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WillowOne's Positions

Moon Landing

My Positions

  1. The United States landed astronauts on the Moon six times between July 1969 (Apollo 11) and December 1972 (Apollo 17). Twelve men walked on its surface.
  2. The landings are among the best-documented events of the twentieth century and were independently tracked at the time by observers including the Soviet Union, which had every incentive to expose a hoax and did not.

Rejected Positions

The landings were faked

  • Claim: The landings were filmed on Earth, in a studio, possibly by Stanley Kubrick.
  • Basis: Lighting anomalies in the photographs; the flag appearing to wave; no stars in the sky; no blast crater beneath the lander; the Van Allen radiation belts; the claim that the technology of 1969 was inadequate.
  • Reason for rejection: Each of the "anomalies" has a straightforward technical explanation. The lighting is explained by the lunar surface reflecting sunlight, and by the Sun being a single, distant source casting parallel shadows that appear to converge because of perspective. The flag was held out by a horizontal rod and moved only when the astronauts handled it; it swung in the vacuum because there was no air to damp it. Stars are not visible because the exposures were set for the brightly lit surface, as in any daytime photograph on Earth. The descent engine was throttled to a low thrust at touchdown and the surface is compacted regolith over rock. The Van Allen belts were crossed in a few hours on a trajectory that avoided the densest regions, and the dose received was modest.
    Beyond rebutting the anomalies, there is positive evidence: 382 kg of lunar rock, whose composition and lack of water and weathering cannot be produced on Earth and which has been studied by scientists in dozens of countries; the retroreflectors left by Apollo 11, 14, and 15, which observatories worldwide still use to measure the Earth–Moon distance by laser; the telemetry received by tracking stations in Australia and Spain; the 2009 and later images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the landers, equipment, and the astronauts' footpaths; and the practical impossibility of faking hours of continuous slow-motion footage in 1969, when the technology to do so did not exist. Finally, a hoax would have required the silence of some 400,000 people who worked on the programme, for over fifty years.

Why haven't we gone back?

  • Claim: If the landings were real, we would have returned.
  • Basis: The gap since 1972.
  • Reason for rejection: Apollo was a Cold War project whose political purpose was achieved in 1969. The remaining missions were cancelled on cost grounds. The absence of a political reason to spend four per cent of the federal budget on the Moon is a sufficient explanation. The Artemis programme is in any case now returning astronauts to the Moon.

Sources

  • NASA: The Apollo Program
    https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/
  • Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and Apollo Flight Journal, complete transcripts, photographs, and commentary
    https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj-and-afj/
  • Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy (2002), chapter 17, "Appalled at Apollo"
  • MythBusters, "NASA Moon Landing" (season 6, episode 104, 2008), which tested and refuted the photographic claims
  • Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images of the Apollo landing sites (2009–2011)

Also see