Posts Tagged ‘Apollo Moon Hoax’

The Apollo Moon Hoax

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Debunking the conspiracy theories about the Moon landings

I’m an astronomy fan, I really like to read, watch shows and documentaries and talk about our Solar System,
the Sun, the Milky Way and the Universe. I often read articles and news about the ongoing research for extra terrestrial life in the Universe, as well as the efforts put by scientists all over the world to understand the mysteries of the cosmos. I think it’s really cool stuff, and also love to discuss about it with people.

When I do, I sometimes end up touching the topic of the NASA missions to land a man on the Moon. If I’m in a big enough group, I always find somebody who either believes the Moon landings were faked, or has heard about “conspiracy theories”. These “theories” (and I have to put the quotes around the word, because they are actually just a lot of nonsense) state that the whole thing was just a huge hoax created by NASA, to meet the deadline to land a man on the Moon before the end of 1969, and of course, to beat the Russians in the space race, which had begun more than a decade before.

Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon

When I hear the statements of these theories, all I want to do is laugh, because they are so ridiculous and contradictory that is really hard to stay serious. But many people have claimed to have found the evidence to back the story up, which (I’m giving you the heads up) is all in the pictures and video footage released by NASA itself!

You can either read the whole page as it comes, or click on one of the links to the specific arguments:

The best kept secret in history?

Before taking a look at the “evidence” the hoax believers claim to have, let’s analyze the conspiracy theory and see if it actually does make sense.

The Apollo 11 lift-off

NASA doesn’t build its spaceships, it hires contractors to do it for it. For example, NASA hired Grumman to build the lunar lander, North American to build the command module, Boeing and other companies to build the moon-rocket. The total number of people who worked on the program, including NASA and all those companies, was estimated to be around 400.000! That’s a lot of people. Now, here I already see a big problem with the conspiracy theory. Assuming that NASA really wanted to fake the landings, it could have done two things:

  • Include everybody in the conspiracy
  • Include only the people that must know in the conspiracy

If NASA would have included all the 400.000 people in the conspiracy, that means that for over 40 years, every single one of them has kept the secret. No one has come forward all this time. Many people have died since then. Is it really possible to still have zero deathbed confessions? Some other people got fired from some of those companies and NASA. Have all of them stayed loyal to their former employers? Why no one has spilled the dirty secret? Furthermore, NASA has spent over $30 billion in U.S. taxpayer money on the Apollo project. If it was all a conspiracy, I don’t see any reason why they would build actual space-worthy hardware. If they were not going to the Moon, they didn’t need the equipment to go there either. What happened to all this money? Was it used to payoff all those people to keep the secret? Many of them are now enjoying retirement all across the U.S. But there is NO evidence of this enormous wealth resulting from it. Plus, Apollo is a government project, and there is an enormous amount of paperwork, schematics, designs, contracts, flight-plans, archives, tests. All of this is publicly accessible. And they all fit together according to the facts. To create the conspiracy, NASA would also have to make up all that paperwork without any contradiction. I find that almost as difficult as actually going to the Moon!

OK, let’s consider the second scenario, the one where only the high executives and the astronauts know. That one clearly has the advantage of drastically lowering the number of people who have to keep the secret. And all the contractors hired by NASA to build the spaceships will believe that NASA did what said it did. But this introduces another big problem. Now everybody at NASA who doesn’t know, together with all the contractors, think that they need to build, put together and meticulously test the hardware needed to go to the Moon. This means that at the end NASA actually had the equipment capable of going to the Moon. So are we supposed to believe that all those people researched, invented and worked for nearly a decade, spent billions of dollars, built the spacecrafts to go to the Moon, and still NASA faked the whole thing? Remember, the whole premise of the conspiracy theory is that NASA couldn’t do it! If NASA had the equipment able to land on the Moon, and they needed to make people believe that they actually did land on the Moon, the smart thing would be to really do it!

This line of reasoning already convinces me that all this idea of the conspiracy is just a lot of nonsense, and I hope it convinced you too. But let’s go ahead and examine the claims the conspiracists bring up.

No stars in the sky

The first “evidence” advanced by the conspiracists is almost always the lack of stars in the pictures. With no atmosphere, the sky is black, so where are the stars?

