It wouldn’t be the first time we prepared to fake an event. You know that painting of Washington crossing the Delaware? That was painted just in case he didn’t make it across. Ever see the Rhode Island State House? It was built just in case we couldn’t get the Capitol building in Washington completed. Plenty of other fakes were made in preparation for failure.
But as I have repeatedly said elsewhere, faking the moon landings would have been utterly pointless. It would simply have guaranteed that the USA would become a laughing stock, because the hoax would be guaranteed to be exposed.
The locations of the landings weren’t kept a secret: the target zones were publicised ahead of time, and the exact landing spots were released to the public as soon as they were known. The moon is open for anyone to visit, so as soon as someone visits and finds no lunar module descent stage at that location, not to mention a mismatch with the photographic record (if the photos were faked on a sound stage then there is no way they could match the real lunar surface at that location, down to the last crater and rock) then Houston would have a very big problem indeed.
For all that anyone knew in the late 1960s, the Russians were just months away from launching their own lunar mission. Nobody would possibly authorise a hoax that could blow up spectacularly almost immediately and completely destroy America’s reputation on the world stage.
This is the simplest argument against faking the moon missions and yet nobody seems to focus on it. The moon isn’t hidden. It’s not like claiming you have a unicorn in a locked room and not letting anybody in there, it’s like telling people you’ve chained a unicorn up in a field where anyone can go and look at it, if they choose.
You don’t have to convince me, I’m not being serious. All the reasons the moon landing wasn’t faked are the reasons there was no preparation to fake it.
I wasn’t trying to convince you; sorry if it came across that way. I am just amazed that none of the people who claim the landing could have been faked apply a bit of logic to it. I mean, all that stuff, hardware, footprints, sacks of trash, is all just sitting there on the moon. It’s not going anywhere.
What does “The Shining” have to do with it?
I’ve worked with the government. It is the worst run business on the planet. They could not put together a conspiracy to convince people not to take poison.
Whenever I hear “government conspiracy” I have to laugh.
What about fake it till you make it- fail the first time, get Kubrick to film it as a success, a year later you make it and no one knows you didn’t make it the first time? What would be the proof to the USSR that it wasn’t successful? Video was the only proof (at the time) it WAS successful, and you would have had that, via Kubrick. And like any conspiracy, some would think it fake, some not, that how these things work.
‘Too many people involved to lie’ seems to be the mantra here but very very wrongheaded- go to any list compilation site (CR***ED for sure, not sure I can say that here) and find “Top 10 mind melding govt. conspiracy theories that ACTUALLY HAPPENED” or whatever and see how its possible- how may top men (SCIENTISTS!) were involved in the syphilis tests on blacks in the 40’s, and that was kept a secret for decades, correct? Why possible there, not possible here?
Are you here to ask a question, or are you here to promote a theory?
Plus, this was obviously in the days of the Cold War before internet and twitter and the like- if the USSR thought it was fake, would the average US citizen even be aware they thought that? Maybe a Reuters article in the New York Times ‘Soviets question US landing’ but that’s about all you would get here. Not like their leaders could host an hour live YouTube feed detailing all the reasons it was fake.
Also, it came out much later, and could not be disproved at the time, that the Soviets lied about various aspects of Gagarin’s 1961 mission to make them look better- proof the ‘race’ was important enough to lie about. The US is automatically above that I guess?
Czarcasm,
Ask a question, and looking for answers based in fact, not people scanning my post, seeing only ‘moon landing’, ‘fake’ and ‘this is his tenth post’ and answering the question they want to answer, not the question asked, which I have given tons of support to show it is at the very least a legitimate question- the USSR lied about certain aspects, why is it impossible to think the US would not have as well? Can you directly answer that?
Again, why didn’t they use that approach for all the other failures in the space program? They had no plans to fake it, there was no need, it would serve no purpose.
Except that any subsequent genuine mission would not match the faked version. And it’s not “just video” - even Apollo 11 alone brought back nearly 50 pounds of rock and soil, along with 123 photos taken on the surface itself, which can be plotted precisely using photogrammetry, showing that they were taken on a real large 3D surface.
