The moon landings and fakery (updated)

Posted on by

I often joke with friends that the Apollo 11 moon landings were faked in a TV studio just outside Phoenix. Of course, I don’t believe it for a minute. But now comes CNN giving unnecessary coverage to those claiming the entire program was a fraud. I assume these are the same type of folks who believe that the US government planned the 9/11 attacks, that Obama was not born in the US and that the CIA killed JFK. Why sully the remembrance of the heroic astronauts 40 years ago with any focus on the conspiracy “theorists”?

Mythbusters took these claims head on some time ago, and you can watch the results:

One of the most notorious of the conspiracy nuts is Bart Sibrel, who ambushed Buzz Aldrin and got a well-deserved punch in the face for it:

Update: And now, a celebrity has joined fantasy land. Whoopi Golberg, talking on the view, promotes the conspiracy lies and questions whether we actually landed on the moon.

14 thoughts on “The moon landings and fakery (updated)”

  1. If you put these people in the same category as the people that believe the US planned 9/11 then I KNOW the moon landing was faked.

  2. You make the classic logical error of “guilt-by-association”. Whereas the moon-landings are easily provable scientifically, there are literally 1000s of engineers and scientists who’ve looked at the available _data_ regarding the building demolitions of 9/11 and have concluded that the government’s story cannot possibly be true and is therefore an outright lie. There has even been un-detonated explosive nano-thermite definitively found in the dust from the 9/11 demolitions. This has been confirmed independently by several labs. Yet the mainstream news media refuses to bring any of these facts to light. I suggest you get your facts straight before insulting a group of people who are doing everything within their power (peacefully, I might add) to bring some accountability for the crimes of 9/11.

  3. If you didn’t realize but Mythbusters so called “busted” the moon landing myths by USING A SOUND STAGE AND PROPS.
    For example they “busted” the shadows theory by making a set with props that looked just like the moon landing with lighting effects saying that it WAS possible for different directions for shadows.
    BUT ALL THEY DID WAS ALSO PROVE THAT IT COULD’VE BE SET UP ON A STAGE JUST LIKE THEY DID TO TEST THE MYTH.

  4. The fact is that we do not know enough about the moon’s unique rules (gravity, atmosphere, etc..) itself to compare it to happenings on earth. The moon is like a different planet. It has it’s own rules that have to be figured out. Also a theory is “a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural.” It is not fact as it has not been proven. Also, the myth busters were proving that shadows that are not parallel can come from one single light source. And why would the NASA people that supposedly staged the landing go through so much trouble for the “weird” shots if it was just going to make people rise and pick at every imperfection that does not match up to earth’s natural rules (gravity, atmosphere, etc..)? I just think that people should be focusing more on problems that are affecting the world as a whole than to look at something that happened about 40 years ago. Humanity is able to achieve many goals, why is it that reaching the moon in those times would not be possible when humanity also made the A-bomb for WWII which was a couple of decades before the landing. Just something to think about. We have had great minds in the human history.

  6. Let NASA duplicate the moon landing this time. If they can do it then probably I might believe the first one.

  7. I watched the first moon landing as a college student. As somebody who was young at the time and remembers it well, I can say that the frequency of our subsequent trips to the moon made them almost routine. The expectation was, “okay, what’s next?” We should have had a functioning colony on the moon and men on Mars by the end of the 1980s. And certainly by 2010, we would be reaching beyond that. We should have conquered living at extreme low temperatures and spending years in suspended animation or else reaching hyper-speeds that made space travel do-able. There were all these expectations in 1969 that the moon landing was just the beginning. Instead, it became the end.

    The reason the conspiracy theorists get such traction today is that we stopped traveling in space, except for the shuttle missions (which use 1970s technology, of course). Why has there been such scanty progress?

    I recall that there was a widespread feeling in the early 1070s that we should be spending our dollars to address poverty on earth rather than cavorting around in space. (That really worked well, didn’t it?) People wanted practical applications that they could share in the benefits of.

