In honor of the anniversary of the moon landing, Space.com has an article listing (and debunking) the
top 10 Apollo Hoax Theories. Below are the top 10 points raised by those who believe the moon landing was a hoax. You'll have to read the article to get the explanation of why these points DON'T prove that the moon landing was a hoax.
#10. Fluttering Flag: The American flag appears to wave in the lunar wind.
#9. Glow-in-the-Dark Astronauts: If the astronauts had left the safety of the Van Allen Belt the radiation would have killed them.
#8. The Shadow Knows: Multiple-angle shadows in the Moon photos prove there was more than one source of light, like a large studio lamp.
#7. Fried Film: In the Sun, the Moon's temperature is toasty 280 degrees F. The film (among other things) would have melted.
#6. Liquid Water on the Moon: To leave a footprint requires moisture in the soil, doesn't it?
#5. Death by Meteor: Space is filled with super-fast micro meteors that would punch through the ship and kill the astronauts.
#4. No Crater at Landing Site: When the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) landed, its powerful engine didn't burrow a deep crater in the "dusty surface."
#3. Phantom Cameraman: How come in that one video of the LEM leaving the surface, the camera follows it up into the sky? Who was running that camera?
#2. Big Rover: There's no way that big moon buggy they were driving could have fit into that little landing module!
#1. Its Full of Stars!: Space is littered with little points of lights (stars). Why then are they missing from the photographs?
Comments
However, they always miss or purposely avoid the the one piece of irrefutable proof that it did in fact happen. That is that the Soviet government never refuted the American claims and they were in a unique position to do so. For even after the Americans landed on the moon the Soviets still continued to send orbiters, landers and rovers to the moon.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_planetary_lunar.html
Now if they wanted to get the goods on the Americans all they had to do was to land, photograph or explore with a rover the American landing sights. Just imagine the embarrassment not to mention the the damage to American credibility, at the height of the cold war no less, that such information would generate. Records even show that they never landed or even explored that areas that that American landings happened. So they did not even go and look to make sure because they knew it really happened.
The next question then is even if they did know they were faked why did they never use the information. They did not use it to pressure the Americans to stop bombing North Vietnam and Cambodia where Soviet military advisers were being killed as a result. They did not use it to
pressure the United States to stop sending military advisers to and providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan fighters during the Soviet occupation. They did not use it to stop the Star Wars program of the
Regan administration.
In fact they did not even use it to turn the West's attention away from the Soviet Union during the Soviet Coup of 1991 when members of the Soviet government briefly deposed Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and attempted to take control of the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_coup_attempt_of_1991
Which every body knew was the last death throws of the Soviet empire. If they did not use the information then to turn the attention of the American, and world public, inward to their own governments lies and thus corruption and force it to ignore the events in the Soviet Union
in order to deal with a damaging domestic and international issue. Then the proof of faked moon landings did not and never existed.
One final thought. After the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian economy tanked. People were selling all kinds of stuff owed by the crumbling state, ships, weapons, artworks and knowledge but nobody ever approached any Western news agency or tabloid to sell them this information. And to say that one would buy it but not publish is foolish. The seller could just keep peddling it until someone would.
Let's see, radio waves travel at the speed of light. That's 186,282 miles per second. I'm not sure how far away the moon was at the time of the landings, but I'll just use the average distance of 238,857 miles. That means it took only 1.28 seconds for the signals to reach the moon and another 1.28 seconds for the response to arrive back on earth. Hell man, modern radio communication has gaps that long.
So while the communication gap wasn't instantaneous (no communication is), it was easily short enough to allow for a normal flow of conversation.
Any other questions?
It was 115 miles on May 5, 1961. Alan Shepard became the first American in space. The moon landing came over eight years later, not five.
You're actually pretty right about the space shuttle. Not that I can see what your point is.
Please do some research be for you start to spout.
