“Something that looks like an expanding bubble” is a refutation so unspecific as to make it impossible for me to address your issue. You’ll have to give me a timestamp of the specific event.
One thing I did note as I rewatched the video (and yes, I’ve gone through the pain of listening to this imbecile drone on in his Hugo the Abominable Snowman voice at least a dozen times now) is that great emphasis is placed upon how the clouds allegedly speed up and slow down, corresponding with the movement of the supposed bubbles. This is supposedly due to changing the frame rate to make the motion look as if it is in vacuum rather than constrained by the viscosity of water. I find this peculiar, as it would be far easier and cleaner to add the background of the planet via greenscreen post-processing than to build a giant “Earth simulator” projection screen in the background which would be distorted by diffraction through water. Such greenscreen technology is in no way new or unavailable to China, and with a modest amount of effort is literally indistinguishable from digitally processed video images, especially at the image quality of the video of the spaceflight, or for that matter, cinematic quality images. (I defy anyone to view the film True Lies and positively identify all frames in which the Harrier sequences are pure CGI effects versus practical effects. And that film was released in 1994.)
The question isn’t whether such a scene could be faked with modern CGI technology; in fact, there is no question that it could absolutely be manufactured, and likely undetectable save for some oversight. The question is, if the assumption that fakery has occurred on the part of the Peoples’ Republic of China manned space program in the interest of national prestige, why they would have done such an utterly craptastic job of faking it that some mook with a YouTube.com account can reveal it and yet not one major news organization–not even Reuters, News Corp, or the Beeb–has jumped on this as a smoking gun. This is the news story of the decade, and offers the kind of headlines any copywriter would kill to slip onto a front page–“Chinese Takeout Doesn’t Deliver To Orbit”.
I have no way of picking the video apart because it isn’t footnoted or linked to the images claimed to be false. The rocket images are different but I don’t know where they came from. There is clearly some color saturation changes with the clouds that can be adjusted back with a blue filter but again, I don’t know where the images came from.
On a separate note, I believe a government willing to filter the entire internet over a single event would bend over backwards to paint over a failed mission. The Russians went so far as to remove people from pictures when things went south.
So, you can’t point to anything that was specifically faked or otherwise indicate any particular incidence of deception, but because the PRC has some vaguely defined reason to be deceptive about its activities in general, we must assume by default that this particular claim is highly suspect and fraudulent until demonstrated otherwise.
It is people like you who resulted in O.J. Simpson being acquitted and writing a book entitled If I Did It, even though every intelligent person in the western hemisphere was fully aware of the indisputable evidence linking him to the crime.
The pictures of the rockets ARE different in the video. I just have no way of verifying if they are images provided by the Chinese government of the same event. Not all the objects presented as bubbles came from the open hatch so your theory that they are blown out in a continuous pressurization of the hatch doesn’t explain it. And given the movement of the ropes above the hatch that’s one hell of a pressurization process going on to make the ropes float.
The vaguely defined reason for deception is national pride for which they have gone to ridiculous lengths to maintain over one single incident in history.
sigh Let’s try this one more time. The supposed “bubbles” don’t behave in the way that actual air bubbles in water do. They go in straight, diagonal lines in differing directions, displaying no signs of turbulent motion or visible expansion or splitting. The explanation offered in the YouTube video–that blowers are forcing the water to different sides to counteract buoyancy–isn’t born out by the motion of other objects in the frame. Also, if this were filmed in a water tank, and especially one in which pumps are pushing fluid around, you would expect to see more bubbles and more debris floating around. It is impossible to keep any large pool completely free of particles and debris, and all of that tends to refract and scatter light in a way that is distinct from what you see in a gaseous atmosphere or vacuum. See this image from Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Lab as an example. As any underwater photographer knows, you have to be really close to a subject (often macro lens close) to get the clear, professional looking images.
As far as “floating” of the lanyards and hoses, if you bother looking at any other spacewalk videos from Gemini, Apollo, STS, and ISS missions, you’ll see identical phenomenon; in freefall any loose line or hose tends to return to whatever its most evenly distributed load orientation is, which causes them to appear to “float” as if buoyed.
But honestly, the absolutely dumbest thing about this theory–aside from that it requires the Chinese to perform elaborate image processing to correct the color temperature and remove other artifacts but be so sloppy as to leave supposed air bubbles–is that it is utterly and completely unnecessary. If the Chinese wanted to fake a spacewalk by making a taikonaut appear to be in freefall, the easiest way would be to film him actually in a freefall environement such as that produced by a high altitude parabolic flight (see NASA’s or Zero-G Experience flights). Then there would be no need for image processing in the foreground and no question that the scene was filmed in freefall.
Until you come up with a more specific and credible rationale for why this spacewalk was faked, I’m done addressing this issue.
