Just a reminder the moonlanding hoax will be on Mythbusters tonight. Discovery channel at 9:00pm EST.
It will be interesting to see what they come up with.
Are they going to blow up the moon?
They were going to try it, but then they realized that they couldn’t fit the whole moon onto an abandoned Naval yard.
So they are mounting a nuclear warhead to their Confederate pipe missile next week.
Just watched the latest Mythbusters on the supposed moon hoaxes and thought I’d see what my fellow 'dopers thought. I’ll try not to put any spoilers in and will ask that at least for a bit anyone talking about the show directly put it in a spoiler box (all this supposes there aren’t already threads on this subject…if there are then mods feel free to close after someone gives me a link :)).
Personally, I think that anyone who is convinced that the moon landings were a hoax is going to be unconvinced by this episode. While I believe they pretty much hit all home runs (as usual), I can see a bunch of ‘flaws’ that CTers are going to latch on to…the main one being that they were using parameters and equipment by the font of all evil, a.k.a. NASA.
BTW, a question for anyone who knows this CT well…what do the CTers say about the laser reflectors and equipment that is pretty much visible from the Earth? Seems like right there it would kill any thoughts of a hoax, so they must have SOMETHING to say about it.
Anyway, feel free to discuss the episode and the moon hoaxes in any way you like. Just wanted to see what people thought.
-XT
They fired a laser at the moon, but it didn’t blow up.
Merged xtisme’s thread with this one, that’s why it reads strange.
samclem GQ moderator
Maybe they just aimed at the wrong retroreflector. Maybe a mischevous astronaut hid a detonation device in a different one.
Wait… so that means… the moon itself is the hoax!
So what exactly did they do? The best evidence disproving the “Moon landings are a hoax” theory would have been for them to build a rocket and travel on it to the Moon and back.
They recreated contentious photographs, simulated the moon’s gravity in a plane, and tested flag planting in a vacuum.
They also attempted to slow down film footage, tested to see if a footprint would stay on the moon (using simulated moon dust provided by NASA), and, as mentioned, shot a laser at a retroreflector left on the moon by the Apollo 15 astronauts.
The response I remember seeing is that it wouldn’t require a manned mission to set that up, and that NASA may have sent an unmanned mission to do it.
I have to say I was fairly disappointed in this episode. The weightlessness part was well done (although probably just an excuse to get the station to pay for a zero g vacation 
) as was the flag bit. But the other segments weren’t done properly. I don’t believe in the moon hoax nonsense, and I agree with their explanations, but i don’t feel like the demonstrations were done properly or viscerally enough:
The footprint segment explained everything well enough, but the demonstration was poor. Honestly, the footprint in moon sand didn’t look all that different from the footprint in regular dry sand. They should have done both the regular sand and moon sand next to each other in the vacuum chamber so you could clearly see the difference, and probably have changed the lighting a bit so there was more contrast.
The astronaut in shadow bit suffered from a lack of control. They made a whole deal out of how with just one source of light the astronaut would be hidden in the shadow, but with reflected light from the surface he would become visible. But they never showed the astronaut toy hidden in the shadow! They should have taken one picture with a non reflective surface as a control, and one picture with the reflective surface as the variable, to show the difference and also to prove that they had eliminated all ambient light besides the source light and the surface reflection.
The non parallel shadow bit also wasn’t very demonstrative. Granted they did a before and after, and proved that you could have one source light creating shadows of different apparent angles. But they didn’t demonstrate very well exactly how that worked. Instead of creating a lump of dirt, they should have made the table surface manipulatable, such that they could show that as the surface gradually gains slope, the shadow changes. And possibly even contrasted it with a view from above which would show that altho the angles look different from the side, from above you can see that the angles are actually still parallel.
As for the laser bit, they were probably limited by the equipment they had, but being able to actually see the reflector in the telescope image, or seeing the laser beam actually hit something in the lab rather than just a blip on a computer screen graph would have been more convincing.
So, arguably, they did bust these myths, but an essay could have done that. As a tv show they should have demonstrated the principles and contrasts better visually and intuitively.
What people dont realise is that yes the moon landings were real BUT the crew was made up of Bigfoots carefully edited out of the pictures and replaced with photos of humans.
They couldn’t get enough salami.
This episode was about rational explanations. Therein lays the reason it will fail to prove its point. Moon hoaxers are not motivated or persuaded by rational thinking.
You can’t convince the die-hard believers. But the people who don’t really think too hard about stuff and are easily persuaded by kooky ideas might change their minds after viewing the episode.
Not that such people are likely to have been watching them in the first place.
AArrgghh was savoring every moment of the Red Sox destroying the Yankees, and totally forgot all about this. When’s the repeat? [Yes, off to the DC website to check myself]
Edit: Friday 10 pm EDT.
They were going to, but someone stole their Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
It looks like somebody wants to be on the Mythbuster team!