@Woodsman, have you seen the uncut Apollo footage that starts around 8:20? It shows astronauts in the spacecraft in orbit around the Earth filming a hoax of going to the moon.
These are devil in the details items, and they're worth addressing at the risk of muddying the waters for readers preferring Black & White realities.
Nothing is ever straight forward.
First of all, let's clear one thing up: The astronauts in orbit
weren't filming a hoax of going to the Moon. They were making a press-suitable image of the Earth. That's a big difference.
-Beyond all engineering challenges and accepted mission parameters, public media consumption and propaganda were
of course going to be huge issues. Some department, I have little doubt, (Fletcher Prouty even hinted that the CIA might have had agents involved), had a mandate to ensure the public face of the mission presented smoothly, given Russian competition and the political climate.
We see fake polish and corporate oversimplifications constantly with every organization where large investments, public perception and what we today call "branding" are on the line; even when successful products are brought to market, we see over-simple liars versions in their marketing. The astronauts had almost certainly been ordered to comply with a public relations department, and like booking time on a big computer, (or satellite) such a department would likely have used their allotment to have them to produce nice pictures and press-suitable content on schedule. If you want a cool picture of the Earth when all you have is a white-balance destroying video image in the window, then it's not much of a stretch to think that cosmetics would have been employed. It didn't seem like they were using specific tools created for the mission to fake a smaller earth, (which would reasonably have happened were it actually an elaborate hoax); rather it looked like they were making it up on the spot. Like tucking away a dirty bed sheet and picking up empty dishes before making your FB photos. Something along those lines would be my first guess on the list before I reached the "Faked Absolutely Everything From Whole Cloth" option at the bottom.
You also bring up the time delay issue. -That one is a really intriguing item for a few reasons. You'll notice that the most thoughtful and dedicated of the debunkers will leave that one off their long lists of damning evidence. -Which is because, I'm guessing, despite its 'gotcha!' allure, upon close inspection, it is actually a weak assertion without reliable proof.
For one thing, there are conflicting reports from people recalling the original broadcasts; some claim that there were indeed long pauses between voice transmissions as would be expected, while others remember it differently. So, basically, it's 50 year old witness testimony from people with extreme biases, rendering it next to worthless. The original transmissions themselves are hard to come by. Nobody had VCRs in the day, so all the video available was created post-mission for press consumption, allowing for reasonable doubt to enter the equation. It's not a long stretch at all to suggest that dead air was cut out to save on broadcast time and make it more appealing.
Second, the official transcripts in fact include the voice transmission delays of the expected several seconds at the contested moments.
Third, (and this one is my favorite) people have become accustomed to video and audio being combined into a single signal. But that's not how it worked; there were no mics on those video cameras. Everything was sent through a primary broadcast antenna along with all the other bits of instrument data from the LEM, but they were unpacked as separate data streams on Earth. Any audio would have been a separate 'file', so to speak, and it would be up to the editor's discretion as to how to release it. Presumably, they'd just line up the time synchs with video, but there would have been no data loss on the video itself if the audio was edited to reduce hanging air for later press kits and such. It is also argued that a listener would be able to tell if there were cuts in the audio, but that's by no means a certainty; static and 'room tone' can easily marry nicely together without any perceptible hiccups between clips.
Beyond all of that, however, and this is just an opinion, it doesn't seem like the kind of error anybody would actually make. -When constructing an elaborate hoax with years of planning? It's just too dumb. It seems like the kind of thing which would have been long before recognized as a possible fail point and easily accounted for. If I was building a fake space program, I'd have put an artificial delay on the comms precisely so that it wasn't left up to the pilots' acting abilities. -At such a critical point of contact between public relations and the world at large? Entire teams of rocket scientists wouldn't be so incredibly stupid as to miss a clunker like that! But like I said, that's based on nothing more than my own conjecture. (Seems reasonable to me, though.)
