Comment on Apollo Moon Landing Hoax by jfb.

@Arindam:

“1) The onus is on NASA to refute each and every argument challenging the moon landings.”

That is exactly backwards. NASA has already presented all the evidence it needs to: physical samples from the lunar surface, data from the science packages left on the surface, miles of telemetry, video, film, and still photographs from the surface and from orbit, science results from multiple Earth-bound labs that analyzed the samples and science data, mission reports, first-person accounts from astronauts and engineers, etc., etc., etc.

The onus is on the people claiming that all of the above is the result of an elaborate hoax. If the lunar samples are fake, *you* must demonstrate how and why they are fakes, and why all of the scientific results deriving from those samples are invalid. Were the samples created synthetically in a lab? Were they dug up from somehwere on Earth? How can you prove that they *didn’t* come from the Lunar surface? Those are the kinds of questions *you* have to answer to prove that the program was a hoax.

If all the film and video was shot on a sound stage in the desert instead of on the Moon, *you* have to show the evidence for the existance that sound stage *and* that all the published film, video, and still photos were taken on that stage. Are there images that were taken from “backstage”? How did they simulate 1/6 Earth normal gravity? Did they evacuate all the air from the stage to keep the dust from floating after it was kicked up? Again, that’s the kind of counter-evidence *you* have to present to seriously challenge what NASA has already presented.

If the photos are doctored, *you* have to demonstrate how they were doctored by finding undoctored originals. If the mission reports are all made up, *you* have to show why that’s the case.

“A question that continues to puzzle me: why didn’t the Soviets put a person on the moon? Even if the Americans had put the first man on the moon, the Soviets could have had the glory of putting the first woman on it.”

It wasn’t for lack of trying; the Soviets did have an active manned lunar program in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the N1 booster (Soviet equivalent of the Saturn V) never achieved orbit. Instead of building a few really big, really powerful engines like the F-1, they clustered something like 30 smaller NK-33 engines together. The end result was complex, fragile, and unstable, and never worked.

Once the Americans succeeded, the justification for the Soviet manned lunar program evaporated (it *was* a race, and the Soviets lost; the first woman would have been *at best* the third human being to walk on the moon, and at the time that’s all anyone cared about).

We also have to remember that the Soviet government was dysfunctional *at its best*, and was somewhat capricious as far as the space race was concerned. I’m convinced that the only reason Apollo succeeded was that the engineering was allowed to trump politics (a mistake Congress has vowed never to repeat, which is why we’ve been tooling around in LEO for the last 35 years). The Soviet approach to engineering (and biology, and farming, and just about everything else) was that ideology trumped all other considerations, with unfortunate results.

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@Canadian Light:

Why haven’t we sent anyone back to the Moon?

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Baratacus:

“The lunar orbitor that recently took photos of the landing sites was only able to take low resolution pictures where the craft appeared as 6 pixel^2 blob and could not be readily identified. The fact that you can see a …


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Who panned the camera?

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Did you know that many of the people involved in the moon landing died from a car crash?

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It’s not a C, it’s an O.

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