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Moon Landings Found to be Fake - Article

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https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/moon-landing-conspiracy-theories-debunked

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Conspiracy theory 2: Apollo astronauts could not have survived Earth's radiation field

Earth is surrounded by a zone of charged particles known as the 'Van Allen' radiation belt.

"These are regions surrounding the Earth in our magnetic field where high energy trapped particles from the Sun tend to get confined," Prof Ojha says. "What that means is if you are going into these regions, there are extremely high radiation concerns."

If that is the case, how did the Apollo astronauts travel through the Van Allen radiation belt and out of Earth's orbit unharmed? Surely the amount of radiation would have killed them? Doesn't this prove that the Moon landings were a hoax?

Prof Ojha has a killer reply.

"My answer to that is... firewalking," he says.

"If you've ever done firewalking, you'll know the one thing you don't do is linger around in the middle of the firepit. You cross as quickly as you can. From a science point of view, as long as you walk across quite quickly, looking at the thermal conductivity of your feet, you are not going to have enough thermal energy going into the soles of your feet to burn you. You're absolutely fine. Just don't hang around in the middle!

"In a similar way, the transit time through the Van Allen radiation belt right at the beginning of the Apollo voyages was incredibly short. Travelling through the Van Allen radiation belt if you are going fast enough - which you need to be if you're going to the Moon - is no problem whatsoever."

Conspiracy status: debunked

Conspiracy theory 3: why are there no stars in pictures of the NASA Moon landings?

Here is another Moon landing photograph which has caught conspiracy theorists' eye.

Buzz Aldrin carries experiment equipment during the Apollo 11 Moon landing (NASA)

If the image really was taken on the Moon, shouldn't the sky be filled with stars? After all, there is no atmosphere to distort the image, no clouds to interrupt that glorious view.

Conspiracy theorists argue that the lack of stars in the Apollo 11 mission photographs prove that the event was staged. NASA could not have faked the full wonder of the lunar sky, and so they simply chose not to include any stars at all.

Here's another solution: both the astronauts and the lunar landscape itself are brightly lit by the Sun. The sky may look black, but remember, this is in fact daytime on the Moon.

If you're going to take a photo of a brightly lit scene, your camera's shutter speed needs to be fast and your aperture incredibly small. In that situation, faint objects like stars simply aren't going to show up.

Conspiracy status: debunked

Conspiracy theory 4: the Apollo 11 US flag is waving in the wind... but there's no wind on the Moon

"One of the crowning moments in terms of US national pride was seeing the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the Moon," Prof Ojha says.

Buzz Aldrin salutes the US flag during the Apollo 11 Moon landing (NASA)

Buzz Aldrin saluting the proudly waving American flag on the Moon remains one of the iconic images of the Apollo 11 mission, a declaration of US supremacy over space race rivals the Soviet Union.

But if there is no atmosphere on the Moon, there is no wind - so why is the flag waving? Is this the proof that conspiracy theorists have been seeking?

Look again at the image, and in particular along the top edge of the flag, and you will find the answer. A telescopic pole has been extended along the top in order to make the flag fly proudly (yes, NASA really did think of everything).

"Because it's been set up like this, it appears to be waving in the wind," Ojha explains. "All the wrinkles are there because it's literally been screwed up for four days en route to the Moon."

Conspiracy status: debunked

Conspiracy theory 5: if we really went to the Moon in 1969, why have we never been back?

Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission to land astronauts on the Moon, took place in 1972. Since then, humans have never returned.

Maybe that's because we never went to the Moon in the first place?

Apollo 17 wasn't meant to be the end of the story, of course. Throughout the 1970s there were ambitions to establish a permanent lunar base before turning to the next major space exploration challenge: Mars.

It never happened. But this was no grand conspiracy; this was geopolitics.

"The answer is we changed our priorities," Ojha says. "From a combination of the Vietnam War, but also there was this geopolitical element of thinking, 'We've won the race'. Just as we'd got good at doing science on the Moon, we abandoned it."

Instead, attention turned to the Space Shuttle programme and, latterly, the International Space Station, which has been permanently inhabited by teams of astronauts since November 2000. But that doesn't mean humans couldn't return to the Moon in the future...

Conspiracy status: debunked

Apollo 11 50 years on: leaving our mark on the Moon

The Moon landings were not a hoax. Apollo 11 did happen. Humans really did set foot on the Moon.

We have countless images, videos, lunar samples and scientific data to prove it. But more than that, human exploration has literally left its mark on the Moon's surface.

