The Earth in the window

Sibrel’s film shows the crew talking about camera setups while a small round Earth fills the screen. He argued that the round shape was a window frame and that the crew was only in low Earth orbit, using the window to make Earth look far away. [1]

Armstrong names the window being used in the transcript. It is one of the square side windows, not the round hatch window. [1]

From low orbit a spacecraft moves at more than 17,000 miles per hour, and the ground would sweep past the window in seconds. In the footage the cloud patterns stay fixed for the whole broadcast. [1]

Altered images remain a problem. After Artemis II in April 2026, fact-checkers found AI-edited pictures of Earth being shared as genuine. [2][3]