Posted on 07/10/2019 10:21:39 AM PDT by NRx
It took 400,000 Nasa employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 – but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His name was Bill Kaysing.
It began as “a hunch, an intuition”, before turning into “a true conviction” – that the US lacked the technical prowess to make it to the moon (or, at least, to the moon and back). Kaysing had actually contributed to the US space programme, albeit tenuously: between 1956 and 1963, he was an employee of Rocketdyne, a company that helped to design the Saturn V rocket engines. In 1976, he self-published a pamphlet called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, which sought evidence for his conviction by means of grainy photocopies and ludicrous theories. Yet somehow he established a few perennials that are kept alive to this day in Hollywood movies and Fox News documentaries, Reddit forums and YouTube channels.
Despite the extraordinary volume of evidence (including 382kg of moon rock collected across six missions; corroboration from Russia, Japan and China; and images from the Nasa Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the tracks made by the astronauts in the moondust), belief in the moon-hoax conspiracy has blossomed since 1969. Among 9/11 truthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers, flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers and Sandy Hook conspiracists, the idea that the moon landings were faked isn’t even a source of anger any more – it is just a given fact.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Exactly!
It's not a matter of choosing a side to believe in. It's a matter of evidence and rational thought. Buying in to nutty conspiracy theories is not being a skeptical citizen. Just the opposite. It's refusing to apply skepticism to the nutty claims.
I knew a guy who had a similar background. Wired a bunch of electronic equipment together. He had a lot of oscilloscopes running like the opening of the old Outer Limits TV show. He claimed he was detecting tachyons and could use them detect nuclear stockpiles remotely no matter where they were. Listening to him was like listening to Star Trek & Babylon 5 technical chatter.
We didn’t fund him.
Yep, this is how they know the moon is moving away from the earth at a rate of about 3.8 centimeters per year.
Yup
Don’t bother trying to explain that to them though..
Technologically possible? Of course. But we can't do it because we long ago let the gatekeepers of the welfare state become the decision-makers.
Bump
Bingo. And in the process, they have run us into debt where it is difficult, if not impossible, to justify the expense.
Remember Ralph Abernathy’s wagon train to the Cape where he highlighted how shameful it was to spend moon in space and not in the ghettos? (Did that in the later Apollo missions!)
Yes the welfare gate-keepers won.
Appealing to white nerds as the space program did brought in very few votes!
Saturn V had a thrust of 35MN. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy is a little under 23MN. The SpaceX BFR (renamed to Starship), due to go into service next year, will be 61MN, almost twice the Saturn V (all figures from wiki)
Because the government always lying to us builds oh so much trust....
And I guarantee that a rebuilt Sat V wouldn’t be 150% more expensive than a Falcon Heavy. Probably closer to 300%. Trying to resurrect old equipment is a lot harder and more expensive than people think.
What was especially irritating about the War on Some Drugs was that we paid the government to lie to us. It’s crap like that fomented the 60s cultural rebellion.
It’s impossible for any Earth-based telescope, now matter how high its magnification, to photograph details that small at the distance of the moon. It has nothing to do with the power of the telescope, but rather is a limitation driven by the physics of light. Even the orbiting Hubble telescope can’t see them.
I don’t recall the full explanation, but essentially it has to do with the physically-limited maximum resolution of any telescope and how that translates into an angular limitation on its ability to resolve anything at a given distance. The resolution of a telescope lens or mirror at the focal plane may be a few hundredths of an inch, but when expanded out to the distance of the moon the smallest objects that can be resolved at that distance are in the hundreds of feet. Even the Hubble, at lunar distance, can only resolve objects that are no smaller than 141 feet in diameter.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, however, WAS able to take photos of the Apollo landing sites and the artifacts left behind, because it orbits the moon at a distance of only 31 miles from the surface. It even took photos of the tire tracks left behind by the lunar rovers used on several missions.
So short answer: Basic physics makes it impossible to see the Apollo sites from the Earth.
Yup!!! LOL
I can’t ’ get a link to post but go to
Jamesvernacotola.com
For an awesome time lapse photo.
However, we can pin point the locations of where the Apollo landings are.
I shot this image below of the Apollo 15 landing location. See red dot at lower center.
Apollo 15 landed at the foothills of the Apennine Mountain Range in the summer of 1971. This was the first Apollo mission to transport and use the lunar rover which allowed the astronauts to traverse 17 miles on the lunar surface. The Apennine Mountain Range seen above, has peaks that rise to 17,000 feet above the lunar surface.
AF admitted to losing money, but then again, they’re a state-owned entity and lose money on everything. BA are also, but they claimed the Concorde made them money.
I was six when Armstrong and Aldrin planted that flag. It took me all of two seconds to conclude that a stick was holding the flag out.
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