At 05:55 PM 30/01/06 -0600, Chris de Morsella wrote:
"I also have run into this particular conspiracy theory from time to time. I tried to look at it with an open mind the first time around and have long ago satisfied myself that it is lunacy. I often wonder why this particular fabrication still has a belly to slither on."

Indeed.

With apologies to Mike Rupert, who's annoyance with this entire topic I entirely share, I'd like to discuss the exact nature of the lunacy that lets this 'faked moon landings' theory live on and on.

Note to Mike R: skip this post. You've got better things to do. Thanks for your good work btw.

Firstly, I'll admit that I'm a conspiracy-theory-o-phile ... I _enjoy_ looking into conspiacy theories of all kinds. Quite often, I become convinced they are worthy of serious attention.

So, although my childhood memories of staying up to watch the first moon landing live, are very dear to me, and I consider the Apollo Moon Program one of mankind's (few) great achievements, I tried to keep an open mind when originally reading the 'it was faked' assertions.

However, I concluded this theory was madness. Or more precisely, the product of a quite interesting kind of detachment from reality, that tells us a lot about what 'moden man' is becoming.

To illustrate what I mean, I'm going to discuss just a few of the (mis)statements made at http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html - the 'photo analysis' site. There is a common element through much of it, which is that the writer demonstrates a fundamentally flawed understanding of matters of simple physics. He simply has no idea of how matter, gases, heat, light, etc, work in reality. This is a person who has apparently never been exposed to a basic high school level physics course (or who slept through it.) But the saddest thing is how many people read his essay, and don't immediately see the many glaringly wrong assertions. Thus demonstrating that they too, lack such fundamental understanding. More on this later. First, the quotes from the web site:

One: "An important factor to take into consideration is the great variations in temperature that the film would have had to endure whilst on the lunar surface. The temperature during the Apollo missions were recorded as being between -180F in the shade to an incredible +200F in full Sunshine. How could the film emulsion have withstood such temperature differences? The astronauts can be seen to move between the shadows of the rocks and then into full sunlight in some shots. Surely the film would have perished under such conditions?"

Here he demonstrates that he doesn't comprehend the relationships between temperature, heat flow, and thermal mass. Sure, something left in shadow in the vacuum of the Moon's surface, and radiating heat away via infra-red, will _eventually_ fall to a very low temperature. Likewise, a surface in direct sunlight, with little thermal conduction to a heat sink, will reach radiative input/loss equilibrium at a pretty high temperature, after some period of time. But the film is inside a camera - which has shielding plates on the outside, and a fair thermal mass inside, with little heat conduction between the outer plates and the inner film canister. Plus, the astronaut will be moving around, and so the camera will be alternately in light and shade. It's internal temperature will be a slowly following average. So, the film will be fine. If the camera was set down on the ground, in the sun, and left there for an hour, it would likely be a different story.

Notice that he mentions a couple of instances when a camera was accidentally pointed directly at the sun, and damaged. Well, naturally - the lense focussed the light on the internal camera parts (the shutter presumably) and quickly overheated them. No surprise. But it does remind me of the time I was carrying a foot-diameter glass lense across my yard on a summer's day, and nearly set fire to my pants.

 Two: "Take a look at the pictures presented here and you will see that parts of the crosshairs have disappeared from the film. This is impossible unless the film has been tampered with. The crosshairs should be completely visible in all shots and not hidden behind objects in the pictures."

Here he demonstrates that he fails to understand how light interacts with lenses and film. Yes, the fine, black crosshairs are not visible over very bright objects. That's because the photons don't all go _exactly_ where they should if everything was perfect, and so the edges of very bright objects tend to 'bleed' a little, as though they were out of focus slightly. Thus washing out the very fine black line of the crosshair where it has 'bright object' on both sides.

Three: "Why does this rock have a letter 'C' on it? There is also a 'C' on the ground in front of the rock. The use of the letter C on film props is well known by the people in Hollywood and is used to show where the centre of the scene should be."

Seems to be a common characteristic - people who think the outputs of their own visual neural nets are somehow deeply significant. Yes, there are two shadows that look a lot like 'C's. Even if they are different 'typefaces', and pretty irregular ones. I can also see some other letters in the same picure - there's a clear V, an S, a running writing 'double-L', and probably more if I cared to keep looking. But they are all shadows, of dirt and rocks. What kind of mind immediately locks onto their perception of 'a letter', and fails to carefully consider the simplest explanation - that its just a random pattern match (and not a very good one at that)? The answer is - a mind that doesn't understand statistics, and randomness, and the difference between a 'near match' and a perfect match. The 'C' on the dirt is just a shadow of a dirt lump, and the 'C' on the rock looks like the edge-shadow of a roughly circular flake. How appropriate. When I see a complete sentence (or even a word), all in a line, and neatly done in a uniform font, then I'll believe someone has been leaving messages on the Moon, or Mars, or wherever.

