Were The Moon Landings Faked?

Fred Butler at Hip and Thigh posted a link today to a clip from the television talk show The View in which Whoopi Goldberg expressed some doubts as to whether or not the Moon landings were faked.



Oh, wow! I almost feel sympathy for Goldberg. It is horrible to have to display your ignorance on national television that way. “Who took the pictures?” have you ever heard of a tripod, Whoopi? And then Walters has to cap it off by trying to explain that Mike Collins, still in orbit aboard Columbia, was some of taking the pictures. And people watch this show?

Okay, about the flag, when they set it up it began to swing, not from air resistance but from gravity and inertia. Without air to slow it down, the bottom corner of the flag kept swinging like a pendulum for quite some time. This is been replicated in vacuum chambers more than once. Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel recently did a whole show debunking many “the Moon landings were faked” myths.



Several years ago, I was sitting in my office and I had a picture from Apollo 15 on my computer desktop. A really nice color shot of one of the astronauts standing by the flag in front of the lunar module with the lunar rover parked close by. A guy came into my office, saw the picture, and remarked, “You know that was all faked, don’t you?” Initially, I thought it was joking, but it was soon evident that he was quite serious. After a few minutes, it was also quite apparent to me, that no amount of discussion would change his mind. This was my one and only personal encounter with a Moon-landing Denier.



The main “evidence” that was brought up that day, the same “evidence” that such Moon-landing Deniers always point to, was; #1) the waving flag; #2) the lack of stars in the background of the photographs from the Moon; and #3) the shadows of objects in the photographs from the Moon. The waving flag we have already dealt with. The lack of stars in the backgrounds of the photographs is easily explained when we understand that the camera’s aperture was set to take photographs in full daylight. Compared to everything in the foreground, the dirt, the rocks, the lunar module, and the astronauts, all standing in full sunlight, the stars are too faint to show up in the photographs. The problems with the shadows disappear when you realize that the surface of the Moon is not flat and uniform. Shadows cast on a sloping surface will seem to be pointed in a different direction from shadows cast on a flat surface.

The fact that so many people believe that the Moon landings, all six of them, were faked, and denying the Moon landings while using personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, and watching satellite television, is just another testimony to the total inadequacy of the American education system!

For detailed refutation of the "Moon myths" see here and here.

Has It Really Been 40 Years?

Exactly 40 years ago today, at 20:17:39 GMT (3:17 PM EST,) the first manned spacecraft to ever visit another world landed on the Moon. I was only four years old, but I remember my dad getting me out of bed when, almost 7 hours later, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the Moon. I have a very vivid memory of sitting in my pajamas with my sisters on the green carpet in the den in front of the television.

To get into the mood for this anniversary, Mrs. Squirrel and I watched The Right Stuff on Friday night, and then HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon on Saturday. (Mrs. Squirrel drew the line and would not let me watch Apollo 13 today. (Well that’s not quite true, but I could tell that it would not have pleased her.))



Here are some interesting facts that you may not known about that first Moon landing:

Because Neal Armstrong diverted from the primary landing site and landed manually some distance away, Mike Collins was never able to spot the landing site from orbit.

While Armstrong and Aldrin spent 21 ½ hours on the surface, they only actually walked outside for 2 hours and 36 minutes.

The "dashboard" of the Apollo 11 command module had 24 instruments, 566 switches, and 71 lights. The command module also had approximately 15 miles of wire, enough to wire about 50 houses.

Mechanical problems with the command module’s water filtration system caused hydrogen bubbles to build up in the drinking water supply, resulting in some rather odiferous “out gassing.” It affected all three crew members, so at least no one could point fingers. (From all reports, after a few days in space without any kind of shower facilities, an Apollo capsule wasn’t the most pleasant place to be. I understand that things are much better now aboard the space shuttle and the international space station.

When Armstrong and Aldrin came back inside from their moonwalk, their suits were coated with a fine powder of Moondust. Armstrong said that it smelled like “wet ashes in a fireplace” while Aldrin described it as a “spent gunpowder” smell.

Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) that directed Eagle, the Apollo 11 lunar lander, to and from the surface of the Moon, had 74 kB of memory and 4 kB of ram! Oh, and it cost $150,000+… (my cell phone has over a gigabyte of memory, and cost about $100…)

Before they left the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin threw their boots, EVA backpacks, and garbage out the hatch and left it all on the Moon.

The Apollo 11 crew only spent 21 ½ hours on the Moon. The last Apollo mission, Apollo 17, would spend the longest time on the Moon, at just over three days.

NASA's Apollo 11 40th Anniversary page
Wikipedia's Apollo 11 page
Apollo 11 Fact Funs
More Fun Facts



Mankind is visited the Moon only six times, and each time only two men walked on its surface, and all that took place in three short years 40 years ago. We haven’t been back since. In total, in the entire history the world, 12 men have spent a total of 300 hours on the Moon. That is less than two weeks.

Maybe it’s a result of such early exposure to space travel, but I’ve always been nuts for outer space. The vast majority of my recreational reading is science fiction, and I’m talking the hard, technically oriented stuff. Honestly, growing up, I figured that there would be all sorts of space based industries by now. But all that we have is one itsy bitsy collection of components without a commercial application on board; about the equivalent of a dozen or so shipping containers held together of baling twine.

But 40 years ago, expectations were much, much higher. If you watched the television coverage or read the newspaper reports from the time, it’s easy to see that they expected us to have permanent settlements on Mars by now. Even with the turmoil and social unrest of the late sixties, there was a much higher level of optimism in the future then we see today.

The space shuttle, now almost 30 years old, is slated for retirement some time in 2010. And the Constellation program, with its Ares rockets and Orion crew vehicles, essentially updated 5-man Apollo-type capsules, which is the manned space vehicle that is supposed to replace the shuttle, now faces an uncertain future due to possible NASA budget cuts.

If NASA’s budget will allow it, the Constellation program plans on returning man to the Moon by the year 2020, 48 years since our last visit. Plans are then to establish a permanent base on the Moon, and push on to Mars.

So today as we look back it that achievement 40 years ago, and salute Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins, let’s see if we get our imaginations going about the future again.