compared with the ones taken either side of it covering the area to the north-west.
It's odd that this is an oblique image and covering a much wider area - deliberate attempt to capture the airfield, or just a glitch? Just for info, here are the ther swathes covering the USSR on that mission:
So, how do modern scans of the image compare? Here's the entire width of the photograph:
and here's the same area:
It's very obviously much better quality than the one on which the ADs are relying. You can even get closer in:
One of the things they complain about is the lack of detail in the image - the lack of roads and so on. It's the arse end of nowhere chaps there's nothing there.
Now, the labelling system of the images suggests that this photo was taken on the second orbit. If the ADs are correct, then images taken in much later orbits will be even worse! OK, how about this one, taken on orbit 14 showing a 180 mile by 12 strip in the American Midwest (ID DS009009014DV061).
There should be nothing in here right?
Oh! Seems that the images have got better over time!
All the ADs are seeing in the image they've looked at is film grain - a grainy scan of a small part of a much larger image taken on the first successful mission of its kind.
It does not prove their point at all. This cannister has exposed its film to space longer than any Apollo Hasselblad magazine. They were claiming that this supposed damage was from something that wasn't that vacuumy - I'm guessing now it won't have been vacuumy enough.
They can posture all they like about pressurised film systems like lunar orbiter (where the pressure was there to protect the developing process, not the film), they can pretend the Soviet film return missions didn't happen, but they have no evidence other than their own deeply flawed "experiment" that the film used in Apollo, be it in Hasselblads, or the Metric and Panoramic cameras, wouldn't have worked.
Peter B:
I just watched Dave McKeegan's latest video in which he dismantles the claims of the Apollo Detectives. It's hard to see how the ADs can be so badly mistaken in their experiments and claims, leading to my conclusion that they're simply grifting at this point.
TimberWolfAu:
The thing that always annoyed me with the whole "film needs to be pressurised", is that the same people making these claims usually have no problem saying the Project Gemini and Project Mercury flights happened. You know, those manned flights that didn't use pressurised film cannisters for the cameras. If a film camera is working in low Earth orbit, it's working on the moon. Hell, assuming my understanding here is correct, even the "radiation" issue for the film is pretty close to being the same between low Earth orbit and the lunar surface.
onebigmonkey:
It's embarrassing how ill-informed they are, and how much they think ChatGPT is the be all and end all of information sources instead of a glorified garbage in garbage out info dump.
This book
https://www.cia.gov/resources/publications/corona-between-the-sun-and-the-earth/
suggests that the initial orbits experienced some issues and threatened to tumble out of control, wich may explain the odd angle and coverage of frame 58, compared with frames 57 and 59. This book
https://archive.org/details/eyeinskystoryofc0000unse/mode/1up
has a version of the airstrip image of comparable quality to the one I downloaded, along with many other very high resoltuion CORONA images.
I've also seen that image called "the first" one in took - it clearly isn't, but this source:
https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/discoverer-xiv/
shows I've interpreted the naming convention correctly - the airstrip image is from the 2nd pass early in the mission. That source also mentions the number of previously unknown military sites that the mission was able to discover, despite the poor resolving power, like this one
of Kapsutin Yar Missile Test Range. Lots of detail there, despite it being taken 7 orbits later than the one they look at. I downloaded this myself, so I hope I got the right spot.
Later missions improved to be able to se objects 5-6 feet across, rather than the 35-40 or so feet in this one. All the information they need is out there, if they choose to put some actual effort in. Th AD video calls itself 'Part 1'. I wonder where part 2 will take us.
onebigmonkey:
--- Quote from: TimberWolfAu on August 16, 2025, 02:49:38 AM ---The thing that always annoyed me with the whole "film needs to be pressurised", is that the same people making these claims usually have no problem saying the Project Gemini and Project Mercury flights happened. You know, those manned flights that didn't use pressurised film cannisters for the cameras. If a film camera is working in low Earth orbit, it's working on the moon. Hell, assuming my understanding here is correct, even the "radiation" issue for the film is pretty close to being the same between low Earth orbit and the lunar surface.
--- End quote ---
That's exactly the point McKeegan made in one of his earlier videos - the AD seemingly have no issue with those missions, but conveniently gloss over them. Their response was mostly to go for the ad hominem approach, claiming (without no evidence at all) that Dave uses digital cameras and doesn't know about film, and that he needs to get hold of the SO film to prove his point - the irony of that escapes them, given theat all they did was test off the shelf film and produced results that any competent film developer could resolve.
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