Here are my point-by-point comments on this:
1. The first thing you notice between the two mountains is the horizon. The horizon appears to be about 500 yards away meaning the moon is about a mile wide. "But the moon's nooooot a mile wide." Okay, did they land on lunar Mount Everest then? That horizon drops right off.
Whoever said "a mile" is exaggerating greatly. Given the relative sizes of the Earth and Moon, the horizon should be anywhere from 10% to 30% as far away as on Earth depending on the local topography.
2. The next thing you should notice, is that the clarity and color of this video are superb, even striking. Somehow they had the technology to pump live video feeds back from the moon in 1969, yet none of our deep space missions (Voyager, Cassini, etc) have attempted to send back video. "But deep space is booooring!" I'm sure a video feed would be quite interesting for *COUGH* missions that LANDED, such as Huygens, Deep Impact, NEAR, and the mars rovers.
Has this person ever heard of the relationship between signal strength and data bit rate? The farther away the spacecraft, and hence the weaker the signal, the fewer bits per second can be sent because each bit must be "heard" for a longer time by the reciever in order to detect it without errors. It's the same reason that it takes longer for a human to identify a faint sound than a louder one.
Voyager at Neptune would have been about ten THOUSAND times as far from Earth as Apollo on the Moon. That means that its signal would have been a hundred MILLION times weaker for every watt of transmtting power--for a signal that was being transmitted at less than fifty watts in the first place.
3. There is a 1.3 second time delay from the earth to the moon. Yet the astronaut says "Houston, we're on our way" almost exactly 1.3 seconds after liftoff. So he said this immediately when the engine fired? How strange. I say this because the 3-2-1 audio appears to be synced with the Houston side of the feed. It's synced to one side or the other, you can't have it both ways. But ~50 feet in the air is exactly when the viewer would expect to hear "we're on our way."
So it is illogical for the astronaut to say "We're on our way" right BEFORE he presses the engine start button?
4. I've already posted about the improbability of controlling that remote camera with a 2.6 second delay from Houston, as well as the comparative simplicity of wiring it to the lander with a timer and a switch. Of course AE4 and Grand Lunar think that a wire and a clock are horribly complex to design and build. Meanwhile, the camera has, apparently, a high-gain antenna pointed at earth, a computer to take commands and a responsive servo motor. Hell, if we left a webcam on the moon, let's look at it right now! Oops. Not there.
"But the camera was powered by baaaaatteries!" I guess the camera only had battery power for 36 seconds of video? Because that's when the video cuts off.
Webcam? I don't think it would be compatible with Windows, Mac, or Linux-based systems of today.
And who says that there is no more video after 36 seconds? NASA only puts out the video for the first 36 seconds because after that the audience can not see the LM in the picture (the camera can not point directly upward and the LM would have moved into the camera's blind spot, and been too high to see as more than a dot by the time it came out of the blind spot). The rest of the video is presumably boring pictures of sky and local terrain as seen from the rover. You could probably get access to some of it if you pestered the right people at NASA enough.
5. I've already posted about the obvious PR risk of having only one shot at success for retrieving men from the moon. The NASA fanboys think that stranding astronauts on the moon is no big deal and wouldn't jeapordize the overall space program.
The PR cost of stranding astronauts on the moon was expected to be less than the PR cost of not going to the Moon at all, given that it was assumed at the time that the Soviets would get there first if the USA took too long in doing so. Remember, the Nixon administration decreed that the cost and risk was too great to continue the program past Apollo 17.
Also, "only one shot" at success for retrieving them? There were no provisions at all for rescuing stranded astronauts from orbit during the Mercury and Gemini programs if their retro motors failed to slow them down enough to enter the atmosphere, and yet we did those anyway, so I don't think that having no back-up is a total show-stopper. Besides, what would have happened if NASA had built a rescue vehicle and kept it standing by during every mission, and it was never called into use? People would have been screaming that NASA was wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on the "clearly unnecessary" rescue vehicle.
6. Houston says "30 seconds" at 21 seconds into the flight. Oops. He must have been reading the wrong clock. He says it at *exactly* 30 seconds into the video.
21 seconds after lifting off from the Moon? Unless it was a mistake and he meant "twenty seconds" (or he said "twenty seconds" and you misheard), then without more details I can not explain this.
7. I saved the best for last. At 25 seconds into the flight, the astronauts report "1500 feet." That works out to 41 miles per hour. Remember, 1500 feet is a quarter mile and a human sprinter can run that in under a minute (20 mph). Meanwhile, the escape velocity for the moon is roughly 5000 mph as per Wiki. You know the Earth's escape velocity is like Mach 12 and the moon is 1/6 mass. Definitely a lot higher than 40mph.
Let's work out the Newtonian equation for this, assuming constant acceleration (which will do well enough for a rough estimate since the ascent stage burns only about five percent of its fuel during the first 25 seconds).
1500 feet is about 455 meters.
d = 1/2 * a * t^2 (distance is one half of acceleration times the square of time--look familiar?)
455 = 1/2 * a * (25)^2
455 = 1/2 * a * 625
1.45 = a
Thus, the LM would have been accelerating upwards at approximately a meter and a half per second per second. The LM ascent stage massed about 4550 kg at launch (minus a few dozen kg for trash left behind on the surface, but plus a few dozen kg for lunar samples brought back), and had an engine thrust of 15,570 newtons. Dividing engine thrust by vehicle mass gives us an acceleration of about 3.1 m/s^2, which is approximately equal to the 1.45 m/s^2 observed above plus about 1.6 m/s^2 being lost to lunar gravity. This would imply that the stated altitude of the LM after 25 seconds was consistent with its declared techical specifications (mass, engine power) in a lunar environment.
"But they were accelllllerating...!" I guess the tiny moon lander carries 1/6th the chemical fuel of a Saturn V rocket? Damn, that's a compact package.
Here is a common misconception about rockets. The amount of fuel used does NOT scale linearally with the amount of impulse (mass times acceleration) produced. Rather, it scales exponentially. The rocket equation, derived by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, is:
delta-v = v(e) * ln (M1/M2)
in which v(e) is the exhaust speed of your engine, M1 is the initial fueled mass of your rocket, M2 is the mass of your rocket after the engines are shut off, and ln is the nautral log function (exponent to the base of "e", which is about 2.71--if ln x = y, then e^y = x).
Thus, you can see that to reach a speed equal to your exhaust speed, your rocket needs to be about 63% fuel. To reach twice your exhaust speed, your rocket must be 84% fuel. To reach three times your exhaust speed, your rocket must be 95% fuel, and to reach four times your exhaust speed, your rocket must be more than 97.6% fuel--and remember that the remaining 2.4% not only includes your payload, but your fuel tanks and engines too!
Because of this, lifting off with the same mass from the Earth does not require six times as much fuel as lifting off from the Moon, but rather e^6--or nearly four hundred--times as much. This is why the LM could land on the Moon using only nine tons of fuel and lift off using only three tons of fuel, while the Saturn V required over three thousand tons of fuel.
