Phil 9 Posted July 16, 2017 Share Posted July 16, 2017 An interesting conspiracy theory was that Yuri Gagarin was not the first man in space. But he was the first one to come back alive Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Privett Posted July 16, 2017 Share Posted July 16, 2017 Posted by Tom Sharp 2 on 16/07/2017 22:00:08: The transmissions from the first landing were in colour but we only got them in B&W. Was that another conspiracy? The transmissions from the moon for Apollo 11 were not in colour. We saw them in B&W because that's all we had! They did have colour film cameras - Hasselblad cameras using 70mm film. But the still images captured on these could not be viewed until the film had been returned to Earth and developed. Below is the first image taken by Neil Armstrong with one of these cameras immediately before setting foot on the moon for the first time. For the live TV coverage they were limited by the technology of the day and the comms bandwidth available for TV from the moon's surface for Apollo 11 was limited to a mere 700kHz. The solution was ti use a slow-scan (10fps) 320-line B&W camera transmitting its signal back to Earth, which is why the live video was not great quality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geoff S Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 "Seriously, if the Americans had tried to fake it, the Russians - not to mention Kettering Grammar School - would have detected it immediately and shouted it from the roof tops." Thanks for reminding me, Peter. I totally forgotten about Kettering Grammar School and their enthusiastic science teacher. Geoff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter Miller Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 One thing that the conspiracy crew never mention. They brought back moon rock. Various institutions were given samples. I believe that the Russians were given some as well If it had just been lumps of material from earth everyone and especially the Russians would ave been screaming "Fake" from day one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cuban8 Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 According to Langley Research Center, 400,000 personnel were involved in the Apollo project at its peak along with 20,000 individual companies; a fact that the sad conspiracy theorists overlook, or they come up with an 'X Files' type explanation that silences everyone (usually involves aliens). Totally absurd and it denigrates the bravery of all astronauts, cosmonauts and test pilots, to say nothing of the engineering and science people behind it all. Sorry, but a bit of a 'hobby horse' of mine. Edited By Cuban8 on 17/07/2017 08:27:30 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simon B Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 I beer between getting cross with conspiracy theorists and feeling sorry for the people who don't have the imagination to believe humankind could achieve our greatest feat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Wright Stuff Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 Posted by Cuban8 on 17/07/2017 08:24:50: Totally absurd and it denigrates the bravery of all astronauts, cosmonauts and test pilots, to say nothing of the engineering and science people behind it all. Sorry, but a bit of a 'hobby horse' of mine. Absolutely. I was born in the 70's and as such missed the space race by a decade. I suspect that very few people of my generation really stop to think about the significance of the achievement. I would have absolutely loved to have lived through it. My soul could have entered this life at any point over the last half a million years, so to miss the defining moment of the entire history of the human race by less than a decade is totally gutting. It's a deep philosophical point, but I do think deeply about that! On the plus side, surely with the current interest in returning to the moon from China and other non-NASA private ventures, the doubters must surely be silenced soon! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simon B Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 In my experience the mind of the conspiracy theorist is incredibly flexible and can perform all sorts of somersaults to keep their belief system going. Very sad. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kevin 216 Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 It was without a doubt a great achievement - as an RAF apprentice in 1969 we were permitted to stay up beyond 'lights out' to watch on our communal TV. One small point according to the film 'First men In The Moon' We (the Brits) got there first Lionel Jeffries claiming it for Queen Victoria and Britain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter Christy Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 Posted by John Privett on 16/07/2017 22:45:21: For the live TV coverage they were limited by the technology of the day and the comms bandwidth available for TV from the moon's surface for Apollo 11 was limited to a mere 700kHz. The solution was ti use a slow-scan (10fps) 320-line B&W camera transmitting its signal back to Earth, which is why the live video was not great quality. Indeed! And for the later missions that were in colour, they used the same B&W camera, but put a spinning coloured disc in front of the lens. The disc was split into three segments, red, green and blue, and synchronised with the frame rate of the camera, so you got one frame of red, then one of green and finally one of blue. Back on earth this was re-assembled into a colour image, and explains why, on rapid movements, you got a rainbow stripe effect behind the movement. The reassembled video was then converted to 525-line NTSC (Never Twice The Same Colour) for American broadcasters, before being beamed over a transatlantic satellite to Europe, where it was converted yet again into either 625-line Secam (System Essentially Contradicting the American Method) for France and Russia, or PAL (Peace At Last) for the UK and rest of Europe. Its no wonder the pictures looked so grotty after all that mangling! I read that recently some of the original slow-scan video tapes turned up at a ground station in Australia (?), where they had been recorded during the missions. The hunt was then on to find a machine capable of playing them and someone who knew how to operate it! The original images were supposed to be quite good quality, despite the limited resolution and slow scan speed. Most of the deterioration occurred because of the requirement to feed them to the American public - who had paid for it all - via the rather poor quality US broadcasting system.......! Oh, and that spinning coloured disc was something that many early TV experimenters played with. Indeed I seem to recall that when colour TV transmissions started in the UK, one of the hobby electronics mags did a construction article showing how to convert your B&W TV into a colour one using just such a system! I have no idea how many people actually tried this, but I would have thought there were severe safety implications in having a large and rapidly whirling disc in front of your TV.......! -- Pete Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel R Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 Words fail me when it comes to conspiracy theorists. I am minded of the Douglas Adams quote; "isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are