Four: "Some of the lighting on 'official NASA film' are very suspect. The NASA picture to the left should show the astronaut in complete shadow because the sun is behind him, and yet the whole of the astronaut is caught in bright light? The shot should appear like the one on the right which was simulated by David Percy."

Oh the old 'moon shadows must all be perfectly black' misconception. No, it depends on how much secondary light source there is. On Earth, the entire sky is a light source, so we never see very deep shadows in daytime. On the moon, only the ground is a secondary light source - and it depends how much of that lit surface an object is exposed to. Here the suit is exposed to reflections from all the ground in front nearby, and so is illuminated quite well. The closer an object is to the ground, the smaller it's 'reflection horizon', and hence the darker the shadow. That is why the shadow behind the rock on the ground seems pitch black. Also note, that the suit colour is pure white, and so it doesn't take much reflected light to make it look as bright as the surrounding dark ground. Notice that the suit gets darker the closer to the ground? His legs get dimmer (may also be partially due to dust smears.) His boots are black, and his shadow really is pitch - because it gets virtually no light from the surrounding ground. The parts of the suit that are directly illuminated by the sun are so bright they saturate the film, so you can't tell how very much brighter they were in reality. Again, the writer simply fails to understand how the real world works. He uses some of the terms, but it's as if a monkey was stringing them together with no understanding at all.

Five: "Shadows do not appear to be correct on several of the Moon shots. Take the picture to the left for example. The shadow on the LEM is due East and yet the shadows on the rocks in the foreground are South East?"

He makes a lot of this shadow business. Yet in all the picures he presents, I can see how ground profiling probably accounts for the supposed discrepancies. The thing about the Moon's surface, is that it is both generally featureless, and so different from our experience that our eyes can't tell (especially from a 2D photo) what the ground shape really is. Is that matt looking grey surface sloping up, down, or what? Even on Earth, smooth landscapes can be very deceptive. Try walking around on ex-glacial alpine heathlands, and you'll see what I mean.

Six: "During the Apollo missions, the movie cameras were fitted with special night lenses to compensate for the lack of light. Due to the atmospheric conditions on the Moon's surface, only 7% of light is reflected from the ground (that's the same reflectivity as asphalt). So, taking this into consideration, how did the Hasselblad stills camera manage to pick up more detail than the movie cameras? "

Oh boy. Uh, could it be something to do with the still shots being taken with a longer exposure (naturally), and more sensitive film, perhaps? Just guessing here. As for that 'due to the atmospheric conditions ... only 7%, etc', sigh. Ah, no, the low reflectivity (which I'm sure varies quite a lot from the 7% _average_ albedo, and I'm not bothering to check if that figure is even correct) would be due entirely to the nature of the surface. Nothing to do with the 'atmosphere' or lack of it. Still, its another statement that screams 'HE HAS NO CLUE!'

Seven: "Watch the film sequence to the left that has both movie and still pictures to compare the difference. It's interesting to note that the still photos seem to have Aldrin brightly lit, in comparison to the gloomy motion picture images that had the special night lens on it? It appears that artificial lighting was used or has been added to the still photos to show better features on Aldrin's suit and the Lunar Lander. Because of the lack of atmosphere on the surface of the Moon, the shadows would be intensely black."

Two misconceptions combined. Failure to consider the better sensitivity of the still camera, plus that same 'pitch black shadows' furfy again. Aldarin was high up - plenty of surface-reflected light. Just not enough for the motion picture film (or the video camera - I recall those live images were pretty poor.) Note the LEM entry area behind Aldarin is evenly illuminated - no visible shadow cast by Aldarin. If there'd been a point artificial light source anywhere near the camera, you'd see a shadow in there. But the 'ground light' is diffuse, from all directions, hence no shadow on the LEM.

