The series was a hoax at the expense of its contestants, who were told they were being trained as cosmonauts at a Russian military base before undergoing a five-day trip into low Earth orbit. In reality, the entire series was filmed in Dore, and the contestants did not leave Earth.
I…am skeptical that it was actually believed.
I mean 4Chan was possibly able to convince at least some amount of people that iOS 7 update somehow made their iPhone gain water resistance that would trip a hardware “smart switch” built into the phones. Just a numbers game that at least a small amount of people would believe something long enough to not really think about. Though the same can also be applied to convincing folks that other folks were dumb enough to be tricked. Which is still the same result. ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
Imagine you take 200 people who answered an ad seeking “thrill seekers” and to be on TV. Then you psychologically weed it down with questions in order to pick the 6 most gullible, groupthink, extroverts.
That’s how they got the people. Out of all the applicants. However many their were, they took the most gullible extroverted ones they could get.
It never would have been pulled off as a success with regular people.
Billions of people believe in some kind of magical sky fairy. Just saying.
Yea, me too. More like reality show wannabe’s that just went along with it for their 15 minutes.
It was the 2000s. Internet disinformation wasn’t really a major thing. I can imagine they believed it.
Gravity at the height of the ISS is still about 90%. It’s only being in orbit that results in free-fall giving a zero-g effect, not so different from those “vomit-comet” flights.
So if they’d come up with some explanation about it staying up without being at orbital speed it would have been closer to the truth.