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Jake, you posed the question. Tell us, what do YOU think?
I'm one of those patroitic types, grandpa, who always wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. So yeah, I believe it happened.
But the conspiracies against are awfully convincing at times!
Anyway you don't have to look to far to find info to debunk the hoax but you do have to do a little reading. My favorite is the badastronomy [badastronomy.com] website especially this page [badastronomy.com] because it uses cute little models to prove it's point.
What is so hard to believe about travelling to the moon, anyway? Hard to believe is that so many jets fly daily and so seldom collide!
Why haven't we gone again? A better question is, why would we go again! Been there, done that.
It really DOES NOT MATTER. What difference does it make, one way or the other?
Sorry, but I just could not disagree more! This ball of dirt that we live on will not sustain us forever. Space travel may well be the answer.
If you find that funny, ask yourself if anyone in Wilbur and Orville's day could have imagined how casual air travel is today, and how much our economy depends on it.
Besides, advancement of science is always important to me. Don't you crave knowing What's Out There?!
Besides, my dad was on the team responsible for the first Apollo moon landing. He says it happened.
I also believe we are not alone in space. I do NOT believe that "we" will find "them" however - I'm convinced it will be the other way 'round.
[Edit: I prefer that we consider the "ball of dirt" here as our only option rather than assuming we'll "go forth and colonize" - makes more sense IMO....]
Anyone here read:
Interview with an Extraterrestrial - on Paul Lutus website. Quite believable.....
I didn't plan my first child at 27, I didn't plan my second child at 29, and didn't plan my third at 45. At (almost) 54, I'm not planning my fourth child.
I found out why you should have kids when you're young.
1. Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the Moon. In front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air flow over the ball. The Moon has no atmosphere and no air.
The ball bending in flight is caused by airflow - just mis-hitting the ball off to the right is caused by the impact of the club on the ball.
2. A camera panned upwards to catch Apollo 16's Lunar Landerlifting off the Moon. Who did the filming?
Probably a remote
3. One NASA picture from Apollo 11 is looking up at Neil Armstrong about to take his giant step for mankind. The photographer must have been lying on the planet surface. If Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, then who took the shot?
ditto
4. The pressure inside a space suit was greater than inside a football. The astronauts should have been puffed out like the Michelin Man, but were seen freely bending their joints.
Possibly the designers of the suits considered this problem, and designed the joints of the suits around it.
5. The Moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn't America make a signal on the moon that could be seen from earth? The PR would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with magnesium flares.
They did leave behind some mirrors I believe - these are used to reflect a laser shone from earth, and among other things calculate the distance between the moon and earth. Links:
[nasa.gov...]
[lpi.usra.edu...]
6. Text from pictures in the article said that only two men walked on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor has no camera. Who took the shot?
Another remote device? Maybe the same one.
7. The flags shadow goes behind the rock so doesn't match the dark line in the foreground, which looks like a line cord. So the shadow to the lower right of the spaceman must be the flag. Where is his shadow? And why is the flag fluttering if there is no air or wind on the moon?
Shadows are confusing on uneven ground - especially in photographs where the fact that the ground isn't flat may not be obvious.
8. How can the flag be brightly lit when its side is to the light? And where, in all of these shots, are the stars?
The flag is i) translucent (so light shines through) and ii) being lit from all sides by reflection of light from the surface of the moon.
Given the lighting conditions they were filming in, there is no way stars would show up on a camera.
9. The Lander weighed 17 tons yet the astronauts feet seem to have made a bigger dent in the dust. The powerful booster rocket at the base of the Lunar Lander was fired to slow descent to the moons service. Yet it has left no traces of blasting on the dust underneath. It should have created a small crater, yet the booster looks like it's never been fired.
The lander did not come straight down, it was traveling laterally over the ground as it came down. As pointed out, it also had a throttle.
Given the lighting conditions they were filming in, there is no way stars would show up on a camera.
To elaborate: if they had exposed the film so as to make the stars show up clearly, then the moon surface (grey) and astronauts (white suits) would have been much too bright, all washed out to white with no detail.
I don't think so. We threw 4 billion dollars and thousands upon thousands of the best and brightest US citizens at the problem. These thousands of people were coast to coast at our highest academic institutions and advanced technology companies - I don't think they could have been duped and they say it happened, I believe them. IMHO
I've got plenty of doubts now, especially since they have never been able to repeat this, in spite of any and all technological improvements since then. Heck they can't even keep the shuttles flying.
I agree, if you are old enough, you know it happened because tens of thousands of people were involved and there is no way they could fake it without the whole world knowing within hours. Think about this, it was during Vietnam and there was a huge mistrust of the American government at the time. Also, if the Soviets found out is was faked they would have blown the whistle just to discredit the American government.
