It's understandable that many people over the years have questioned the validity of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. It was an incredible, unprecedented triumph for NASA and a monumental achievement for humanity in general—and one we haven't bothered to repeat since the end of Apollo.
The general idea behind most moon landing conspiracy theories is that the landing was faked on a sound stage with actors, a set, and professional lighting taking the place of the real deal. There are all kinds of article and YouTube videos dedicated to this argument—and plenty dedicated to debunking it, too. This new video from TruTV's Adam Ruins Everything is a quick distillation of the case against the hoax theory. It would've been harder to fake the landing on Earth than it would have been to actually go to the moon. In fact, in 1969 it would have been impossible.
There are a few key reasons for this. On reason is the shadows, which are the result of parallel sun rays with no diffusion. The only way to recreate this on Earth would be to light the scene with millions of super-bright lasers. Lasers were incredibly expensive in 1969, and the only color they came in was red. In modern times, we could just change the color with CG, but back then, altering images with computers wasn't possible.
Aside from this huge hurdle, there's the issue that dooms a lot of grand conspiracy theories: Even if NASA had secretly invented computer graphics and kept it from the public, the organization would have had to keep 400,000 employees from spilling the beans, and it would have needed to coordinate the story with dozens of world leaders, including our enemy at the time, Russia.
The moon landing isn't fake. So relax. We have plenty of real problems to worry about.
comrade_batman on November 11st, 2017 at 13:13 UTC »
And the theory that Kubrick directed the fake Landing is just mad. Anyone who knows of his work would know he would've actually wanted to film on the Moon for real to get it just perfect.
coffeeinvenice on November 11st, 2017 at 12:34 UTC »
A few fun facts to throw at moon landing hoax advocates:
One argument hoaxers commonly throw out is that human beings could not survive passing through the Van Allen radiation belts which surround the Earth. However, the Apollo missions were not the first spacecraft to enter the Van Allen belts. In September 1966, Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon flew Gemini 11 to an apogee of 1,370 km, well within the lower edge of the Van Allen belts (1,000 km). Neither suffered any ill effects.
Related to the above, in September 1968 the Soviet Union sent Zond 5, a spacecraft with a biological payload to the moon. It circled the moon, passed through the Van Allen belts twice, and returned safely to earth. The biological payload included tortoises, wine flies, mealworms, plants, seeds and bacteria - none of which suffered any ill effects related to radiation. Proving that humans could pass through the Van Allen Belt with no ill effects.
Zond missions 5, 6, 7, and 8 sent unmanned spacecraft on circumlunar missions and returned them to the Earth's surface. This proves that from at least 1968 onwards, the USSR had the ability to track and monitor any spacecraft going to the moon and back. So regardless of anything that NASA says, there is independent evidence from another country with a deep space tracking network that the Apollo missions took place.
Related to the above, at no time did the USSR ever raise the possibility that the moon landings were a hoax, nor doubt that the moon landings took place. If the Apollo moon landings were a hoax, what possible reason would the USSR have for keeping it secret? It would have been the propaganda coup of the century.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we now know that the USSR had it's own lunar landing program in the 1960s. If it was technologically impossible to send a manned mission to the moon, then why did the Soviets start their own lunar landing program?
The technology to get to the moon and land there was not substantially more complex than the technology it took to get into Earth orbit. If the Apollo program was a hoax, then so was every other manned space mission.
The Apollo program took place during the 1960s, a time of rapid social change and arguably one of the most anti-government and anti-authoritarian periods in US history. How could NASA persuade over 400,000 engineers and private contractors - some of whom were in other countries - to universally agree to keep a hoax secret? What's in it for them?
There is a repository at the Johnson Space Center in Houston with over 400 pounds of lunar rocks, soil and core samples. Over the past 50 years, the repository samples have been examined and studied by over 1,000 geologists from all over the world. Not one of them has ever had reason to doubt the origin of those samples. The material includes core samples and coring tubes which could only have been obtained by hand. If the Apollo program was a hoax, how did they get here?
Neil Armstrong's pressure suit is archived at the National Air and Space Museum. Armstrong was told to bring his pressure suit back with him so that suit designers could study the effects of micrometeorites on the suit fabric and the polycarbonate face plate of the helmet. The depth, angle, and nature of the micrometeorite tracks in the faceplate and suit fabric demonstrate that at some point, the suit was standing still in an upright position on the surface of the moon.
In 1970, President Nixon ordered samples of lunar rock to be given as goodwill gifts to the 50 states and over 135 countries worldwide. If the lunar landing program was a hoax, why would the US risk discovery by doing this?
SucculentGoatMeat on November 11st, 2017 at 11:29 UTC »
What kind of nut thinks that thousands of people involved could keep such a thing secret for so long? We went to the moon people accept it. We discovered alien settlements there and they shared their advanced technology with us ffs.