# Moon Landing **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 10, 2008, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069 "2008-11-10T17:58:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Euphonious\_Polemic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/euphonious_polemic/32/3002_2.png) [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2008, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/41 "2008-11-10T23:56:31Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > I never sleep… > > Peeing on the moon IS physically impossible…unless you are in a space suit. Just saying… > > -XT great, now I have that Police song going through my head: Giant steps are what you take Peeing on the moon I hope my legs don’t break Peeing on the moon We could walk forever Peeing on the moon We could live together Peeing on, peeing on the moon ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2008, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/42 "2008-11-10T23:58:57Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I personally saw Apollo XVII take off. Even those who think the first one was a hoax would have a hard time explaining why we spent all that money hurling all that hardware into space seven times. I saw Apollo 14 take off (while I was in an airliner west of Cape Canaveral). ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/43 "2008-11-11T00:36:36Z")
> [@Don\_t\_fight\_the\_hypothetical](#): > > Of course not. Do not be intimidated by these pseudo-intellectuals. [The truth.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUOItuKm5UE) > > 😉 > [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > It’s way too stupid to be real, but not quite funny enough to be a joke. Just in case someone misses the whoosh, it was a film made to make fun of the hoaxers. > **[Moon landing conspiracy theories in popular culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_hoax_in_popular_culture_and_parody)** > > The notion that the Apollo Moon landings were hoaxes perpetrated by NASA and other agencies has appeared many times in popular culture. Not all references to Moon landing conspiracy theories are in support of them, but the ideas expressed in them have become a popular meme to reference, both in humor and sincerity. > In 1956 James E. Gunn wrote a science fiction story entitled "Cave of Night" in which the United States Air Force fakes the first crewed American spaceflight. When lack of funds prec... > [@](#): > > In 2002, William Karel released a spoof documentary film, Dark Side of the Moon, ‘exposing’ how Stanley Kubrick was recruited to fake the Moon landings, and featured interviews with, among others, Kubrick’s widow and a number of American statesmen including Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. It was an elaborate joke: interviews and other footage were presented out of context and in some cases completely staged, with actors playing interviewees who had never existed (and in many cases named after characters from Kubrick’s films, just one of many clues included to reveal the joke to the alert viewer).[3] ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/44 "2008-11-11T00:38:20Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > Peeing on the moon IS physically impossible… Are you sure? I would have thought _stopping_ would be the problem. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/45 "2008-11-11T00:42:37Z")
Yeah, I’m pretty sure if you whipped it out you’d never have the chance too pee…either at the time or ever again. Vacuum, no atmosphere, intense cold…all that jazz… I could be wrong of course…maybe you’d have just enough time to do it before all that bad stuff would happen to you. This being the 'dope and all, no doubt someone has the answer to this burning question and will provide us with enlightenment. 🙂 Wonder where the OP wandered off too…? -XT ---
**Author:** ![JimOfAllTrades](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@JimOfAllTrades](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JimOfAllTrades)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/46 "2008-11-11T00:43:37Z")
> [@dehacker](#): > > The best thing to come out of the moon landings? > > Buzz Aldrin at 72, [punching](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOo6aHSY8hU) Bart Sibrel for calling him a coward and a liar. Bart is the idiot conspiracy theorist who believes that NASA faked the moon landing. > > The man was already a hero of mine. This moved him directly into Legendary status. I think that we must always be wary that no government agency silences even crackpots like Bart Sibrel. Nutty as a fruitcake or attention seeker, we have to allow the lunatic fringe to ask questions as surely as we had to allow the Washington Post and other papers to ask questions about the Watergate affair. But Aldrin was not speaking on behalf of the Government. He was a private individual accosted by a man who stuck a mic in his face and called him names. So this wasn’t a freedom of speech issue at all, and the nutbar got what he really deserved. If Sibrel, the police, and DA had decided to pursue assault charges\* I (and probably about a million other people) would have gladly chipped in for Aldrin’s defense. > [@dehacker](#): > > So in summary – don’t fuck with Buzz. Damn Straight! \*which I assume they could have done, it looks like there was no doubt Aldrin dropped Sibrel when Aldrin really wasn’t in any actual physical danger. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/47 "2008-11-11T01:02:04Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > Peeing on the moon IS physically impossible…unless you are in a space suit. Just saying… > > -XT Oh my God–I mean, sure, we hit golf balls on the Moon, and we’ve performed urine dumps in space (“Constellation Urion”). But you’re right–I don’t believe an American ever did pee on the Moon! And now the Chinese are making noises about sending someone there–no doubt with some sort of cunningly-engineered space suit that will allow China to truly, definitively claim the Moon as Chinese territory. Clearly, we must make it a national priority to devise a space suit that will allow an astronaut to pee on the Moon (not to mention the whole sending said astronaut there and returning him safely to Earth thing). We must _mark our territory!_ “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth, after he has peed there, onto the lunar surface itself. We must do this, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/48 "2008-11-11T01:07:50Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader. According to Oliver Stone’s upcoming film, “A”, the whole thing was faked by Henry Kissinger and a couple of MIT grad students as a way to distract the US population way from the deteriorating situation in Viet Nam, and then backdated papers and news reports were inserted into every library and news archive to point by to Kennedy and Johnson in case the truth came to light. Although the popular rumor is that Stanley Kubrick directed the films depicting the lunar landing, it was in fact Irwin “Master of Disaster” Allen who ended up filming the footage as budget proposed by Kubrick exceeded the US Gross Domestic Product by an order of magnitude, and also included erotic symbolism for no particular reason. Kubrick did film some preliminary footage of some psychedelic slit-scan photography which was later used in government mind control experiments albeit without effect as they most potent psychoactive drug being used turned out to be Elmer’s Glue. _Manchurian Candidate_ director John Frankenheimer was originally approached to direct but cinematographer James Wong Howe didn’t like the way the shadows fell on the Moon. Seriously, I recently spoke with someone who worked on the F-1A rocket engine development (the follow-on to the F-1 used in the Saturn V S-IC first stage) and I’ve seen the (massive) stand at Edwards used to static fire the motor for testing, in addition to knowing people by association who worked at Grumman on the LEM. (My dream is to talk to some of the people who developed the RD-170 and derivative engines; that thing is a masterpiece of rocket engine design.) If NASA and the US government faked the Moon landings, they went to enough effort to do so that it would have been just as easy to put men on the Moon. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/49 "2008-11-11T01:11:03Z")