"In 2009 we sent a lunar reconnaissance orbiter to map the lunar surface in three or four orders of magnitude more resolution than had ever been managed before," Prof Ojha says. "Every single Apollo landing site was pictured. Absolutely stunning.

"What really strikes me about these images is that those footprints, those tracks of the lunar vehicles - they're going to maintain their integrity for millions of years," he says. "No matter what we do to ourselves as a civilisation, we've really left our mark on the cosmos."

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Moon landing conspiracy theories, debunked

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The Moon landings were faked. Apollo 11 didn't happen. Humans never set foot on the Moon. Heard all this before?

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The flag flapping even though there is no wind on the moon (The man is not touching the flag.)

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Conspiracy theory 2: Apollo astronauts could not have survived Earth's radiation field

Earth is surrounded by a zone of charged particles known as the 'Van Allen' radiation belt.

"These are regions surrounding the Earth in our magnetic field where high energy trapped particles from the Sun tend to get confined," Prof Ojha says. "What that means is if you are going into these regions, there are extremely high radiation concerns."

If that is the case, how did the Apollo astronauts travel through the Van Allen radiation belt and out of Earth's orbit unharmed? Surely the amount of radiation would have killed them? Doesn't this prove that the Moon landings were a hoax?

Prof Ojha has a killer reply.

"My answer to that is... firewalking," he says.

"If you've ever done firewalking, you'll know the one thing you don't do is linger around in the middle of the firepit. You cross as quickly as you can. From a science point of view, as long as you walk across quite quickly, looking at the thermal conductivity of your feet, you are not going to have enough thermal energy going into the soles of your feet to burn you. You're absolutely fine. Just don't hang around in the middle!

"In a similar way, the transit time through the Van Allen radiation belt right at the beginning of the Apollo voyages was incredibly short. Travelling through the Van Allen radiation belt if you are going fast enough - which you need to be if you're going to the Moon - is no problem whatsoever."

Conspiracy status: debunked

Conspiracy theory 3: why are there no stars in pictures of the NASA Moon landings?

Here is another Moon landing photograph which has caught conspiracy theorists' eye.

Buzz Aldrin carries experiment equipment during the Apollo 11 Moon landing (NASA)

If the image really was taken on the Moon, shouldn't the sky be filled with stars? After all, there is no atmosphere to distort the image, no clouds to interrupt that glorious view.

Conspiracy theorists argue that the lack of stars in the Apollo 11 mission photographs prove that the event was staged. NASA could not have faked the full wonder of the lunar sky, and so they simply chose not to include any stars at all.

Here's another solution: both the astronauts and the lunar landscape itself are brightly lit by the Sun. The sky may look black, but remember, this is in fact daytime on the Moon.

If you're going to take a photo of a brightly lit scene, your camera's shutter speed needs to be fast and your aperture incredibly small. In that situation, faint objects like stars simply aren't going to show up.

Conspiracy status: debunked

Conspiracy theory 4: the Apollo 11 US flag is waving in the wind... but there's no wind on the Moon

"One of the crowning moments in terms of US national pride was seeing the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the Moon," Prof Ojha says.

Buzz Aldrin salutes the US flag during the Apollo 11 Moon landing (NASA)

Buzz Aldrin saluting the proudly waving American flag on the Moon remains one of the iconic images of the Apollo 11 mission, a declaration of US supremacy over space race rivals the Soviet Union.

But if there is no atmosphere on the Moon, there is no wind - so why is the flag waving? Is this the proof that conspiracy theorists have been seeking?

Look again at the image, and in particular along the top edge of the flag, and you will find the answer. A telescopic pole has been extended along the top in order to make the flag fly proudly (yes, NASA really did think of everything).

"Because it's been set up like this, it appears to be waving in the wind," Ojha explains. "All the wrinkles are there because it's literally been screwed up for four days en route to the Moon."

Conspiracy status: debunked

Conspiracy theory 5: if we really went to the Moon in 1969, why have we never been back?

Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission to land astronauts on the Moon, took place in 1972. Since then, humans have never returned.

Maybe that's because we never went to the Moon in the first place?

Apollo 17 wasn't meant to be the end of the story, of course. Throughout the 1970s there were ambitions to establish a permanent lunar base before turning to the next major space exploration challenge: Mars.

It never happened. But this was no grand conspiracy; this was geopolitics.

"The answer is we changed our priorities," Ojha says. "From a combination of the Vietnam War, but also there was this geopolitical element of thinking, 'We've won the race'. Just as we'd got good at doing science on the Moon, we abandoned it."

