And even then, it’s hard to sit down and keep your balance. But seriously, folks, we all know the earth is flat, let’s get back to proving that the moon landing was real.
I don’t know, but I’d rather spend an hour in the Van Allen belt than ten seconds in that chamber wondering if the walls are going to hold.
Eh, just FTR, the consensus over in GQ is that you’d need a “really, really bigass telescope” in order to see anything on the moon, or in order to have seen anything of the 1969 moon shot, and that there ain’t no such critter on the face of the planet at this point in time.
Tsunamisurfer says you’d need 10,000 inch telescope, Chronos puts it at 150 meters. Either way, you’d still have the Earth’s atmosphere to peer through.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=61205
So bummer. 
Oh, well, I will now proceed to get on with my life…
Duck Duck Goose wrote:
Not quite true. For a little while after each Apollo mission launched, the combined 3rd-stage/CSM was parked in Low Earth Orbit. An object that large and that close would have been a rather easy target for the telescopes available at the time. However, once they performed the T.L.I. burn and blasted out of low Earth orbit, the Apollo spacecraft would have quickly dwindled to invisibility.
Of course the problem here is NASA is the main source for most of this stuff. After all, this is the agency that either put men on the moon or faked it, so it’s not too surprising that they are a major source of “evidence” in the matter.
I really don’t get point 3 above; how does proof that we could go again today prove we went in 1969? And what exactly would constitute proof that we could go now, particularily if you won’t accept any figures from NASA? It seems point 3 could only possibly be answered in the negative - we never went to the moon.
The frustrating thing with the above is that you STILL haven’t given an answer to the question of what you would consider proof positive that men landed on the moon. All you’ve done is given “levels of evidence”. What I want from you is a definitive statement of what would prove the moon landing to you, and what form that proof would have to take. For example “If dust kicked up by the astronauts falls as you would expect on the moon, specifically it falls at a rate consistent with gravity equal to 1/6 that of earth’s and in the absence of any atmosphere, I accept that men landed and walked on the moon. The acceptable form of proof would be a publicly available video image of men walking on the moon with sufficient clarity to determine the movement of such dust with reasonable accuracy, and I will take the responsibility of looking up the relevant physics equations and performing the calculations to verify the dust falls as expected.”
That’s just an example. The primary frustration I feel is that you’re presenting a moving target - I have no idea if it’s worth while investing more time in answering a specific objection; if I know it’s THE question then it’s worth while, otherwise it’s kind of a waste of time.
The other frustration is that you haven’t clearly stated what your position is and what you hope to gain from this discussion, and knowing that might change how some of this is handled as well. So for the record, do you believe the moon landings were all faked? Are you not sure and seriously investigating the evidence? Do you believe we went but just like playing devil’s advocate? Or something else? Any of the above would be fine, just clarify it for us all.
And the final frustration (at least for me) is you don’t seem to be trying out any of the various experiments people have talked about here, or attempting to verify some of the evidence. Dig a hole, read a book on photography or physics as it pertains to light, find a newsgroup with some amatuer radio operators and ask them about monitoring the Apollo missions.
And here’s another question to ponder. Suppose you accept that the radio transmissions actually came from the moon (and from in orbit around the moon). The moon is approximately 385,000 kilometers away (the orbit isn’t a perfect circle, but this is a good average and close enough for the point I’m making). A radio wave in space travels at approximately the speed of light in a vacuum (300,000 kilometers/second), so that means it takes about 1.3 seconds for a radio transmission to get from earth to the moon. With me so far? That means if someone on the earth asked someone on the moon a question, it would take at least ~2.6 seconds to hear the answer (1.3 seconds for the question to get from the earth to the moon, then another 1.3 for the answer to travel from the moon to the earth).
So, if you say there was simply a repeater on the moon and that the astronauts’ voices were really broadcast from the moon to the repeater and back, that adds another full round trip to the equation. Therefore the quickest exchange would take ~6.2 seconds! Just listen to the tapes and you’ll here plenty of exchanges that were much quicker than that.
Or the alternate hypothesis might be they pre-recorded everything on earth beforehand and ground control just carefully followed the script so they asked questions at just the right time so the pre-recorded answers being automatically replayed from the moon matched them. Think about how hard that would be to pull off over an entire mission and tell me if you think that’s reasonable.
