Apollo Moon Landings Fact or Fiction
September 7th 2007 10:14
Armstrong on the Moon working on the LM
I am sorry to disappoint the conspiracy theorist out there but the Apollo Moon landing actually happened. And in a moment I will describe why.
A cresent Earth seen form the Moon
Engaging in Skepticism is also healthy here to you need to offer some scientific argument to put forward your case to why you do or don’t think the Manned Moon missions where staged.
NASA spent an enormous amount of money developing the American space programme. It was the cold war era and the race for space supremacy and political ideologies was in top gear.
The development of the massive Saturn V rockets underwent years of design and testing. They where built for a specific purpose and that purpose was to put humans on the Moon.
Why build such massive rockets? It all centers on payload you need a massive rocket to be able to carry the Lunar and command modules crew, fuel and equipment into space and then have enough power to break away from the gravitational pull of the Earth and Moon.
So where does all the doubt come from? The reasons are misinformation, a lack of understanding of common logic and scientific principles.
Some of the arguments put forward are there are no blast crates from the Lander.
The pictures the astronauts took of the Moon have no stars in the background, the Moon has no air without air, the sky is black, and so where are the stars?
The stars are there! They're just too faint to register on the film. The Moon is not like the Earth. The environment on the Moons is totally alien to us, and our senses are likely to fool us. The Moon's surface is airless. On Earth, our thick atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading it out over the whole sky. That's why the sky is bright during the day. Without sunlight, the air is dark at night, allowing us to see stars.
On the Moon, the lack of air means that the sky is dark at all times. Even when the Sun is high off the horizon during full day, the sky near it will be totally dark. If you were standing on the Moon, you would indeed see stars, even during the day.
Buzz Aldrin exits the LM
So where are the stars in the Apollo pictures?
Let’s say for a moment you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow colleague. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to a fast shutter speed and close down the aperture setting as well to offset the depth of field; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day.
So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air; it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars! The film the astronauts used had a relatively low ISO rating meaning the film speed was low.
Buzz Aldrin standing near flag
A rocket capable of landing on the Moon should have burned out a huge crater on the surface, yet there is nothing there.
Take for example parking your car you don’t scream into a parking bay doing a 100kph Of course not. You would slow down first, easing off the accelerator. The astronauts did the same thing. Sure, the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had a throttle. They fired the rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough to land on the Moon, but they didn't need as much thrust as they approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about 3000 pounds of thrust.
If you do the mathematics: the engine nozzle was about 54 inches across, which means it had an area of 2300 square inches. That in turn means that the thrust generated a pressure of only about 1.5 pounds per square inch! That's not a lot of pressure!!. Moreover, in a vacuum, the exhaust from a rocket spreads out very rapidly. On Earth, the air in our atmosphere constrains the thrust of a rocket into a narrow column, which is why you get long flames and columns of smoke from the back of a rocket. In a vacuum, no air means the exhaust spreads out even more, lowering the pressure. That's why there's no blast crater! Three thousand pounds of thrust sounds like a lot, but it was so spread out it was actually rather gentle. If you watch the Apollo 11 landing the camera view from the bottom landing strut you can see the amount of exhaust thrust is very small and the dust is blown outwards like fine powder.
View of the LM decent engine
Apollo 15 landing site
I have included an image taken by the Clementine Lunar orbiter
This image taken by the mapping spacecraft orbiting the moon shows some anomalies around the Apollo 15 landing site Arrow A shows a rounded diffuse dark spot believed to be from the decent engine. Arrows B and C show fresh small impact craters the pattern is different and more symmetrical to dark spot referred by Arrow A
Credit: Kreslavsky&Shkurtov
Another myth is often reported by conspiracy theorists also involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow can be seen, sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque on the side of the lander that can be read easily. If the Sun is the only source of light on the Moon, they say, and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows should be utterly black.
If the Sun is the only source of light...not really, I thought the Earth was bright enough to fill in the shadows, but subsequently realized that cannot be the case. The Earth is a fraction of the brightness of the Sun, not nearly enough to fill in the shadows. So then what is that other light source?
The Moon itself. SNAP! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a torch at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore you), and not the person on the side.
Now think about the sunlight. Let's say the sun is off to the right in a picture. It is illuminating the right side of the lander, and the left is in shadow. However, the sunlight falling beyond the lander on the left is being reflected back toward the Sun. That light hits the surface and reflects to the right and up, directly onto the shadowed part of the lander. In other words, the lunar surface is so bright that it easily lights up the shadows of vertical surfaces no mystery there.