faeries at the bottom of it?" Taken slightly out of context I know, but not so very far. The moon landings were an amazing achievement and one like Wright Stuff I wish I could have seen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Fairweather 1 Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 In the video clip above, is it my imagination or is Buzz Aldrin doing his best 'I can be the next Doctor' face ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brokenenglish Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 This thread is painful. Inventing mental acrobatics to dispute obvious fact is a pretty poor way of using any intellectual ability that you may have ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Former Member Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 [This posting has been removed] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DCW Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 I used to believe that most modellers were intelligent life forms... Now I'm not so sure.... May I remind you that this is an model aircraft forum and NOT for ridicuolus theorists! Thanks DW Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geoff S Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 I actually saw colour a colour TV receiver in the early 1950s in the labs at Murphy Radio but there were no broadcasts until much later. I worked in the service department at MR when I was a teenager as a so-called dealer's son in training on a minimal wage that just about covered my digs rent. Colour didn't become properly available until after I decided there was zero future in running a small TV retail business in 1961 and bailed out. Fortunately we avoided NTSC (Never Twice The Same Color) and used PAL (Perfection At Last) whilst the French went for SECAM (System Essentially Different from the American Method) as you'd expect from our Gallic friends In many ways it was a miracle that the Apollo missions succeeded. I worked as an electronics hardware engineer involved in instrumentation and when micro processors became available we taught ourselves how to use them as logic replacement devices. None of us had the first idea how to write software properly and we had a local college lecturer come in to give us some idea of structured programming techniques. He opined that had the s/w reviews that were then coming in and are now mandatory been applied the project would never have got off the ground. The s/w was probably full of bugs that, fortunately, didn't cause any problems. The whole Apollo programme was amazingly successful and they even managed to overcome the Apollo 13 disaster without loss of life. The only sad thing is that it didn't herald further exploration as those of us brought up on a diet of Dan Dare fondly imagined Geoff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel R Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 "They are clearly more capable than we thought.........." Of course they are. They're actually lizards who are the royal family who arrived here in the pyramids which are actually alien spacecraft. They can do anything. Including assassinating JFK, abducting Elvis and suppressing free energy technology amongst other things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel R Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 "The s/w was probably full of bugs that, fortunately, didn't cause any problems." It probably was. Fortunately, it was also quite simple. Imagine if they had had to rely on a Microsoft application to get them there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andy48 Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 Funnily enough I've just finished reading a book by Gene Kranz who was a NASA Flight Director for many of the early missions. Actually the software did have lots of bugs in it and caused a number of problems. However, other problems were caused by not fully understanding the mechanics and mathematics of space flight itself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter Miller Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 I am not sure how true it is but I have heard that the average modern digital watch has more computing power that Apollo 13. I look forward to being corrected. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Wright Stuff Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 Posted by Andy48 on 17/07/2017 12:00:02: Funnily enough I've just finished reading a book by Gene Kranz who was a NASA Flight Director for many of the early missions. Actually the software did have lots of bugs in it and caused a number of problems. However, other problems were caused by not fully understanding the mechanics and mathematics of space flight itself. Yes, I've read the same one. He breathed a sigh of relief when Apollo 18,19 and 20 were cancelled: he felt they were pushing their luck, and that a fatal disaster in space was inevitable at some point. the fact that they did it with such limited technology only heightens the achievement, for me. Peter, it probably depends on the watch (and how you define computing power), but pocket calculator, cellphone, certainly!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Bennett Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 i believe the Russians used punched tape readers to run their early space craft. but i could be wrong. Tony B Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter Christy Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 Posted by Tony Bennett on 17/07/2017 12:19:56: i believe the Russians used punched tape readers to run their early space craft. Well I remember reading that the Soyuz uses something akin to the mechanical timer on a washing machine to control re-entry! And someone spoke earlier about "Moon Machines". There was a fascinating programme in that series showing how NASA did it. Bear in mind that at the time, a disk drive was the same size as a washing machine, and not very reliable! RAM was mostly built around ferrite cores on a matrix of wires. Apparently the firmware was "written" on so-called "rope memory" - a bunch of wires bundled together into a rope, some containing ferrite beads (1) and some not (0)! Simple, reliable and robust - and it worked! If ever they repeat "Moon Machines" (usually on one of the more obscure channels), its well worth a watch! -- Pete Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin Harris - Moderator Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 Posted by DCW on 17/07/2017 11:14:47: I used to believe that most modellers were intelligent life forms... Now I'm not so sure.... May I remind you that this is an model aircraft forum and NOT for ridicuolus theorists! Thanks DW Apart from the OP and one other, the consensus seems to be that the conspiracy theorists are "somewhat misguided". Surely this reflects your previous impression and I don't think you need to worry about the majority of modellers... This was, however, posted in the chit-chat section and is therefore a valid (if far removed from model flying) topic. I've particularly enjoyed some of the descriptions of technologies used at the time - most informative! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Wright Stuff Posted July 17, 2017 Share Posted July 17, 2017 I wonder if the camera remote operator had to do a range check! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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