Hoax director to fake astronaut: Now, remember, when Mission Control asks you a question, be sure to wait 3 seconds or so before replying, okay?
I think I figured out how the astronauts took pictures without viewfinders: Practice. “Lessee, that big-ass rock is about 3 meters away, the sun is behind me and to the left, so if I set the f/stop like so and the shutter speed like so, and the focus on 3 meters, it should fall within the depth of field. If not, we’ll just throw the picture away and the public will never know what a lousy photographer I am…” CLICK!
Two weeks later, the astronaut looks at the photo and smiles. It DID work.
I post that only because it’s clear from the photos that the astronauts DID have some way of focusing the cameras. This link is a list of ALL the photos taken on Apollo 11 with the Hasselblad, a total of 127 images! Note that some of them are out of focus and some are described as unintentional or accidental. Note that Armstrong and Aldrin were required to share this camera and used to photograph a wide variety of things at a wide variety of distances. Note that the focus is not always right.
I admit that focusing cameras without viewfinders is difficult, but it ain’t impossible.
Venkman: You’re playing into the conspirator’s hands by throwing out softball problems like the time delay. Obviously, if the astronauts and Ground Control were BOTH on Earth, they could hold a delayed conversation and relay the whole thing to the moon, through the simple expedient of inserting the appropriate time delay between them electronically.
This is the problem with these conspiracy theories.
Someone offers a solid piece of evidence, and someone else throws out another piece of evidence that perhaps isn’t all that well thought out. So the conspiratorialist ignores the first one, rips the second one apart, and comes out on top. Now he can go around telling his fellow nutcases how he tore up a bunch of scientists and others who debated him.
Anyway, I hope you guys realize what BickByro is - by his own admission, he’s an online shit disturber. He’s basically a troll, but a sophisticated one. He simply offers up an absurd argument, then uses all the tricks in the book to rile up the natives and keep the discussion going as long as possible. This is pure sophistry. And when the others finally get their act together and come up with the hard proof that shoots him down, he’ll just say something vague like, “Those are some reasonable points, and I’ll have to do some further research”. Then he’ll vanish, and go on to his next ‘debate’. I doubt that he belives the conspiracy theory, and he probably gets a big chuckle every time he logs on and sees a new round of messages that represented a lot of effort.
That makes him the center of the universe, at least while the debate continues. It’s the intellectual equivalent of vandalism, perhaps not in effect but in motivation.
I’ve seen guys like him come and go for years and years.
While it’s true that we may never get BickByro to admit we’re right, we may convince others who are skeptical. Case in point: handy, who admits here that he has not made up his mind.
Okay, it’s time this thread died so I will officially kill it:
Since Werner Von Braun was a Nazi war criminal, is there any reason we should trust him or anything he touched?
< dusting off my hands >
There. The Nazis have been invoked, so that should do it.
sigh I don’t have the patience to read through this whole thread, much less respond to all the points. I hope I don’t repeat things already mentioned, but I think there’s some good information to BickByro’s questions.
Regarding shadows, I have yet to see any pictures with two shadows for an object. All claims for multiple light sources are from the shadows of different objects acting differently, or the “dark” regions being too well lit.
All the non-parallel shadow claims boil down to two explanations: (1) the ground is uneven; (2) parallax.
I suggest you check out http://users.erols.com/igoddard/moon01.htm for the best site to address the shadow questions. He demonstrates very clearly the non-parallel shadows due to uneven ground. He also demonstrates very clearly the reflective properties of the lunar soil, and how that would fill light into the shadows behind the LEM or onto objects like the astronauts. He puts side by side pictures taken under similar lighting conditions with the only change being white or black “ground” underneath.
A second major question had to do with non-NASA tracking of the Apollo missions. A claim has been made that an unmanned craft could have been used to relay radio signals from the Earth to fake the transmissions. This would not work because the response times would be double in delay factor for transmission time. As for independent tracking, check out http://www.users.wineasy.se/svengrahn/trackind/Apollo17/APOLLO17.htm .
