SpaceX recently launched their Falcon Heavy for the first time on Tuesday with a curious payload – Elon Musk’s own cherry Tesla roadster, fit with a dummy in a SpaceX flight suit named Starman. This was a huge feat of engineering and has since gained worldwide attention. Attached to the car were 3 cameras, feeding a live stream of the vehicle back to Earth as it orbited the Earth. For four-and-a-half hours we saw glorious views of the Earth in crisp 1080p from thousands of miles away, something not really seen live since the Apollo missions. The car orbited Earth for 6 hours, and then the second stage reignited and sent Starman into an orbit around the sun.

And of course, like every other major event in history, there are people denying what really happened. This time, it’s mainly the flat-earthers, some of the craziest people in history. Despite all of the evidence available, they come out and claim this is fake. I will prove to you that it really is real, and really did happen.

I will cycle through some of the popular claims circulating the internet right now. The claims include the footage being pre-recorded and faked, the footage being fake because there are no stars or satellites, the footage is CGI, and it just being too silly to be real.

Section 1: It is not pre-recorded or fake

This claim is mainly just that, a claim, thrown out by the deniers. It’s common for things like this, but cannot be proven. Luckily, we can prove the contrary. To do this, we must compare the footage in the Starman feed to meteorological and cloud-cover data. Take 3:16:15 in the Starman live feed as a base point for our proof. Now, this screenshot is showing Austrailia (the large brown blob on Earth). Knowing this, we can compare this still frame to the cloud-cover data from Austrailia’s Bureau of Meteorology. Unfortunately, the data only goes back 24 hours, but I was able to capture a screenshot of the data before it came unavailable.

Now for the slightly confusing part. The frame of the Starman footage is 3 hours and 16 minutes into the feed (3:15 to round). The feed started about 15-20 minutes after launch, so this frame is from about 3 hours and 30 minutes after launch. The launch took place at 15:45, EST on Tuesday, so this frame is around 19:15 EST on Tuesday. Because the frame shows Australia, 19:15 EST on Tuesday is 10:15 AEST on Wednesday. Now, the image above from the BOM shows the cloud cover over Australia at 13:30 AEST on Wednesday, 3 hours after the frame of the live stream occurred. Let’s compare the cloud cover better, shall we?

Look at the similarities. Compare the clouds. It’s a perfect match. So, we know this is a live shot. The data isn’t released in real-time either, and there is no way SpaceX could have known where the clouds would be between available data times. It would be impossible to predict their location to such accuracy, so we know this has to be real. We can even observe a change in the shape of the clouds:

The top image is from ~30 minutes into the feed, while the bottom is the original image, from ~3 hours and 15 minutes into the feed. Not only does the position of the cloud move relative to the terminator line (the shadow on Earth where the sun doesn’t hit), the shape of the cloud changes as well. This proves that the clouds were moving and changing, and could not have been predicted accurately by SpaceX without the necessary data, which only came once an hour.

Section 2: There shouldn’t be stars or satellites.

It is claimed, by those questioning the footage, that the stars and thousands of satellites should be visible to the camera. This belief is a result of the lack of knowledge of many conspirators in the subject of photography. While this seems like you should see them, if you know how cameras work, you can understand why there is no reason you should be able to see the stars or satellites.

Video cameras determine how bright the footage is in two ways: Aperture and ISO. Aperture is how “open” the lens is. The smaller the aperture, the less light hits the camera sensor, the darker the image. The opposite occurs if the aperture is enlarged. Here’s an example of the camera aperture:

ISO is how sensitive the image is to light. Like aperture, the smaller the ISO, the less sensitive, the darker the image. The larger the ISO, the more sensitive, the brighter the image.

Now, because both the car and Earth are reflecting the bright sun, and take up a large portion of the frame of the video cameras, the cameras adjust their aperture and ISO to see them, without overexposing the image. The small aperture and low ISO mean little light can pass into the camera, allowing the bright car and Earth to be seen, but dimmer objects, like satellites and the stars, do not. You can even try this at home. Go outside with a video camera on a clear night, and point it at the stars so you can see them. If the stars aren’t bright enough to see, try some other very dim object. Now, stand in front of the camera, and point a light at it while recording the video. You should see that the camera changes its exposure so that it can see the light you point at it. This results in the dimmer stars or object looking like it disappears.

Section 3: It is not CGI

As I proved before that this footage was live and did happen, people claim it was CGI. They take this image as proof of a soundstage, and claim it was a glitch in the live feed made by SpaceX (I increased the brightness so you can see):

Now, this arguably looks like a soundstage, but only to those who don’t know what it really is. This background is actually the inside of the fairing that the car was held in. There were images taken before the launch of the car next to the fairing:

See the inside? It matches the background of the frame of the video. But that isn’t all. The conspirators claim this scene of the live stream of the launch was the “correction” made by SpaceX (gif form):

Now, let’s slow it down frame-by-frame:

Watch how the 2 parts of the fairing separate to the left and right. This isn’t CGI. It’s real.

Section 4: Independent trackers have spotted Starman.

Numerous independent trackers and observatories have spotted Starman in the sky as it orbited Earth and headed off into a heliocentric orbit. Over the California sky on Tuesday night, multiple people took photos of the exhaust left by the second stage. Independent observatories also took video of the second stage firing as it crossed over Arizona. Lastly, independent observers using telescopes spotted Starman after he began moving away from Earth and to a heliocentric orbit. They calculated the orbit of the object they saw and it matched exactly with the data released by NASA and SpaceX: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi (click change next to “Target body” and type “-143205”).

In conclusion, we can effectively say that this event, this live stream, all of this, really did happen. To deny it would be denying the evidence. Denying the proof, that Starman was, and still is, very much real. Thank’s for reading.