In news:Xns9877630B4D723kiwilovesomewherenz@203.109.252.31,
Harvey@NZ <kiwilove@co.nz> typed:

I think you'll have to be into rocketry to know whether the Saturn V
was all that it was cracked up to be? The biggest rocket doesn't mean
the most efficient rocket, with the most thrust (efficiency) possible.
It could have been burning up huge amounts of fuel, and not providing
the vital thrust?
There was a programme about a Russian rocket, how it's design
efficiency was much more efficient - that it got the Americans
attention.

I saw a film about rocketry recently. I think I saw that on Youtube. Of
course the real reason for the development of such large rockets was to
develop ICBMs. In many ways the space race was a show of power and a means
to test new weapons. A peaceful alternative to nuclear war. :)

<snip>

I wouldn't be so sure that universities at that time, had the
necessary tracking equipment available, although the Australian
tracking station would have.

Well even radio hams were monitoring the early Apollo missions, They would
have only needed to compare notes on signal direction, signal strength and
have done some calculations allowing for distance and the curvature of the
Earth to get a fairly accurate position. It would have been impossible to
have fooled the public without at least sending a space probe to the Moon to
relay signals back, because anyone with a suitable antenna or dish connected
to a suitable receiver could have monitored it's position comparing notes
with others. It isn't difficult to construct a radio telescope in one's back
garden with some parts from a hardware store and some electrical wiring,
building aerials is fairly simple and you don't even need a Radio Ham
Licence to receive signals.

We know now that NASA's track record isn't too good, with 2 fatal
space shuttle mishaps, which were totally preventable - yet no one was
lost on the Apollo missions. I couldn't be bothered watching the
Apollo 13 movie or documentaries about it. I don't know why? I had no
interest in watching anything about it? At the time, I didn't have
any kind of thoughts it all being faked, etc etc. Maybe my pysche was
telling me something?
Conspiracy theorists wouldn't have a leg to stand on, if there weren't
missions to the moon since. By anyone.
Will we have to wait until NASA again goes to the moon?

Well sending people into space is a dangerous business. I never bothered
watching the Apollo 13 film. After all we know what happened. It was nail
biting at the time, but the film seemed pointless, there was no suspense.

I think a decent VCD quality is OK to watch - but anything less than
that, does not do the footage justice, etc.
I have converted avi etc files to VCD - and it's amazing how small the
file can shrink down to, and still be of reasonable, watchable
quality. It is a slow conversion process to do this, via Nero.
I will guess, that YouTube prefers even smaller files than this - and
only when broadband is dirt cheap and extra high speed is normal,
will they up the quality possible...? there

The problem I find with Youtube and Google videos is they use a sort of
flash player. Which on my system plays things at about 4 frames a second if
I try to watch it fullscreen, so I have to watch them at the reduced size. I
don't get that trouble with any other video format. I find anything around
320x240 is quite watchable and no worse than VHS as long as it isn't too
heavily compressed. I tend to watch most videos fullscreen if I can. I have
a 19" Dell CRT monitor so can sit down in an arm chair and it's basically no
different than watching a small to medium sized TV set. Although the sound
system is better than most Televisions since it comes through both the
computer speakers and a hi-fi, so I do at least get all the hair raising
digital Dolby 3d surround sound effects when I watch better quality DVDs.
Which is quite funny really because the sound can be absolutely epic and you
sort of expect the picture to be about 50ft across LOL
-- 
Amanda