Talk:Capricorn One

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"Capricorn One was a fictional movie about a space landing hoax. " -- what, it's a film that never existed? -- Tarquin 19:02 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

Contents 1 ITC project 2 Interesting fiction... 3 "movie magic" 4 The best way to hide the truth is to put it in front of people' eyes...

[edit] ITC project

This article is part of the ITC Entertainment Distributions WikiProject, an attempt to build a comprehensive, detailed and structured guide to ITC Distributions on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

[edit] Interesting fiction...

I remember watching Capricorn One as a child when it came out on TV. I enjoyed the movie, but it stuck out in my mind as a symbol of how ridiculously impossible it would have been for NASA to fake the moon landings.

I love this film, but there are a couple of possible flaws that stick in my mind. (1) Would it have been possible to guide the rocket unmanned so it splashed down at exactly the same time and place as it would've done had it been manned? (2) Would NASA's equipment have been sophisticated enough to tell whether a signal was coming from 300 miles away or closer? 300 miles is only about 0.0016 light seconds. Martyn Smith 10:43, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

a) Sure - most capsules are essentially just ballistic. Fire the retrorockets at the right point, and ride the pre-plotted path down. Not much flying involved.

b) For a cheap Mars flight you'd want a Hohmann transfer, which would be... uh, by my reckoning, on arrival about point seven five AU from Earth; an AU is eight minutes one way, so for a mid-flight guess let's say about five to ten minutes round-trip delay. It'd be noticeable just from response lag by a few weeks into the flight even without equipment to check it - remember the last time you spoke to the other side of the world on a phone? You can notice the delay lag even then, and that's just going to geostationary and back... Shimgray | talk | 13:56, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Apollo and Soyuz fly/flew a lifting re-entry controlled by the on-board computer. So it would be irrelevant whether there were people on board. It's only the very earliest capsules that flew ballistic re-entry (or Soyuz when the computer screws up). Mark Grant 23:20, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

True, though from the point of view of the occupant dumb-ballistic and automatically-controlled-lifting are much the same (except you can breathe easier in the latter). Thinking about it, Apollo did have some manually-operated parts of the descent sequence - it's what almost wrecked the ASTP landing - but nothing that couldn't be automated easily enough (and was automated, on early unmanned flights) Shimgray | talk | 23:28, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, the difference between 20g and 6g (or thereabouts) is pretty significant, not to mention the difference between 'land where you hit' and 'land where you aim'. Also, there's nothing in the re-entry that had to be manually controlled -- remember, they flew entirely unmanned Apollo missions to test the spacecraft before they flew manned missions -- about the only thing that absolutely required a human on board for an Apollo mission was docking with the Lunar Module in the SIVB stage, or dealing with problems that couldn't be fixed on the ground. The latter is really the biggest technical problem with the faked mission in the movie: it's incredibly unlikely that an Apollo-based spacecraft could get to Mars and back without some kind of problem that would require human interaction. Mark Grant 23:43, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "movie magic"

Is this the only film where someone is trying to kill OJ Simpson?

Anyhow, Hal Holbrook's character clearly says that the memorial service at the end of the film is "right here in Houston", and not at all in Arlington. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.55.71.154 (talk) 01:37, 5 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] The best way to hide the truth is to put it in front of people' eyes...

... and that is exactly what this movie's goal was striving to accomplish. Well, it did, because now most people would not buy that NASA could be that dumb to had staged the Moon landings in very similar fashion. Oh well... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.253.190.123 (talk) 20:09, 10 December 2006 (UTC).