Posted on 01/05/2003 5:06:37 PM PST by ContentiousObjector
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Is that the moon or a studio in the Nevada desert? How can the flag flutter when there's no wind on the moon? Why can't we see stars in the moon-landing pictures?
For three decades, NASA has taken the high road, ignoring those who claimed the Apollo moon landings were faked and part of a colossal government conspiracy.
The claims and suspicious questions such as the ones cited here mostly showed up in books and on the Internet. But last year's prime-time Fox TV special on the so-called "moon hoax" prompted schoolteachers and others to plead with NASA for factual ammunition to fight back.
So a few months ago, the space agency budgeted $15,000 to hire a former rocket scientist and author to produce a small book refuting the disbelievers' claims. It would be written primarily with teachers and students in mind.
The idea backfired, however, embarrassing the space agency for responding to ignorance, and the book deal was chucked.
"The issue of trying to do a targeted response to this is just lending credibility to something that is, on its face, asinine," NASA chief Sean O'Keefe said in late November after the dust settled.
So it's back to square one -- ignoring the hoaxers. That's troubling to some scientific experts who contend that someone needs to lead the fight against scientific illiteracy and the growing belief in pseudoscience such as aliens and astrology.
Someone like NASA.
"If they don't speak out, who will?" asks Melissa Pollak, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation.
Author James Oberg will. The former space shuttle flight controller plans to write the book NASA commissioned from him even though the agency pulled the plug. He is seeking money elsewhere. His working title: "A Pall Over Apollo."
Tom Hanks will speak out, too.
The Academy Award-winning actor, who starred in the 1995 movie "Apollo 13" and later directed the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," is working on another lunar-themed project. The IMAX documentary will feature Apollo archival footage. Its title: "Magnificent Desolation," astronaut Buzz Aldrin's real-time description of the moon on July 20, 1969.
While attending the Cape Canaveral premiere of the IMAX version of "Apollo 13" in November, Hanks said the film industry has a responsibility to promote historical literacy. He took a jab at the 1978 movie "Capricorn One," which had NASA's first manned mission to Mars being faked on a sound stage.
"We live in a society where there is no law in making money in the promulgation of ignorance or, in some cases, stupidity," Hanks said. "There are a lot of things you can say never happened. You can go as relatively quasi-harmless as saying no one went to the moon. But you also can say that the Holocaust never happened."
A spokesman for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington says there will always be those who will not be convinced. But the museum does not engage them in debate.
The spokesman acknowledges, however, that if a major news channel was doing a program that questioned the authenticity of the Holocaust, "I'd certainly want to inject myself into the debate with them in a very forceful way."
Television's Fox Network was the moon-hoax purveyor. In February 2001 and again a month later, Fox broadcast an hourlong program titled "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?"
Roger Launius, who agreed to Oberg's book just before leaving NASA's history office, says the story about the moon hoax has been around a long time. But the Fox show "raised it to a new level, it gave it legs and credibility that it didn't have before."
Indeed, the National Science Foundation's Pollak says two of her colleagues, after watching the Fox special, thought it was possible that NASA faked the moon landings. "These are people who work at NSF," she stresses.
The story went -- and still goes -- something like this: America was desperate to beat the Soviet Union in the high-stakes race to the moon, but lacked the technology to pull it off. So NASA faked the six manned moon landings in a studio somewhere out West.
Ralph Rene, a retired carpenter in Passaic, N.J., takes it one step farther. The space fakery started during the Gemini program, according to Rene, author of the 1992 book, NASA Mooned America!
"I don't know what real achievements they've done because when do you trust a liar?" Rene says. "I know we have a shuttle running right around above our heads, but that's only 175 miles up. It's under the shield. You cannot go through the shield and live."
He is talking, of course, about the radiation shield.
Alex Roland, a NASA historian during the 1970s and early 1980s, says his office used to have "a kook drawer" for such correspondence and never took it seriously. But there were no prime-time TV shows disputing the moon landings then -- and no Internet.
Still, Roland would be inclined to "just let it go because you'll probably just make it worse by giving it any official attention."
Within NASA, opinions were split about a rebuttal book. Oberg, a Houston-based author of 12 books, mostly about the Russian space program, said ignoring the problem "just makes this harder. To a conspiracy mind, refusing to respond is a sign of cover-up."
Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell does not know what else, if anything, can be done to confront this moon madness.
"All I know is that somebody sued me because I said I went to the moon," says the 74-year-old astronaut. "Of course, the courts threw it out."
The authorities also threw out the case involving Apollo 11 moonwalker Aldrin in September.
A much bigger and younger man was hounding the 72-year-old astronaut in Beverly Hills, Calif., calling him "a coward, a liar and a thief" and trying to get him to swear on a Bible, on camera, that he walked on the moon. Aldrin, a Korean War combat pilot, responded with a fist in the chops.
He also is probably tired of being called a liar. There are films of him that could be used.
I also would not do a public interview. If it were me, I would do the same as Aldrin. --- A poke in the chops.
They used Hasselblads. It's larger than the 35mm cameras. Custom-built for use while wearing spacesuits.
Well were they encased in lead? Unlikely because of payload restrictions. So how did the film survive? I am not saying that it didn't happen, I just want NASA to answer the freaking questions.
Do they say that the radiation belt doesn't exist? Or do they say that they had special precautions for the radiation? What do they say? They don't say anything, except that it's all just a bunch of kooks asking kooky questions.
They did.
One great danger is that a solar flare could cook them like crustaceans in the shell. NASA observed the sun closely, very closely considering the state of the art at the time. Launches were dependent on a relatively quiet sun. In addition, the astronauts were prepared to turn the entire spacecraft so as to block radiation as much as possible if the radiation had some direction to it. They also passed through the Van Allen Belts quickly enough that the dose they were bound to receive was not overly dangerous. At the same time, if the sun flared while they were on the moon, they would have been in trouble. A dice game, but weighted dice.
Can't say about the film. It would have been buried inside as much mass as possible.
Thus, the surface of the moon is simply too close for them to resolve anything of note upon its surface.
Few people, it seems to me, truly have an understanding of the sheer distances involved in astronomy. They're brutal. It has been said that, were there only two bees in flight right NOW over the continental United States, the airspace thereof would be more congested with bees than space is with stars.
THAT is the distance we are speaking of. The Moon is barely a million miles away (I think...someone can provide the exact figure. I believe it is actually less than a million miles, though). A telescope designed to look at bodies trillions of miles away simply cannot look at it.
No, I met him at a convention in Chicago over 20 years ago.
He passed out autographed pictures. I haven't seen him since.
The space shuttle has radiator elements on the entire surface of the bay doors so it can dump heat when in orbit.
SR
There are blast craters,--- Just not very big ones. Smaller than the lander and so also not visible by telescope.
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