Instead, attention turned to the Space Shuttle programme and, latterly, the International Space Station, which has been permanently inhabited by teams of astronauts since November 2000. But that doesn't mean humans couldn't return to the Moon in the future...

Conspiracy status: debunked

Apollo 11 50 years on: leaving our mark on the Moon

The Moon landings were not a hoax. Apollo 11 did happen. Humans really did set foot on the Moon.

We have countless images, videos, lunar samples and scientific data to prove it. But more than that, human exploration has literally left its mark on the Moon's surface.

"In 2009 we sent a lunar reconnaissance orbiter to map the lunar surface in three or four orders of magnitude more resolution than had ever been managed before," Prof Ojha says. "Every single Apollo landing site was pictured. Absolutely stunning.

"What really strikes me about these images is that those footprints, those tracks of the lunar vehicles - they're going to maintain their integrity for millions of years," he says. "No matter what we do to ourselves as a civilisation, we've really left our mark on the cosmos."

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Moon landing conspiracy theories, debunked

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The Moon landings were faked. Apollo 11 didn't happen. Humans never set foot on the Moon. Heard all this before?

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It’s now been nearly four decades since Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind” — if, that is, he ever set foot off this planet. Doubters say the U.S. government, desperate to beat the…

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The moon landings were faked (and other science confessions)

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Dean Burnett: A recent programme asked if we really landed on the moon. That's not all science has lied about

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Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (1969-1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon. Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, and Moon rock samples.

Much third-party evidence for the landings exists, and detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims have been made. Since the late 2000s, high-definition photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the Apollo landing sites have captured the Lunar Module descent stages and the tracks left by the astronauts. In 2012, images were released showing five of the six Apollo missions' American flags erected on the Moon still standing. The exception is that of Apollo 11, which has lain on the lunar surface since being blown over by the Lunar Module Ascent Propulsion System.

The conspiracy theories have sustained public interest for more than 40 years. Opinion polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans, 25% of Britons, and 28% of Russians surveyed believe that the crewed landings were faked. Even as late as 2001, the Fox television network documentary Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? claimed NASA faked the first landing in 1969 to win the Space Race.

An early and influential book about the subject of a Moon-landing conspiracy, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was self-published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Despite having no knowledge of rockets or technical writing, Kaysing was hired as a senior technical writer in 1956 by Rocketdyne, the company that built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. He served as head of the technical publications unit at the company's Propulsion Field Laboratory until 1963. The many allegations in Kaysing's book effectively began discussion of the Moon landings being faked. The book claims that the chance of a successful crewed landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%, and that despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings than to really go there.

In 1980, the Flat Earth Society accused NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams' film Capricorn One (1978), which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, might have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post- Vietnam War era. Dégh sees a parallel with other attitudes during the post- Watergate era, when the American public were inclined to distrust official accounts. Dégh writes: "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance." In A Man on the Moon, first published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar-orbit mission in December 1968, similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.

Claimed motives of the United States and NASA

Those who believe the Moon landings were faked give several theories about the motives of NASA and the United States government. The three main theories are below.

Motivation for the United States to engage the Soviet Union in a Space Race can be traced to the then on-going Cold War. Landing on the Moon was viewed as a national and technological accomplishment that would generate world-wide acclaim. But going to the Moon would be risky and expensive, as exemplified by President John F. Kennedy famously stating in a 1962 speech that the United States chose to go because it was hard.

Hoax theory debunker Phil Plait says in his 2002 book Bad Astronomy, that the Soviets - with their own competing Moon program, an extensive intelligence network and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data - would have 'cried foul' if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing, especially since their own program had failed. Proving a hoax would have been a huge propaganda win for the Soviets. Instead, far from calling the landings a hoax, the third edition (1970-1979) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (which was translated into English between 1974 and 1983 by Macmillan Publishers, and was later made available online by TheFreeDictionary.com) contained many articles reporting the landings as factual, such as this article on Neil Armstrong. Indeed their article on space exploration describes the Apollo 11 landing as "the third historic event" of the space age, following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin's flight in 1961.

Conspiracist Bart Sibrel responded, incorrectly asserting that, "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep space craft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly canceled."

In fact, the Soviets had been sending uncrewed spacecraft to the Moon since 1959, and "during 1962, deep space tracking facilities were introduced at IP-15 in Ussuriisk and IP-16 in Evpatoria (Crimean Peninsula), while Saturn communication stations were added to IP-3, 4 and 14," the latter having a 100 million km (62 million mi) range. The Soviet Union tracked the Apollo missions at the Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment." Vasily Mishin, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered," describes how the Soviet Moon program dwindled after the Apollo landings.