Aldrin saluting the flag

This is normally the first argument the hoax believers talk about, and frankly is also the silliest. Almost everybody owns a camera now, and therefore is a claim very easy to verify. Just go at night in a dark spot and try to take a picture of the city lights under the starry sky. Then take a look at the picture. You’ll see that the stars won’t be there, even if you see them with your naked eyes. The stars are just too faint to be captured. Furthermore, when the picture you are trying to take is the one of a bright object with a bright background, like the one of an astronaut on the surface of the Moon, the camera will have to set the exposure time to be fast, and with the aperture setting closed down, in order to let very little light in. The stars are not in the pictures because they are too faint. This is basic photography.

Dark shadows

This claim involves shadows, and is also used often as “evidence” by the conspiracists. Since the only source of light available on the Moon is the Sun, and there is no air to scatter the light, therefore the shadows must be deep dark. Why can we see the astronauts in the pictures even when they are in the shadows?

Aldrin descending from the Lunar Module

The Moon is like a big ball of rock, but it’s still visible in the night sky. And it’s pretty bright too. It is because it reflects the light. The objects standing on the surface of the Moon, even if in the shadow, are illuminated by the light reflected by the surface of the Moon itself.

Perfect pictures

Another claim is that all the pictures taken from the Moon were well set and exposed. Every picture we see is perfect, with the right settings and correctly centered. But since the cameras were mounted on the front of the astronauts spacesuits, how come all the pictures came out so well?

Actually, other then the pictures normally seen around, there are thousands that are overexposed, underexposed, out of focus, not centered. The one below is a clear example. The picture was taken by Pete Conrad, commander of the Apollo 12 mission. The flag on the left and the antenna are almost completely covered by the sun glare.

Sun glare almost covering the U.S. flag

You’ll never find those in a magazine or in a book, exactly because they didn’t come out right. But if you want to see them anyway, they are still available for examination. You can find them at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal website.

Identical backgrounds

There are pictures with the exact same background, with and without the lunar module. How can this be?

On the Moon there is no air, and the atmospheric haze that makes distant objects hard to make out doesn’t exist. Furthermore, there are no familiar objects, like trees, houses that give the sense of dimensions. Also, the horizon on the Moon is a lot closer than on Earth. It’s at only 2.4 km. So, mountains that look very close, are actually at a few km away. Even if photographed from different spots, they will look the same exactly because they are far away. It’s like taking two pictures of a big mountain from two different spots away from each other of just hundreds of feet. The houses in the foreground will disappear, but the mountain will look the same in both pictures.

The flag waves

When the astronauts are setting up the flag, it waves. Is it perhaps an errant breeze on the set? On the Moon there is no air, and therefore that can’t be wind. So, why does the flag wave?

That’s another claim put forward by the hoax believers as one of their strongest “evidence”. But it’s actually really silly because is easily proven wrong. The flag waves only when the astronauts touch it. And since there is no air, there is no resistance to slow down its swinging, so the effect of waving lasts a little longer than on Earth. But when is left untouched, the flag stands still. Take a look at the footage. I challenge you to find a fragment when the flag is waving and the astronauts aren’t touching it. You can find the video with the whole Apollo 11 EVA here.

Crosshairs in front

In some pictures, the crosshairs etched in the astronauts cameras are covered by the objects. That seems to be impossible since they were in the camera. Were those pictures faked?

Harrison H. Schmitt in the Lunar Rover

I have to be honest. When I first read about that, I didn’t have an explanation. But before jumping to a conclusion, I informed myself. It turned out that the crosshairs were behind of an object only when the object photographed was white. When you photograph a thin dark object against a white background, the thin object tends to disappear due to the brightness around it. That is a very well known effect in photography, and is a really common one. Plus, what is the reason for faking a picture by putting crosshairs after, and partly behind an object? It doesn’t make any sense. It would have been enough just to take the pictures with a camera with crosshairs already etched in. Below there is a portion of the previous picture magnified, showing the effect described above. One arm of the cross seems to disappear when the object behind is very bright.

The crosshairs appear to be "swallowed" by the white object behind it

Rover tracks

In some pictures you can’t see the tracks that were supposed to be created by the lunar rover, as if the vehicle had been lifted in order to be moved from one position to the other.

