Did US Astronaut land on the moon for real?

[james_s]

I thought the transmission originated from the lunar module and not the rover.
It does not make any sense to me that they would install a parabolic antenna on a moving vehicle.
Especially since the rover only had two batteries as a power supply that you would need manly to drive the 4 electric motors.

It doesn't have to make sense to you, they designed the rover the way they did and it's all well documented.

[james_s]

The problem with those proofs is that they prove that there are tracks on the moon, they prove that there is a landing module there, they prove that a mirror was left behind. They prove the photos match. But they do not prove that someone set foot on its surface 50 years ago.

If you are going to go so far as to plant all that stuff on the moon and leave tracks all over the place, why would anyone try to fake the manned landing when they've already accomplished 90% of the hard stuff just by getting a rover on the moon that can drive around and leave tracks? It's utterly ridiculous to think that it made sense to go through the monumental effort of getting tons of equipment all the way to the moon and then fake the part where some guys get out and walk around.

It seems to me that some people want so badly to believe it was faked that they will come up with the most impossibly convoluted theories into how that could have been done, simply ignoring the fact that faking those parts and keeping it covered up would be a far more impressive feat than sending people there.

[donotdespisethesnake]

For those thinking it was all too difficult getting to the Moon with 1960's technology, it was successful in hindsight. At the time, those involved realised it was very risky. There were several setbacks and near disasters, as well as actual disasters when 3 astronauts died in a ground fire. The Soviets also had problems, they just did no publicise them.

Armstrong thought he would probably return alive, but there was a 50/50 chance of actually landing on the Moon. The Apollo 11 lander nearly ran out of fuel during landing. Apollo 13 showed what could go wrong, it was amazing they got back alive.

The manned mission to the Moon was expected to be very difficult, that was the reason Kennedy chose it as something that could beat the Soviets while giving the US time to catch up.

Despite it being basically a political stunt, it is still a remarkable achievement. It's a great pity there are insufferable cretins who believe it was faked. Kinda shows that humans are just too stupid to bother with.

[coppice]

I have a serious question please?

Why did they place a parabolic antenna on the moon rover?

How else would we have seen them live?

I thought the transmission originated from the lunar module and not the rover.
It does not make any sense to me that they would install a parabolic antenna on a moving vehicle.
Especially since the rover only had two batteries as a power supply that you would need manly to drive the 4 electric motors.

How would the suit systems be able to directly communicate with the lunar module when its well out of sight? These things don't need to be thought out. The designs are well documented. Just read.

[olkipukki]

The manned mission to the Moon was expected to be very difficult, that was the reason Kennedy chose it as something that could beat the Soviets while giving the US time to catch up.

At the (more or less) same time he (Kennedy) suggested join cooperation with Soviets for a moon expedition

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-4209/ch2-4.htm

[Nusa]

But they do not prove that someone set foot on its surface 50 years ago.

Of course not! There were no footprints there 50 years ago! We're still about 7 months shy of the 50 year mark of the first manned landing. And 46 years since the last footprints we put on the moon. Which is certainly too long, I must admit. But there have been unmanned landings, one as recently as 5 years ago by China.

They didn't invite an independent observer.

There WAS an independent observer on that last trip. Harrison Schmitt was a trained scientist and civilian astronaut. He's also still alive to talk about it.

It's all classified.

I'm sure some things are, not even close to "all". The stuff you really need to know is available or not hard to duplicate! Particularly when you use updated technology to do it. What you don't have is the massive pile of resources required to pull it off, both in money and people. So large a pile that only the state level resources of major countries could manage it in the past. It's gotten cheaper, and I'm sure if you had enough billions to spend you could get SpaceX to duplicate the feat.

Speaking of which, the first part of that is already happening. SpaceX is planning a 2023 moon trip for a paying passenger: https://www.spacex.com/news/2018/10/09/first-passenger-lunar-bfr-mission

[fsr]

No wheel prints? Well, consider how much moon dust/dirt is being flipped up and without an atmosphere it pretty well drops right back down again - covering the 'tracks'. Walking is different since you are imprinting the ground.



Pretty clear just how the moon dust/dirt is just dropping right back down to cover the buggy's tracks. Only in the softest areas where the wheels have sunk down is there any more obvious imprints left.

cheers,
george.

That was one of the videos i mentioned before. You can see how the dust falls to the ground without leaving a cloud behind, because there is no atmosphere for dust particles to remain suspended. Impossible to fake something like that with special effects of that time.

[bsfeechannel]

If you are going to go so far as to plant all that stuff on the moon and leave tracks all over the place, why would anyone try to fake the manned landing when they've already accomplished 90% of the hard stuff just by getting a rover on the moon that can drive around and leave tracks? It's utterly ridiculous to think that it made sense to go through the monumental effort of getting tons of equipment all the way to the moon and then fake the part where some guys get out and walk around.