As far as arguments about building a sealed chamber large enough for a soundstage, that’s just preposterous. The largest thermal vacuum chamber in the world is at Johnson Space Center - Chamber A. It is 3 stories (90 ft) tall, 50 ft diameter, with a 45 ft diamter door. It is immense on the scale of these type facilities. It was build for Apollo to test the lunar equipment. It is still used to test equipment because it is the only facility of that size anywhere on the planet. How it works: first they pump out as much of the air as they can. That takes a set of immense vacuum pumps. But that’s not good enough, there’s still enough air in the room to affect tests. After that, they run liquid nitrogen through a series of panels along the walls. These panels are cold enough so that many of the remaining air molecules stick to the walls. This creates an incredible vacuum, good enough for the tests of space equipment. The volume of remaining air molecules in the chamber would fit inside a ping-pong ball. But guess what, that is an order of magnitude larger than the vacuum of space. We just can’t get there.
By the way, in case you’re wondering, no, Chamber A is not nearly large enough to function as a soundstage for faking the Apollo stuff. Watch the rovers drive around, kicking up dirt. Watch the dirt follow a parabolic path. There is no kicking up a dust cloud that happens in air like driving down a dirt road in the country. It all goes up then down. The chamber is no where near large enough to film something like that.
Sure we can build reasonably air-tight pressure systems. It’s not the air-tightness that’s the problem, it’s removing the air that’s in there.
Cameras on Apollo…
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/expmoon/Apollo11/A11_Photography.html
http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/hardwares/moon/1.htm
(from page 2)
The EVA cameras used 70mm film. The reseau plate is the source of the cross marks in the pictures.
For more information:
Jim Scotti has an excellent page on the standard set of Apollo Moon Hoax claims. I ran a web search looking for some information and hit a half dozen sites with the exact same text (just in the ones I read), all of which are the same claims made here.
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/
Be sure to check out Jim Scotti’s review on the Fox show.
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/FOX.html
One of the claims on the show has to do with similar backgrounds for different pictures, one with and one without the LEM visible. This site has an overlay showing the two photos. In fact you can see the parallax - the slight shift in features due to a different angle of viewing.
http://www.hypnoide.com/moon/
Other general Apollo Hoax debunk pages
http://www.apollo-hoax.co.uk/homepage.html
http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/
Additional Apollo Mission resources on hardware, photos, descriptions, etc:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html
http://www.apollosaturn.com/frame-lib.htm
See especially
http://www.apollosaturn.com/Lmnr/contents.htm
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/apollo.engin.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/mars/reference/flag/flag.html
http://www.lunaranomalies.com/images/fake7.JPG
http://planetscapes.com/solar/history/SP-350/ch-14-8.html
Some general space film clips, including erecting the flag on the moon, driving the lunar rover, Armstrong’s first step, and the feather drop experiment.
http://tommy.jsc.nasa.gov/~woodfill/SPACEED/SEHHTML/movies.html
Now you’re trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, you claim there are features in the pictures that show the pictures are fake. One typical claim used is in fact the lack of stars in the sky. When we explain why there shouldn’t be stars, you say then that we were smart enough to catch this one. Now wait a minute. We explain an “anomaly” that is “proof” of the pictures being hoaxes, and then you say it’s just proof NASA is a smarter hoaxer.
Finally, a comment to the other side. I understand frustration against repeated comments that have been addressed before, or stupid remarks. However, so far I haven’t seen any evidence this guy is a troll, so calling him one is inappropriate. Try to keep the invective out - it doesn’t help the case at all. (Admittedly I only read the first page and a half.)
Aw, Irish, you are a sweetie. [smooch] Have a beer. [hands him can of beer] I don’t think Bicky’s a troll, but I don’t think he’s coming back, either. So all that copy and paste, for nothing. [sigh] Oh, well, no doubt future generations of Dopers will rise up and call you blessed, the next time Fox runs the “moon landings” special (provided we’ve been able to teach them how to use Search by that time).
See ya. 
It’s a good thing I’m self-employed, because if I had a boss and s/he knew I just spent 6 potentially billable hours following this argument, I’d get canned.
But I’m surprised no one pointed out the obvious. The freaking hoax program was on FOX! Of course it was a bunch of horseshit.
Now, I gotta go feed.
