Do you think the moon landings were for real (Man walking on the moon)?

Question

Only I need to find out the percentage of yes and no's of the british public.Thanks' .... Will post again when I have a few answers in

The reason I'm asking is because last night I posed the same question on YAHOO ANSWERS AMERICA which you can go onto at the bottom of the screen. I don't know if any of you want to look for it? But they all belive it and one or two of them got a bit funny,,,,,,,Still I've got the job of picking best answer!! Ha Ha

Answer 1

I know you’re only asking for a count of how many believe this, but there are a number of people who have said that they do, basically because they think so. Well here are some thing that might change their views.

Most people who believe that the Moon flights were faked do so because they have seen very bad “documentaries” made by people who have an amazing ignorance of the space programme, and also of basic photography. They use a very selective choice of photos and video, and they only give a very small part of the story.

One thing to realise is that at the time of the flights, we simply didn’t have the digital imaging techniques that would have been needed to fake to video and photos. In fact, even now we wouldn’t be able to fake everything, because some of the images can only be produced on the Moon!
I give lectures on space exploration and this is a question that often comes up. I watched all the Moon missions and I have DVDs of the uncut transmissions. So let’s make a start …

1) There are shadows that go in different directions. All the shadows should be parallel.
Shadows in photos taken on Earth as well as the Moon appear to converge – it’s due to perspective. Shadows caused by the sun will be parallel if (a) the objects that make them are parallel and (b) they fall on a flat surface. One of the famous photos used in this regard shows Jim Irwin by the flag on Apollo 15. Firstly Irwin is leaning forward, towards the camera, to counterbalance the mass of his backpack, whilst the flagpole is clearly leaning to one side – it may well be leaning backwards as well. Secondly, the surface of the Moon is not flat; it has craters and hills of all sizes and this means that shadows are very unlikely to fall in the same direction.
In fact the pictures are very strong proof that they were not taken in a studio. To do so would have certainly required more than one light, as there is no studio on Earth large enough to have a movie set a quarter of a mile wide – an absolute minimum requirement – that can be lit by a single source, which itself would have to be even further away in order to avoid perspective from it. However if more than one light was used – and thus produced shadows going in different directions, then every item would have more than one shadow – one from each light. Now it can’t be argued that they were spotlights focussed on each object, because the ground would not be illuminated evenly (there would be “hot-spots”) and there would be occasions when, say, an astronaut walked by the flag and both shows would have been visible. In fact there isn’t a single photo that shows an object with two shadows.
If this was all filmed in a studio, it couldn’t be done in real-time, as they couldn’t create the slow-motion that has been proposed. This means that all the filming would have had to have taken place before the mission. Yet the astronaut’s time was all accounted for.

2) The flag “waves” when it should remain still.
In all cases the video used to illustrate this is from a sequence when the astronauts are still setting the flag up, so of course it’s waving around. They are doing their best to push the pole into the ground and set the upper part with the flag in place. Incidentally, the flag is held out at right-angles to the pole by a wire stiffener, otherwise it would hang straight down and would hardly be seen. However once the astronauts let go and the vibrations moving the flag die down, it never moves again – not even when the astronauts run past it. On Earth, this would stir up air currents which would make the flag move, but in the vacuum of the Moon, it stays still.

3) The scenes on the lunar surface were actually filmed on Earth.
The footage of astronauts kicking up the surface material and the dust flying off the wheels of the lunar rover show that it all follows a parabolic trajectory back on to the ground. In an atmosphere, this dust would produce clouds of material. Just watch any footage of a car travelling on sand or something similar and you will see how this is churned up into the air and takes ages (even under the higher earth gravity) before it settles. This shows that they were in one-sixth gravity and in a vacuum. There is nowhere on earth that a vacuum chamber exists of the size required to fake this.

