Conspiracy Encyclopedia

Challenges and responses

1. The lack of a more than two-second delay in two-way communications at a distance of a 400,000 km (250,000 miles).
   • The round trip light travel time of more than two seconds is apparent in all the real-time recordings of the lunar audio, but this does not always appear as expected. There may also be some documentary films where the delay has been edited out. Principal motivations for editing the audio would likely come in response to time constraints or in the interest of clarity.
2. Typical delays in communication were on the order of half a second.
   • Claims that the delays were only on the order of half a second are unsubstantiated by an examination of the actual recordings. It should also be borne in mind that there should not be a straightforward, consistent time delay between every response, as the conversation is being recorded at one end – Mission Control. Responses from Mission Control could be heard without any delay, as the recording is being made at the same time that Houston receives the transmission from the moon.
3. The Parkes Observatory in Australia was billed to the world for weeks as the site that would be relaying communications from the Moon, then five hours before transmission they were told to stand down.
   • The timing of the first Moonwalk was moved up after landing. In fact, delays in getting the Moonwalk started meant that Parkes did cover almost the entire Apollo 11 Moonwalk.
4. Parkes supposedly provided the clearest video feed from the Moon, but Australian media and all other known sources ran a live feed from the United States.
   • While that was the original plan, and, according to some sources, the official policy, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) did take the transmission direct from the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek radio telescopes. These were converted to NTSC television at Paddington, in Sydney. This meant that Australian viewers saw the Moonwalk several seconds before the rest of the world. See also The Parkes Observatory’s Support of the Apollo 11 Mission, from “Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia” (The events surrounding the Parkes Observatory’s role in relaying the live television of man’s first steps on the Moon were portrayed in a slightly fictionalized 2000 Australian film comedy The Dish.)
5. Better signal was supposedly received at Parkes Observatory when the Moon was on the opposite side of the planet.
   • This is not supported by the detailed evidence and logs from the missions.