The USA was the first nation to step on and plant a flag on the moon.
Therefore by doing so, does the USA own the Moon? If something were discovered below the Moon’s surface, such as Oil or Diamonds, would ownership of the rights to all of those materials belong to the USA?
If this was debated, and went to court…where would it go to Court? Supreme Court is a USA court and would be biased, etc.
Furthermore did the USA actually land on the Moon or was it filmed in Hollywood as some people choose to believe? Therefore do they own nothing?
That is correct, although get your facts straight, it wasn’t called Pixar then. Back then the CGI production operation was still a secret division of NASA, operating in an underground bunker at Area 51. Most of the fake moon landing was created by a young George Lucas with the assistance of several of the space aliens held captive there, and it would not be another eight years until he became famous for using the same techniques in the movie Star Wars. A little-known fact is that two of the Star Wars characters, Darth Vader and Yoda, are closely based on the aliens that worked with him in Area 51, and whose advanced technology from the planet Gazoomba made the hoax so convincing.
The zealousness with which the moon landing secret is still being guarded is well illustrated by the fact that when a conscientious citizen confronted Buzz Aldrin and demanded that he admit it was all a hoax, Aldrin – to his everlasting credit – punched him in the face.
My physics teacher in the 60s stoutly maintained that the Russian film of Leonov spacewalking was all faked in a swimming pool somewhere. Mind you, he went on extended leave shortly after that, and never came back.
You guys are both wring. It is true that NASA contracted with Stanley Kubrick to produce footage of a moon landing, but it turned out that filming the spectral reflection of sunlight on the regolith was beyond the state-of-the-art in special effects circa 1969, and they didn’t have five years to wait while the perfectionist Kubrick built and rebuilt his sets, so they ended up going to the Moon to film a backdrop just to fake the landings. Apollo 13 occurred during a rigger’s strike and so NASA had to concoct this story about an explosion in order to avoid having to film without proper lighting, quashing Jim Lovell’s opportunity to be nominated for the Secret Squirrel Academy Award For Best Lead Actor In Faked Footage Or Top Secert Government Training Film.
Bah! Kubrick was just a creative CGI consultant on this and his role has been greatly exaggerated. The real credit goes to Lucas and the aliens, the original real-life Darth Vader and Yoda, who did all the hard spadework on 3D virtualizations and rendering. Now that I think about it, another alien that looked like Chewbacca was part of the team, too – he was a real whiz at the green-screen stuff, and he’d lived on the moon for awhile so he knew the scenery like the back of his paw.
All extraterrestrial disputes would naturally be brought before the Pleiadian Emissaries of Light and decided by the Intergalactic Council at Tau Ceti, whose elders materialize from the vacuum energy to hear cases once every galactic orbit.
Although if Darth Vader and Yoda testified about their work on the hoax, there really wouldn’t be much of a case.
BTW, why isn’t this purely factual discussion in GQ?
When I looked at Apollos Eight’s picture showing an alleged “Earthrise”, it was immediately obvious that I’d been airbrushed into the photograph of Earth.
You guys are forgetting the little known fact that Quentin Tarantino directed the actual moon walk. He also picked the musical score that went along with it.
The only one so far. And since we haven’t been back, ownership, even if it were that easy, would be more a theoretical thing.
No. Effectively, anyone who can go up there and get whatever is up there can basically go up there and get whatever is up there. The only thing stopping them is being able to do that (or do it economically enough to profit from it). The US doesn’t own anything more than the moon rocks and samples (and data) we brought back from our own expeditions…and some of those we’ve given away to other countries. If, say, China sends an expedition to the moon and gets samples of their own, they would belong to China or whoever they gifted with them.
I’m guessing the outer space treaty would come into play, though I would assume that when/if space travel becomes a viable economic concern that this treaty is going to have to be massively rewritten or a new one put in it’s place, since it’s kind of ridiculous for nations on this planet to say that the rest of the universe is off limits for entities to claim or exploit economically. Right now it’s kind of a moot point, since only the US has been there.
Well, so much for a serious debate. Only someone who has their head buried in the sand at this point would think that the US never landed on the moon. Today you can actually get telescopes powerful enough to SEE the freaking landing sites and the stuff we left behind, as well as experiments we set up that are still working. This leaves aside the mountain of other evidence that we went there. This is one of the stupider CTs out there, to be honest.
I’m sorry but you’ve been badly misinformed. Kubrick was responsible for the practical effects including the high fidelity models of the CSM-LM docking, liftoff of the LM ascent module, and the highly detailed avionics consoles, as well as elaborate instructions for the use of freefall toilet facilities. His insistance on verisimilitude was absolutely critical in simulating the flight environment and operations, and particularly the placement of lighting in order to get the correct shadowing representing the roll rate of the CSM in the supposed translunar flight profile. The small amount of work using primitive CGI and bluescreen compositing was performed by then USC film school student George Lucas with framing and blocking performed by a young college dropout named Steven Spielberg. A drug-addled Robert Evans produced the footage, but insisted on his right tell the story, yelling, “Fuck my life! I want the credit!” He was subsequently brainwashed by a private company operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. However, the composite footage was of so obviously poor quality that the majority of it had to be scrapped, hence the need to call on the Zeta Reticulans to provide help in building a vehicle to actually take astronauts to the Moon to film the actual hopping around and hitting golf ball footage.
As for ownership of the Moon, I believe there is a long standing legal battle between Donald Trump and the Koch Brothers over who gets naming rights. However, actual possession is claimed with priority by an indigenous tribe of lunar flying tortoises which occasionally visit Earth in order to protect us from giant lizard monsters which arrise from the ocean to attack Tokyo.
Of course, the silence in all the lunar footage is a dead giveaway. Sound travels perfectly well in outer space, but the technology of the late-'60s couldn’t convincingly replicate the sound of rocket motors. The whole “sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum” thing was concocted at a late-night writers meeting.
Sound effects had improved dramatically by 1977, and Lucas was able to make the spaceships in Star Wars zoom and whoosh as we all know they do.
Oh, man, it was so much more than that. When you’ve gone through selection process after selection process and risen to the top of the heap of all astronauts, the elite of all the elite, to become one of the duo of the first two human beings in human history to walk on another world, and you’ve risked your life to do so – mission #1 has all the unknowns – I imagine it creates a certain mindset. A mindset that, when challenged by a bloviating lunatic who is harassing you and won’t get the hell out of your way and is calling you a liar and a coward, kind of turns said lunatic face into the perfect image of a punching bag. And the judge handling the assault charge agreed. The whole thing was just great!
You know, I’ve had it with you people who give so much credit to Lucas. You know who did all the real design work for the look and feel of the space mission? Ralph McQuarrie. Seriously, take a look at the early concept art he did for Apollo, back when Lucas was still wanting to name the first moon astronaut “Annikin Starkiller” instead of “Neil Armstrong”. McQuarrie did all the iconic visual design for the mission and deserves at least co-creator credit.
Right now it’s kind of a moot point, since only the US has been there.