4) The shadow areas should be absolutely black as there is no air to scatter the light.
This is similar to “All the mountains should be sharp as there is no weather to smooth them”. That was what we originally thought, before we reached them Moon and realised that the mountains really were smooth because – without an atmosphere – there was no protections from millions of years of micrometeorites that battered its surface.
Yes, the air on Earth does scatter the light, but a much greater effect is simply the reflection of the sun off the ground, and anything else. The reason we can see the Moon at all is because the sunlight reflects off its surface, and it reflects in all directions. Again, there is one famous photo used to make this point – Aldrin descending the ladder to the Moon. In this picture, Armstrong is looking almost towards the sun, which is out of the frame, which means that the light is coming this way and bouncing off the surface of the Moon back on to the Lunar Module and Aldrin.

5) All the photos are absolutely perfectly framed and exposed.
Most of the photos that are shown on TV and printed in books and magazines are a tiny selection of the ones taken by the astronauts. Most of them are also cropped to show the picture composition at its best. However many photos were very well composed and exposed as the astronauts had spent ages being trained in how to use the cameras. In addition they had experts in Houston passing recommendations on exposure for particular shots during the missions. What the general public doesn’t normally see is the huge number of other images, which include many badly exposed and composed shots. Obviously NASA gives out the best shots for publication, but you can see all the rest on-line.
This is the total opposite of the view of mcfifi’s friend, who said they were so bad they had to be re-shot on Earth. Actually, just think about that. Weren’t all the images supposed to have been prepared in advance?

6) The are no stars in any of the pictures.
A photo taken on Earth showing a night scene won’t show any stars either. They are simply too faint to be seen normally. The human eye adjusts to different light levels, and our pupils expand to let in more light, so we can take in a night scene and then look up and, as our pupils expand further, see the stars. A camera iris can be opened up in a similar way, but the difference in the brightness of the ground and the stars is such that to correctly expose a picture to show stars would completely overexpose everything else. You can have this confirmed by any photographer.

7) The astronauts just went round the Earth.
Give the Russians some credit. We can track spacecraft out to the limits of the solar system. The Russians sent the first probe to the Moon in 1959. If Apollo 11 didn’t actually go to the Moon they would have been the first to jump up and down and say so.

8) On Apollo 15, David Scott dropped a feather and a hammer which fell at the same rate and reached the surface of the moon at the same time, just as Galileo predicted. Even if the feather was a fake which weighed the same as the hammer, its surface profile would have been different, so air resistance would have made it unlikely that they would fall together. They must have been in a vacuum. Speak to any special effects person, and they will tell you that it is impossible to slow down TV footage for some actions whilst maintaining speech at the correct speed. It would have also meant that the entire action must have been pre-recorded. In which case, when was it done? The astronaut’s movements, locations and activities were known during the time prior to the flight.

9) The astronauts could not have survived the radiation from the van Allen belts.
The radiation from the van Allen belts was less than a dentist uses to take an x-ray. Don’t forget that the astronauts were flying outward from the earth and at the time they passed through the belts their velocity was about 20,000 mph. If they had been orbiting the earth at the altitude of the belts that might have been another thing, but they went “across” the belts, not “along” them.

10) The rocks are fake.
Now this is just silly. It is impossible to manufacture rocks, whatever ceramics laboratory NASA is supposed to have. In any case, Moonrocks are not made of ceramic! What they are is 4.6 billion years old, much older than the oldest rocks ever found on Earth. They contain small glass-like beads, called spherules, which are larger than their counterparts on Earth, because they formed under a lower gravity field. They also contain materials in different combinations to Earth rocks, One such type was called armalcolite, after the initial letters of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. Ask any geologist about armalcolite and see what s/he replies. Samples have been distributed to hundreds of scientists all over the world, and in over 35 years, not a single person who has studied the Moon samples has ever expressed the slightest doubt about their authenticity.

There is one point that the conspiracy theorists totally refuse to discuss, as they know they don’t have a leg to stand on: On Apollo 11, 14 and 15, astronauts placed special reflectors at the landing sites, and the McDonald Observatory in Texas is one of the places that still fires laser beams at the Moon. The *only* places they are reflected back (which allows us to calculate the Moon's distance) are these landing sites. The lasers were only able to be bounced back after the landings took place, so the reflectors weren't there prior to those dates. It is impossible for lasers to be reflected in this way from anywhere else on the Moon.