 Skipping several more equally confused points, we come to the 'dust and rocket flame' section- Eight: "The lunar lander used two engines stacked on top of one another. The LEM's descent engine used hyperbolic propellants, that means two different fuels that light at the same time. The exhaust jet coming out of the LEM on descent or ascent should have created an enormous cloud of reddish coloured gas, instead we see the bursting apart of the milar covering as it leaves the Moons surface? The fuel used are exactly the same as used on the Shuttle today, and we can clearly see the exhaust smoke coming from them, so why not the LEM? "

That should read 'hypergolic', not 'hyperbolic'. A very ignorant mistake. So is "that light at the same time" - they react spontaneously with each other. As for 'reddish' exhaust, per the shuttle... sigh. The Shuttle uses both solid rocket boosters (which make the red smokey exhaust) and liquid fuel rockets on the shuttle itself - which make virtually no smoke. Watch a close up of the shuttle rockets at launch. The LEM rockets produce a jet of high velocity gas, jetting into a vacuum. There is no smoke, and once outside the rocket nozzle, the exhaust gas molecules travel in straight lines, with virtually no visibility. Only at their very hottest, just as they exit the combustion chamber, can they be seen as a visible 'flame' - although they are not 'burning in an atmosphere'. However, those exhaust molecules are travelling very fast, and easily rip the gold foil on the lander descent module to shreds and blow the shreds away, as the ascent stage takes off. Which btw, is a shot that proves the whole thing occured in a vacuum - the shreds of foil all fly off in straight lines, driven by the rebounding rocket exhaust, with no resistance from any other gas at all. Very difficult to fake in an atmosphere. Here he demonstrates that he totally fails to understand how gases and objects behave in a vacuum. Plus, he has utterly failed to pay any attention to how the Space Shuttle works.

 Nine: "Surely there should have been some type of crater under the Apollo landing modules, especially the Apollo 12, as it slowly moved across the moon's surface before landing. The 5000 degree Fahrenheit heat from the 10,000 lb thrust of the engine should have produced at least some volcanic rock. If you compare the molten volcanic rock at Mount Etna,  that was boiled at only 1000 Celsius. I have heard some sceptics claim that the engines force would have been dispersed mainly sideways, but if this is so, what actually held up the 2,300lbs of lunar lander when it was on its descent to the Lunar surface?  Why was there not any dust in the landing pads either? There is certainly lots of dust scattered when the LEM is leaving the Moon and if the engine simply blew all the dust away from around the LEM as it landed, how did Armstrong manage to create that famous footprint?"

 The landers did kick up quite a bit of dust - you could see it in the descent films. Of course, it all left the scene at very high velocity, rather than hang around in clouds. So it didn't look like 'dust' as we know it, it looked like lighter coloured rays projecting out from under the LEM. As for 'crater under the lander', I doubt it. More like a kind of ablation, with dust grains being blasted off fairly evenly over a wide area under the lander - the exhaust spread out in a wide cone, not just straight down. Wouldn't raise much dust though, since the jet would interact with the surface more as a kind of even, downward pressure over the whole area. It might compact the dust layer a bit, but not 'cut a crater'. Also, they shut off the rocket while still some distance above the ground- thats what those big shock absorbers in the landing legs are for. Low gravity too - a couple of meters fall was nothing to worry about. While descending, the LEM had thin probes that projected some distance past the leg pads. I think they shut off engines once those contacted the ground.

As for '5000 degree Fahrenheit heat' - thats presumably the peak combustion temperature. The product gas molecules very radidly lose heat via photon radiation - hence the visibility of the 'flame' at the rocket nozzle exit. By the time the molecules have travelled even a few feet, they are much cooler (hence invisible) and won't be melting any surface dust into glass. Try melting sand with an oxy torch, while holding the flame a foot away from the sand. Ain't gonna happen.

"There is certainly lots of dust scattered when the LEM is leaving the Moon" - no there isn't, not at all. All the junk you see flying away when the ascent motor fires, is stuff stripped off the descent stage left on the ground. Mostly foil.

Ten: "Do you seriously believe that Neil Armstrong could land the Lunar Module by trying to judge the terrain below from a very restrictive view of the Moons surface from the small triangular window positioned on the side of the craft?"

Actually, the view from that window was pretty good, since the pilot stands right up against it. Plus, ever heard of instrument landings? He had height radar, and attitude indicators, since visually judging height and pitch above a possibly featureless grey surface would be a problem. So, he could probably have landed with no view at all. The window was there so he could pick a spot without boulders. Not that he had spare fuel for much manouvering. I do think it's pretty likely the article writer could not have landed the LEM, no matter how many times he tried, since I suspect he lacks the intellectual capacity to be trained for the complexities of the task. Also probably, the bravery to try, knowing there was a good chance something might go wrong - as there was.

