why was the usa the only one to go to the moon?

[Chew]

My new favorite YouTube channel is The Brain Scoop.

Other great ones are:
Veritasium
C. G. P. Grey
MinutePhysics
Vi Hart

As long as we're jacking the thread I would like to recommend the Caustic Soda podcast. I recommend starting at episode 1 and working your way through in order. Skip around to ones you think might look more interesting but even the ones you think will not be interesting are interesting. Seriously. They're that good. Fraser Cain was on the Near Earth Objects episode.

numberphile on mathematics, and several others.

The ebay result video was incredible!

[raven]

Though it is drawing to a close and has basically changed focus recently, NurdRage's videos on chemistry are really fascinating.
VintageCG has some really fascinating videos showing early CGI, as well as videos from the time of the experiments on various work in human computer interaction. Some really neat stuff if that is soemthign that interests you. And, of course, all the fellow Apollo Nutters channels.
Sure, most of it's preaching to the choir, but you never know when you might learn something.

[Chew]

As for astronauts on a wire the TV show Fact or Faked Paranormal Files tried it. They said their attempt looked so similar. Yeah, sure. If you ignore his legs kicking out, him going up and forward and then down and back, and not rotating about his center of mass.

[Noldi400]

As for astronauts on a wire the TV show Fact or Faked Paranormal Files tried it. They said their attempt looked so similar. Yeah, sure. If you ignore his legs kicking out, him going up and forward and then down and back, and not rotating about his center of mass.

The "clip mining" all the HBs seem to love to do always seems to me to be very similar to their "quotemining" habits.

They all seem to refuse to take into consideration that commercial films - from Destination Moon to 2001 to Apollo 13 achieve the illusion of low or zero gravity by the skillful use of angles and careful editing. Anyone who has been even peripherally involved with film making knows that it's not unusual to take an entire day to shoot a five-minute sequence.

But the Apollo videos, especially 15-17, were literally hours and hours of continuous shots. Even if a few seconds of action can be simulated - as in the Paranormal Files video - I think any Special Effects person would quickly agree that the continuous action moving over the distances they traveled is flatly impossible to achieve with FX.

[raven]

Even now, the only way to do it would be practically all CGI from start to finish, something absolutely definitely not possible back then, and even now I would not trust it for photographs, just video.

[Glom]

As you all know, I'm normally the last one to scream troll, but I'm screaming it here. The chronic messing up of quote tags is an obvious attempt to annoy.

[ka9q]

Even now, the only way to do it would be practically all CGI from start to finish, something absolutely definitely not possible back then, and even now I would not trust it for photographs, just video

Yeah. Even the simplest properties of the lunar landscape are still impossible to convincingly fake today. The lighting alone is a show-stopper (literally). Given the large, scenic areas roamed by the J-mission astronauts, you'd have no choice but to do it outdoors. Do it in the day, and you have to make the sky black. Even if you could key it out without any artifacts, its scattered light would give the trick away. At night, you'd have to artificially light a huge area just as the sun does: with a single source at infinite distance casting single shadows with just the right amount of fuzziness for the sun's 1/2 degree diameter, uniformly illuminating tens of square km, and steadily moving across the sky at 1/2 deg per hour so all the shadows behave properly.

And that's just the lighting.
 

[Tedward]

If it was to have been attempted, the only way would have been from start to finish. This raises many issues and I am sure that Area [edited out by secret shills...] is subject to the issues the rest of the planet has with night time only being a certain number of hours with the obvious regularity of sunsets and sunrise. That pushes it indoors and with all the other attendant requirements, a vacuum set.

And so on.

[ka9q]

Good point. If you're slowing everything down to 41% to simulate 1/6 g free fall, you'd also slow the sun's apparent speed from 15 deg/hr to 6.1 deg/hr. That's still nowhere near the 0.5 deg/hr you need to simulate the sun in the lunar sky.

[gwiz]

The dust is a real problem, too.  I've never seen a film that had a convincing way of simulating Apollo's obvious combination of vacuum and low gravity for dust kicked up by the astronauts.

[Bob B.]

Considering how difficult it would have been to fake the TV sequences, then, had Apollo been a hoax, I believe there wouldn't have been any TV.  It would have been easy just to say that transmitting TV from the moon was beyond our capability at that time, and no one would have questioned it.  The whole problem goes away.

[Tedward]

Thing is, if they want faked then they think it through. Time it for a night time only then you have a few hours either side of a glow on the horizon. That will need to be timed for on air and time on the moon will only be a few hours, no long stays. Different rotation rates etc, people spot it and jobs a bad un.

Or film it before hand? Same problem. Either way there are issues and some are compounded like continuity, few hours each night, edit together and so on. Pre filmed does not allow for events that happened such as news being read and the other finer points. Filming on the trot clashes with daylight. And dust etc. That leads inexorably to the need for  chamber. That film set needs other requirements. The job just got a whole lot impossible.

[Bob B.]

The job just got a whole lot impossible.

I didn't realize there were varying degrees of "impossible".  Is there such a thing as a little impossible?

[Tedward]

OK, I should not have used that little word or two before.

Probably should have said "a lot harder" anyway rather than impossible.

[Abaddon]

Huh? The Prof bailed already? Wuss.