At the peak of the Apollo programme, NASA employed over 400,000 people, and not one, not an astronaut, a mission controller, anyone who worked at any of the NASA centres, nor any of the contractors, has ever stood up and said “It was a fake”. On the contrary, there are hundreds of tons of documents about the missions, the plans, the equipment, the training; thousands of hours of film; hundreds of thousands of photos. Why create all of this? Why build the Saturn V rockets? Why fake something like Apollo 13? Why would the University of Hawaii fake the photo of the oxygen cloud leaking from Apollo 13? The fact is, it would have actually been easier to go to the Moon than it would to have faked everything.

The principle known as "Occam's razor" essentially says that the simplest answer is probably correct. So did the Apollo astronauts fly to the Moon in full view of the world, land there and set up reflectors that are being used today and bring back samples that have been validated by bona fide scientists all over the world - or did we fake the whole thing; put the astronauts into Earth orbit although no-one detected their craft and no-one saw it orbiting overhead in the night sky, and then let them splash down into the ocean to be picked up by the navy; produce thousands of photos and hours of film; manufacture rocks when we don't know how; and secretly send the reflectors to the Moon using unmanned craft that no-one saw being launched and no-one tracked???

When Patrick Moore was asked about the conspiracy theorists, he said that their ignorance is so great it's hardly worth discussing the subject with them. They use very selected photos and short clips of film to illustrate their theories. Despite basic misunderstandings about the Apollo programme, science and photography, they think that they have detected flaws that no-one else has noticed in over 30 years. They also come up with the most ridiculous ideas. One of the worst is that the reason there were no stars in the photos taken on the Moon is that people would have realised they were in the wrong places, which would have given away the hoax. Surely if anyone could have said "No, this is where the stars ought to be!" then NASA could have found someone who could have worked that out and put the stars into the photos in the right places!

Saying that we didn't go to the Moon does a great dis-service to science and to all the people who were involved. What we should be doing is to promote science, to use space to inspire youngsters to study science and technology, and to be proud that we have achieved a most amazing feat that has resulted in humans walking on the surface of another world.

I have followed the space programme and given lectures on it since the 1960s, and I have devised and presented a course on the subject at the University of Hertfordshire.

Jerry Stone
Freelance presenter on Astronomy and Space Exploration
Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
Director of the Mars Society UK
Director of the Sir Arthur Clarke Awards

For a presentation about the Moon landings or some other aspect of space, contact me at spaceflight_ukyahoo.co.uk

Answer 2

1) Twelve 12 American astronauts have walked on the moon.

Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin
Apollo 12: Pete Conrad & Alan Bean
Apollo 13: << failed to land on the moon >>
Apollo 14: Alan Shepard & Edgar (Ed) Mitchell
Apollo 15: David Scott & James Irwin
Apollo 16: John Young & Charles Duke
Apollo 17: Eugene (Gene) Cernan & Harrison Schmidt


2) Why haven't we been back?

a) American astronauts visited the moon on six occasions.

b) The "moon race" was an extension of the cold war. It was mostly about national prestige. We got there first and achieved our primary objective. There was some good science: surveys, measurements, sample collection. But it was mostly about being there first. Once we achieved our primary objective, there was no political will to go back. There still isn't. Perhaps, if we discover He3 or something else valuable, there will be.

c) I used to travel to Crested Butte, Colorado every year to ski. Because I don't go anymore, does it mean that I never went?


3) What about the Van Allen radiation belts? Wouldn't it have killed the astronauts?

The existence of the Van Allen radiation belts postulated in the 1940s by Nicholas Christofilos. Their existence was confirmed in *1958* by the Explorer I satellite launched by the USA.

The radiation in the Van Allen radiation belts is not particularly strong. You would have to hang out there for a week or so in order to get radiation sickness. And, because the radiation is not particularly strong, a few millimeters of metal is all that is required for protection. "An object satellite shielded by 3 mm of aluminum will receive about 2500 rem (25 Sv) per *year*."