Eleven (Apollo 13): "The film here sees  the astronauts from the Apollo 13 just before they transferred to the LEM, the craft is allegeded to be some 200,000 miles from Earth.  If we look out of the window we see blue sky? how can this be if they are in deep space??? Surely the windows should be showing black space, unless they are in near Earth orbit of course?"

Sure that's a window? Looks like a computer screen to me. Even if it is a window, so, it looks blue. So does part of the white flight suit close by. Sun shining on the window, window fogged with mist, together with colour inacuracy in the film - could easily make the window look blueish. Again the common thread - the writer fails to even attempt to come up with any sort of alternate explanation from the first conclusion he has jumped to. Really, a very careless way of thinking, and one that just doesn't work when seriously attempting to understand the real world.

Twelve: "As pointed out by Percy and Bennett in 'What happened on the Moon?', the picture on the left shows the Odyssey after it was damaged by the oxygen tank explosion... the one on the right shows a normal shot of a command and service module with its cover removed from the scientific instrument bay.  Do they look similar to you? "

Noooo.... because the explosion site is just that - a wreck. Besides, I don't think the oxygen tanks were in the scientific intrument bay, so why should the two pictures look similar? Its difficult to see what point the writer is trying to make here. 

 Thirteen: "see how the astronaut who has fallen over, gets up. He stands up without putting his hands on the ground, or the other astronaut helping him.  just like a puppet on a string!!!"

Or, just like someone carrying gear with a _mass_ that would be impossible to lift on Earth, but a _weight_ much less. Allowing some interesting tricks with pushing at a tangent to the mass center of gravity, and using inertia to get yourself upright again. Same old story - writer ignorant of physics, unable to comprehend something that is different to his own Earthly experience.

Radiation. Fourteen: I won't quote this bit, its too long, with too many misconceptions. All that can be said, is that the astronauts could see cosmic ray flashes in their eyes, when in the dark. Yes, they braved some pretty high radiation levels. Wouldn't be allowed today, probably. Another reason we can't go back to the Moon - the phrase 'personal sacrifice' has dropped out of the language. Solar flares - yes, the moonshot astronauts were very lucky with their timing. In the section "How much radiation awaits lunar colonists?" the writer comes as close to being right as he does anywhere in the article. Yes, it is a big problem.

Hills... Fifteen: "One of the main anomalies that leads me to believe that the Moon footage was taken on a film set is the fact that the same mountains appear on different Apollo missions which are supposed to be landed several hundreds of miles from each other. In the following sequences you will even see the camera pan across the landscape that at one point includes the Lunar Landing Module. In another shot from the same mission, we see the very same mountains, but no Lander? How can this be when the mountains appear to be exactly the same distance away from the camera?"

Good grief. The hills are a long way away, over a flat plain. You could move kilometers in any direction, and the hills would still look exactly the same. Where does this fellow live, and don't they have big open spaces there?

Sixteen: "... What you can see in BOTH films is the same rocks. How can this be if the sites are several km's apart?  It turns out that after some research, the two films were of the same EVA and was mistakenly labelled by NASA. Rather a lapse for such a company don't you think?"

So, mistakes happen. And NASA admitted it. What does this prove? This is mere suggestion by innuendo - further indication of the kind of 'reasoning' that goes on in the writer's mind.

 Stars in the sky, Seventeen: "1. Produce pictures showing stars that are taken on the Moons surface. They say because of the very bright conditions on the Moon, stars would not be visible from its surface! "

As he mentions elsewhere, the film was ASA 64. Really, quite slow, insensitive film with fine grain size, for high resolution. Just right for for the very brightly lit Moon scenes. Hence, generally no stars visible in the sky on film. Nevertheless, _some_ stars might still have been bright enough, with longer exposure times. I don't know if the cameras used auto-exposure adjustment? I'd expect that it would be likely, given that the astronauts couldn't be expected to be fiddling with exposure adjustments (on cameras they could barely see out of the bottom of their visors.) So, some shots, that contained a large area of sky, thus low overall light level, might show some brighter stars. So what?

Eighteen: "2. Show an example of Movie footage that was taken aboard the Lunar Rover whilst it is in motion. (I asked the site how could the satellite dish at the front of the rover relay the video signal to a satellite or Houston if it was moving all over the place?). I was even told that this footage does not exist?... see below"

There were two antennas. See http://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/slidesets/3dsolarsystem/slide_21.html I presume the low gain antenna linked back to the lander, and TV signals could be routed back to Earth that way. The low gain antenna is not directional, and will work regardless of the rover's movement. Author's failure to do even basic research.