Quoth **Simplicio** : > [@](#): > > Man, we didn’t land on the moon. The moon landed on US! No, no, silly, that’s Soviet Russia you’re thinking of. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/50 "2008-11-11T01:22:23Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#): > > I saw Apollo 14 take off (while I was in an airliner west of Cape Canaveral). Obviously we’re both part of the conspiracy. _bwah-hah-hah_ Actually, that’s cool. I assume you didn’t hear it. ---
**Author:** ![Terrifel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c68b51/32.png) [@Terrifel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terrifel)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/51 "2008-11-11T02:30:49Z")
While the moon-hoax theory does kind of overestimate the government’s ability to keep such a conspiracy under wraps for any length of time, I like the fact that it doesn’t undersell the most important fact: man walking on the moon is a really amazing achievement that is honestly kind of hard to believe. If anything, I’d think that most people would tend to underestimate the difficulty of this accomplishment rather than the reverse: “What’s so hard about getting to the moon? We have airplanes don’t we? You just keep going up!” In fairness, I have seen some conspiracy literature that manages to combine the two perspectives, proposing scenarios wherein the government has all these secret Tesla-based antigravity technologies and Mars bases built in partnership with the aliens… yet the actual Moon landings were still faked for some reason. Presumably the Moon was so built up by the 1960s that they couldn’t find a parking spot. ---
**Author:** ![Hawkins](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/278dde/32.png) [@Hawkins](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hawkins)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/52 "2008-11-11T03:01:13Z")
NASA is unquestionably guilty of a conspiracy. It started when JFK said he wanted a man on the moon before the decade was out. And guess what? They ran with it. Shmucks. They knew it couldn’t be done, and they went ahead and did it anyway. Then they released videos that made it look like they were shot in Sudbury, Canada while all this time they were on the moon. Nice try, NASA. ---
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/53 "2008-11-11T03:01:31Z")
> [@dehacker](#): > > The best thing to come out of the moon landings? > > Buzz Aldrin at 72, [punching](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOo6aHSY8hU) Bart Sibrel for calling him a coward and a liar. Bart is the idiot conspiracy theorist who believes that NASA faked the moon landing. > > The man was already a hero of mine. This moved him directly into Legendary status. > > So in summary – don’t fuck with Buzz. Buzz is old school, you don’t call a man a coward and a liar to his face and NOT expect to get punched. Any older and Buzz would have demanded pistols at dawn. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/54 "2008-11-11T05:36:41Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > Yeah, I’m pretty sure if you whipped it out you’d never have the chance too pee…either at the time or ever again. Vacuum, no atmosphere, intense cold…all that jazz.. Doing so would mimic a very good vacuum pump. Seems like it would be OK for a few seconds. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/55 "2008-11-11T15:56:37Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > Just in case someone misses the whoosh, it was a film made to make fun of the hoaxers. > > [Moon landing conspiracy theories in popular culture - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_hoax_in_popular_culture_and_parody) > > > [@](#): > > > > In 2002, William Karel released a spoof documentary film, Dark Side of the Moon, ‘exposing’ how Stanley Kubrick was recruited to fake the Moon landings, and featured interviews with, among others, Kubrick’s widow and a number of American statesmen including Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. It was an elaborate joke: interviews and other footage were presented out of context and in some cases completely staged, with actors playing interviewees who had never existed (and in many cases named after characters from Kubrick’s films, just one of many clues included to reveal the joke to the alert viewer).[3] The truly sad thing about this is that despite it being a parody, it was hard to distinguish from the real conspiracy nuts. A “former CIA director” (whom I had never seen) being interviewed exclusively in a foriegn language. Claims that California, Texas, and Florida were the locations of all the funding, based on having presidents who were not even elected for a decade or more after the last launch–then turning around and claiming that GM (Michigan) and Boeing (Washington) were the big industrial donors. It made so little sense that it looked just like a real conspiracy claim. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/56 "2008-11-11T16:06:49Z")
Of course it was fake. They showed how on the documentary _Capricorn One_. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/57 "2008-11-11T16:34:37Z")
> [@CurtC](#): > > Doing so would mimic a very good vacuum pump. Seems like it would be OK for a few seconds. Well, people have been conditioned by what they see on TV and in movies. They don’t realize that, in the greater scheme of things, 14.7psi at sea level isn’t that much more than a vacuum. Maybe enough to give your member a case of the bends, but not enough to suck your body out your open fly. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/58 "2008-11-11T16:57:16Z")
The United States did not land on the moon. It was actually some NASA astronauts. ---
**Author:** ![Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/bc8723/32.png) [@Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/59 "2008-11-11T18:10:24Z")
One thing that’s always bothered me about this particular conspiracy theory: do the moon-landing skeptics ever consider how much money it would **cost** to keep up a conspiracy this large for so long? How would anybody make their money back? ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2008, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069/60 "2008-11-11T19:47:33Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > The United States did not land on the moon. It was actually some NASA astronauts. First time that joke has been made in this thread. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/moon-landing/472069.md?page=4)