David Scott working at the Lunar Rover

There are different reasons for the lack of tracks, or the not clearly visible tracks.

The astronauts walked around a lot during the period of activity, and is very plausible that they just eliminated the tracks previously created. In one case, during the Apollo 17 mission, they had to repair the right rear fender of the lunar rover, so you can imagine how much they’ve walked over it. In some other cases the pictures were taken when the rover was on a slope, where the dust was thinner than in a valley, therefore the rover didn’t sink as far, leaving very superficial tracks, more difficult to see. Finally, the rover was very light, and in the Moon’s 1/6th gravity condition, it could have been lifted quite easily. Actually, in some cases, the astronauts really did that, because they found it easier to point the rover in the direction they wanted to go just by lifting it.

Heat

How could the film in the camera survive temperatures so extreme, like 180 F (82 C) in the sun and -180 F (-117 C) in the shadow?

Those temperatures are often cited by the conspiracists, but they always forget to mention that they refer to the max and min temperatures on the lunar surface, reached after 14 days of sunlight exposure (that’s how long the lunar day is) and after 14 days of darkness (the length of the lunar night). The landing sites and times were chosen so that the astronauts would get there in the early morning, before the temperatures would rise to extreme levels. Also, with the sun low on the lunar horizon, it was easier to estimate how high mountains were, since they casted long shadows. A very important factor when trying to land. On the Moon there is vacuum, and with no air, heat is transmitted only by radiation. In order to heat up, an object has to be exposed directly to a source of heat, like the sun. Protected by casings coated with aluminum, the photo cameras would absorb very little heat from the sun light, but enough to keep the film within its operating temperature.

Radiation

But what about the lethal radiation of space? How could the astronauts go through the Van Allen Belts without being seriously harmed?

The Van Allen Belts are a region of energetic charged particles around Earth, trapped and held in place by Earth’s magnetic field. There are two regions of the belts: The inner belt, which is intense, and the outer belt, which has lower energy. It’s true that a man without protection, exposed to the Van Allen Belts for a long period of time would be killed. But the spacecrafts that went to the Moon passed through the belts very quickly. There wasn’t enough time for them to get a harmful dose of radiation. They passed through the inner belts in a matter of minutes, and through the outer belt in about an hour. Furthermore, the astronauts were protected against most of the radiation by the aluminum layer of the spacecraft. Even Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the belts, rebutted the claims that the levels of radiation were harmful for the astronauts. In the Mission Report of Apollo 11, NASA states that the dose received by the astronauts was between 0.25 and 0.28 rad, which is well below the medically significant level. In other words, the level of radiation absorbed during an Apollo mission, comports radiations equal to the ones received at sea level over a period of three years, or the ones received from a chest X-ray. For more details, you can go read the Biomedical Results of Apollo.

Shadows

As said before, the times and places of the landing were chosen in order for the astronauts to work in the early morning, when the sun is low on the horizon, casting long shadows. In some of the pictures, the shadows are not parallel.

The shadows in the picture don't look parallel, but seem to be converging

Some hoax believers even said that the shadows not being parallel are due to the presence of two sources of light, like, of course, on a set. Well, if there are two sources of light, how come there are not two shadows per object? It’s enough watching an evening game on TV to see that if there are two sources of light, every objects casts always two shadows. Two shadows are parallel only if they are projected on two surfaces that have the same inclination. That happens also on Earth. If you look among your photos, you’ll probably find some picture with shadows that are not parallel. Plus on the Moon, is more difficult to notice when a surface is inclined, due to the lack of familiar objects. It’s also a matter of prospective, which tends to converge parallel lines.

Letter ‘C’ on a rock

There is a photo where a letter ‘C’ seems to appear on the rock, which looks like a catalogued object.

On the rock, on the bottom left, a 'C' mark appears on the rock

Here is the portion of the picture with the rock:

The 'C' mark on the rock

That, as the rest of the claims, doesn’t make any sense either. Why catalogue a rock? Furthermore on a set that is supposed to represent the Moon, where there are mostly rocks, and then more rocks? Plus, if somebody was so anal to put a mark even on rocks, why would he use a system that allows only 26 objects? And marking it in such a visible way?