Still, it doesn't alter the fact that the moon's distance from the earth isn't anywhere near great enough to have caused an appreciable delay in communication on its own. With current technology I would expect the delay to be just over the 2.5 second turn-around.
Even with our communication advances, isn't there a time delay from live feeds from the US to Australia? Even if it is just a matter of seconds or nanoseconds or whatever?
Back then I don't believe there was anywhere near the communication ability as there is today. Ok, radio waves haven't changed in speed, I suppose, but it had to go through a satellite and then transmitted to the earth. It seemed to me odd that there was hardly any appreciable delay in communication.
Why was the transmission controlled entirely by the government? Months before, a satellite was put into orbit to broadcast to the control room simulated flight data for practice. The control room could never discern the difference between test flight data and the real flight data. The CONTROL room(funny name don't you think? It was a room controlled by the government...ok, you say it was controlling the Eagle)
THe television broadcast of the events was a recording from the video monitor in the control room.
Clear, color broadcasts from inside the Eagle and craptackular video from the moon's surface. Ok, techies, explain that one to me.
Why hasn't the US gone to the moon since then? Is it because Nixon isn't president anymore? The Apollo missions started and ended with Nixon, right?
Why didn't they put powerful telescopes on the moon instead of wasting their time driving around in dune buggies?
The questions can continue...
As far as the government controlling things - well, it was a government project. Did you expect them to set up telemetry computers in people's garages?
Well, the video monitors in the control room would have been the only ones picking up the live feed. As for being a recording, that's pure speculation with no evidence to back it up.
I've seen lots of color video from the surface. You have to remember, the surface of the moon is very stark. Not a lot of color out there, but what there was came through. Also, inside the capsule you didn't have the contrast issue you had on the surface. All that white/light grey rock and dust reflected a lot of light back into the camera, tending to wash out less bright images.
In fact, if the whole thing were staged wouldn't you expect them to do a better job of it? If the images were perfect you'd be using that as an example of how it wasn't real.
$$$$$. That and a lack of public interest pushing it through. With no obvious returns (the Soviets having already been beaten) why bother anymore.
Kennedy started the Moon Project. A rather famous speach of his, in fact.
Why would they? Any telescope they could have brought with them wouldn't have been any better than the far bigger telescopes on earth, though they would have had the benefit of not dealing with an atmosphere. And who would adjust them? Batteries would only last a short while then fail, rendering the telescope useless. Plus, they would have had the same issue as earthside ones in that the planet they were on kept moving all the damn time. That's why so many telescopes are being put into orbit.
You're such a gull!! Next you'll be claiming the Kennedy 'assassination' and Twin Towers 'terrorist attacks' were not set up and faked:) God, I can't believe there are still people who cannot see through this CHARADE!!!!!
😉
Certainly other countries would have continued to the moon, if it was possible at the time. A matter of pride? A matter of obtaining hugely significant scientific data? A matter of being the second country to do this. Nothing to snub one's nose at.China wants to do this by 2015.Not to mention Russia was far advanced in their space program. The first man in space, the first synchronous orbital flight, etc.
A telescope satellite could have possibly been jettisoned out into space further than ever at the time, right? I know, my scientific knowledge is lacking.
The video from the first landing was horrible on the surface of the moon. But the interior shots were great.
I wasn't talking about the moon mission including the Gemini, Mercury and others. The Apollo mission was during Nixon and ended with Nixon, I believe. Not saying he had anything to do with it.
October 11, 1968 Apollo 7 First Apollo mission to fly. Made 163 orbits around earth. 9 months later they broke free of the orbit and landed with no problems on the moon. Yes, Apollo 13 was made dangerous, probably to garner more public support for the missions(I mean, getting money.)
The space program lands on the moon in the time frame given by Kennedy in which Nixon calls the greatest event in creation...and they run out of $$$? Makes no sense. It makes more sense that this was a propaganda piece that NASA thought dangerous to continue. Or, NASA was completely successful in learning how to launch huge, far-reaching rockets that could have intercontinental ballistic missiles attached. Mission accomplished and instead of continuing the lie, they stopped.
