I’ve been skeptical since I was a little kid, and tried to re-enact it in my mind. I could see where we might could have landed. But how was there enough energy to have launched us back up FROM the moon, and made it all the way back to Earth?
The original videos all mysteriously disappearing a couple decades ago pretty much sealed it for me. But if someone smarter than me wants to try to explain it, I’d be happy to listen.
“Wouldn’t it be great to make everyone think we had landed on the moon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw
My father was an engineer on the Apollo design team. We were very involved in the project. We landed on the moon.
Since the end of the Apollo program no person has ever left low earth orbit and we are told no further scientific data can be achieved by sending man back to the Moon. This would be like if after Columbus all Europeans just decided to chill on the Canary Islands and ignore the huge new world they just discovered.
“But how was there enough energy to have launched us back up FROM the moon, and made it all the way back to Earth?”
The Moon only has 1/6th of Earth’s gravitational pull.
Meaning that 100 pounds on Earth is about 17 pounds on the Moon.
More than half of the Lunar Module’s weight was fuel that gets burned off in its descent stage.
So when the LEM is launching from the Moon its mass is less than half of what it began with, and it has to overcome a gravitational pull only 17% of what Earth exerts.
Once the LEM and capsule escape the Moon’s weak gravitational tug the ride is basically all downhill to Earth requiring no fuel.
We did land the Apollo missions on the Moon, but significant aspects of the missions were and still are classified.
My personal belief is that, as the government is wont to do, a contingency was prepared in case the first landing mission needed to be faked for whatever reason. But the contingency was not invoked.
The moon lander rocket unit only sent ts upper body part back to the command module, which them took them back to earth.
All low gravity launch operations so a lot of rocket liftoff power wasn’t needed to take the upper part of the moon-lander unit into a rendezvous with the more powerful Command Module.
The “original videos” didn’t all “mysteriously disappear”. The original low-framerate downlink of the Apollo 11 moonwalk was lost, probably accidentally recorded over, that’s all.