Also, there was nothing "abrupt" about the Apollo cancellations, which were made for cost-cutting reasons. These were announced in January and September 1970, two full years before the "late 1972" claimed by Sibrel. (See Vietnam War below.)

NASA funding and prestige

Conspiracy theorists claim that NASA faked the landings to avoid humiliation and to ensure that it continued to get funding. NASA raised "about US$30 billion" to go to the Moon, and Kaysing claimed in his book that this could have been used to "pay off" many people. Since most conspiracists believe that sending men to the Moon was impossible at the time, they argue that landings had to be faked to fulfill Kennedy's 1961 goal, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." In fact, NASA accounted for the cost of Apollo to the US Congress in 1973, totaling US$25.4 billion.

Mary Bennett and David Percy claimed in the 2001 book Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, that, with all the known and unknown hazards, NASA would not risk broadcasting an astronaut getting sick or dying on live television. The counter-argument generally given is that NASA in fact did incur a great deal of public humiliation and potential political opposition to the program by losing an entire crew in the Apollo 1 fire during a ground test, leading to its upper management team being questioned by Senate and House of Representatives space oversight committees. There was in fact no video broadcast during either the landing or takeoff because of technological limitations.

Vietnam War

The American Patriot Friends Network claimed in 2009 that the landings helped the United States government distract public attention from the unpopular Vietnam War, and so crewed landings suddenly ended about the same time that the United States ended its involvement in the war. In fact, the ending of the landings was not "sudden" (see The Space Race above). The war was one of several federal budget items with which NASA had to compete; NASA's budget peaked in 1966, and fell by 42% by 1972. This was the reason the final flights were cut, along with plans for even more ambitious follow-on programs such as a permanent space station and crewed flight to Mars.

Hoax claims and rebuttals

Many Moon-landing conspiracy theories have been put forward, claiming either that the landings did not happen and that NASA employees have lied, or that the landings did happen but not in the way that has been told. Conspiracists have focused on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. The foremost idea is that the whole crewed landing program was a hoax from start to end. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was lacking or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible.

Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, have given detailed answers to conspiracists' claims on the laboratory's website. They show that NASA's portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common mistakes as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections. Using the scientific process, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. The 'real landing' hypothesis is a single story since it comes from a single source, but there is no unity in the hoax hypothesis because hoax accounts vary between conspiracists.

Number of conspirators involved

According to James Longuski, the conspiracy theories are impossible because of their size and complexity. The conspiracy would have to involve more than 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, the 12 men who walked on the Moon, the 6 others who flew with them as command module pilots, and another 6 astronauts who orbited the Moon. Hundreds of thousands of people - including astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers - would have had to keep the secret. Longuski argues that it would have been much easier to really land on the Moon than to generate such a huge conspiracy to fake the landings. To date, nobody from the United States government or NASA linked to the Apollo program has said the Moon landings were hoaxes. Penn Jillette made note of this in the "Conspiracy Theories" episode of his television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in 2005. With the number of people involved, and noting the Watergate scandal, Jillette noted that someone would have outed the hoax by now.

One rebuttal by Sibrel to this claim is that NASA had compartmentalized all of the work on the Apollo program. This would have allowed for only a small number of people to actually know the truth about faking the Moon landings.

Photographic and film oddities

Moon-landing conspiracists focus heavily on NASA photos. They point to oddities in photos and films taken on the Moon. Photography experts (including those unrelated to NASA) have replied that the oddities are consistent with what should be expected from a real Moon landing, and are not consistent with tweaked or studio imagery. Some main arguments and counter-arguments are listed below.

1. In some photos, the crosshairs appear to be behind objects. The cameras were fitted with a Réseau plate (a clear glass plate with a reticle etched on), making it impossible for any photographed object to appear "in front" of the grid. Conspiracists often use this evidence to suggest that objects were "pasted" over the photographs, and hence obscure the reticle.

2. Crosshairs are sometimes rotated or in the wrong place.

3. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.

4. There are no stars in any of the photos; the Apollo 11 astronauts also stated in post-mission press conferences that they did not remember seeing any stars during Extravehicular activity (EVA). Conspiracists contend that NASA chose not to put the stars into the photos because astronomers would have been able to use them to determine whether the photos were taken from the Earth or the Moon, by means of identifying them and comparing their celestial position and parallax to what would be expected for either observation site.

The astronauts were talking about naked-eye sightings of stars during the lunar daytime. They regularly sighted stars through the spacecraft navigation optics while aligning their inertial reference platforms, the Apollo PGNCS.