I was talking to some people in their twenties who thought it was faked, the said "why did we never go back?". Answer, we did go back, several times. We stopped when it almost became a disaster. Plus, it turned out there was nothing up there that we did not already have on earth, so the whole mining issue went away.
It happened folks.
I really do not know how to express my disbelief that so many of the young people are as skeptical as this thread has brought out.
It don't matter DrDoc. None of us is going to sway anyone who fails to comprehend fact.
Next time I see a thread like this, I'm gonna shine it on...
The presure inside a space suit is not greater than inside a football. A football has about 2 to 3 atmospheres pressure inside.
A space suit then had about 0.3 atmospheres, thats why they breathed pure oxygen. They had to make up for the drop in partial presure of o2 of normal air. Nitrox SCUBA divers will know what I am talking about.
The lower presure made it a lot easier to move in the suit.
All the other arguements are just as easily explained by someone with a little knowledge in the right area.
The moon landings happened.
..but here in the UK we had kids at high schools tracking the whole mission with home made kit. Not just at one school but at 2 or 3 different schools. Several hundred kids, plus parents plus Science teachers plus Engineer fathers etc. etc. etc. Unless you are seriously suggesting that they flew all the way there and back several times but were afraid to try a touchdown?
Nobody, not the CIA, the FBI and the NSA together could have faked it sufficiently to fool all of those folks. From a Brit perspective the conspiracy idea is a joke - you guys couldn't even keep Watergate quiet, and only a few people were supposed to know about that one.
It happened, and made me proud of my species.
As a kid I heard about all of these miracles of space transport. And as a kid I never questioned it.
I'm looking at the advanced technology we have today. How many million dollar satellites and robots have been sent into space, only to have them fail or miss their target completely? I still remember the huge gaff that was made about the Hubbel telescope and how the mirror was wrong.
This kind of costly failure rate with today's technology on relatively simple inanimate projects (simple as compared to sustaining human lives in space travel) disproves any previous claims of success.
According to some folks, we're naively expected to believe that with primitive "bearskins and stone knives" 1960s technology, NASA managed to get humans to the moon and back when today they are so incompetent they can't even keep the shuttles going without killing the crew?
Yea, right. It's only by their word and their media/propaganda which people believe. And their word isn't worth much these days given NASA's current record of safety and accomplishment.
When perhaps they can prove themselves by improving reliability, accuracy and by making it to the moon for regular people to be able to visit, then there will be less skepticism.
This kind of costly failure rate with today's technology on relatively simple inanimate projects (simple as compared to sustaining human lives in space travel) disproves any previous claims of success.
I don't think it disproves anything. What it shows is that no matter what advances in technology we make, there is always a downside. In the case of space technology, it's about having reliance on more systems which are prone to failure.
The early Apollo spacecraft were incredibly simple by comparison to todays spacecraft. In some senses, while they are capable of less, they were probably less prone to failure.
As we push ourselves further and further and continue to bend the boundaries of technology, the probability of failure increases.
Although a lot of difficulties had to be overcome given 1960's materials etc, I don't think the principle, physics and technology behind the moon landings was all that complex at all.
TJ
[edited by: trillianjedi at 4:07 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2004]
Where did you get that idea?
I can think of two very serious mishaps, one of which killed three people.
Bit harsh considering the number of missons the shuttles have performed. It's also terribly bad logic. By that reasoning, mankind is incapable of flight as well.
The race for space was extremely competitive, every failure by the U.S. and U.S.S.R was played for all the press it could generate, every success was carefully scrutinized by the other side.
What a wonderful world we live in. People believe that a pyramid will sharpen razor blades, but refuse to believe we've been to the moon.
[edited by: digitalghost at 4:46 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2004]
2. Others believe it never happened and was, in fact, a grand conspiracy.
3. Those who hold a view opposite to yours is ignorant; i.e. they simply refuse to accept facts which are self-evident and point to the obvious truth.
Let me state categorically that I'm a definite believer in #3. :)
I have checked the facts. They are not self evident, they are now externally verified.
Technical glitches aside, after two fatal shuttle explosions and reports of satellite and exploration vehicle failures, errors, not knowing metric from imperial, etc....all of which cost millions of dollars, who can have any serious confidence that NASA is the same agency responsible for the moon landing we were all told happened way back then? Where is the proof today of their current competence? Or for that matter that anything they claim to have accomplished?
Their have permitted far too many blemishes on their reputation of late to be taken seriously, even if they did actually land a person on the moon.
Which person or company could sustain a claim of such boastful things if their performance today were to incur millions of dollars in losses? It's impossible.
NASA's performance of late seems ill equipped to manage a parking lot, let alone space exploration.
Believe what you will, knowing the cold war was quite active at this time and politically driven ideological propaganda knows no limits. But constantly seek proof of such boastful claims, even if such proof amounts to gauging current performance and competence levels.
[edited by: snowman at 7:23 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2004]
