Was the moon landing a hoax? If not why haven't we been back?

Answer 1

It wasn't a hoax, and we haven't been back simply because there's no point.

We have a lot of information about the moon and, except for the fact that it's quite close, there really isn't that much interesting about it.

Scientific research is focussed on things much further afield.

China are going to send a man to the moon in the next decade or so they think. It's more of a symbolic thing than for any scientific purpose though.


Because of this question I have just been doing a wee bit of reading - it would seem that NASA are actually going to send men back to the moon. See the link below:

Answer 2

Although my wife's father performed fuel calculations for the original Apollo landing, I'll spare you that speech. Instead, I will encourage you to watch two programs. The first show is called Conspiracy Moon Landing that it currently showing on the National Geographic Channel and it pretty much obliterates all of the popular conspiracy theories.

I would also encourage you to watch a movie called Capricorn One. Made it 1978, it is a fictional story about a fake mission to Mars. Although it is a science fiction story, it is a good example of how utterly impossible it would be to fake a moon landing for any length of time.

12 men walked on the moon from 1969 to 1972 and we have neither the resources nor the technology to pull off that big of a hoax for so long. Hundreds of thousands of people have worked on the space program. It would be far easier to put someone on the moon than to try and fake it and keep it secret for nearly 40 years.

The landings came at a time when our space program was ultra competitive with the former Soviet Union. Remember how big of a deal it was when Sputnik was put into orbit? They had the technology to monitor our moon shots and transmissions. Don't you think they would have called us out if they had evidence that it was all fake?

Perhaps the most definitive proof of our trip to the moon is what we left behind. For the last 35+ years, scientists have been beaming lasers to the moon and measuring the return times. How are they doing this? The beams are reflected back by equipment left on the moon on at 3 different locations.

Case closed.

Answer 3

The effectiveness of keeping a conspiracy intact is completely dependent on the number of people involved; the more people there are, the less likely the conspiracy will hold over time. There were literally tens of thousands of people involved in the Apollo program, and it has been over thirty years since the last lunar landing; faking the landings and keeping the people silent would have been more difficult than actually performing them.

On three of the Apollo missions, laser reflection dishes were set up which scientists use to this day to accurately calculate the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This equipment could only have been set up manually; no robotic missions could have performed these tasks.

The Clementine lunar satellite was able to take a picture of the Apollo 15 landing site, but the resolution was too low (100 meters) to be considered overwhelming evidence. The Indian space program plans to send a remote sensing spacecraft in 2007, called Chandrayaan I, which has a five meter resolution. Assuming the craft is successful, its images should provide definitive evidence that the moon landings were real.

No matter what evidence one provides, however, someone will always come up with an excuse to negate it. "The scientists are in on the conspiracy with the laser reflector experiment", or "The images from the satellite are fake", or "They set up the Apollo landing sites afterwards using robots". One has to set their own limits on when evidence becomes definitive, and then stand by that limit.

Answer 4

There were a total of six moon landings but after the first, the Congress was already starting to complain about the cost of going further. It seems that many people thought that the money should be spent for social programs at home rather than rather pointless manned journey's to the moon. Also, the attention started to focus on long-term space travel, with Skylab. It then became more of a priority to have heavy lifting into low earth orbit to look at the long-term effects of space flight. Once the Saturn 5 had been decommissioned and the knowledge base scattered, the technical means of getting back to the moon were gone in the absence of another massive effort. Finally, the Shuttle program became our primary launch vehicle. But the Shuttle cannot go nearly has high as the moon and has had many technical difficulties of its own.

So the reason we haven't been back is a complicated collection of politics, saving money, different priorities, and there being very little use for manned programs when the much cheaper robotic probes could do all the needed science. This lead to a place where the technical knowledge has been either lost or stashed away and forgotten. It seems that now that China has decided to go, the US has the political will to 'show them' and to go again. Since the original program was a product of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, this is all in line with how the US does its science.

Answer 5

Russia monitored our space program very closely during the time we landed on the moon (in 1969 they were still behind the Iron Curtain). Do you really think if it was a hoax that the Russian's would not have outed us? We have been back to the moon since 1969, but there is little reason to go back there anymore as we have found out what we need to know already. Space Exploration is costly (both in lives and money), we should be concentrating our money on fixing the planet we live on now...before its too late.

Answer 6

The moon landing wasn't a hoax.

We haven't been back because we have to have a reason.

-- Space exploration costs billions of dollars that the government doesn't want to spend.
-- Landing on the moon once proved one thing, that it was possible.... future missions have to prove other things of equal or greater, scientific value.
-- There isn't anything on the moon of value to acquire.

As soon as we come up with a reason to go, we'll go. Scientists have been compiling all sorts of research tests to conduct while going so it's possible in the near future, we'll see another moon landing but right now, we'll have to wait.

As for people claiming that the moon landing was a hoax:

The flag waving is explained very simply by the fact that when the astronauts planted the flag, the pole was still moving when they took the picture.

Secondly, it's very strange that no other country in the world has refuted U.S. claims of landing on the moon but that the biggest detractors are conspiracy theorists.

Thirdly, over 800 pounds of moon rock that no scientist in the world has said "This stuff doesn't come from the moon, it's a fake!"

Answer 7

It was real. I remember watching it live on a big screen at night set up in the Sheep Meadow in New York's Central Park along with thousands of others. It was a warm August night in 1969.

The three-man Apollo program used a big Saturn V booster. I think it had three stages because it had to get the capsule up to escape velocity. I don't know how many of those rockets they built, but I think they abandoned the program after the several moon missions in the late 60's - early 70's to concentrate on the less expensive space shuttle program.

The moon missions, including the several bags of "moon rocks" they brought back, was more for propaganda purposes than anything else. The "space race", started when the Soviet Sputnik went into orbit in 1957, was a part of the Cold War, and Kennedy wanted to show that American capitalism was better than Soviet communism. Getting to the moon was a part of that. National prestige, it was.

As to the second part of your question, the shuttles are always in "low earth orbit". The technology for going to the moon has been abandoned. Soon, when the International Space Station is completed, the remaining old shuttle vehicles will be retired. I think NASA is gearing up for some more adventures further out there in space -- but Congressional funding will be contentious.

Answer 8

i think there was no moon landing i mean if there was a moon landing the technology would be advance, but if NASA can't even send space ships into space without some technical difficulties in this day and age how the hell did the manage to to send it to the moon i think it was a big hoax

Answer 9

It was not a hoax.
There were thousands of people involved in NASA & the Apollo programmes back then.
There is no way that it could have remained in doubt to this day. People, no matter who they are, cannot keep secrets & always have to tell someone.
We have not been back because we have learnt all we need to know about the moon. Any further space travel will be made to place much further afield but will not be manned flights simply because of the distances & times invloved.

Answer 10

No it was not..... This is proved by the Greenwich observatory which is still using one of the experiments put on the moon during the Apollo missions. They reflect laser light from a set of prisms and this allows them to accurately measure certain things about the moon.... So no matter what the conspiracy nuts say, there is evidence which you or I could if we had a laser and a measurement instrument, and it is certainly something we could see for ourselves by asking at the Greenwich observatory!

As for why we haven't been back.... I guess the cost to gain ratio never warranted it