US and Russia could have been in cahoots. Russia receives aid from US in return they don't blow the whistle. Speculation.
Do you know and can you provide info/sources on any observatories that kept track of the Apollo mission as it ascended in the direction of the moon? I would love an answer to this question.
Collins, Buzz, and Neil look extremely uncomfortable during the press conference after they returned. They didn't remember seeing stars on the surface of the moon either.Only question they did not have an answer for. All three retired after their mission. I've heard the top director of Apollo retired weeks before the missions for no given reason...forgot the name at this time(how convenient right?)
I'm unsure about your telescope comment. There's no reason to send most telescopes outside of earth's orbit. As long as they're in a location free from atmospheric pollution and can stay pointing at one part of the sky for extended lengths of time they do just fine. The only reason to send one further into space is to get close-up images of the other planets and misc, and we've been doing that with probes for 40 years.
The images from the surface would have been washed out. They improved in later missions. They also would have required far different cameras than interior cameras, ones intended to operate in a vacuum.
Again, how is this evidence the landing was staged? Do you think NASA would have used substandard cameras for their faked 'lunar surface' footage than for their interior shots? Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just use the same cameras?
Mercury was the program to get Americans into space. Gemini was the program to develop the skills and technology to produce the Apollo program, operating from 1963-66. Gemini was the 'testing ground', so to speak, where we learned what it would take to get a manned capsule to the moon. The Apollo Program was the actual lunar program. Nixon was elected in '68.
The images from the surface would have been washed out. They improved in later missions. They also would have required far different cameras than interior cameras, ones intended to operate in a vacuum.
Again, how is this evidence the landing was staged? Do you think NASA would have used substandard cameras for their faked 'lunar surface' footage than for their interior shots? Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just use the same cameras?
You're correct about Apollo 7. Your comment on Apollo 13 is pure speculation with no evidence to back it up.
The space program didn't 'run out of money', the government stopped funding it as much. Public opinion waned after the first landing. Subsequent landing barely rated television time, except on the news. Nobody wanted to pay for it anymore when the Soviets had already been beat. If another 'threat' had surfaced then perhaps the interest and funding would have come, but none did. By your own argument some threat should have been 'manufactured' at this time to keep interest and funding up, yet none came. You can't have it both ways. No government agency willingly stops accepting money.
Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin were not celebrities. They were people assigned a dangerous job who managed to pull it off, with the help of thousands of people supporting them. Of course they were uncomfortable being in the limelight.
And as for retiring, they had done something no other person had ever done before. It's hard to top that. And Armstrong in particular hated the attention and hounding the press gave him. Paparazzi isn't a modern phenomenon.
As for the top director of Apollo retiring, I have no info on that. Even so, what does it prove?
You keep making comments without any reasoning to back them up. You say "this is suspicious", but you don't follow through and state why, or why it would matter. You point out what you perceive as anomalous 'facts' as if that proved your case, yet you don't ever state why this should be so. You seem to be making huge leaps to your conclusions, leaps other people can't understand.
For instance, the camera quality issue. Even if the images from the surface are of less quality than the interior shots, how does this support your position? What reasoning are you making that would link this with the landings being faked?
But Charybdis, riddle me this:
Several peculiarities exist for the
Could it have been a boost to have the most advanced, technical film making studio be associated with the NASA program? I mean they could have made the cameras better for lunar surface broadcast. All that darned bright light.
Maybe they could have been able to film the stars that must have been so brilliant on the moon without atmosphere..you know, those same stars that the three astronauts
DIDN'T REMEMBER IF THEY SAW STARS OR DIDN'T SEE STARS ON THE LUNAR SURFACE. They must have been too busy trying to keep the flag from waving around huh?
