"Look at that!" he shouted, pointing at the skewed shadows. "If the Sun is the only light source, shouldn't they be parallel?"
"If we're going to do this," Jamie said, his voice flat as ever, "we have to go big. We need a vacuum, we need high-powered lasers, and we need to stop people from saying the flag was waving." Act I: The Shadow Play [S6E10] NASA Moon Landing Hoax
Next came the flag. "There's no air on the moon," Jamie noted. "So why does it look like it's flapping in the wind?" "Look at that
Conspiracy theorists argued that footprints in the dry lunar dust should be impossible without moisture. Adam stepped into a tray of dry, fine-grained lunar simulant in a vacuum. Because the dust was jagged and had nothing to "cushion" it, the footprint held its shape perfectly. No water required. Act IV: The Laser Reflector "There's no air on the moon," Jamie noted
As the episode wrapped, the team looked at the data. They had recreated the "faked" photos, proved the flag’s movement, and literally touched a piece of human history with a laser beam.
They placed a replica flag inside a . On Earth, air resistance makes a flag stop moving quickly. But in a vacuum, without air to provide friction, the flag continued to oscillate for a long time after being touched. The "waving" wasn't wind; it was physics in a vacuum. Act III: The Lunar Footprint
"If there’s nothing up there," Adam said, watching the monitors, "the laser won’t come back."