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Why would anyone disbelieve the moon landings? I wasn't alive at the time. HOWEVER, I have seen - twice, in person - the 747 with the shuttle on top fly over: once over my school in Seabrook, Texas, and once over my house in Burlington, Washington, in 1986.

If we have a real shuttle that can launch into orbit, with all the complexity that entails, why could we not send a man to the moon?

To be fair, the technology of the space shuttle (my dad worked on the prototype Enterprise) is leaps and bounds beyond that which we used to get to the moon. Did you ever see Apollo 13? It's accurate, they practically had to graph their descent path, write all their variables down and solve for X. It was analog space travel, like using an abacus instead of a calculator.

The technology was prehistoric but I don't doubt that we went there. You can't keep a secret that big for this long, especially considering the amount of people that would been involved in such a staging. It's common sense, the same thing I personally use to debunk all those retarded 9/11 conspiracy theories [tangent] - do you mean to tell me that the government (or someone else?) had all those poor people on the planes taken from the airport, put in a room, told to call their loved ones and say that terrorists had hijacked their plane, and then had them simply disappear? And what of the hijackers? How were they (or someone else) forced to fly airplanes into buildings? Could any sane individual REALLY believe that someone in the government would kill 3,000 people and go through all this trouble... for what? To start a prolonged war on unfamiliar soil, any possible economic benefits of which would be crushed by the costs of the war itself?

Wait, haven't libs always been saying that Pres. Bush is stupid and childish? But other libs think he's an evil, diabolical mastermind? Which is it?[/tangent]

Back to the topic at hand, I find it stunning that someone so irresponsible could be entrusted to keep track of something so important. I hope this gets found someday, it would be a real damn shame if it's still sitting in some basement by the time The Man Upstairs starts His comeback tour...

The technology needed to put a payload into orbit has been around since Sputnik. THAT was no hoax. The engineering behind rocketry has enjoyed an undeserved reputation for being at the limit of human capability, but to tell the truth, rocket science ain't really rocket science.

Building the container to keep astronauts alive in while in space is also easier than it's popular image. It just took a whole lot of money, time and manpower to build the necessary infrastructure for the program, and then to build the vehicles themselves, and finally test them and refine them to make sure they would continue to work properly in spite of their complexity.

Within the next few years it looks as if there will be private space vehicles actually transporting people into orbit, and when that becomes commonplace the people who claimed that traveling to the moon is fiction are going to look silly.