Now, try looking for stars when you're standing in a sea of white and gray rocks and dust with the sun overhead. The lunar landscape could be very bright at times, and even in the darker areas it was still bright enough to ruin night vision, which is required to see all those faint stars.
Yes you could see the stars from the moon, but only if you shielded your eyes from all the brighter objects all around you. It would have required staring straight up for a long enough period to allow your eyes to adjust to the lower light levels. And even then I'm uncertain just what affect reflected light would have had on the astronaut's helmets. Perhaps none, perhaps a lot.
And, once again, your present an argument that in no way supports the idea that the landings were faked. Do you honestly think that NASA (this incredibly manipulative and conniving group, it seems) would have forgotten to add stars to their supposed backdrops? Or that the astronauts, who were presumably complicent in the fraud, wouldn't have lied and claimed they *did* see the stars?
How, in your mind, would such an omission on their part ever make you think the landings were faked?
"Any telescope they could have brought with them wouldn't have been any better than the far bigger telescopes on earth, though they would have had the benefit of not dealing with an atmosphere."
SO which is it? Too much reflected light to not see the stars from the moon or really bright stars that are well seen due to the lack of atmosphere on the moon? You can't have it both ways.
Stars added to the backdrops would be very difficult to fake, I assume. Astronomers world wide might be able to point out anamolies in constellations, etc. Best way to deal with it is not mention them at all. It would, however, have behooved the astronauts to rehearse the star questions before the press conference.
What happens on earth during the day is that the dust in the air reflects sunlight, causing the sky to basically glow with a soft blue light. This light is easily brighter than the stars shining through it, so the stars disappear. At night this glow disappears, but the atmosphere still has different layers at different temperatures, causing the stars to shimmer, much like when looking out at a low angle across a hot pavement.
On the moon you don't get either of these issues, so you get a much clearer view of the stars.
Now, to the second issue. If bright light is entering your pupils then they will grow smaller to protect your eye from overload. This has the side-affect of limiting your low-light vision, meaning you can't see fainter lights, such as stars. This in no way is negated in a vacuum. The cameras of the time suffered from this affect even more so than the humans. If the cameras were to allow enough light to enter to make the stars show up, then everything else in the image would have appeared more or less solid white due to too much light entering the lense. You see this often on television for dramatic affect, the image starts out very bright and solid, and as the light is filtered the image gets darker and details start appearing.
If you doubt this try some simple experiments. Go outside at night and try to see the stars near a light pole. The closer to the light you get the more the stars grow fainter until you can't see them at all. Imagine the entire landscape lit up in such a manner and it's not hard to see why your pupils wouldn't allow enough light to enter to make the stars visible.
Now try it with a camera. Take a picture of the light and see if any stars are visible in the image. Unless you turn the exposure way up you won't be able to see any, but then the light would be so bright as to cause an annoying glare in the center of your picture.
To recap.
1) Dust in the air scatters light and outshines the stars. Only objects brighter than the sky (the moon, Venus, and sometimes Jupiter. Maybe Mars as well, in certain circumstances) will show through.
2) Light reflects off objects and terrain, causing your pupils to contract letting in too little light to allow you to see the stars. The affect is the same with cameras, though through mechanical and not biological processes.
http://history.nasa.gov/ap11ann/apollo11_log/log.htm
1:55 p.m.- Armstrong tells Mission Control: "We're getting this first view of the landing approach. This time we are going over the Taruntius crater and the pictures and maps brought back by Apollos 8 and 10 give us a very good preview of what to look at here. It looks very much like the pictures, but like the difference between watching a real football game and watching it on TV-no substitute for actually being here."
About 15 minutes later he adds: "It gets to be a lighter gray, and as you get closer to the subsolar point, you can definitely see browns and tans on the ground."
And a few moments still later: "When a star sets up here, there's no doubt about it. One instant it's there and the next instant it's just completely gone."(why couldn't he say this during the press conference? No, he has to stumble over his words..I remember something about stars, don't know which ones....and Buzz says "I don't remember seeing any."