 Nineteen: "3. If I could provide film footage of the LEM producing a flame on the Moons surface (This would prove that the movie was not taken on the Moon because the Moons atmosphere and vacuum would prevent such a flame)."

We already covered this. I love his phrase "the Moons atmosphere and vacuum". Boy, is this fellow confused. Anyway, the 'flame' is the very hot exhaust gas from the rocket. Of course it's glowing, its really, really hot - briefly. That's the whole point about rockets - they don't need 'air' to burn (or push against either.) Again, that incredible ignorance of the most basic physics. Pitiful.

 Skipping again, this is really annoyingly stupid stuff... we come to:

'32 things that need to be answered' 1) 'no stars' . We covered that. ASA 64, ASA 64, ASA 64...

2) "The pure oxygen atmosphere in the module would have melted the Hasselblad's camera covering and produced poisonous gases. Why weren't the astronauts affected?"

What??!! Good grief, Charlie Brown. The man has no idea, simply no idea. Yeah, the camera would have burned very nicely in a pure oxygen atmosphere, even that very low pressure one. If someone were silly enough to put a match to it. Only one Apollo crew tried that experiment (perhaps), and they died.  But 'melt'... eh? What kind of weird chemistry is this?

3)  "There should have been a substantial crater blasted out under the LEM's 10,000 pound thrust rocket.  Sceptics would have you believe that the engines only had the power to blow the dust from underneath the LEM as it landed. If this is true, how did Armstrong create that famous boot print if all the dust had been blown away?"

Covered this. Distributed, even pressure, little dust blown away. Boot applies localised pressure, and leaves print.

4) "Sceptics claim that you cannot produce a flame in a vacuum because of the lack of oxygen. So how come I have footage on this page showing a flame coming from the exhaust of an Apollo lander? (Obviously the sceptics are wrong or the footage shows the lander working in an atmosphere)"

Orrrr... both the 'sceptics' he quotes, and the author quoting them, are idiots, who don't have a clue about the simplest aspects of rocketry, and hypergolic fuels 'burning' (ie combining) in a vacuum. But then, he can't even get the word 'hypergolic' right, so no wonder.

5) "Footprints are the result of weight displacing air or moisture from between particles of dirt, dust, or sand.  The astronauts left distinct footprints all over the place."

Some of this rubbish makes me want to cry, or start swearing and smashing things. F* me! This jerk doesn't even understand _footprints_! Which are the result of the dirt particles being compressed into a more compact arrangement, by applied pressure. The air between the particles has nothing (or very little) to do with the process. It just gets squeezed out if its there, or not, in the case of dirt in a vacuum. Such a massive failure to comprehend, its past astonishing. What is he saying, that in a vacuum boots would leave no prints, because there is no air between the particles to get squeezed out? But for our exercise (how can this gibberish fool so many people?) we have to think about what kind of mental defect allows a mind to accept such nonsense. It seems to me, that a person must simply have failed to construct any kind of functioning, predictive inner model of the world around them. How could that happen? Lets go on, painful though it is.

6)  "The Apollo 11 TV pictures were lousy, yet the broadcast quality magically became fine on the five subsequent missions."

Don't know, could do with some research. Maybe they just improved the equipment? Could happen.

7)  "Why in most Apollo photos, is there a clear line of definition between the rough foreground and the smooth background?"

Many of the Moon photos on this very page disprove this point. However, where it occurs that effect is typical of flat plains. At some distance all the surface features become too small to resolve, and everything past that point looks 'smooth'.

8) "Why did so many NASA Moonscape photos have non parallel shadows? sceptics will tell you because there is two sources of light on the Moon - the Sun and the Earth... That maybe the case, but the shadows would still fall in the same direction, not two or three different angles and Earth shine would have no effect during the bright lunar day (the time at which the Apollo was on the Moon)."

Covered this. Surface contours are often deceptive, and perceived shadow angles and lengths are greatly affected by such contours.

9) "Why did one of the stage prop rocks have a capital "C" on it and a 'C' on the ground in front of it?"

My pet duck did a poop in the shape of a perfect 'L'. So what? Well actually, it wasn't quite perfect, and neither were those two 'C's. Nature makes shapes. Some of them look like familiar man-made things to us. Get over it.

10) "How did the fibreglass whip antenna on the Gemini 6A capsule survive the tremendous heat of atmospheric re-entry?"

