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.
It all depends on the field strength, the length of exposure, and how the film might have been shielded. I don't know the answers to these question off the top of my head, but I have provided the basis for figuring it out.
By the way, on the earth's surface you are exposed to the earth's natural electro-magnetic field. Semper911, were yoou talking about the Van Allen radiation belts?
You are right... thanks for alerting us you were going to make an error before posting it.
The figure of 32 feet per second per second is totally accurate and an object falling from an "at rest" position WILL fall 32 feet (~9.8 meters) in the first second... it will then fall 64 feet more (a total of 96 feet) in the next second... and it will fall 96 feet in the third second for a total distance of 192 feet in three seconds.
On Earth, dust is particulate matter carried (or suspended) by a turbulent fluid (in our case, the atmosphere) and deposited when the carrying capacity of the fluid lessens. The dust is blown laterally by the wind, and you can observe "wind shadows," saltation marks, back slopes and slip faces, and other erosional and depositional features.
On the moon there is no atmosphere. The moon's dust is the byproduct of meteor impacts. The meteorite ejecta is mostly blown upward, away from the impacts, the smaller particles (dust) travelling farther away from the source than the larger, rocky fragments. The dust settles by way of gravity, hence, it is falling back down to the surface on a near vertical trajectory. Your drifts are the result of horizontal movement.
If you were close enough to a young, large impact site, you might indeed see the features you are looking for. Hope this helps.
And a veritable mountain of detailed testimonial, pictorial, and scientific evidence gave us the "truth" that Oswald acted alone. How many here at FR believe that still?
Could it be that those now questioning the moon landings are being called tinfoil hatters in the same way that those who questioned the Warren Commission were?
Look, I love the idea that we as a nation, alone on this planet have walked on another world, but quite apart from the questions raised by the hoax proponants and the evidence they offer in support of their claims I have to wonder why no other nation has bothered to try duplicating our feat in these last 30 years or so.
Hope you check back in at FR from time to time. CR
The Apollo capsules contained a lot of gold foil, if I remember correctly, which reflected much of the solar heat away from the capsule. Still, the craft was rotated so that each side got equal amounts of heating and cooling.
I doubt it. Those who perpetuate the Moon Hoax aren't interested in the truth or physics or anything else. They're solely interested in separating dollars from gullible people. People who think that the X-Files was a documentary! Besides, whatever you painstakingly research and publish will be tossed aside by them as they come up with more "proof" that it was a hoax.
I do find it disappointing that several Freepers seem to have doubts about the Moon landings. I wonder if they have the same doubts about whether the Space Shuttle actually contains astronauts? I can look up into the sky just after dark and see the SS fly by but I certainly can't see any astronauts. All of the supposed on-board crew imagery could be easily faked. There isn't a single piece of evidence that anyone could come up with that I couldn't shoot down using the Moon Hoaxers' logic. Yet, I haven't seen a single "Shuttle Hoax" posted. Why?
There is not a scintilla of evidence from the side of the "Hoax" proponents that stands up to even cursory scrutiny. Their points are points made by laymen who haven't got a clue about what they are looking at.
The answer to your wonderment about why no other nation has duplicated the feat in the last thirty years has more to do with economics, utility, and technical base than the supposition that it cannot be done. It took the US with its vast technological manufacturing base nine years and almost $20 BILLION dollars (in actual 1962-1973 dollars) to put 14 men on the moon in seven successful trips. That same effort today would require over $100 BILLION in 2002 dollars. Not many nations can afford that kind of investment.
What is the utility of the Moon? What can we do there that we cannot do here or in low Earth orbit or Geo-synchronous orbit? The answer is: not much that is worth the cost.
The final reason other nations have not done it is the same reason the Soviets abandoned their plans... nobody remembers the second place finisher.
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