Aldrin's footprints on the moon
Some of rationale put forward by the conspiracy theorist’s based on the movie Capricorn 1, an entertaining movie about how NASA must fake a manned Mars expedition. Then also make reference to the Apollo footage [from the surface of the Moon] is strikingly similar to the scenes in Capricorn 1 It is purely coincidence that the actual Moon images look like the movie, or is it evidence of conspiracy? I think not! The movie was produced in 1978, many years after the last human walked on the Moon. The movie was made to look like the real thing! (Personally I would has chosen 2001 film by Clarke/Kubrik) This statement by the conspiracy theorists is particularly ludicrous, and indicates just how far the people are willing to go to make a sensational conspiracy theory and make a dollar or two in the process.
ImageCredit: Kreslavsky&Shkurtov NASA
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Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
The mirrors left on the moon on one the Apolo landings are tested every week with a laser.
This is used to measure the distance between the earth and the moon.
Mirrors reflect a different albido than moon dust and thus the loss on the laser should be easily measured in decibels.
Unfortunately conspiracy theories sell books faster than theories about super string.
Conspiracie theories are sometimes like science for the feeble mind, sometime superstition and other times pure fiction.
Comment by CarlCan
Astro Earth
I have to agree that conspiracy theories do sell and the factual evidence takes a back seat in the scheme of things.
You mention the Laser distance measuring facility, yes this is an interesting and useful tool and is somthing you can see from Earth I have experimented with lasers and have bounced a low level laser beam off the Moon's surface perhaps I willl talk about this in another post.
Cheers
Carl
Comment by Anonymous
Because I wonder what will happen if the Chinese go there and is not flag..what will be the reason?..are they going to tell us that they did take it back just in case some recalcitrant "terrorist" maybe tempted to burn it?.....one thing is "conspiracy crazy theories", and other is common sense ,U.S.A. in that time of history did not have the capacity for such landing with a human cargo,the U.S.A. goverments were under a lot of preasure from all different sources to do something about those conspiracy arguments and what they did? nothing..!!..just ridicule those that were making questions..and loosing the tapes as somebody put them somewhere and whooosssh! they disapear.
Today NASA can land a module in the surface of a comet,won't be very difficult to pint point and photograph the" left overs" of the Moon landing as the flag (poor thing all there by itself),don't you think so?,you may said that is very costly and not relevant..sorry,.. the reputation of U.S.A. is at stake in front of the World!!
Or are they waiting for the real moon landing to clear the messy story?,if so better to remind the next astronauts not to forget the Flag...and keep the future tapes under the bed..just in case!!
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by CarlCan
Astro Earth
I am not sure where you get your information from. There is no air on the Moon that is correct.
If you bothered to do you research of the FACTS instead of just putting what you think did or didn’t happen on the Moon.
You continue with this diatribe of you own concoction without any reason or methodology behind your statements. I am not sure that you even grasp the situation.
As I mentioned before you cannot see small objects on the surface of the Moon with Earth telescopes. If you did some more research you see that the previous surveyor robot landing (early 1961 onwards) on the Moon before the Manned Moon missions had taken place. The Apollo astronauts took photos of the surveyor robot Landers when the Apollo touched down close to where one of the surveyors had touched down some 8 years earlier. The flag as someone else has suggested is suspended by wire.
By all means put in your opinion but at least support it with some facts not just with your assumptions.!!
Comment by Anonymous
It was said also that a robot was imposible to be send again to the moon to photograph the Flag..(?) ..
The response was if there are other moon landings on the Board in NASA why they don't take the opportunity to let clear the issue once and for all, of something so important to the human race.? how could somebody said that it has no meanings and is not important..?
What sort of facts can be put to support a question so basic?
The conspirancy theory did born out of many things that didn't sum up especially in the 60's time,factors as International political strugles and the great impact on other nations well behind on American science,the anouncement of President Kennedy did took by surprise many peoples in the scientists community and of course was used as a great propaganda after the succesfully launch of the first Russians satellites.
Since then the Moon Landing have been a question mark for many.
Articles after articles were released on the imposible task of the americans,it was argued time after time that they were not advanced enough at that time to achieve such landing,still the topic is hot today..so how can NASA or the Goverment of U.S.A. think that is a waste of money and is something of not relevance ?..to send a robot to the site and photograph the flag and others marks and left over of the event, and recover the original tapes of the landing? .
"Somebody put them somewhere." please ? explain .. I don't think that a normal person in the street need more
FACTS,to come to "assumptions"..as you call them.
Easy to call "conspiracy" to anything that is too hot to handle..if we (and "WE" are millions around the World)the ones that are thinking that the "Moon Landing" was fabricated ,that action by Nasa ,will help us to recover the faith on a Nation that want to take the Lead to teach Democracy to the rest of the World,especially after the latest lies told to the world before the Iraq war.or are we going to call those lies a conspiracy as well?
So if you or others in NASA or The USA Goverment call that "not important" I wonder what they call "Important"..(?)..