No photos taken in a studio on a faked mission could do this.
You’ve been given plenty of answers as to why what you envision just didn’t(and couldn’t) happen the way you envision. If you are just accepting answers that agree with your theory, then there isn’t much point in continuing this conversation.
The problem isn’t that people aren’t answering you-it is that you don’t like the answers.
Take a probe and put taped astronaut conversation (their lines in the script) over the radio and the reflectors to be disbursed through mechanical means and viola, faked moon landing.
Colophon, very valid points, but they voluntarily provided those upon return because the mission was a success, and they had them. If a failure, they could have said, yes we made it (see the video!) but the cameras were destroyed, didn’t film correctly, dropped the bag of rocks, etc. I’m sure at least a few people who have ever scaled tall mountains broke their cameras on the way down and have no proof they did it.
No, the reasons I have been given are- the US had nothing to gain by it (they did), the US govt. wouldn’t be involved in a conspiracy to make themselves look good (they have, and would) and ‘too many people involved to have a successful conspiracy’ (possible). The technology existed at the time existed to produce a fake that would be believable to the average person.
And yes, with any theory, you are looking for corroboration- ideally someone out there had read a book ala Area 51 where someone around at the time had some insight into this being a possibility, or some strange footage found in a locker in 1991, a declassified memo, something like that. This is what I was looking for, having a real interest in the subject and finding the ‘clues’ in The Shining fascinating.
Since no one here yet is apparently aware of anything like that, then yes, I agree, the thread is pretty much pointless lacking that type of info. Fully willing to agree if its the case that there is no tangible proof or even hearsay it was even a consideration.
Wasn’t looking to debate or rile up others. Was looking for any real information on a subject that interests me that I could not find online myself.
It’s seems as if you really want to find a way for the US to have faked this, but there isn’t one.
At what point do you fake it? You have to at least have a launch right? You can’t just declare that we landed on the moon on a slow news day, in the hopes that no one noticed that we never launched the rocket to begin with. The thing’s huge. Tall. Makes a butt ton of noise. A lot of people generally show up for the launch.
You have to load it right? You don’t want a bunch of people at Bethpage to say, “I don’t know where that LEM came from, we never delivered one.”
You have to put men on it right? Do you think you’re going to get a bunch of military fighter pilots on board with this giant ruse? Admitting that they don’t have “the right stuff” and they are all posers?
So then you’re left with building it, manning it and launching it. So all of the ground support people know that it’s just orbiting the earth, not doing anything. Those hundreds, thousands? of people are just going to keep quiet?
And the Russians, they’re on board with this? Because they’ll see the spacecraft just orbiting away, not going anywhere.
You can see right, that there is just no where to go with this?
Not sure if you are trolling or being deliberately obtuse but I will go along- reading the OP would help also. OBVIOUSLY the US sent a manned mission to the moon in 1969. OBVIOUSLY it landed successfully. Any evidence at all that the US would have shown fake video of them landing to look as though the beat the Reds to the moon IF THEY DID NOT REALLY BEAT THEM??
The only reasonable retort to your question is that nobody with an ounce of sense even considered it because it was flatly impossible. Impossible in every conceivable way. No fake would fool anyone with the knowledge to know what the real thing should look like, which would have been tens of thousands of people around the world. No fake could replace the real transmissions: the substitution would have been instantly obvious. Nor could a fake have been used for the entire several-day-long mission. Nor would the astronauts have gone along with it for even a second. Nor any scientist in NASA.
Faking the moon landing was impossible, stupid, counter-productive, technically ridiculous, mindless, a waste of time and money, self-inflicted suicide.
You received the full and complete answer in the very first response. I can’t imagine what gaps in basic knowledge and understanding keep you arguing against that, but the fault is not in any of the posters. Nobody contemplated doing it any more than they contemplated waving their arms and flying to the moon if the Apollo rocket had exploded. One would have made exactly as much sense as the other.
The point you seem to be missing is that a fake moon landing would have been more expensive, more difficult, and have a higher risk of failing than an actual moon landing would have been. So anybody making a choice between the two, would choose to do an actual moon landing. Because it was easier than faking it.