But there you demonstrate part of the problem: a large enough part of the general public, even including what would be considered well-informed people compared to the average masses, will ahve gaps in their initial recollection of events or understanding of information, that allow a foot-in-the-door to the “questioners” while the person gets his ducks in order – And be it evolution, the Holocaust, or the Moon landing, all it takes is for the person arguing the reality to take pause to wonder “wait a minute, am I remembering that right”, for the other side to go:* “AHA! So you do NOT know for certain!”* .
As to the ease of the skepticism about the feasibility of this, blame also Dick Nixon or the Congress of the early 1970s or whoever it was that decided that once we had proved we were hung bigger than the Commies, there was no need to follow up further on “conquering space”. A lot of people out there honestly believe that if the USA were really such a technological superpower, by now we should have the flying cars and robot maids and Mars bases; that hasn’t happened so obviously the whole Space Race was a smokescreen :rolleyes:
I don’t think that is true, There was one crewman on the return modual orbiting, while the others went down and up in the LEM. Also IIRC earlier Apollo missions just swung around the moon to test systems and would have passed over the dark side.
Apollo 13 I think had a different orbit then all others, IIRC the others used a ‘safe return’ orbit, meaning they would swing around the moon and if they did nothing they would automatically return to a earth orbit. A 13 had a orbit that would not afford this.
A few people have done some accounting on the subject – their conclusion was that faking the landings would have been seriously expensive and difficult. A cheaper and easier solution would have been – get this – actually going to the Moon.
control-z, I think enough people here have enough information on the topic to set you straight, but you might want to read up on BA’s website, here. You can also click on “Bulletin Board” (which you’ll have to sign up to use), then go to the Conspiracy Theories forum, and post your concerns. If, after having gone 6 rounds with Jay Utah, you’re still not convinced, then you’re as dumb as a bag of spatulas. You’re not dumb as a bag of spatulas, are you? Of course not!
I recently heard a Ricky Gervais piece about what a crap place the moon must be, Michael Collins flew all the way there and couldn’t be bothered getting out of the Lunar Module even if just to stretch his legs.
I watched Apollo 11 in the control room of a local TV station – I was an intern on the news staff there, and the first moonwalk pre-empted our local news. We watched in utter awe, but I remember thinking, “Jeez, the video is really crappy.” If they were faking it, it wouldn’t have taken much to just say, “Oh, and we have this great new video technology,” and provided much better video of the whole thing.
As far as the technology is concerned, I think I remember a NASA guy explaining to Walter Conkrite that it was really just a matter of two things – brute force to launch 'em out of Earth’s gravity, and mathematics to plot the correct course. After the heavy lifting, everything else was just math. I don’t mean to denigrate mathematicians – God knows I couldn’t solve a TV murder with cosines – but seriously, they just applied the math that had already been done and combined it with a kick-ass rocket motor.
Oh, yeah, one other thing – if the whole thing was a hoax, why bother to hoax up Apollo 13? Or the launchpad fire? Why hoax failures? To make it more believable? If so, why kill three astronauts in a fake launchpad fire but let three more survive a near-disaster in space? Sorry, but you just cannot make that shit up.
Easy. Apollo 13 was to create credibility, so those in on the conspiracy could ask “why bother to hoax up Apollo 13?” And Apollo 1 caught on fire because Gus Grissom was going to “blow the whistle” on the whole scam.
Geez, man, bone up on your whack-job conspiracies, will ya?
They actually did have much better video technology, but the format was incompatible with broadcast television. The footage that was broadcast was captured by setting up a television camera at one of the ground stations and pointing it at the monitor displaying the actual feed. So it’s no wonder it looked crappy.
According to Jim Lovell in Lost Moon (pp. 113f) there was a group that monitored the moon flights with a telescope. The vehicle itself was too small to be seen, but the cloud produced by urine dumps (Wally Schirra’s “Constellation Urion”) could be seen. And they had absolutely no problem seeing the cloud produced by Apollo XIII’s exploding oxygen tank. (They were able to see the third stage of the Saturn booster.)
Not only was the rest math, but all of the math — on rocket thrust, escape velocity, and orbital velocity — was known by the 1940s, and research papers were published on this topic.
Self-contained pressurized suits had also been developed for diving in the 1940s.
The U.S. Army Signal Corps first bounced radar waves off the moon in 1946, and by 1954 voice transmissions were relayed off the moon. Lunar relays of radio transmissions became routine by 1960.
The U.S. space program proceeded in stages: in 1961 they were able to rocket a man straight up and down; in 1963 they were able to put a man in orbit around the earth; in 1968, they were able to get a spacecraft to leave the earth, orbit the moon and return; in 1969 they were able to land on the moon.
It also looked crappy because the image was in monochrome and photographed at only ten frames per second (films are photographed at 24 fps and American television at 30 fps), and then relayed from a receiving station in Australia by satellite to Mission Control in Houston, adding a layer of ghosting effects that television satellite transmisions of that era were plagued by.
I can look it up if necessary, but I remember reading that “going to the moon” was considered a bit “boring” as far as orbital mechanics goes, so students/scientists were often given problems involving the other planets. When it came to actually going to the moon, there was actually a relative dearth of published data compared to Mars, say.
My OP was not so much about if they would or could fake the landing, but whether anyone else has come across educated people who so strongly believe that it was indeed faked–especially people (like Italians) who have no particular reason to suspect fakery.
