Did you check the link I provided? ;_D

I realized after posting that I might be giving the HB’s more ammunition for their arguments. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that this rig was used for anything other than to develop a physiological “feel” for walking in 1/6 g. The cables were, as you said, not thin. Not only were they visible, but the multiple suspension points on the trainee’s body had wide padded slings to support their weight. This was definitely NOT a stealth rig that would fool anyone.

- Jack

Jack, great additional comment about the multiple shadows. At one point it crossed my mind, but got lost in the shuffle. The key point in my mind was to explain the differing shadow directions in the linked picture, but it is also useful to understand what is missing for the picture to be a hoax as claimed.

As for the training rig, yes they did several gimmicks to try to train for low gravity. Vomit Comet runs gave short bursts of low g, and water tank immersion was also used, which is the backbone of spacewalk testing even today. You are correct, they did rig up a harness system with a sloped wall. However, I would hardly call the cables supporting them “wires”, and that left them stuck on one side, not able to turn around. Hardly anything like the freedom of motion shown above.

What seems to be suggested above (and elsewhere) is the idea that the astronauts are upright in a studio hanging from some catwalk/framework above. It would have to be a complicated rig that moved freely in various directions, allowed for the astronaut to piroutte in place without tangling, and allow them to circle each other, get in close proximity to exchange hardware, etc. And it would have to do so while being seemlessly recorded. Plus, since it is on Earth, the support cables would have to support minimum 200 – 250 lbs while being so thin as to be invisible.

James, that’s a great point that I neglected to consider at all. Human performance is not entirely a factor purely of gravity. Leverage, response time, inertia, etc all play a role. Additionally, as you say, high jump is not just about vertical jump height. Clearing the bar is accomplished by contortionist moves to go over the bar higher than the cg ever gets. Thus the “Fosbury Flop”, as it’s called. (Spelling?)

Lots of factors affect the reality instead of the simplistic expectation of 6x performance.

I’ve only seen one good article on this: astonomer Robert S. Richardson’s “Space Technology of a Track Meet”

Richardson analyzed how athletes’ bodies actually work in various events and tried to work out how differing gravity would effect the impulse from their muscles, the leverage of their limbs, interaction with the ground, and all the other things that might be different between here, the Moon, and the other planets.

Turns out that for jumpers, the important factor is not how high the feet get off the ground, but how much the center of gravity is raised. The hight of a bar that can be cleared on the moon works out to significantly lower than six times what the same person could clear on Earth.

Lots of other neat things in it about how athletes might have to vary their techniques to achieve optimum performance on light and heavy planets. The astonauts hopping instead of striding is a case in point.

I was applauding, but I was too busy to respond at the time. The TV signals from the moon were even weirder than that, though. Except for Apollo 11, all of the TV cameras on the landing missions were color, but they couldn’t manage a true NTSC color signal in that small of a box with mid-60’s technology. The cameras were actually opto-mechanical with a filter wheel spinning in front of a single B&W vidicon tube. The wheel was synchronized to the scan speed so that the image frames were sent in sequential red-blue-green sets. There was a fairly major amount of signal processing done at the receiving end to convert it to NTSC so that it could be broadcast by the networks. That’s why the images seem to stream colors whenever something moves quickly through the frame.

Irishman – Bravo on doing a great condensation of several debunking sites into a couple of posts! One thing you left out about the “multiple light sources” argument, though, is that multiple sources will create multiple shadows on EACH object, not just different angles on different objects.

And, finally, for those who talked about the wires, the astronauts actually were trained on a wire rig. They had a large wall, like a rock-climbing wall, tilted back about 20°. This created a gravity vector towards the wall of 1/6 g. The trainee was suspended horizontally by a very sophisticated wire rig that supported the other 5/6 of their weight allowing them to bounce around the wall realistically.

- Jack