Why do Americans still believe they actually landed on the moon? No other country has ever landed on the moon.

Question

of course the US would never lie to its own people about something like a moon landing, WMD's or even 911. The US values its citizens too much to ever do such a thing. silly me...sorry i posed the question.

Answer 1

The fact that no other country has landed people on the Moon does not mean that America hasn't doesn't so. I'm not sure that any other country has had a civil war over slavery, but I have no doubt that the American civil war took place.
The Soviet Union did try to send cosmonauts to the Moon, but their N-1 rocket failed on its three unmanned test launches, leading to the programme being cancelled. Simply put, no other country had the technology. All Americans should be proud of what they achieved, and even though I'm from England, I'm proud of the fact that I was able to watch - live - as men from Earth walked for the first time on the surface of another world.

As to the theories and the evidence, most people who believe that the Moon flights were faked do so because they have seen very bad “documentaries” made by people who have been described by Patrick Moore as having an ignorance of science that is so great that it’s hardly worth talking to them. They certainly have an amazing ignorance of the space programme, science in general and even 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 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 from Apollo 11 and other missions. 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, something that the hoax theorists don't seem to understand! 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 for scenes like this) that can be lit by a single source, which itself would have to be even further away. However if more than one light was used, they would have each produced shadows, and 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 shadows 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 every case 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 that are 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 towards him 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, because the editors want to show only the best views. 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.

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, or you can use a longer exposure time, 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 hoax theorists are not experts in radiation either, so goodness knows where they obtained this “fact”. The radiation from the van Allen belts was actually 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: The astronauts left reflector arrays that are still used to bounce lasers fired from Earth. By timing the pulses, the distance to the Moon can be measured down to a few centimetres. It is impossible for lasers to be reflected in this way from anywhere else on the Moon, and to say that they were put there by unmanned craft is also silly; no-one detected the launches and no craft showed up on anyone’s radar.

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 have 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, tracked by other countries including Russia; 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 for a week 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 with a load of "mistakes" in them; manufacture rocks when we don't know how to; and secretly send reflectors to the Moon using unmanned craft that no-one saw being launched and no-one tracked???

Casting doubt on the Moon landings does a dis-service to everyone who was involved in them, and to science in general. 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.

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
Chairman of the Space Education Council

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

Answer 2

You must be one of those young pups that don't believe WW II happened because it was before you were born. Get real.

The rocket technology was available and working as programmed, the hardware was available and working as programmed, the astronauts were trained, they launched the rocket with the astronauts and hardware, they landed, they returned. What is so hard to believe? Are you so egocentric and naive that you think if one country has the technology and will that, by osmosis, all other countries have the will and technology? They have to develop those things the way America did.

As to the history teacher teaching that it never happened, well, maybe that's why our educational system is so terrible. Teachers that teach to the test and by opinion rather than by fact should not be teaching at all. Maybe they could qualify as ditch diggers. What we need here is to promote education, not promote passing tests to make schools look good.

Read about the moon landings, and watch the videos. You will not see stars because the camera was set for photographing the moonscape and the astronauts. Had it been set to see the stars there would have been too much glare to see the astronauts or the moonscape. The flag waved because the astronauts were moving it. The dust had a parabolic trajectory (it didn't billow) which is what you would expect in a near vacuum. There are no, repeat, no discrepancies in any of the still photographs or the videos. Oh, and you could see in the shadows because the astronauts and the LM reflected sunlight into the shadows.

Answer 3

I'm not American. There is no doubt they did it. In some respects it is simpler than you might expect. What is or was to stop them? They actually had to slow down on the way over. The hardest part is to get the spacecraft into space. At least three countries have put people into space and more have launched unmanned space craft ranging from a few kilograms to a tonne or so weight.

If you think that computers were not advanced enough, you are quite wrong, the computers did not need big memory, all they had to do was calculate. Computers have been able to do advanced calculations quickly since the 1940s.

They had the resources and the will to do it. They also developed the technology, some of which was around in any case. No other country with the possible exception of the old Soviet Union has had the resources to do it. The Soviets were too badly organised, but they still beat the Americans into space.

I watched the later missions on TV. Didn't see the first, there was no TV where I was living at the time.

Answer 4

No other country is like the United States, which is why we are the only superpower left in the world. There were way too many people involved to keep it under wraps, someone would have talked. Before Fox aired that show about how it could have been staged, no one was talking about it. Most people are just nutty, and can't comprehend how something so complex could have been achieved by such a primitive being. Sometime around 2025 we will probably land on mars, and people will say that's a hoax too.

Answer 5

Why are there people who deny that this event ever happened? It is just like denying the Holocaust. Are these people out there to sow confusion and doubt? Is it best to ask them to wake up and be in the real world?