What the skeptics say is that the problem is not related to the possibility of success, but to the risks of failure. If, for instance, a spacecraft fails to dock to the ISS, you can return down to earth and have a chance to save your astronauts. You do not have that kind of margin on the moon. There's no plan B. You can't wait there until the tow truck arrives.

So you create all the plausible technology, plant all the evidence, fake the descent, landing, walking around, ascent and return, to avoid the high risks. No one is there to prove it false. If later someone says it didn't happen, show them the planted evidence. Profit.

The risk now is to be debunked, which is much lower than to be forever accused of sending three good guys to a slaughter house.

That's why the movie First Man is so brilliant. Zucca complained, and I quote, "I was disappointed to see some lack of enginnering details and a lot romance in it."

But that's part of the argument. The film shows the astronauts were not olympic heros. They were people like you and me, with a wife, four kids, two dogs, and a horse. Their involvement in the space program was not the result of a unilateral decision on their part. Their families were also affected, involved, and had a say on their decision.

The film then asks, how do you send these normal people to certain death in front of the whole world with such a precarious technology that you had in the sixties? The answer: you don't.

It seems to me that some people want so badly to believe it was faked that they will come up with the most impossibly convoluted theories into how that could have been done,

Or they may just be playing the devil's advocate.

simply ignoring the fact that faking those parts and keeping it covered up would be a far more impressive feat than sending people there.

The movie "First Man" almost makes you praise them for faking the whole thing to save the lives of those poor buggers while being able to send their message to the Soviets.

[james_s]

There are guys who do all sorts of incredibly dangerous work for the thrill of it. Test piloting aircraft was particularly dangerous back before it was possible to test and simulate things on a computer. Lots of people died right here on earth, developing supersonic aircraft, diving in the ocean, climbing mountains. Space exploration was incredibly dangerous but even with all the safety hysteria today I bet if you announced something like the early moon missions you'd have thousands of people lined up willing to take a very big risk to achieve such a thing. You really think guys willing to climb into a capsule on top of a gigantic rocket capable of delivering a payload to the moon are going to wuss out and not land and walk around if they have the technical ability to do so, even at great risk?

[coppice]

There are guys who do all sorts of incredibly dangerous work for the thrill of it. Test piloting aircraft was particularly dangerous back before it was possible to test and simulate things on a computer. Lots of people died right here on earth, developing supersonic aircraft, diving in the ocean, climbing mountains. Space exploration was incredibly dangerous but even with all the safety hysteria today I bet if you announced something like the early moon missions you'd have thousands of people lined up willing to take a very big risk to achieve such a thing. You really think guys willing to climb into a capsule on top of a gigantic rocket capable of delivering a payload to the moon are going to wuss out and not land and walk around if they have the technical ability to do so, even at great risk?

There are quite a lot of people who given a good chance of walking on the moon, and a poor chance of getting home afterwards, will still line up to go.

[bsfeechannel]

There are guys who do all sorts of incredibly dangerous work for the thrill of it. Test piloting aircraft was particularly dangerous back before it was possible to test and simulate things on a computer. Lots of people died right here on earth, developing supersonic aircraft, diving in the ocean, climbing mountains. Space exploration was incredibly dangerous but even with all the safety hysteria today I bet if you announced something like the early moon missions you'd have thousands of people lined up willing to take a very big risk to achieve such a thing. You really think guys willing to climb into a capsule on top of a gigantic rocket capable of delivering a payload to the moon are going to wuss out and not land and walk around if they have the technical ability to do so, even at great risk?

That's not the point of the movie. The astronauts are not depicted as coward people.

However, sending someone to a deliberate suicide mission in front of everybody is another thing. In all certainty, the questions raised by the movie were discussed by those involved in the space program.

And if in fact it is proved fake, that'll be the smartest political move of the 20th century.

[Alex Eisenhut]

There are guys who do all sorts of incredibly dangerous work for the thrill of it.

When I was a kid I thought the Trieste
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
was a submarine and that the big tank thing was where the people walked around, and that goofy-looking ball was a camera or something.
Only later did I find out the tank was the ballast and the ball is the submarine, or bathyscaphe.
Yeah, when you have to wiggle down that tube to end up in that tiny ball with a few inches of Lexan between you and ~16000 PSI ocean....
Suddenly space doesn't seem so bad.

[coppice]

There are guys who do all sorts of incredibly dangerous work for the thrill of it.

