News newswatch, but first heres click. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. So said president John F Kennedy in 1962. On july the 16th, 1969, three astronauts, Neil Armstrong, edwin buzz aldrin, and Michael Collins made ready to fulfil that promise as they prepared for apollo 11. The First Crewed Mission to land on the moon. Three men to represent the culmination of a dream. Here at nasa in houston, texas, Mission Control monitored every aspect of the moon shot. These days its used to monitor the International Space station. The actual control room used for the apollo 11 mission is undergoing a bit of a refurb in honour of the 50th anniversary. Marcos flores is one of the current Mission Controllers for the iss. There was no guarantee that apollo 11 was going to be successful. I mean, it was really cutting edge, dangerous stuff, wasnt it . Yeah, definitely. There was a lot of risk involved in the missions themselves and how dangerous they were, but also a lot of unknowns in terms of being able to successfully land on the moon. The 36 storey tall saturn v moves out of its Huge Assembly building and heads for the launchpad. To build the launch vehicle, nasa contracted boeing, north american aviation, the douglas aircraft company, and ibm to help build a rocket that would end up being the biggest and most powerful ever built. Call that a rocket . This is a rocket. Inside here is the saturn v rocket. Stage 1 gets you off the launchpad and up to a speed of 6,000 mph. Two and a half minutes later, all of this fuel is burnt. You dont want to carry an empty casing into space so you ditch it to save on weight. Then five rocket engines in stage 2 ignite and send you into the upper atmosphere. At 115 miles up, all that fuel is gone, too. You ditch the second stage. And this rocket on stage 3 fires you around the earth and into orbit. Then it powers down and, a little while later, it restarts. This time it sends you to the moon. So heres the thing. That bit there . Camera shutter clicks thats where the people sit. All the rest of it is fuel. While the rocket was incredibly powerful, so, at the time, was the Computing Power required for the apollo programme. Even though in Popular Culture the computers of the day, which in this case were giant mainframes, are often compared unfavourably to contemporary technology. The 360 75 that we used was a 1 mip machine one million instructions per second. And it had 1 meg of real memory or1 million bytes of real memory and 4 million bytes of auxiliary memory. The numbers you hearfor the iphone that i own are anywhere from 10,000 times as fast as that to even a million to maybe even i think ive seen one that was 100 million times as fast. Homer programs the actual code used for the descent and ascent of the Lunar Landing module. And onjuly the 20th 1969 it kicked in, as Neil Armstrong piloted the lunar lander onto the moons surface. Music plays weve had shutdown. The eagle has landed. At 0239 hours, armstrong exited the landing module and uttered the immortal phrase. Thats one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Now, as any good tourist knows, photos are a must. Armstrong and aldrin also left a plaque and a flag. And took a phone call from president richard nixon. Hello, neil and buzz, im talking to you by telephone from the oval room at the white house. And this certainly has to be the most historic telephone phone call ever made. And what did we learn from the Apollo Missions that we still use today . We are leveraging a lot of the experience that we gained with the vehicles themselves in terms of the rocket design, the capsule design, and what it takes for us to safely, you know, send that body up to space and bring it back down. A recent poll suggests that one in six britons believe that the moon landing was staged. In the age of the internet, conspiracy theories run rampant and claiming the moon landings were a hoax is at the head of the pack. Companies like nvidia have tried to use technology to try and prove the moon landings did happen. They built a 3d render using powerful graphics processing units which realistically represents how light behaves on the moon. Debunking a popular Conspiracy Theory about the lighting in the moon landing images being wrong. We decided to do some digging of our own, and examine the evidence that proves, yes, human beings have landed on the moon. Jonathan swift, the famous novelist satirist reasoning will never make a man correct an opinion by which from reasoning he never acquired. If someone has an unreasonable opinion about something, based on nonsense, it doesnt matter how much reasoning you do with them, you are never going to reason them out of it, because reason didnt get them there, to begin with. So there are the famous ones, that they didnt actually get there, they actually launched in the rocket, orbited the earth a few times, pretended they went to the moon, and came home. Radiation, thats the other one. There is no way they could have gone through the deadly van allen belt