The Earth-Moon distance is, on average, 384,404 km. If you subtract off one moon-radius, and one earth-radius, you get the average surface to surface distance of 376,289km. That’s a long, stinking, way.
So long, in fact, that light takes a bit to make the trip. The real and radiant glory of the sun is only reflected from the moon. There’s no real light of its own there – we find only the impression of light-giving because of the moon’s theft of the burning-sun of heat, that the moon beholds night and day.
Light, the ultimate speedster, travels at 2.99 x 10^8 meters per second, or about 186,000 miles per second. Fast, but not infinite. The silvery moon light you see on a cloudless night left the craggy surface of the moon 1.26 seconds previous.
I have been an admirer of the moon, honestly, not for its natural beauty, but for the symbol of achievement it has become in the matter of science and spaceflight. Having worked in science and engineering fields, the lunar missions take on a kind of professional glow, a bright light of conquest. It’s a warm glow to think of “our guys” having done “all that”.
I am a Purdue alum, and Purdue’s most famous alum is Neil Armstrong. I have wondered for years why it was that 40 years on, Purdue could never get around to honoring the most famous person in the world. The words were taken from my mouth when, finally, they dedicated the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering just recently. Purdue’s history is loaded with astronauts, and many showed up, including Armstrong, Cernan, and others. They gave speeches and sat in the front row, next to a statue of Neil. I went, and was totally jazzed by the whole thing.
So, you know, I’m not a natural prejudice for all the lunar-hoax business that is out there. I have spoken to friends and colleagues about the importance of a manned mission to mars. I tended to believe in America’s technical prowess as a civilisational achievement, a happy thing, one of those bright spots in life that gives you happiness.
So, its been with a critical eye that I’ve looked around at what people offer as evidence that the Apollo moonscapes were shot on a sound stage. It seemed a ridiculous nay-saying to me. An absurd argument of the kook-fringe. Most of the arguments I’ve looked at in mild curiosity seemed silly. The physicist in me was aroused, and I thought that the claims should be easy to debunk.
For example, the Moon’s acceleration due to gravity is well known. In the videos, an astronaut drops a feather and a hammer from rib-cage height. If on the moon, in the video, the time it takes to hit the ground, from a known height, should be calculable, and different than the earth. I watched. I measured. I calculated. It was about correct. But thinking about it, the effect could be achieved by playing with the speed of film shot on earth. So this proved only that if there were a hoax, a bunch of physicists or engineers were in on it. No gain.
Then I thought of something equally simple. Radio waves travel at the speed of light. Any live communication with the earth, between Apollo 11 and Houston, would have to have the precise Earth-Moon delay in the conversations. No problem, I thought. Just listen, measure, and compare.
If this is the definitive live record -
We have this -
“Columbia, Columbia, this is Houston, AOS, over.”
[1.07 second pause]
“Houston, Columbia…”
The pause ought to be 2.51 seconds – minimum. That’s 1.258 seconds for the message to go out, and 1.258 for it to come back, if the astronaut replied instantly. If both Houston (H) and Columbia (C) spoke instantly, and both continually spoke without interrupting each other, you would see a pattern, if recorded on earth, like this:
CH—CH—CH—
A pause of 1.07 seconds would be a distance between Earth and Columbia of 159,965 kilometers, or 42% of the journey to the moon. Had Columbia begun her reply in order for the message to arrive at the time recorded in this record, she would have had to start speaking when Houston was saying “Columbia, Columbia.” But etiquette and standard practice is to wait until the “over”. When you listen to the record, it sounds like a natural conversation, with everybody saying “over” at the end, to punctuate the communication, wait for the other party to speak. But the pattern continues.
“I guess you’re about the only person around that doesn’t have TV coverage of the scene.”
[1.07 second pause]
“That’s alright, I don’t mind a bit.”
In order for “That’s alright” to arrive on earth 2.5 seconds after transmission, Columbia would have had to utter it when Houston was speaking the word “doesn’t.” It would have been like this at the Columbia end:
“I guess you’re about the only person around that doe-That’s alright I don’t mind a bit.”
Talk about completing each others’ sentences!
But what really attracted my attention is that in the “brand new” and “refurbished” NASA video of the same situation, the pauses are the right length.
“I guess you’re about the only person around that doesn’t have TV coverage of the scene.”
[3.37 second pause]
“That’s alright, I don’t mind a bit.”
More, there is an echo-artifact stuck in the middle, in-between “scene” and “That’s alright”. It’s an
“echo” of “the scene”. It arrives at a perfect 2.62 seconds after being uttered, exactly the time it would take to moon bounce. It’s “perfect”. Here is the “refurbished” audio, showing the end of the sentence, and the echoed word “scene”.
The problem is that neither the pause nor the echo in the “original” version was there. The proper signature delay is only there in the “new and improved” version.
What’s clear, if I am indeed working with the original audio footage, is that the original recording could not possibly have been a live conversation between the earth and the moon. Physics defies it. You cannot travel faster than the speed of light with a radio packet, and these recordings clearly show communication with a delay that is 42% of the value it should be.
And it’s clear that the new and improved version has delays that are just right, to sound as though they were between the earth and the moon, complete with a little moon-reflection to “prove” that they were exactly “that distance” away, along with a human pause before replying.
Of course, the easiest explanation is that I simply got ahold of a piece of audio which had all the silence edited out, trimmed for presentation. It’s normal practice, and hardly a conspiracy. But the video on youtube is labeled as original rendering, and it seems that way in the fine-grain of the audio. The static is continuous, there are no abrupt transitions, and the human conversation has a very natural rhythm, cadence.
At first, it seems this would be easy to settle. Hundreds of people with audio editors and original recordings all over the world can measure it and post their findings to the internet, along with a detailed description of the origin of their recording.
But this has been complicated. NASA apparently rounded up many of the original television tape recordings in order to make their “new and improved” versions. People who possessed them previously no longer do. Then NASA says it thinks it destroyed the original tape.
Everyone who has original, live, as-aired audio of conversations between earth and the moon should post them, and begin to measure the time delay between transmissions. They should also make copies of their as-aired original, and keep track of it. The transmissions were recorded on earth, so the time delay
between Columbia’s audio and Houston’s reply can be zero. But the audio delay between Houston’s statement and Columbia’s reply needs to be 2.51 seconds. 1.258 to go out. 1.258 to come back.
Minimum.
One last word. The origin of the delay we expect is physics. It is the most established physics in the world. We are not talking about equipment delay, or digital delay, or what have you. Physics requires that no signal, of any kind, can make the trip faster than 1.258 seconds, closest edge to closest edge, using the average distance earth to moon. There is a little variation in, for example, edge of earth to edge of moon, as opposed to most direct path, but these would make the time lag longer, not shorter. The other citeable source of distance variation is the natural gravitational apogee and perigree. Two published values for these distances are 357250 km and 406628 km. Assuming the shortest path
Distance, and the moon closest to the earth, at 357,250km, this would represent a 5% change in our stated numbers above, or about 6/100ths of a second. So, we can safely make this statement.
Neglecting atmospheric attenuation, the minimum time of travel for any radio communication from the surface of the earth to the surface of the moon is 1.26 seconds +/- 6%.
Trying to find original live recordings on youtube has become difficult. One lengthy video, which had a lot of discussion of the delay issue, has vanished.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:lR1acj7MbUIJ:www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DAlvEGR1hhk8+delay+in+moon+communication+Appollo+11&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
I offer this discourse to my readership as a challenging puzzle.