Following an investigation by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, they discovered that one of the printed pictures in their collection was the source of the mark. In fact, the mark didn’t appear on the masters used before 1997. The people at LPI studied the print under a microscope and discovered that the mark was probably a hair on the photographic paper onto which the picture was printed. Here is the original picture. You can click on it to magnify. As you can see the mark was not originally there.

The original picture of Charles Duke standing near the rover

No blast crater

In the pictures of the lunar lander there is no blast crater. How come? A rocket capable of landing on the Moon would have created a crater on the ground.

Always remember that the Moon is not the Earth. The Moon has a gravity equal to one sixth of the Earth’s. Therefore the engine necessary to keep in equilibrium a lunar module is way less powerful than one on Earth. Yes, the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but it was significantly slowed down before landing. Furthermore, in a vacuum, the exhaust from a rocket spreads out very quickly. When there is air, like on Earth, the thrust is confined in a narrow cylinder, causing long flames and smoke from the back. In a vacuum, the thrust spreads out even more, lowering the pressure. That’s why there is no blast crater.

No telescopes can see them

Why don’t we point a telescope on the landing sites and see if we find the bottom of the landers, the lunar rovers and the instrumentation left?

The answer may sound surprising, but is because none of the terrestrial telescopes available is powerful enough to spot objects like the ones left by the astronauts, whose dimensions are just a few meters wide. Yes, they can spot galaxies and nebulaes that are very far away, way further then the Moon, but they are also significantly bigger. They are hundreds, even thousands light-years across. The only one who could do it is the Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal, a high mountain, in Chile. The VLT theoretically would be able to achieve an angular resolution of around 1 milliarcsecond, equivalent to the gap between the headlights of a car, as observed from the same distance as between the Earth and the Moon. But it looks like the telescope didn’t achieve the highest result possible yet. According to a press release on an observation of the star Eta Carinae, the best result obtained is of 0.005 arcseconds, which is five times worst than the theoretical best.
But what about Hubble? The Hubble Space Telescope has given us some of the most spectacular and beautiful images ever. Plus, it was the largest telescope ever launched into space. But the landing module and lunar rover are still way too small to be seen, even by Hubble. With its 2 m diameter mirror, the smallest object that Hubble can resolve, at a distance from the Moon, of about 240,000 miles (400,000 km), has a diameter of around 80 m. The objects left by the astronauts are ten times smaller. There is a very detailed explanation about it here. Plus, it costs time (and money) to perform such an experiment. Even though I’m sure that a picture taken with a telescope now wouldn’t change anything for the hoax believers. They didn’t trust the pictures and footage brought back by the astronauts, why would they trust other pictures taken later on.

The Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, photographed by the LROC

Actually, on June 17 2009, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), photographed the Apollo landing sites! The pictures show the descent stages of the lunar landing modules on the surface casting long shadows, and in the case of the Apollo 14 site, you can even see the perturbances left by the astronaut’s boots!

Technology

How is it possible that 40 years ago, when computers were way less powerful than a present day cell phone, we went to the Moon? On a mission that no one had ever tried before?

The technology of the 60’s was modest, but still good enough. The computers on board of the rockets were very limited, and they depended on very large calculators on the ground. Even though it may seem that the commands were “manual”, they were actually computerized with human supervision. Furthermore, the astronauts were rigorously trained to calculate the manoeuvrings.

Also, it is incomplete to say that the mission to land on the Moon was untried. Yes, no one had ever landed before, but the technology to get in low-Earth orbit was developed and tested during the Mercury missions. The orbital techniques of docking, undocking, orbital rendezvous were performed in the Gemini missions, and four Apollo missions (Apollo 7, 8, 9 and 10) were launched before attempting to land on the Moon, with Apollo 10 being a dressed rehearsal of the landing. It did everything that Apollo 11 did, except for the landing. In fact, it got at only 15.6 km above the lunar surface before going back up.

What I find funny, and inconsistent, is that the conspiracists never question the Russians. Also the Russians had their number of “firsts” in space. They launched the first satellite and the first man in space, but no one ever doubts those achievements, even though their technology was way less advanced than the United States’.

All went just right

It looks like everything worked like clockwork. How is that possible?

