The only real difference between the "spaceflight" in the 1960's and today is that these pictures don't need to be hand painted - you can render them in Blender in a single day.

But yeah, sure. With the amount of fake stuff on the internet including AI image generation, we're expected to believe that the US government dumped billions of dollars into going to space when they could give the appearance of doing so for a few bucks in nano banana credits? Hah.

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maxbond 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals.

Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?

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slopinthebag 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How would they prove that no launch happened? There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, and if there were it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.

	▲	maxbond 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, ... A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty. Which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined; you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue". It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon. > ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.

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mylies43 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Im curious, so the rocket definitely took off, where did it go?