Does anybody out there really believe that the U.S. was able to put man on the moon?

Question

Every time i read about it there's always speculation that is was a hoax by the U.S. government to thwart Russia (Cold War era) from being the first country to send a human to the moon. What do you guys think?

Answer 1

I agree with water skipper. Just an addition. To fake something like that would have taken at least a handfull of people. Somebody would have shot their mouth off about it by now. They'd make a fortune for a book deal.

Answer 2

Subjective opinions are irrelevant in this matter. It's a scientific fact that the landings happened.

The conspiracy theory is based completely upon bad science, faulty common sense, and, in some cases, anti-government bias.

We don't have to take the government's word for it. Consider the following:
1) Apollo 11 left a retroreflector that astronomers have detected thousands of times. It's used to precisely measure the distance to the Moon.
2) Independent radio telescopes, when pointed at the Moon, were able to detect the Apollo transmissions. If there hadn't been a ship on the Moon, they wouldn't have heard anything.
3) The Moon rocks have been examined in detail by geologists, who have positively identified the rocks as being of lunar origin. They explain that there's no way for NASA to falsify this.
4) No scientist rejects the landings. If there was something fishy about the Moon landings, would it not be scientists who would realize it? Instead, scientists are the first to vigorously defend the landings.

Evidence just can't get any more incontrovertible than this.

On top of all of that, there isn't a shred of legitimate evidence against the landings. Ironically, the very evidence that the conspiracy theorists cite only proves that the landings were real.

Answer 3

Get this straight and don't be foolish about it any more, okay? The basic technology required for a manned flight to the moon was developed in Germany in the late 1930s through the mid 1940s. This technology needed a lot of refinement to make a safe manned flight a reality.

We worked on that technology through the 1950s and 60s, and made the first manned moon flight in 1969. It all fits together, and if you read all the history and don't let the wackos lie to you, it will be impossible for you to continue to be fooled into believing that the moon missions did not take place.

The American people were much better educated and more intelligent in the 1960s and 70s than they are now, and it would never have occurred to NASA engineers and managers that 35 years later a bunch of ignorant dolts with nothing to do would come up with a stupid conspiracy theory stating that the moon landings were faked.

If that had occurred to them, I suspect the engineers would have gone to the trouble to create a larger and more visible object of proof, to compensate for the decline in the quality of the American mind and its education that occurred during and after the Reagan presidency.

But there is a real physical proof available. The astronauts who landed on the moon left behind reflectors that are used every day by astronomers to measure the irregularities of the moon's orbit. This is done by bouncing laser beams off reflectors at known locations that were left by the astronauts. Ask your science teacher for information about these experiments. You can arrange to see this done with your own eyes.

Let me put the question to you this way: If you think the moon landings were faked, when did they become "fake?" When did the idea become popular that NASA had invented the idea of an imaginary moon mission and created a huge technological empire to fool people? When was all this fakery done? In the 60s? 70s? 80s?

And why? What was the point? And how did they fool all the people that reported the news, operated the machinery, built the moon rockets, and watched them take off and land?

Do you realize that one American in 500 was a part of the Apollo program? Millions of them are still alive. Are they fooling you? Why? If you go out to a football game, look around you. In the stadium there are people who worked on the Apollo program.

Ask around. You are surrounded by people who know for sure that American astronauts stood on the moon more than 35 years ago.

Answer 4

Hello
I believe that we have put a man on the moon. We have a probe that is already heading out of our solar system. We have probes that have photographed Mercury and Venus. Probes that have landed on Mars. We have a telescope the size of a bus that can see 15 billion light years in to the past.

The moon is just a rock in the sky only 250,000 miles away. We had the technology in the 60's to fly to the moon so why would we fake it if we knew one day the Russians or some other country would get to the moon one day and realize that there is no lander or American flag or any evidence that says we were ever there? I just couldn't see that happening. This is just what I think.