What, this whip antenna? http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/fullimage.jsp?searchpage=true&selections=GT6&browsepage=Go&hitsperpage=5&pageno=15&photoId=S65-61886

The pickup beacon whip, which isn't extended till after the capsule hits the water? Does he mean that one?

I wonder how this fellow's mind survives the tremendous heat of his supersonic thought? Sorry, I'm descending to insults. Can't help it.

11)  "In Ron Howard's 1995 science fiction movie, Apollo 13, the astronauts lose electrical power and begin worrying about freezing to death.  In reality, of course, the relentless bombardment of the Sun's rays would rapidly have overheated the vehicle to lethal temperatures with no atmosphere into which to dump the heat build up."

Which demonstrates a complete failure to understand the concept of albedo, and the balance between radiative heat input (on the Sun facing side of the craft) and heat loss (from all the surfaces of the craft, not just the dark side. In reality, the craft had to be electrically heated. By varying amounts, depending on it's attitude to the Sun, and thus how much surface area was being solar heated. They also prefered to keep a little slow roll going, to keep the craft skin temperatures evened out.

12) "Who would dare risk using the LEM on the Moon when a simulated Moon landing was never tested?"

There were various Earth-bound simulators used. Even some that actually flew, I think. But the real answer is 'brave men.'

13) "Instead of being able to jump at least ten feet high in "one sixth" gravity, the highest jump was about nineteen inches."

Basic physics... Aldrin: "My Earth weight, with the big backpack and heavy suit, was 360 pounds. On the Moon I weighed only 60 pounds."  But... still with the inertia of 360 pounds, and a fragile faceplate. No one would be tempting fate by jumping as hard as they could. 

14)  "Even though slow motion photography was able to give a fairly convincing appearance of very low gravity, it could not disguise the fact that the astronauts travelled no further between steps than they would have on Earth."

I've seen some pretty long 'steps' taken on the moon. Looked fine to me.

15)  "If the Rover buggy had actually been moving in one-sixth gravity, then it would have required a twenty foot width in order not to have flipped over on nearly every turn.  The Rover had the same width as ordinary small cars."

And a low centre of gravity, and low mass, and very spongy tyres. Plus, I don't believe I ever saw it doing a sharp turn. Steered manually - it would be a pretty stupid and shame-faced astronaut who rolled the moon buggy.

16) "An astrophysicist who has worked for NASA writes that it takes two meters of shielding to protect against medium solar flares and that heavy ones give out tens of thousands of rem in a few hours.  Russian scientists calculated in 1959 that astronauts needed a shield of 4 feet of lead to protect them on the Moons surface. Why didn't the astronauts on Apollo 14 and 16 die after exposure to this immense amount of radiation? And why are NASA only starting a project now to test the lunar radiation levels and what their effects would be on the human body if they have sent 12 men there already?"

More of the same. 'Protect' is a relative term, and depends on how long you expect to be exposed, and what level of risk (and damage) you are prepared to accept. Also, in 1959 not much was known about levels of radiation in space. Today, you couldn't get an insurance company to provide cover for someone attempting what the Apollo astronauts did.

 17) "The fabric space suits had a crotch to shoulder zipper.  There should have been fast leakage of air since even a pinhole deflates a tyre in short order."

Oh ha ha ha. Gross negligence with the research there. There are layers and layers to those suits. Wonder what this dimwit would make of the information that the glove finger material was deliberately designed to leak air through it's porous surface, so the fingers could be bent? Also, the suits contained a pretty low pressure, same as the lander, etc.

18) "The astronauts in these "pressurized" suits were easily able to bend their fingers, wrists, elbows, and knees at 5.2 p.s.i. and yet a boxer's 4 p.s.i. speed bag is virtually unbendable.  The guys would have looked like balloon men if the suits had actually been pressurized."

More of the same. Go research the suits. Lots of clever stuff, but apparently too much for the writer to bother with.

19) "How did the astronauts leave the LEM? In the documentary 'Paper Moon' The host measures a replica of the LEM at The Space Centre in Houston, what he finds is that the 'official' measurements released by NASA are bogus and that the astronauts could not have got out of the LEM."

No idea on this one. It was supposed to be very squeezy. I suspect 'bogus' is the operative word here.

20)  "The water sourced air conditioner backpacks should have produced frequent explosive vapour discharges.  They never did."

'Water sourced'? What is he on about? They used circulated water to keep the suit temperature even regardless of sun/shade differences on the outer surface. Beyond that, I can't guess what he means. Perhaps they vented water vapour to get rid of excess heat? Whay would that be expected to be 'explosive', rather than a continuous slow venting? I wouldn't even expect to see it - the water wouldn't recondense, it would just depart as invisible water molecules in a vacuum.