When I was a kid I thought the Trieste
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
was a submarine and that the big tank thing was where the people walked around, and that goofy-looking ball was a camera or something.
Only later did I find out the tank was the ballast and the ball is the submarine, or bathyscaphe.
Yeah, when you have to wiggle down that tube to end up in that tiny ball with a few inches of Lexan between you and ~16000 PSI ocean....
Suddenly space doesn't seem so bad.

I imagine a lot of people give up that kind of work, because they can't stand the pressure.

[edy]

I think the more appropriate question and answer is "How could they have possibly landed on the moon, it is mind-boggling"... with the answer being "lots of money, engineering, learning from mistakes but most of all balls...". These people did not let fear of the unknown stop them, and probably didn't know all the answers and may not have fully tested everything but they still went. We don't take enough credit for human achievement. When national will-power and collective cooperation by either some political or other ambition is mustered, many great (and also evil) things can be accomplished... just look at history.

[rrinker]

 I made the mistake once of posting replies to the comments on one of the many YouTube moon landing hoax videos - because not one thing in the video was valid science. Well, the ongoing ad-hominem attacks and disregarding of the most basic physics in order to justify their position that it was all fake... wow. And it never ends - it was MONTHS ago and I just got a reply tonight calling me a "juvenile yank". One person in the thread goes on and on about NASA sayign they "lost" the methods used to get to the moon. First, no one at NASA ever said they lost or forgot how they did it, and even lost it - well, it's kind of hard to 'lose' a Saturn V on display right outside your facility. Mentioning that was dismissed as not knowing what "lost" means. Seriously.

 CuriousMarc on YouTube currently has a series going where he is helping a group restore a complete flight computer to operation. Fran and Dave have shown bits and pieces of it, the guys Marc is working with have the whole dang thing minus the DSKY and they have problems with the memory cores, but the logic, regulator, and watchdog units are all complete - last one I saw, they got as far as getting the right voltages out of the regulators and the watchdog alarms are all functioning as expected. That was a lot of effort to design and build probably the most amazing computer at the time, just to use it as a special effect to fake the whole thing.

[coppice]

I made the mistake once of posting replies to the comments on one of the many YouTube moon landing hoax videos - because not one thing in the video was valid science. Well, the ongoing ad-hominem attacks and disregarding of the most basic physics in order to justify their position that it was all fake... wow. And it never ends - it was MONTHS ago and I just got a reply tonight calling me a "juvenile yank". One person in the thread goes on and on about NASA sayign they "lost" the methods used to get to the moon. First, no one at NASA ever said they lost or forgot how they did it, and even lost it - well, it's kind of hard to 'lose' a Saturn V on display right outside your facility. Mentioning that was dismissed as not knowing what "lost" means. Seriously.

They are probably referring to the requirement in all Apollo contracts that all design data would be destroyed at the end of the project. This is apparently real, but sounds like it was there just to generate generations of conspiracy theories.

[bsfeechannel]

I think the more appropriate question and answer is "How could they have possibly landed on the moon, it is mind-boggling"... with the answer being "lots of money, engineering, learning from mistakes but most of all balls...". These people did not let fear of the unknown stop them, and probably didn't know all the answers and may not have fully tested everything but they still went. We don't take enough credit for human achievement. When national will-power and collective cooperation by either some political or other ambition is mustered, many great (and also evil) things can be accomplished... just look at history.

But think about the odds. What if something went wrong and they got stranded there, without any possibility of rescue? Do you think the US would risk turning the moon forever into a tomb? Into the place of a tragic historical event?

The moon, let me remind you, is not a distant land or a lost point in a starry night. It appears prominently in the sky and is visible around the whole world.

I'm not saying it didn't happen, but we have to admit that those who question the feat have a point.

The movie (and the book) The Martian gives us a much more realistic approach. Before sending someone to land on another celestial body, like the moon, mars, whatever, send an unmanned service module with supplies, for the case they get stranded, until the arrival of a rescue mission. Then send an unmanned return spacecraft. Finally send a manned spacecraft. The risks are still high, but at least you have a backup plan.

Of course such an approach would be prohibitively expensive, but no doubt was considered by them.

[hamster_nz]

Oh.

Em.

Gee.

You all better be trolling...

[Nusa]

Of course they would dare, since they did dare! Disasters happen. You figure out what happened, then do it right the next time. A significant number of people have died in various space programs, yet we still press on. You would have to be pretty young not to remember any of them.

The most recent was in 2014 on a Virgin Galactic test flight.

How about the 2003 disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia?