which surrounds planet earth. There is the kind of anomalies with photographs. All of which are ridiculous. Stanley kubrick directed it in a film set in area 51, somewhere in the desert. The technology to fake the moon landings did not exist in 1969. The technology did exist to get to the moon. In 1969. Just. Feet down, two and a half. Its very pretty out here. The lunar surface cameras were based on our 500 er systems. We had many modifications, viewfinders and a mirror system, and all of this was removed to save weight. Which then locked into a chest bracket on the astronauts suit. And it was literally moving their body, tilting the body, to frame up the images. We cant see any stars because the contrast range of the surface of the moon is too high. If it is a bright day and you stand outside a house, and open the door to the house, and look in, you cant see any of the detail because its too bright where you are. So this is as close a modern equivalent as we would have. It has a 100 megapixel sensor. If we took it to the surface today, we would not be able to capture stars and the lunar surface detail in the same image. One of the issues of doing it in a studio is the dust on the moon. And when there is no atmosphere, dust behaves differently than when there is an atmosphere. Now you would have to have a studio that you evacuated and had a vacuum in. The Lunar Mission comes as a climax of the space race that the United States and the soviet union have been competing in since the mid 1950s for technological and psychological supremacy. The soviets possessed advanced tracking capabilities of their own. They would have used them to track icbm missiles as well as space flight. So their inability to detect conspiracy of this nature seems unlikely. Moreover, they would have had every incentive to expose this to score a major propaganda victory. Apollo engineers were very well aware of the van allen belt and, a, it wasnt in there for very long and b, it charted a course were actually where the van allen belt was quite weak, anyway. You would think that having moon rocks on the earth would be living proof that conspiracy theories could be debunked. Those rocks are still being studied today. Some of them are sealed up, have never yet been touched, because the scientists even back in the 605 and 705 knew that the technology would get better with time and they would be able to make new scientific discoveries. We have, left by the apollo astronauts on the moon, retro reflectors, these are passive experiments where a bit like cats eyes, we can fire a laser at them. Bounce lasers from the earth to the moon to understand the changing behaviours of the moon in its orbit. It is sadly not enough for the deniers, because they will always see conspiracy. For one, moon landing conspiracies have been around for several decades. They have suddenly got a new lease of life in the age of the internet. Things like facebook groups, they let all of these disparate ideas and people come together and find each other in a way that we never had before. So the romans had conspiracy theories, they just didnt have the internet. Now we still have conspiracy theories, because we are humans, and our brains are fallible, and we have the internet, it is a perfect storm. And that is it for this short cut of click from Flight Control one here at nasa. Theres loads more brilliant space stuff in the full length version. Thats waiting for you right now on iplayer, and next week we will be back to look even further into space. Thanks for watching, and we will see you soon. Hello and welcome to newswatch with me, samira ahmed. Questions raised over question time, has the programme become more of a shouting match . And that is why we devoted all of the shirt of examining the state of bbc 0nes flagship today programme. The faces around the table have changed but the music and the format are changed but the music and the format a re pretty changed but the music and the format are pretty much same, it will be a0 yea rs are pretty much same, it will be a0 years this september since robin day presented the First Edition of the show and in that time controversy has never been far away. Arguments have cropped up notjust around the table what about the programme itself, now amplified by social media. Take fiona bruces second show in january when the media. Take fiona bruces second show injanuary when the labour Party Complained that diane abbott had been interrupted more than other panellists and that the audience had been wound up against her. We are happy to talk to the government about some sort of movement. And a couple of occasions since you have had other complaints about the audience. In february, the make up of those attending a recording in motherwell and in particular this man aroused the anger of viewers, one of whom wrote. In on inona in on a programme from scotland in may also raise concerns when the presence of this woman led to the writer and commentator gerry hassan
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