21) "During the Apollo 14 flag setup ceremony, the flag would not stop fluttering."

Haven't seen it, but I have seen other instances where the 'lander hoax' crew claimed the flag was 'fluttering'. More like crinkling a bit. Static charge? Kicked up dust? Water venting from suits? Who knows. Sure didn't look like 'wind fluttering' to me.

22)  "With more than a two second signal transmission round trip, how did a camera pan upward to track the departure of the Apollo 16 LEM? [snip]"

Uh, preprogrammed, perhaps? Anticipation?

23) "Why did NASA's administrator resign just days before the first Apollo mission?"

No idea.

24) "NASA launched the TETR-A satellite just months before the first lunar mission. The proclaimed purpose was to simulate transmissions coming from the moon so that the Houston ground crews (all those employees sitting behind computer screens at Mission Control) could "rehearse" the first moon landing. In other words, though NASA claimed that the satellite crashed shortly before the first lunar mission (a misinformation lie), its real purpose was to relay voice, fuel consumption, altitude, and telemetry data as if the transmissions were coming from an Apollo spacecraft as it neared the moon. [snip]

So, this TETR-A flew to the moon, for the initial trial run. Then it came back to Earth, in order to go back to the moon while pretending to be Apollo 11 (since it had to follow the supposed trajectory of the real ship, so radio telescopes receiving the signal could follow that trajectory without suspecting anything.) Then it came back to Earth again while pretending to be the returning Apollo 11. And it kept doing this for all the other Apollo Moon missions? This is just silly. I gather the writer has no idea how accurately a radio telescope dish has to be pointed at an object to receive it's signals? More of that general ignorance of scientific reality.

25) "In 1998, the Space Shuttle flew to one of its highest altitudes ever, three hundred and fifty miles, hundreds of miles below merely the beginning of the Van Allen Radiation Belts. Inside of their shielding, superior to that which the Apollo astronauts possessed, the shuttle astronauts reported being able to "see" the radiation with their eyes closed penetrating their shielding as well as the retinas of their closed eyes. For a dental x-ray on Earth which lasts 1/100th of a second we wear a 1/4 inch lead vest. Imagine what it would be like to endure several hours of radiation that you can see with your eyes closed from hundreds of miles away with 1/8 of an inch of aluminium shielding!"

Seeing the radiation is common to most space missions, not just that one. It's important to understand the difference between infrequent but very high energy cosmic rays (which cause the retinal flashes), and lower energy but more intense radiation (in various forms) that will kill you fairly quickly in quantity, even though you'll never see any 'flashes'. Dental x-rays - lead vests are more for legal liability than anything else. X-ray staff wear them for a more reasonable cause - their cumulative dose after hundreds of x-rays would actually be dangerous. But the best quote here, is "can see with your eyes closed from hundreds of miles away". Ah, wonderful stuff. It seems his understanding of the nature of high energy particles is completely up the duff as well. Cosmic rays have nothing to do with the Van Allen Belt. But no point going into the details here.

26) "The Apollo 1 fire of January 27, 1967, killed what would have been the first crew to walk on the Moon just days after the commander, Gus Grissom, held an unapproved press conference complaining that they were at least ten years, not two, from reaching the Moon. The dead man's own son, who is a seasoned pilot himself, has in his possession forensic evidence personally retrieved from the charred spacecraft (that the government has tried to destroy on two or more occasions). Gus Grissom was obviously trying to make a big statement as he placed a lemon in the window of the Apollo I spacecraft as it sat ready for launch!"

Well, Grissom certainly wasn't happy. And it was pretty stupid to run a pure oxygen atmosphere at near full atmospheric pressure. With no quick escape hatches. Then there's the idea that Grissom himself tried something silly, that started the fire. Who knows. At least some lessons were learnt.

27) "CNN issued the following report, "The radiation belts surrounding Earth may be more dangerous for astronauts than previously believed (like when they supposedly went through them thirty years ago to reach the Moon.) The phenomenon known as the 'Van Allen Belts' can spawn (newly discovered) 'Killer Electrons' that can dramatically affect the astronauts' health." 

Please. Not CNN. Please lets not suggest we take CNN seriously.

28) "In 1969 computer chips had not been invented. The maximum computer memory was 256k, and this was housed in a large air conditioned building. In 2002 a top of the range computer requires at least 64 Mb of memory to run a simulated Moon landing, and that does not include the memory required to take off again once landed. The alleged computer on board Apollo 11 had 32k of memory. That's the equivalent of a simple calculator."