Answer 5

Some of the moon landing hoaxers arguments are really juvenile, like the no stars in the sky and the flag waving. But other more technical points like the dust settling, the quality of the film, the Van Allen belts, you and I have not got the technical experience to make personal comments, saying “I believe this, I believe that”. But there is very very simple common sense and logic that we can all apply, where you don’t have to resort to science.

400,000 people worked on Apollo over the 11 years of the project. It is pure fantasy that all these people could be fooled by simulated moon landings. But more specifically, the engineers who worked on the equipment would have been watching the lunar film very intently to see how their “babies” were performing.

Take the lander – 8 years of development costing over billion dollars. A huge team of the engineers and builders would have been watching to see how their particular “baby” was performing. To think that not one of these highly technical people would notice over 6 missions, over 3 years, that what they were seeing was not real, is tantamount to idiocy.

And all those engineers and technicians who developed the The Lunar Rovers, they would be watching their creation like hawks. How could anyone think for a minute that not one of these people would cry “hey, that doesn’t look right”.

And that cry would have been heard very quickly by the huge team of controllers at Mission Control. How can anyone even begin to believe that a simulation and its transmission to Houston Mission Control could work so seamlessly for all six missions over 3 years, with not one hickup to alert those controllers – hundreds of them, many having come through the early Gemini and Mercury missions.

You would really have to ask yourself, when did the simulations take over from the real. Were those early space missions hoaxes? What about Apollo pre-moon landings? Did they not do docking missions in orbit? Did Apollo 8 not orbit the moon? When exactly could suddenly a bunch of simulations kick in so seamlessly that hundreds of controllers never noticed?

Of course, nothing ever had to kick in. A system of simulated moon landings that would fool the whole of NASA people for years, and which runs all that time without the slightest indication of it being a fake, is infinitely more complex to implement that the Apollo program itself.

All the moon landing hoax arguments are like the argument that, scientifically, a bumble bee should not be able to fly. And we have all seen bumble bees fly.

Answer 6

There are websites mainly for nutballs that talk about it a lot. They post the same things over and over because they have few new ideas. This is a science site, and science doesn't care about stupid rumors. A guy named Bill Kaysing had a low level job with Rocketdyne during the 60's. He had a degree in English and never worked in science a day. It was the only job he ever held. When he left it, he began writing self-published conspiracy books about conspiracies. He wrote several about the Apollo program, including one that said we did not go to the moon, and others that said we went and found Nazis, Aliens, Ancient Ruins, and Kevin Bacon's mother. None of them amounted to anything, and the guy lived quietly in the desert in a trailer with 200 cats. Nothing would have come of it, but Fox TV decided to do a special about that particular one. His "proof" was laughable, especially his photographic evidence. He made wild, idiotic statements about the Van Allen Belts and other scientific matters. One of the Astronauts said he was an idiot and he tried to sue the astronaut. The judge threw it out. He also tried to sue the makers of the movie Capricorn One, claiming they stole his idea. He also claimed that they falsified their copyright date to hide the theft (his book was written in 1981, and Capricorn One was released in 1978.

Failing as an entrepreneur, he set up a web site to his greatness, and died. His followers were in the dozens by then, and they all set up web sites too. Now you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a fake moon landing.

I lied about Kevin Bacon.

Answer 7

Belief doesn't come into it. There is a mountain of facts that prove that we landed on the Moon six times and brought home tons of rocks which can't be duplicated on Earth. This is FACT!!

Answer 8

DAMNIT PEOPLE, why is this question so popular. Yes, we landed on the moon, if you have a fairly good telescope in good conditions you can see the system left on the moon by NASA to track the speed at which the moon is moving away from the Earth!

Answer 9

I think the landings were real. They couldn't fake stuff like that back then. Haven't you ever watched a science fiction movie from the 1960s?

Answer 10

Almost everybody knows that Apollo landings were real. Only fringe cooks think it was a hoax.