David is right; the communications were, for the most part, not responsive conversations. The astronauts knew what they had to report and when. Just because an astronaut statement follows directly after a mission control statement doesn't mean it was given in response to it.

You must also recall that the recorder was on earth and that it's not always possible to distinguish between the capcom and the astronaut. If an astronaut makes a statement and the capcom responds, it will properly sound as if the capcom's answer directly follows because no communication delay applies to the recordings of the capcom.

Michael Collins describes his amusements with comm delay. After the Eagle landed and the capcom said, "Be advised there are lots of smiling faces around the room," Collins remarked, "And one in the command module." But because the comm interval was longer for Collins (three trips instead of two), his comment is recorded on the tape after Houston's next comment: "That was a beautiful job, you guys." And so the tape makes a shambles of the flow of the conversation and Collins is spending the rest of his life explaining that he was pleased at a successful landing, not fishing for a compliment.

The best way to convince yourself that comm delays really did happen is to listen to the first hour or so of the Apollo 11 EVA. Very often when Neil or Buzz keys his mike you can hear the tail end of mission control's last statement echoing from the astronaut's earphones to his microphone, exactly 2.6 seconds after it was directly recorded on the tape. It went onto the tape, but also to the moon and back and onto the tape again.

When people say there's no evidence of comm delay, it's because they haven't looked for any evidence of comm delay. This, actually, is an example of what irks me most about hoax believers. They say, "We should observe X, but there's no X." Usually it takes me only a few minutes to find all kinds of examples of X. But of course the hoax believer's audience isn't necessarily equipped or motivated to look for X themselves; they just assume the hoax author has made an exhaustive search and failed to find X. But really the hoax believer simply hasn't put any real effort or intelligence into his charges; he's just ignorantly and lazily asserting there's no X because he knows it will take effort to prove him wrong -- effort few people will make.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JayUtah on 2002-03-01 10:54 ]</font>