    Also, the moon seemed barren and empty, rather a disappointment except to the few people who got to bounce around and pick up rocks and play “golf.” People just didn’t feel they were getting their money’s worth from moon travel. The war in Vietnam made any military/government-sponsored program unpopular with many young people, who wanted to see the feat of bringing the troops home, rather than glorifying the astronauts — military pilots some of whose counterparts were languishing in the Hanoi Hilton.

    In retrospect, we should have continued going to the moon and beyond. So these annoying hoax-believers would never be able to raise their claims. Some people just love to think of themselves as “smarter” than scientists. In my experience I have met intellectually undisciplined people who resent experts of any kind. They want the high stature for themselves but never had the discipline or talent to master the educational hurdles and achieve that status. So they seethe with envy and are fertile ground for hoax theorists.

    Me, I see the moon landing as proof that our technology and ingenuity have been stalled since the 1970s. We do not have a next-generation space shuttle; we let supersonic commercial travel languish and die because of noise problems, of all things; instead of solving those problems, we gave up. Medical science now offers largely ineffective but jaw-droppingly expensive treatments — particularly for mankind’s great scourge, cancer. The race for a cure was abandoned as unachievable. The internal combustion engine — 19th century technology! — continues to maim the planet without a practical and inexpensive successor in sight. True engineering progress seems to have been lost. To me that is a far more puzzling and troubling conundrum than shadows on the moon.

  8. Those who doubt the facts of the moon landing are a curious puzzle to me. Probably they have never studied any technical courses in their lives and their only knowledge of space travel comes from comic books and long term watching of the “Star Wars” series. Possibly they suffer from paranoia or an inability to imagine the necessary components of a space craft or they cannot comprehend the “incredible” bravery of our astronauts.

  9. Like someone said, all the Mythbusters really did (with the help of NASA) was show that the moon landings could be done on earth. I’m not a firm believer either way but what makes me most skeptical of the moon landings is the radiation factor (something I don’t think Mythbusters replicated to show was harmless).

    I find it really difficult to believe that not one of the astronauts, to my knowledge, got even remotely ill after passing through what is arguably deadly radiation.

    Another factor is that NASA did it multiple times (under the most dishonest and corrupt President in US history) and then suddenly stopped, even though there have been enormous advances in technology since 1972. And that Apollo 11 ‘just happened’ to prove JFK right that the US would land on the moon before the end of the decade.

    And why has no other country, not Russia, China, India, Japan or any other even attempted it? To say they wouldn’t bother because they are not first is ridiculous. Why would the US do it six times? Why would the US send a man into space when the USSR already did it?

    I think the Soviets were put off by the radiation factor.

    I don’t really buy a lot of the conspiracy stuff – I think they clutch at straws sometimes, especially over-analysing images.

    This site http://moon.eu-tube.com shows that the LRO Apollo pics were put through Photoshop. While I don’t think that proves they’re fake, I think it’s a bit silly of NASA to do that, given these pics are supposed to be ‘proof’.

    I also have to say I am not that impressed by them. NASA might say they show the lander or other artifacts from manned missions, but you have to take it on trust.

    People who believe the NASA version will believe what NASA says the pics show; people who don’t believe NASA will say the pics are faked or show something other than what they claim.

    As someone who isn’t firmly convinced either way, the LRO pics do nothing to sway me and further in either direction.

    One thing I can’t recall ever seeing, on all the footage of the Apollo missions, is one of the astronauts panning the camera from the moon to show the earth. Did that ever happen and I forgot or missed it? Or was that not possible for some reason?

  10. I have only two questions for moon landing hoax theroists. First, a hoax of such magnitude would necessitate the involvement of thousands of engineers, technicians, and others. How could such a large number of people remain silent on the issue for all these years?
    Secondly, everyone needs to remember that the moon landings were the culmination of the Space Race. The Soviets were trying to get to the moon first and there are lots of records indicating they closely tracked the Apollo capsules flight paths. They would have literally screamed, “Foul!” had anything been amiss. Remember they were our adversaries and would have jumped at any chance to discount anything NASA was doing. If the moon landings were faked, how could the Soviets have not known?