Even though many things worked well, fruit of hard work, sacrifices and genius of thousands of people, there were many problems. The program was about to be shut down when a fire on the test pad killed three astronauts of the Apollo 1 mission. The computer of the Apollo 11 lunar module gave a red alarm many times during the landing. The Apollo 12 spacecraft was hit by lightning during lift off. Apollo 13 failed, almost killing the astronauts. Maybe the conspiracists should think twice before undermining all the work and sacrifices, sometimes at the cost of lives, that made landing on the Moon possible. Some conspiracists have even said that NASA killed the three astronauts of Apollo 1, and made it look like an accident, because they were about to spill the secret. That’s just very bad. I’ve also read that many teachers who believed in the hoax, wrote letters to the astronauts calling them liars and cowards. And that they were teaching their students that the Moon landings were faked! Would you have though that putting together a bunch of ridiculous and inconsistent nonsense could go as far?!

Returning to the Moon

Why don’t we go back to the Moon?

First of all, because it costs. In the 60’s, over $25 billion dollars were spent on the space program. Second of all, because engineers and pilots would have to learn everything all over again.

Many people at NASA said that is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to return to the Moon anytime soon. That, unfortunately, is most likely true. But let’s be clear, not because the technology to go there never existed.

In the 1960s Kennedy set the clear goal of landing on the Moon before the end of the decade. It was an extremely ambitious program of scientific exploration and engineering, but politically, it was all about beating the Russians. There was no limit set in the budget. As soon as the goal was reached, the interest in the space program dropped quickly, also because the Russians were not as competitive as they used to be. The once unlimited budget became slimmer and slimmer. The missions of Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were canceled because there was no more money.

Most of the people who worked during the Apollo program have retired or passed on. All that expertise hasn’t been passed to the next generation of engineers. The set of skills required was very specific and not necessarily needed in the space programs anymore.

The manufacturers don’t have the specialized tools to build the spacecrafts anymore and the documents with the detailed designs have been thrown out. Why? These are private companies, and their goal is to make a profit, not to create a museum. Documents for one lunar module take a lot of space.

The market for spacecraft is a very specialized one, not meant for mass-production. The companies that produced them during the Apollo program went back to making conventional aircrafts.

Now going to space looks more like a routine and people are not as fascinated by space travel as they used to be. NASA struggles more and more in getting funds for its programs.

More proofs

Other than the enormous number of pictures taken and the footage shot on the Moon, there are more proofs that men have been there. The crews of Apollo 11, 14 and 15 left lunar laser reflectors, that allow to measure the exact distance from the Earth to the Moon. The reflectors still work, and this experiment is operated regularly by the McDonald Observatory in western Texas and a second observatory near the city of Grasse in southern France. More information about those reflectors can be found here.

The astronauts brought back a total of 382 Kg (840 lb) of Moon rocks during all the Apollo missions (except Apollo 13, of course). Scientists from all over the world analyzed the lunar samples, and all agree that they come from the Moon. There is no publication in any scientific journal that disputes this claim.

The "Genesis Rock"

Questioning back

Here are a few questions for the hoax believers that I normally like to ask:

  • Why the Apollo accomplishments are always doubted, but the Russians, who were finally able to send a probe to the Moon and bring back some samples, are never questioned?
  • Why the Russians never said anything about the Apollo missions being fake? They had a very sophisticated spying system, and they were racing against the Americans to the Moon. Imagine how much the KGB would have paid for an information like that.
  • There is only one picture of Neil Armstrong on the Moon (the one of him reflected against Aldrin’s visor). If the pictures were made on the set, why they didn’t have more, and nicer ones? Afterall, Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon.
  • The footage of the lift off of the lunar module from the surface of the Moon, shot by the automated camera shows clearly that there is no air, because dust and fragments fly away following straight lines, and only the dust physically touched by the exhaust of the engine was blown out. How could that kind of effect have been replicated on a movie set? In the 60s?

Also, conspiracists, If you feel like ambushing an astronaut, think twice before doing anything. Here is what could happen to you. That’s a spectacular video of Buzz Aldrin (the second man to walk on the Moon) punching in the face Bart Sibrel, well known conspiracist who’s been tormenting the astronauts for years.

Links

Here are some links you may find useful, if you want to dig deeper:

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