There are a total of twelve men who have walked on the Moon, two each in the six lunar conquests. Apollo 11 in July 1969 (Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin), Apollo 12 in November 1969 (Charles Conrad and Alan Bean), Apollo 14 in February 1971 (Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell), Apollo 15 in July 1971 (David Scott and James Irwin), Apollo 16 in April 1972 (John Young and Charles Duke), and Apollo 17 in December 1972 (Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt). Do you think these people will deny that they had ever been to the moon? How about those in NASA's Mission Control Center? Those spectators watching the launching of these spacecrafts at the launching pads?

Answer 6

How many other countries had (or have, for that matter) an economy as powerful as the US, and the resources to do it? The Russians could have done it, but their launch vehicle never worked.

It is not necessary for anyone else to have gone to the Moon to verify the truth of the NASA moon landings, any more than it is necessary to invade Poland again to believe that World War II could have started because of it. There is a VAST pile of evidence to support Apollo, and I would suggest you go and look at it rather than expounding upon a subject about which you evidently know very little.

Answer 7

It is the religious right who started these rumours that it was faked, Their belief system does not permit them comprehending leaving the earth let alone landing elsewhere in the Solar System.

Theirs is strictly a geocentric Ptolemaic model of the world, in which we live under a rigid dome we cannot escape from even if we wanted to.

If you don't believe it could have happened you campaign to undermine the belief that it did happen. You campaign to sow doubt and confusion. And you imply that you are the ones who know the truth and that the govenrment is involved in a cover-up: this is a deliberate ploy to create the impression that you have something worth listening to, that should help you sell some pamphlets to the gullible.

It has always amused me how the Christian Right's evangelists go on TV to preach against man going into space as being impossible, but they seem to be oblivious to the fact that their words are beamed into millions of homes by being bounced off satellites in geostationary orbits!

So be aware that the campaign to say it was faked is being orchestrated by religious cranks and treat their "arguments" with the contempt they deserve. They are neither smart nor are they professors, They obviously believe claiming to be worthy of academic respect lends them a spurious credibility of which their ideas are sorely in need.

Answer 8

There is no good reason to believe Americans did not land upon the Moon. There was a silly TV show that said the Moon landing was a hoax, but other TV shows refuted it. Who else can afford to send men to the Moon?

Answer 9

Mami, get this immediately and do not be silly approximately it to any extent further, k? The fundamental technological know-how required for a manned flight to the moon was once built in Germany within the past due Nineteen Thirties via the mid Nineteen Forties. This technological know-how wanted plenty of refinement to make a dependable manned flight a fact. We labored on that technological know-how via the Fifties and 60s, and made the primary manned moon flight in 1969. It all suits in combination, and in the event you learn all of the historical past and do not permit the wackos mislead you, it'll be inconceivable so that you can retain to be fooled into believing that the moon missions didn't take location. The American folks have been so much bigger expert and extra shrewd within the Sixties and 70s than they're now, and it might by no means have happened to NASA engineers and bosses that 35 years later a host of ignorant dolts with not anything to do might arise with a dull conspiracy conception declaring that the moon landings have been faked. If that had happened to them, I suspect the engineers might have long past to the challenge to create a better and extra noticeable item of evidence, to make amends for the decline within the high-quality of the American brain and its schooling that happened for the period of and after the Reagan presidency. But there's a truly bodily evidence to be had. The astronauts who landed at the moon left in the back of reflectors which are used daily by way of astronomers to degree the irregularities of the moon's orbit. This is completed by way of bouncing laser beams off reflectors at recognized places that have been left by way of the astronauts. Ask your technology instructor for expertise approximately those experiments. You can prepare to peer this performed together with your possess eyes. Let me positioned the query to you this manner: If you feel the moon landings have been faked, whilst did they turn out to be "false?" When did the proposal turn out to be wellknown that NASA had invented the proposal of an imaginary moon undertaking and created a significant technological empire to idiot folks? When was once all this fakery performed? In the 60s? 70s? 80s? And why? What was once the factor? And how did they idiot all of the folks that said the inside track, operated the equipment, constructed the moon rockets, and watched them take off and land? Do you notice that one American in 500 was once a aspect of the Apollo application? Millions of them are nonetheless alive. Are they fooling you? Why? If you cross out to a soccer recreation, appear round you. In the stadium there are folks who labored at the Apollo application. Ask round. You are surrounded by way of folks who understand for certain that American astronauts stood at the moon greater than 35 years in the past.

Answer 10

Because they actually DID land on the Moon. It's not a question of belief; the evidence is irrefutable. And I'm not even an American!

Answer 11

Why are people so obsessed with this, Why are there always doubters?
It would be better if we stopped wasting money searching for something that can never be. The only planet they think we could survive is so far away we could never get there, whats the point. We are destroying the planet but none of the leaders want to invest in saving it.
Did they, didn't they? Who knows, do you know for sure they didn't? I don't know if they did.