"In practice, Apollo astronauts who travelled to the moon spent very little time in the belts and received a harmless dose. [6]. Nevertheless NASA deliberately timed Apollo launches, and used lunar transfer orbits that only skirted the edge of the belt over the equator to minimise the radiation." When the astronauts returned to Earth, their dosimeters showed that they had received about as much radiation as a couple of medical X-rays.


4) The U.S. government scammed everyone?

In 1972, there was a politically motivated burglary of a hotel room in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. There were only about six or eight people who knew about it. However, those people, including Richard M. Nixon, the President of the United States, failed to keep that burglary a secret. It exploded into a scandal that drove the President and a number of others from office.

If six or eight people couldn't keep a hotel room burglary a secret, then how could literally thousands of people could have kept their mouths shut about six faked moon landings? Not just one moon landing, but six of them!


5) What about the USSR?

Even if NASA and other government agencies could have faked the six moon landings well enough to fool the general public, they could NOT have fooled the space agency or military intelligence types in the USSR. The Soviets were just dying to beat us. If the landings were faked, the Soviets would have re-engineered their N-1 booster and landed on the moon just to prove what liars Americans are. Why didn't they? Because the landings were real and the Soviets knew it.


6) Why does the flag shake? Where are the stars? Who took the video of Neil Armstrong?

Take a look at the first two websites listed below. They deal well with all of the technical questions.


7) Finally, please tell us what you would accept as definitive evidence that the six moon landings were real. Is there anything?

Answer 3

If you watch Capricorn One then it is easy to cover up. There are certain photos that look very questionable when analyised by experts, shadows, no stars, rocks with no letters on, the fact that the flag moves in the films even tho there is no air on the moon. Plus there is the whole race to get to the moon that the US and Russia were having at the time and also why haven't we been back since? The main thing is unless someone comes out and admits it then we will never ever know, best to let sleeping dogs lie.

Answer 4

Hmmm - it's a tricky one. I personally don't think they're real. I remember reading something about the flag blowing like there was wind, which on the moon there wouldn't be, plus if we did it all those years ago why aren't we up there all the time? I would have thought there would be moon landings fairly regularly (unless there are and I'm jut so out of touch with what's going on I'm not aware) and we'd be looking at ways to set up colonies up there and stuff, I mean look how technology has advanced since the original 'landing'. Surely we would have been able to visit other planets by now - look at that pi$$ poor Beagle attempt to Mars - it never even got there did it? Plus I love conspiracy theories, they're always so much more interesting than the supposed reality! So no, I don't think they're real (I'm from the UK btw & sorry for ranting on!)

Answer 5

Really hard to say as there are so many issues with this.
The Command Module (?) was apparently not sufficient to pas through the Van Allen Belt (radiation).
The imagery fed to us by NASA / US Gov is a total shambles - images were doctered and filed as confidential etc. so why are we to believe that any are for real?
There are many 'oddities' concerning the astronauts 'moon walking', some areas of footage appear to show tethers / wires etc.
The Lunar Module landed on soft sand (?) but the propulsion left no signs of disturbance!

And it goes on and on....................

I say lets point Hubble at Tranquility Base and see what's there.

Because until they do I say non.

Answer 6

Yes

Answer 7

Think of the amount of people that must have been involved. No way could you cover up a hoax that size. Plus the astronauts that went get genuinely annoyed when people say they didn't. Can't see them all being top notch actors. They definitely went.

Answer 8

Absolutely

Answer 9

Nah, The Astronauts are see-through...they probably filmed the bouncing Astronauts in a free-falling jumbo (causing weightlessness) and overlapped it with the studio shots of the (supposed) Moon ! And they didnt even do a good job of that !!

Answer 10

No. And I believe a large collection of rocket scientists and astrophysicists somehow weren't smart enough to make a video of a moon landing that couldn't be repudiated by a bunch of regular laymen who have no training in or knowledge about videography or astronomy.

Answer 11

My friend's a professional photographer. He's studied the still photos and he reckons they're dodgy. He says the light is in the wrong place. Not sure what he means, but he's quite adamant about it.

His view is they did go to the moon but the pictures were so cr*p they re-did them when they got back.