Why didn't USA land one moon craft to visible side of moon?

Question

If landed on the visible side, there would be no questions, if or may be. We could see it with a telescope and that would be it. This way there is legit question of acctual landing.

Answer 1

ALL the landings were on the near side, do some research.

Answer 2

All of the landings took place on the visible side of the Moon so that ship-to-Earth communications would be possible. Independent radio telescopes (even those in the Soviet Union) detected the Apollo communications coming from the Moon. This would not have been possible if there hadn't been a ship on the Moon. In other words, these radio telescopes confirmed the presence of the ship on the Moon.

Apollo 11 also left a reflector on the Moon that professional astronomers have detected thousands of times.

We can't see them simply because the landers are so small (about 5 meters across) and the Moon is so far away (240,000 miles). The angular size of one of the landers is in the order of 2 milliarcseconds, which is far too small to be resolved by any current telescope.

And being able to resolve the landers wouldn't eliminate the conspiracy theory. Right now, there is absolutely irrefutable scientific evidence that proves that we did go to the Moon. In spite of that, some people seem to blindly indulge in this particular conspiracy theory, and I have a hunch that new evidence won't change this disturbing trend.

Answer 3

ALL the landings were on the visible side of the moon because if they landed on the other side ,radio communication with the Earth would have been impossible due to the mass of the moon being in the way
There is no legitimate question about Americans NOT landing on the moon 38 years ago today.
Edit:
To Big Al :
Not all moon photos show the same thing. There are many from Apollo 12 that show the LM , Surveyor 3 and an astronaut in the same picture
Surveyor 3 had landed 2.5 years prior to LM Intrepids' successful landing.
So the unmanned vehicle could do it but the manned vehicle with excellent pilots and engineers on board could not,
Why not?

Answer 4

All of the lunar landings happened on the visible (nearest) side of the moon. The problem with using a telescope to actually view the individual landing sites is this. Earth's atmospheric temperatures tend to make any light passing through it distorted (and unable for a telescope to focus sharply enough to see fine detail, even with adaptive optics). Also, the amount of surrounding light (from the sun) that illuminates the landing sites will make it very difficult to distinguish the landers from any other object on the ground (again, comes to being able to see fine detail). It would kind of like using binoculars to read the wattage on an illuminated light bulb a half-mile away.

Now, there is something up there that proves a man-made craft did make it to the moon. Its a laser reflector. This device reflects laser light emanating from earth-based research groups that are determining the precise distance between the Earth and Moon. And of course, it too is on the visible side of the moon.

I suggest you do some research into the whole man on the moon adventure. You may find interesting facts that will lead you away from the flights of fancy conspiracy theorists would have you believe. I hope this helps, good luck!

Answer 5

Everyone who says we landed on the far side of the moon is wrong. All 6 successful landings happened on the near side, which has smoother terrain. Furthermore, the MAIN reason we landed on the near side is because of communications. On the far side, it would have been impossible to have live communications with Earth. There are no sattellites orbiting the moon that could be used as relays. The CSM would have been the only relay, and it too would have been behind the Moon from Earth's perspective for a good part of the time that it would be able to receive signals from the lunar surface.

As far as seeing the landing sites with telescopes, as many good answers here have pointed out, even Hubble does not have the power to see objects that small at that distance. They're just too small. The satellites orbiting Mars can barely resolve the Mars Exploration Rovers and their tracks, and they're in orbit around the world in question - much closer than Hubble is to our moon.

Answer 6

All six Apollo landings were on the visible side of the moon. See these sites for photo maps:

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/landing_sites.html
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Moon_landing_map.jpg

There are no telescopes currently available that have the resolving power to see and photograph any of the objects we left behind.

The Hubble has the best resolving power of any current telescope -- 0.01 arc-seconds -- but that means that each pixel on the CCD cameras that record the images, at the distance to the moon, covers an area about 10 meters in diameter. Since the largest object we left behind was less than 5 meters in diameter, there's no way we could see it. In fact, the smallest object we could "see" would be a football pitch! Go to the URL below for a Hubble photo of the Apollo 17 landing site -- tell us what you can see:

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2005/29/images/g/formats/full_jpg.jpg

But the landings are real. The Russians, English, Chinese, Germans, Africans, Asians, South Americans, Australians, and even the French all tracked each and every trip, and all admitted that we'd done it, and congratulated us on our success. We left behind scientific instruments that are still in use today.

For a complete debunking of the pseudo-scientific claptrap that claims to prove we never landed, go visit:

www.badastronomy.com
www.clavius.org

Answer 7

All the landings WERE on the near side, facing Earth.

No telescope is big enough to see such small things on the Moon. It is just too far away. Yes, I know, they see galaxies billions of light years away, but a galaxy is juuust a little bigger than a flag. You can see the Moon 240,000 miles away with just your eyes, but that is no reason to think you could read a newspaper 1 mile away. That is because the letters on a paper are way smaller than the whole Moon. So the items left on the Moon are way smaller than a whole galaxy and cannot be seen even though they are a lot closer. They are closer, but not close enough.

Answer 8

In reference to the second answer, yes, the moon does rotate, but not in relation to the Earth; the side on which we landed always faces away from us
As to the original question, we were going into completely unknown territory, and the number of things that could go wrong was nearly astronomical (most people don't know about the fire that killed three of the astronauts who were supposed to go to the moon. It was a manufacturing and maintenance problem, and the spacecraft was even sitting right on the ground when it happened.) Thus, the landing had to be made as simple as possible to eliminate one of the potential hazards, and most of the terrain we'd found suitable for landing was on the other side of the moon...the landing site had to be an extremely large flat area, it had to have a thick layer of dust for the lunar module's feet to dig into for stabilty...you get the picture. There were so many places to choose from.

Answer 9

When you go on the far side of the moon, you'd lose all radio contact with Earth, but we know that there was radio contact between Houston and the landers, so yeah, the landings were on the near side.

Are you still thinking that the landings were faked? The Russians would destroy us if that was the case because they were tracking all of our missions.

having said that, I think that there is way too much money being spent on the space program today, billions of taxpayers dollars that could be used on Earth to solve 100s of problems.

Answer 10

Man has never placed a foot on the moon far side or near. The moon landings were faked to get one over the Russians. All the evidence is there to prove that it never happened. There were several landing sites allegedly thousands of miles apart yet in the photos the majority all have the exact same background. There are no stars in sight in any photos. The photos of the lunar landing feet have no dust on them whatsoever yet NASA stated that they landed where they did as it was in their opinion there was plenty of lunar dust to help anchor the landing vehicle. I could go on and on.