  11. Elle,

    That was one of the most beautiful and eloquent elucidations of the problem both with hoax believers and the state of our technology. Indeed, had we continued to realize our potential and exceed our grasp, who knows where we would be today?

    It’s true that no amount of evidence will convince a hoax believer (or any conspiracy theorist) that the ideas he/she espouses are founded on sand and smoke. Reasoned inquiry informed by facts and observation are the hallmarks of true scientific method, whereas hoax believers try to find “facts” that fit their pre-determined notions (I will not call them “theories,” because a true theory is a logical explanation for observed phenomena, and hoax “notions” are neither logical nor explanatory, and very often deal only in imagined phenomena).

    Paul,

    Yes, you too should be lumped in with the hoax believers. Science and engineering apply to the problem of 9/11 as well. It doesn’t matter what “experts” one tries to dig up to support a notion that the U.S. government murdered 3,000 of its own citizens (and citizens of 60 other countries) to score political points — the laws of physics are against you on this one. The World Trade Center was indeed designed to withstand a direct impact by a Boeing 707. The scenario, however, was that a plane landing at a New York airport, nearly empty of fuel, might veer off course and collide with the towers. They never for a second imagined that a plane fully loaded with fuel might be flown intentionally into the building. Steel loses half its strength at the temperatures at which jet fuel burns. From the “point of view” of the steel, the building effectively doubled its weight — a load it was never designed to carry. The towers collapsed because their superstructure melted and fell in on itself.

    People who would believe in conspiracies should keep in mind that they are often accusing the organizations hypothetically responsible for said conspiracy of way more competence than they deserve. Nixon couldn’t even conspire to cover up the Watergate break-in. How is he going to fake a moon landing? But then again, the reasonable conclusion requires facts and logic, so this exhortation is probably falling on deaf ears…

  12. Buzz Aldrin punching that little punk in the face made me laugh. I couldn’t stop watching it! Who does this piece of human trash think he is stopping someone in public and baselessly calling him a coward, a liar, and a fraud? If someone did that to me, hell yeah I’d punch his lights out also!! Hoax or no hoax, you just don’t do that to someone and expect to get away scot free. My respect for Edwin went up about nineteen or twenty notches when I saw him do that.

    I believe the Moon Landings are real. Given that the truth about everything comes out sooner or later, the fact that no one involved in the so-called hoax has spilled their guts in the last forty years is very telling. It would have cost the government FAR MORE money to pay off the 400,000 or so people involved to shut them up, than it would to actually GO to the Moon. Think about it. We’re talking BILLIONS OF DOLLARS needed to perpetrate this. Forty years ago, billions of dollars would have been unimaginable for the government to spend. We didn’t even waste a billion dollars fighting in Vietnam for ten years.

    Someone else brought up a great point about the Soviets. The Russians would have been the first to point out we were lying if they had ANY shred of proof, or even just a gut feeling, that we were faking this. The USSR didn’t even try to publish a rebuttal in the days following the Moon Landing. Now why is that? Who had more to gain from exposing the United States as frauds? No one but the Soviets, but they never even tried to formulate a negative response.

    It really sucks that American citizens are actively trying to undermine America. What possible reason could these people have to want to try and spread lies like this and poison an entire generation against America? How could anyone hate their own country so much? I suppose we should just feel sorry for these ignoramuses, but really it just makes me angry!

  13. Boeing won the bid to again put a man on the moon a few years ago. Then a year later, gave up the contract and it was transferred to Lockheed Martin.
    Reason: Boeing said it was simply too difficult. But 40 years ago, with stone age computers, they did it in less than ten years. And if you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.
    A few years ago, Japan had a moon photography mission to cover the surface and that the moon rover would finally be found and proof therby. I am still waiting for a picture. And why not shoot a pic from Hubble, and let us see it up there.
    But the most convincing fact I believe is the amount of radiation absorbed by the body in space, that close to the sun, would be fatal. Air crews and even SPace Shuttle trips are very much aware of its dangers and limit altitude due to that fact. Yet three days and a quarter of a million miles closer to the sun, its no problem for those early space suits ? C’mon, I was born at night but not last night.