Marionettes: Were Apollo Astronauts Suspended on Strings in the Films?

If you sit around and watch the Apollo Moon footage long enough, you might notice something odd about the movements of the astronauts. They often walk around bent at strange angles, or perform acrobatics that seem to violate some fundamental laws of physics. Many conspiracy theorists have noted that, in order to simulate the effects of low-gravity, the Astronauts were suspended from strings connected to a crane. This conspiracy theory is only given more credence by the fact that NASA actually had such cranes, and used them for "training" sessions.

 

Here on Earth, an Astronaut in his Apollo spacesuit would weigh about 450 pounds. That's pretty heavy, but the Moon has one-sixth of the Earth's gravitational pull. In the Moon's gravitation pull, 450 Earth-pounds feels more like 75 Earth-pounds. Confusing? The Moon makes you feel lighter. Imagine that you weigh only 75 pounds right now, and that you are a muscular, physically fit Astronaut. Wouldn't you be able to jump pretty high?  There's some footage of Astronauts jumping on the Moon, and the results are not stellar. 

If you could walk on the Moon without a spacesuit, then you would discover that you can jump about 6 times higher than you could on Earth. Realistically, it would be even more than this, because the Moon has no atmosphere. 

On Earth, there are miles and miles of nitrogen and oxygen molecules stacked on top of you right now. This weight pushes you down, and prevents you from jumping higher. I did a simple experiment recently to prove that this has a major effect. I measured my jump at sea-level: 44 inches (pretty good, I think). I then traveled up a mountain, to 5,000 feet. At this height, there are less nitrogen and oxygen molecules stacked on top of me (yes, there's a little argon in there too). How high could I jump at 5,000 feet? About 59 inches. That's a huge increase! Imagine how high I could have jumped if there had been no atmosphere at all? Pretty darn high! So, why are NASA Astronauts having so much trouble? Even with their 300 Earth-pound spacesuits, these strong Astronauts should still feel as though they weigh less than half of their Earth weight. If I were to weigh half of my weight right now (and retain my height and muscles), I would certainly be able to jump up in the air about 7 or 8 feet high.

The picture above clearly shows that the Astronaut (John Young) can jump no more or less than he can on Earth (without the bulky suit). So, if the heavy suits make Moon walking/jumping more or less like walking/jumping on Earth, why do the Astronauts seem to float around as they move? The answer might be wires and cranes. The wires would allow Astronauts to defy physics, but leave them struggling to jump off of the ground (to pull them up during a jump would have looked quite fake).

  

In the above sequence of photos taken from an Apollo mission film, we see an Astronaut performing a maneuver that seems to defy physics. The Astronaut begins in a push-up position, and thrusts himself backwards, onto his knees. From his knees, he seems to magically pop up into a standing position - without any obvious effort exerted from his legs. Notice the first photo at the bottom left. In that photo, it seems most plain that the Astronaut is suspended from wires connected to his waist. The wires easily hoist him up, onto his feet. Oddly enough (or obviously enough), Astronauts in the Apollo videos always seem to revolve in circular motions around their waist. Does the Moon do something to people's gravitational centers, making it the waist area? 

 

Occasionally, as shown in the photo above, some possible evidence of wires appears on the films. There are many examples of these "pings" of light. Pings can also be seen in some science fiction films, where wires may have been used to suspend people or models.

Anti-conspiracy theorists always say the same thing: if filmmakers couldn't make space travel look realistic in movies, then how could NASA have made landing on the Moon look so real? Anti-hoax theorists point out that even the most naive, amateur viewer of science fiction movies can usually tell that what he or she is seeing is fake. These theorists aren't considering enough evidence. 

 

Science fiction films do not have teams of scientists working behind the scenes, nor do they have the sort of information stored in NASA archives. Movies produced during the 1960s and early 70s worked with budgets that paled in comparison to NASA's. Capricorn One, a movie that demonstrated how a space landing hoax might work, did a convincing job of staging a Mars landing. That movie was produced on a budget of about 5 million dollars. In comparison, NASA's budget for the Apollo missions raged in excess of 30 billion. Also, science fiction film making had only just moved into semi-mature stages during the Moon landings, with Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though 2001 showed audiences some of the most visually perfect, awe inspiring space movie footage of all time, the budget for the film was only 10 million dollars. NASA's 30 billion dollar budget could surely have done better than that, even if 29 billion dollars had been spent on building semi-useless spacecraft.

This "marionette" idea posed by conspiracy theorists represents some very good thinking. The idea forces us to compare the Moon landings with science fiction films from the 60s and 70s. We must think about how, even with the 300 Earth-pound space suit, the Astronauts should have been able to jump distances that an Olympic athlete or basketball star would salivate over. What, exactly, is that pathetic little hop that John Young is doing in the second photo above? In one-sixth of Earth's gravity, these Astronauts should have been jumping over craters with ease. Where is the photo of Buzz Aldrin leaping over the LM? Well, yes, that's a bit much, but not entirely too much. So, the Astronauts could defy physics while walking around, but they couldn't jump more than a foot or two high? How strange, indeed.