And that is why it _worked_. I happen to be a 'elder' computer engineer, and my contempt for all things PC-ish is beyond expression in a polite forum. Voyager, Mariner, all those early craft had really, really simple processors, and incredibly compact, reliable code written by engineers who knew every single bit of every byte of their object code. It worked. Unlike the overblown, bug-ridden and unreliable code generally used to do the same sort of missions today. Look up what nearly happened to the Mars landers, when their memory management systems overflowed.

29) "If debris from the Apollo missions was left on the Moon, then it would be visible today through a powerful telescope, however no such debris can be seen. The Clementine probe that recently mapped the Moons surface failed to show any Apollo artefacts left by Man during the missions. Where did the Moon Buggy and base of the LEM go?"

I did read a very convincing analysis on this issue, which demonstrated that even Hubble doesn't have enough resolution to see objects like the Landers, still on the Moon's surface. A telescope would need to be able to resolve down to a meter or so on the Moon's surface, and nothing we have on Earth or in orbit can come close to that. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main/index.html will image the Martian surface at 30cm/pixel, but that is right from orbit. The Moon is a lot further away. 

30) "In the year 2005 NASA does not have the technology to land any man, or woman on the Moon, and return them safely to Earth."

Welcome to the declining years.

31) Film evidence has recently been uncovered of a mis-labelled, unedited, behind-the-scenes video film, dated by NASA three days after they left for the moon. It shows the crew of Apollo 11 staging part of their photography. The film evidence is shown in the video "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon!".

Haven't seen it, can't comment.

32) "Why did the blueprints and plans for the Lunar Module and Moon Buggy get destroyed if this was one of History's greatest accomplishments?"

Why did the BBC destroy the tapes of Dr Who? Why did the Australian Broadcasting Commission destroy the tapes of several iconic Australian radio play series, like Blue Hills? Answer: because people can be incredibly stupid. Just as they can believe some incredibly stupid things, such as the 'faked moon landings' theory, and that Bush & Cheney had nothing to do with instigating 911.

 So what can we conclude from all that? Or more specifically from the unfortunate fact that there seem to be a great many people who apparently can't work this stuff out for themselves.

Its not just a widespread failure of logic, and education in physics. It is as if many people just don't seem to 'grok' simple physical reality - the way things all around them have behaved, all their lives. They not only can't add two and two; they can't even recognise '2', and the concept of 'add'. They seem to simply stick commonly heard words and phrases onto shelves in their mind, then trundle them out when they think doing so will make them look clever. Without the slightest understanding of what they say, or recognition of the most outlandish contradictions and illogic within the fables and slogans they repeat. As if they were some sort of clockwork automatons.

What I wonder, is whether a large proportion of the human population has _always_ been like this, or whether it is a characteristic of this age? A product of our human nature, or more recently of 'something we ate'? If not our nature, has it been a failure (deliberate or accidental) of today's education systems? Or perhaps a result (deliberate or accidental) of some other influence, such as television? Or all of the above?

One of my favourite suspects, is animated cartoons. In which all natural physical and logical laws tend to be suspended, as in walking off the edge of a cliff and not falling. What does that sort of conceit do to a young mind, when viewed over and over, in multitudes of forms? I'm serious here. I like cartoons too, but I do wonder - can watching a 'reality' in which logical and physical consequences are entirely variable, dull a mind to making it's own observations of the inflexibility of consequences in the real, physical world? Is there a period in the development of minds, when one is supposed to realise that there is an 'absolute reality' which must be dealt with honestly? And if that moment of revelation never occurs, due perhaps to watching too much SpongeBob Squarepants (or whatever), what then? What kind of adult results?

There has to be some reason why so many people JUST DON'T GET IT.

 Ah well. I suppose we'll see a lot of people suddenly confronting an inflexible reality, when the energy crunch really hits. It will be interesting, eh?

 As for putting aside all that bitter-tasting Apollo-doubting, may I suggest a refreshing taste of the real stuff - the Apollo 11 mission naration: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-11/apollo-11.html



Now if you want a _real_ space exploration conspiracy, look up the matter of why NASA 'adjusts' the colour of all Mars pictures to look redish, and dusty (despite having been plainly caught out, with even JPL publicly showing true-colour images), why they continue to maintain the surface temperatures are lower than they actually are, and why some really remarkable image captures from the Mars orbiters continue to elicit 'no comment'.