Smoking Gun #2 - Apollo 14’s flag wave.

He covers this little poser here. In essence, it’s footage of the Apollo 14 flag that appears and disappears on screen. Rasa’s claim (and again it is by no means an original one), is that some unspecified external wind source moved the flag. He dismisses the idea that the flag was moved by gas being expelled from the LM because he thinks that the flag’s original resting point should have therefore have been visible on screen at the outset.

For someone who claims to be a physicist (amongst other things), he’s remarkably ignorant of Newtonian laws of motion.

Rasas says he’s using the Spacecraft Films DVD, but tellingly we don’t hear everything. The first audio we hear is this:

136:20:50 Shepard: Okay, Houston. Suit Circuit Relief is now in Auto.

That audio actually occurs 101 seconds after this statement:

136:19:09 Shepard: Houston, Antares. We're depressing the cabin for jettison now.

Followed quickly by:

136:19:12 Engle: Okay, Al. We're watching that and it's looking good. Suits are looking good. (Long Pause) Okay, Antares. Could you verify Suit (Circuit) Relief (valve) in Auto, please?

How do they know it’s looking good? Because they can see what’s happening from their instrumentation and also because it’s visible on the TV broadcast.

Why did Rasa miss that key element out?

 Rasa says that the “official” explanation (there isn’t one, but anything that discredits his nonsense gets called “official” because he thinks it taints it) is “outgassing” (not entirely the appropriate term but we’ll let that slide), and that can’t be possible because the flag should start on screen first. He doesn’t explain why that should be the case. We have several views of the flag at rest from both Hasselblad and 16mm footage, as shown below.

The photo on the left shows the flag at rest after EVA 1. The photo above shows the view after EVA 2, note the presence of a now discarded PLSS.

Top right is a still frame taken during a “hotfire” check, with the  PLSS also in view. Far right is the same view but after the check, and immediately right the flag after it has been erected.

This discussion at the start of EVA-2 records some important details about the flag position, notably how it was moved into the position seen top left and remained there throughout the 2nd EVA. We can see it as the crew head up the ladder at the end of that EVA.

Just as they start to go back inside, the camera cable is snagged (not for the first time) to such a degree that it knocks it over, causing Ed Mitchell to set it back upright again.

You can see from this still that the flag is still oriented as it is in the post-EVA-1 photo.

While Ed re-orients the camera, we get a few short glimpses of it, still pointing towards the LM, but not directly at it.

So Rasa’s basic premise - that the flag is somehow at rest pointing completely away from the LM and is then blown back on screen before returning off screen is false. He, and others, demand a simple scientific explanation. It’s this:

Air escaping from the LM as it depresses catches the face of the flag, imparting momentum. As the gas pressure stops blowing against the flag face as it changes orientation, it begins to swing back. The momentum of that back swing brings it on camera, at which point it become subject to the the flow of gas again.

There is absolutely nothing in the laws of physics that contradicts this. If there was, then Rasa’s proposed version (that it blows on screen and then returns off again) becomes equally invalid.