Apollo 17 Lunar Liftoff

"How come there is no booster exhaust"?

It's really simple. In order for there to be a flame oxygen must be present. There is no oxygen in space.

"How come there is no booster exhaust"?

A better question would be: If they faked it, why would they not put in "booster exhaust?" Hollywood movies of space ships had been made with "booster exhaust" for at least 30 years by then.

If they were gonna fake it, they surely would have remembered to put in the exhaust!!

You don't see any exhaust because it was not visible. Why would it be visible? It's only lifting about 2000 pounds. Probly less than 5PSI pressure out the nozzle.

who was filming the takeoff

The camera was mounted on the lunar rover and, for this shot, was controlled by remote control back in Houston. There is a several second delay in communication to the moon because it's so far away so the first couple times they tried this on other landings the timing was off and they didn't get a very good shot of the liftoff. This was the only one where they panned with the right timing to get a good picture.

a fella in Houston was operating the joystick?

really?
sounds like a fib.
it means they should be able to do that today then.

send a hi-res camera up on a probe and operate it from Houston?
must call bullshit on this because...again they fail to do 40 years later...what they did in 1969.

namaste

"How come they don't do it again today?"

Do you have any clue how much this all cost?

It cost about 10 times as much as NASA's current budget. Why would they want to do it again? They've already been there.

The argument that they "can't do it today" is blatantly silly. Of course we could do it again. And we probably will ... some time. But to continue to spend that money all the time just ain't gonna happen.

its a robotic camera that was left there watch when we left earth and it tells about it

how did they link up with the mother ship?

How did they link up with the "mother ship" (the Apollo command module) ...

Both ships have docking ports. They went into lunar orbit and connected the two ships together. Then they left the lander behind and came home in the command module.

They practiced docking in space as early as some of the Gemini orbiter missions several years earlier.