Thanks messierhunter. Ping to APoD list. I'd never live-streamed a SpaceX launch until the FH test flight, which is going to prove to be hard to top, and since then the ad hoc vids of launches have not held as much interest. It's not very different from the reaction of the American public to the Apollo program after Apollo 11 I suppose, SpaceX is making it look routine.
I watched a video from one of the hard core flat-earthers, it was amusing and bemusing. He used a then-recent SpaceX launch video to "prove" that the Earth is flat and that space travel is a hoax. His proof consisted of yelling "it's fake! It's so fake! Look how fake!" over various snippets showing things like, oh, the curvature of the Earth, the fist stage and the fairings falling away, that kind of thing.
A High School buddy and I pretended to be flat earthers as a shtick back in the day. We thought it was a hoot. We had no idea there were still people who really do believe it, though.
The FH test flight was a lightning rod, energizing both space lovers and space deniers. I had my own footage of the launch through landing used by at least two conspiracy theorists on YouTube who claim the whole thing was a fake. One of them even claims my footage shows “inconsistencies” with other amateur footage because they don’t understand why the clouds would look different from different angles, or why the sonic booms would arrive at different times from different distances. I think the quality and the quantity of footage that came from that launch upset them so much that it’s made some of them come completely unhinged as they struggle to rationalize it away in order to minimize their cognitive dissonance.