Man on the Moon: Moon landings were NOT faked

Scene Newspaper ^ | 07/02/09

[KevinDavis]

Jim Scotti takes lunar landing conspiracy theories personally because he took the Apollo missions and Apollo 11 seriously when he was growing up.

Scotti followed in the footsteps of the heroic astronauts of Apollo 11 by becoming a space explorer, albeit an Earthbound one. He is a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab in Tucson, where he works on the Spacewatch Project.

[JerseyJohn61]

You beat me to mentioning the Russians.

The Russkies had an unmanned, observational spacecraft
orbiting the moon at the same time as Apollo 11.
This way they could also claim a presence at the moon
during the first landing.(some feared it might be an
aggressive weapon, meant to “chase off” our landing
attempt.)

If we had not landed on the Moon, the Russians would
have known it and called us on it. They then would
have continued their project until they themselves
had landed first.

JJ61

[Cedar]

Anyone who has taken the late night bus trip leaving San Diego headed south and east for Texas knows they pass right through the landscape where those fake moon shots were filmed.

:)

[wolficatZ]

 

Buzz Aldrin's response...

[Telepathic Intruder]

I like this page, actually:
http://www.brainsluice.com/assorted/misc/moonlanding.html

[LiberConservative]

A former Apollo moon-walker had the best retort for those who think the landings were faked: if we faked the moon landings, then why did we have to fake them 6 times?

[colorado tanker]

It's amazing this is even discussed. I still remember the feeling watching those snowy TV images from the Moon. Amazing.

From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it's not a miracle, we just decided to go.

Jim Lovell, in the movie Apollo 13.

Let's just decide to go back.

[SunkenCiv]

It is strange. The idea that the Moon landings were faked started early. The raging dips... who first championed it (or at least, the first one to become infamous doing so; he’s now deceased I think) worked (if memory serves) for a contractor or subcontractor on the space program. He wound up getting fired for who knows what, but before he did, he started making the utterly stupid ignorant and ridiculous claim that humans couldn’t survive passage through the Van Allen Belts.

[colorado tanker]

I seem to remember concern about an astronaut surviving transit of the Van Allen belts, perhaps in the 50’s? By the time I heard about it in the 60’s it seemed to be in the same category as the fear an aircraft would break up if it exceed the sound “barrier.”

[Joe 6-pack]

"By the time I heard about it in the 60’s it seemed to be in the same category as the fear an aircraft would break up if it exceed the sound “barrier.”"

At one time it was thought the human body could not survive speeds in excess of 100 mph.

[SunkenCiv]

The Van Allen belts were discovered by instrumentation aboard a satellite, in 1958, so it may have been discussed that early.

http://lasp.colorado.edu/strv/vanallen_strv.html

[colorado tanker]

The Van Allen belts are full of deadly radiation, and anyone passing through them would be fried.

Needless to say this is a very simplistic statement. Yes, there is deadly radiation in the Van Allen belts, but the nature of that radiation was known to the Apollo engineers and they were able to make suitable preparations. The principle danger of the Van Allen belts is high-energy protons, which are not that difficult to shield against. And the Apollo navigators plotted a course through the thinnest parts of the belts and arranged for the spacecraft to pass through them quickly, limiting the exposure.

The Van Allen belts span only about forty degrees of earth's latitude -- twenty degrees above and below the magnetic equator. The diagrams of Apollo's translunar trajectory printed in various press releases are not entirely accurate. They tend to show only a two-dimensional version of the actual trajectory. The actual trajectory was three-dimensional. The highly technical reports of Apollo, accessible to but not generally understood by the public, give the three-dimensional details of the translunar trajectory.

Each mission flew a slightly different trajectory in order to access its landing site, but the orbital inclination of the translunar coast trajectory was always in the neighborhood of 30°. Stated another way, the geometric plane containing the translunar trajectory was inclined to the earth's equator by about 30°. A spacecraft following that trajectory would bypass all but the edges of the Van Allen belts.

This is not to dispute that passage through the Van Allen belts would be dangerous. But NASA conducted a series of experiments designed to investigate the nature of the Van Allen belts, culminating in the repeated traversal of the Southern Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly (an intense, low-hanging patch of Van Allen belt) by the Gemini 10 astronauts.

http://www.clavius.org/envrad.html

[kennedy]

The Apollo 14 landing site, as seen from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Of course, if NASA could fake the moon landings and keep all of the conspirators under wraps for 40 years, I suppose photoshopping the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photos would be easy.