I thought you said that the surface of the moon was white and gray rocks...but Neil says it's brown and tan.
Wait, wait...Wait a minute..Aldrin agrees with you and completey disagrees with Neil:
4:18 p.m: Finally, in describing the surface, Aldrin says: "It's pretty much without color. It's gray and it's a very white chalky gray, as you look into the zero phase line, and it's considerably darker gray, more like ashen gray as you look up 9O degrees to the Sun. Some of the surface rocks close in here that have been fractured or disturbed by the rocket engine are coated with this light gray on the outside but when they've been broken they display a dark, very dark gray interior, and it looks like it could be country basalt."
Fractured rocks from the effects of the rocket engine thrust? But no displacement of rocks or moon dust, as would be evidenced by no dust on the landing feet of the LM, underneath the lunar module. I think it produced 10,000 lbs of pressure or something? And no displacement of dust near the landing module as evidenced by the fact of the footprints photographed in the fine dust near the landing site.
Does not Buzz Aldrin recount seeing stars from the surface of the moon in his book written around 1976 entitled 'Return to Earth"? I wish I had the page number. But he didn't remember seeing them during the press conference. This book is something we'd have to read to find out. To the library!
What does this prove? Conflicting answers equals a conflicted story. Details are important. One doesn't remember something here but remembers it at a later date. One sees brown and tan and the other sees white and gray. Just details.
I guess they can't be expected to remember everything that happened on the moon...but it does warrant questioning when they remember different things about the same event.
What about displaced and fractured rocks by the thrust of the engines, but the silt near the landing module was not disturbed and allowed for nicely laid footprints? No dust on the landing feet of the LM, either, from pix I've seen.
From your own post ...you can definitely see browns and tans on the ground.
Neil says he can see browns and tans, not that the entirety of the surface is brown and tan. He also stated this while approaching the landing site. White and gray are the predominant colors at the landing site, but that's not universal across the whole moon. Also, green is the predominant color of a forest, but that doesn't exclude browns and tans from showing through as you pass overhead.
The dust issue has already been raised and explained, I'm not doing so again. It's up there if you care to read it. It's a simple thing, really.
As far as memory goes, Christopher covered it quite nicely. In fact, if everyone agreed on every last detail that would be suspicious, not the other way around.
Face it, you simply don't want to believe the landings occurred, and you're willing to latch on to any perceived 'irregularity' as proof you are correct. You still have yet to provide a single example of any real evidence beyond your feelings.
No they weren't. They were mostly pilots with the determination (and luck) to have made it into space. There was no space exploration to speak of, everyone was learning as the went along. Yes they were highly trained - to operate the crafts they rode in. There was very little research done at first, and what was done was at the direction of earthside scientists.
They weren't yahoos, but there wasn't much room for niceties when your sole goal is to get there and return alive.
You called my explanation of von Braun's being used as a technical consultant for Disney "speculation", not really since this sort of thing still goes on all the time. Except now it is more likely to be a rock or movie star or athlete or out-of-office politician than a engineer or other technical person.
You're right. None of these observations must make any sense at all to you.
Von Braun worked in the film industry. Accept it. He either knew how to make movies or he knew people who knew how to make movies. A rocket scientist plus a film producer equals the ability to produce a movie that appears to be filmed on in space or on the moon.
The van Allen Radiation belts.
Charybdis is very good at debating. He/she/it says the dust issue has been resolved from this post "The dust was only a few inches thick, on average. The dust was piled up around the LEM. The ladder extended out the side of the LEM, not the bottom."
The dust was only a few inches thick...exactly...it should have been blown away from the LM and then no footprints would have been left. It's simple really.
Those astronauts look nervous as hell during the press conference.
This has been hilarious. But now it bores me.
And yet, this in no way is any kind of evidence such an event occurred. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it happened.
