by Iris
The Number One tell-all sign why the Soviets knew straightaway that the Apollo missions were a hoax, as soon as they “landed”:
Initially, the Soviets did not fully appreciate the effect of weightlessness and wrongly assumed that it would enhance the health of their astronauts.
The first short-term flights inspired optimism, but after the 5-day long 1969 Soyuz-7 flight, the returning crew had to be removed on stretchers, and their arrival so distressing that it had to be hid from the public.
On the longer lasting, 18-day long Soyuz-9 flight of June 1970, the astronauts arrived in state of pre-heart infarction and had to be urgently taken to intensive care for ressucitation. The Soviets realised that weightlessness was actually a killer.
That’s an archive photo of Soyuz-9 astronauts Nikolaev and Sevastyanov being carried like motionless dolls out of the return module.
NASA obviously did not know this, since it had never even sent astronauts to orbit around the Earth. So it pictured, on its fake return missions, dashing, fresh and energetic astronauts jumping from craft to ship. This is a photo of the 1965 Gemini-5 crew, after they had just landed in the ocean and were about to jump (literally) into the aircraft carrier collecting them.
So unless the Apollo astronauts were some kind of bionic super-beings with synthetic muscles, they clearly had not been exposed to the major impacts of weightlessness experienced by all of the Soviets, the longer the stay, the more terrible the effects.
Nowadays, the effect of weightlessness are very carefully fought and monitored. The ISS astronauts have to undergo a daily workout plan lasting 2 hours, to prevent bones and muscle loss.