Quick Guide To Answering Moon Cover-up Allegations

July 16, 2009

With the Apollo 11 moon landing anniversary just a few days away, I’m cringing to see if some sensationalistic cable TV news outlets drag out some space-age Inspector Clouseau to claim that the moon landings were faked on a motion picture soundstage. 

This conspiracy fantasy is far from new. It was dramatized in the B-grade 1978 film Capricorn One and parodied in the 1971 James Bond flick Diamonds are Forever.

The moon conspiracy idiocy has a life – where else – on YouTube and assorted whacko websites.  The ringleader of the current crop of loonies is Tennessee filmmaker Bart Sibrel. In 2002 Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin punched him in the nose, after Sibrel called the ex-fighter pilot a “coward, a liar and a thief.” The police did not file charges against Aldrin. Call it “street justice.”

I have lamented in several blogs about the sorry state of science literacy in the United States – the same nation that had the brains to put a man on the moon 40 years ago. The moon conspiracy "theorists" wear their illiteracy of scientific/technical issues like a badge of honor.

The question of whether we faked the moon landings might inevitably come up in casual office conversations, or among family or friends at picnics over the weekend. So here is a quickie guide to helping you answer the most common suspicions that the Apollo landings were faked:

There are no photos showing stars in the black lunar the sky

Oh duh! Maybe because it was the fact that it was daytime on the moon and the camera shutter speed and f-stop were set accordingly. Stars are too faint to record in a fraction of a second camera exposure. You don’t see stars in photos of the International Space Station for the same reason. Photos showing stars in the sky over the lunar terrain would have been evidence of a faked image.

The American flag is waving in a fan breeze

The flag only “waves” when an astronaut’s hand causes the support pole to vibrate. The flag’s pendulum motion takes a long time to dampen out in the moon’s 1/6 gravity and vacuum. Try duplicating the Apollo flag motion on Earth and film it. You can’t do it.

There are multiple studio lights

Simply look at the reflection in the convex gold helmets faceplates in dozens of Apollo archived photos. There is just one light source, the sun. Accordingly, all the shadows converge to a single vanishing point on the horizon; there are no multiple shadows.

The Lunar Module’s (LM) rocket engine should have blasted a crater

If the LM’s rocket engine was powerful enough to blowtorch into the ground the LM would have gone up instead of down! Only low thrust was needed during the LM’s final descent in 1/6^th gravity.  A few inches of lunar regolith were scoured (and photographed from orbit! See next).

 

Even Hubble Space Telescope can’t see any Apollo artifacts left on the Moon.

Hubble can resolve objects on the moon as small as a football field. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will see the Apollo descent stages because it can resolve objects several feet across. Photos from the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE show a bright patch of scoured regolith in the exact location of the Apollo 15 lunar module landing site at the foot of the Apennine Mountains (regolith darkens over time under sunlight). What’s more, 3D image reconstructions from SELENE photos of the Apollo 15 site reveal exactly the same topography as photographed by the Apollo crew 38 years ago! Did NASA’s secret filmmakers use remote viewing to build the soundstage sets?

The radiation environment in space is too deadly for astronauts

Unless the conspiracy crackpots have forked out a few tens of millions dollars to send a probe with a dosimeter through the Van Halen, er,  Van Allen radiation belts and into circumlunar space, they simply don’t have a clue what they are talking about. The radiation flux in outer space is well measured.

If any of your friends express skepticism about the Apollo missions, just politely remind them that six percent of the U.S. population believes the moon landings were faked (five percent are unsure – but my guess is they’re the ones who couldn’t decide between voting for Obama or McCain last fall). At any given time about six percent of Americans are intoxicated. I think there is a correlation.

 

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