As for the dust, try it some time with a sandbox and a can of compressed air. The sand immediately below the air stream will be blown out of the way, but it will pile up around the center. The exhaust wouldn't have simply turned 90
How about the waving flag? I haven't argued that one is a long time. Or how about the melting film since I haven't addressed that one before?
As for the dust...try it in a sandbox with a fire extinguisher. The surface area that would be affected by the descending lunar module with its rocket jets would be larger than the craft itself.
No, the surface area affected would have been larger than the nozzle, but not necessarily larger than the lander. This picture gives a good shot of the lander and the ground beneath it. The nozzle itself looks to be roughly 1/4 the width of the entire lander assembly. It shows that the dust has been blown from directly beneath the nozzle and surrounding area, but not as far as the lander legs. Which is what you should expect with no air displacement.
So you admit the dust would have been blown in all directions, especially upward.
The dust is blown upward, hits the underneath of the LM, is deflected back to the ground,... and none of it lands on the landing feet?
Are the booster rockets similar to the exhaust system in cars? I'm under the impression that the rockets channel the exhaust and explosive powers of the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as they combine and ignite. Is this assumption correct?
In a rocket, the exhaust system is the thrust system. It's the gases being expelled that cause the rocket to move.
The rocket boosters used to launch the shuttle, as well as the rockets actually on the shuttle itself, are far, far bigger than on the lunar lander. The lander didn't have to fight the earth's gravity, only the moon's. And the lander was far less massive that the shuttle.
The space shuttle at liftoff weighs in at around 4,500,000 lbs.
The lunar lander weighed around 5400 lbs as it descended to the lunar surface (lunar weight), and only 1700 lbs lifted off again.
How many pounds of pressure do you suppose comes out of those rockets? And how hot do you think those expelled gasses get?
Once I have these answers, then I have a follow up question and a point to make.
However, the first-stage rockets on the shuttle are solid-fuel rockets, much like in model rocket engines - they are not liquid fueled.
The reason for this is because solid-fuel rockets provide much more thrust per volume of weight. The systems are also far less complicated, so they save money and get greater initial thrust right where it counts the most.
The problem with solid-fuel rockets is that once ignited, you can't turn them off again. This makes fine tuning impossible, so the the shuttle finishes its launch on it's own liquid-fuel thrusters. Once the solid rocket boosters have burned out and dropped away the shuttle draws its liquid fuel from the external fuel tank, and when that's empty it's jettisoned as well. This leaves the shuttle with just enough fuel in its own tanks to maneuver in space and fall out of orbit again.
So no, the thrusters on the lunar lander operated nothing like the shuttle at lift-off. As far as how hot the lander's thrusters burned, and how far away those gases retained heat in a vacuum, I have no idea. I also have no idea how hot you wuld have to get the lunar dush to melt it, if that's what you're aiming at. I would imagine that by the time the gasses first reached the surface and blew the dust away they were cool and diffuse enough to have no affect on the dust. Remember, heat is lost very, quickly in a vacuum since there is not atmosphere to absorb the heat and re-radiate it back at you.
And always, always, ALWAYS copy your post before submitting. 😠
There's tens of thousands of lbs of pressure that is exited by the booster rockets and the external fuel tank/rocket, I'm sure.
Does NASA gather and reuse those rocket boosters after they are jettisoned?
What do you mean "copy your post"?
I'm not sure how hot they get, easily hotter than anything in most homes outside of welding equipment. Still not hot enough to melt the launchpad during the short time it's exposed to it.
I wouldn't be surprised if they replace the nozzles and many other parts of the rockets before reusing them. There's always going to be some damage or stress weakening of them, and these are (relatively) cheap and easy to replace. It's the delivery and structural systems that probably cost the most money, and are the parts they most desire to reuse.
And once again, the space shuttle launch rockets are many factors more powerful than that used on the lunar landers.