If you've a few more years on you, the 1986 launch disaster of the Challenger? I was watching that one live on a big screen TV in a room full of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents

[vk6zgo]

There are guys who do all sorts of incredibly dangerous work for the thrill of it. Test piloting aircraft was particularly dangerous back before it was possible to test and simulate things on a computer. Lots of people died right here on earth, developing supersonic aircraft, diving in the ocean, climbing mountains. Space exploration was incredibly dangerous but even with all the safety hysteria today I bet if you announced something like the early moon missions you'd have thousands of people lined up willing to take a very big risk to achieve such a thing. You really think guys willing to climb into a capsule on top of a gigantic rocket capable of delivering a payload to the moon are going to wuss out and not land and walk around if they have the technical ability to do so, even at great risk?

That's not the point of the movie. The astronauts are not depicted as coward people.

However, sending someone to a deliberate suicide mission in front of everybody is another thing. In all certainty, the questions raised by the movie were discussed by those involved in the space program.

And if in fact it is proved fake, that'll be the smartest political move of the 20th century.

It would also be the foremost Engineering achievement, covering as it would, the landing of multiple unmanned vehicles on the Moon, robotics which are right up there with today's best to drive the lunar rover around, & even before that, some sort of device to make a lot of footprints without leaving any marks of its own & to plant a flag!

By the way, all those unmanned vehicles, after depositing the faked evidence, then had to lift off in their entirety, apart from leaving one descent stage for fake evidence.
Add to this, that it had to be repeated in different spots, over & over.

Remember, that NASA had no idea how advanced the USSR was, so the"fakes" would have to be perfect.
Imagine, if the Russkis had been able to land their own version of an LEM close enough to the Apollo 11 landing spot before it was supposed to happen.
Even a non-landing orbit would have "let the cat out of the bag" if the Cosmonauts had caught the very advanced robots planting evidence.

Another strike against the conspiracy---- in that alternate universe, what the hell was Apollo 13 about?
There would be no reason to include a failure in what would have been a successful series of deceptions.

Then we have the "faking" of communications & telemetry from the Apollo series.
There were large numbers of non Americans who were involved in this aspect.
Why would they want to keep such a hoax secret?

Also, the unmanned vehicles carrying all the "fake evidence" apparently didn't need any comms or telemetry to guide them to perfect landings at all times.

And where were they launched from?
Both the USA & the USSR kept a pretty close eye on each others rocket launching, as an unidentified one could be an ICBM sneak attack.
A series of unannounced launchings from somewhere else than Cape Kennedy (as it was then, before reverting to the old name), would set red lights flashing in the Kremlin.

The need for very advanced technology, precise navigation, a degree of security worldwide beyond anything then or now possible, plus the (secret) funding necessary to, in effect, set up a second "ghost NASA" to do the actual work, means that it would be easier to just send Astronauts to the Moon, which is precisely what happened!

[Simon]

I watched a film called pearl harbour that was full of romance and the actual pearl harbour bit was 10 minutes of crap CGI so I guess that never happened either and america just wanted an excuse to go to war with Japan......

[vk6zgo]

I watched a film called pearl harbour that was full of romance and the actual pearl harbour bit was 10 minutes of crap CGI so I guess that never happened either and america just wanted an excuse to go to war with Japan......

Don't worry, there is sure to be a bunch of halfwits out there who think this already!

The best movie I saw about Pearl Harbour was the oldie "Tora! Tora! Tora!"
It was pretty well done-- no silly CGI in those days.
I did pick one thing, though.
When the Japanese planes flew over the hills in Hawaii, they flew over what was clearly a terrestrial
Microwave system repeater station.---Oops!

[Simon]

well it's OK the yanks thought they were a flock of birds. Yes Tora! Tora! Tora! was a well made film. I believe it was a made as two halves and edited together, they had a Japan unit and an America unit that worked on their own sections of the film and then it was brought together into one story.

[T3sl4co1l]

But think about the odds. What if something went wrong and they got stranded there, without any possibility of rescue? Do you think the US would risk turning the moon forever into a tomb? Into the place of a tragic historical event?

Uh, well...

...Duh:
https://www.space.com/26604-apollo-11-failure-nixon-speech.html

It would've been one hell of a hard hit, but all the same, indicative of the risks taken to push so far.  Probably the only consequence would've been fewer Apollos after then.  Or maybe more to keep things going, who knows.

Only a PR problem, ultimately; nothing a suitable amount of commitment can't overcome, relative to the country's effective value of human life.  Russians have historically lower value among themselves, so it's no surprise that their programs have also had a higher toll.

The astro/cosmonauts, in any case, would've been acutely aware of the risk they were taking.  You're only 1cm away from certain death, in space.  Whether that's an orbiter's hull, a space suit's lining, or an oxygen tank's wall.  Also a few days, in terms of oxygen, or to a lesser extent, water, or food.  That they did that, and lived to tell the tale, is fantastic, a testament to whoevers' engineering -- even including the riskier side's.

Tim

[Kilrah]

Everyone involved understood the risks and just accepted them.