[Coco] re" OT: (sort of): The Apollo 11 moon landing's fourth crew member? A computer far ahead of its time

[Bill Pierce]

I remember the moon landing very well. The night of the landing, ALL TV stations in my area were showing it.
Even before the actual landing started, they explained, the time it takes for the video feed to reach earth and the time it took to process it into a usable feed would not allow them to do a live feed. They only used the live audio, which was delayed by a few seconds. They had a "staged" moonlanding on a soundstage somewhere and that was what was seen on the night of the landing. The video was crisp and clear and most of all... in color. Even as they were broadcasting the landing, a feed came on the bottom of the screen explaining that this was a mock up of the actual landing and not the real thing and that the actual landing would be broadcast the following day. My math teacher at school brought her color tv to class the next day and the whole 4th grade gathered in her room to watch the landing which was broadcast in black & white.
Most of the stills I see from the conspiracy folks are from the mock up landing as they are in color and very crisp & clear. The actual footage is grainy and in black & white. There may have been color footage but that wasn't shown until later and was still poor & grainy. Even the photography was pretty bad (for the most part), though there were a few good stills. It all got better in later landings.
I also hear them complaining the "the flag is waving and there's no wind on the moon"... no, the flag isn't waving... it's a stiff flag set to look like it's waving. It doesn't move.
As a side note, both my Aunt & Uncle worked at Gruman's Aircraft in NY, where the landing models to most of the Apollo missions were made. They gave me the official patches (same as worn on the sleeve of the space suit) for each Apollo mission. The only way to tell the official patches from the ones sold in the gift shop are that on each patch, the mission number is hidden somewhere in the embroidered artwork. It was a thrill each time I got one to try and find the hidden number (I found them all). I think I have from Apollo 7 to Apollo 15 and a couple of the Gemini patches.

 B.Pierce