Stars are rarely seen in Space Shuttle, Mir, Earth observation photos, or even photos taken at sporting events held at night. The light from the Sun in outer space in the Earth-Moon system is at least as bright as the sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface on a clear day at noon, so cameras used for imaging subjects illuminated by sunlight are set for a daylight exposure. The dim light of the stars simply does not provide enough exposure to record visible images. All crewed landings happened during the lunar daytime. Thus, the stars were outshone by the sun and by sunlight reflected off the Moon's surface. The astronauts' eyes were adapted to the sunlit landscape around them so that they could not see the relatively faint stars. The astronauts could see stars with the naked eye only when they were in the shadow of the Moon.

A special far ultraviolet camera, the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, was taken to the lunar surface on Apollo 16 and operated in the shadow of the Apollo Lunar Module (LM). It took photos of Earth and of many stars, some of which are dim in visible light but bright in the ultraviolet. These observations were later matched with observations taken by orbiting ultraviolet telescopes. Furthermore, the positions of those stars with respect to Earth are correct for the time and location of the Apollo 16 photos.

Photos of the planet Venus (which is much brighter than any of the stars) were taken from the Moon's surface by astronaut Alan Shepard during the Apollo 14 mission.

5. The angle and color of shadows are inconsistent. This suggests that artificial lights were used.

Shadows on the Moon are complicated by reflected light, uneven ground, wide-angle lens distortion, and lunar dust. There are several light sources: the Sun, sunlight reflected from the Earth, sunlight reflected from the Moon's surface, and sunlight reflected from the astronauts and the Lunar Module. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many directions, including into shadows. Shadows falling into craters and hills may appear longer, shorter and distorted.[65] Furthermore, shadows display the properties of vanishing point perspective, leading them to converge to a point on the horizon.

This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

6. There are identical backgrounds in photos which, according to their captions, were taken miles apart. This suggests that a painted background was used.

Backgrounds were not identical, just similar. What appear as nearby hills in some photos are actually mountains many miles away. On Earth, objects that are further away will appear fainter and less detailed. On the Moon, there is no atmosphere or haze to obscure faraway objects, thus they appear clearer and nearer. Furthermore, there are very few objects (such as trees) to help judge distance. One such case is debunked in "Who Mourns For Apollo?" by Mike Bara.

7. The number of photos taken is implausibly high. Up to one photo per 50 seconds.

Simplified gear with fixed settings allowed two photos a second. Many were taken immediately after each other as stereo pairs or panorama sequences. The calculation (one per 50 seconds) was based on a lone astronaut on the surface, and does not take into account that there were two astronauts sharing the workload and simultaneously taking photographs during an Extra-vehicular activity (EVA).

8. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground. These may be labeled studio props.

The "C"-shaped objects are most likely printing imperfections and do not appear in the original film from the camera. It has been suggested that the "C" is a coiled hair.

9. A resident of Perth, Western Australia, a woman named Una Ronald (a pseudonym created by the authors of the source), said that for two or three seconds she saw a Coca-Cola bottle roll across the lower right quadrant of her television screen that was displaying the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 EVA. She also said that several letters appeared in The West Australian discussing the Coca-Cola bottle incident within ten days of the lunar landing.

No such newspaper reports or recordings have been found. Ronald's claims have only been relayed by one source. There are also flaws in the story, e.g. the statement that she had to stay up late to watch the Moon landing live is easily discounted by many witnesses in Australia who watched the landing in the middle of their daytime.

10. The 1994 book contains an obviously fake composite photo of Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon with another astronaut.

It was used instead of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors seemingly felt were too grainy for their book. The book publishers did not work for NASA, although the authors were retired NASA astronauts.

11. There appear to be "hot spots" in some photos that look like a large spotlight was used in place of the Sun.

Pits on the Moon's surface focus and reflect light like the tiny glass spheres used in the coating of street signs, or dewdrops on wet grass. This creates a glow around the photographer's own shadow when it appears in a photograph (see Heiligenschein).

Some widely published Apollo photos were high-contrast copies. Scans of the original transparencies are generally much more evenly lit. An example is shown below:

12. Who filmed Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon?

Cameras on the Lunar Module did. The Apollo TV camera mounted in the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) of the Apollo Lunar Module gave a view from the exterior. While still on the Module's ladder steps, Armstrong deployed the MESA from the side of the Lunar Module, unpacking, amongst other things, the TV camera. The TV camera was then powered on and a signal transmitted back to Earth. This meant that upwards of 600 million people on Earth could watch the live feed with only a very slight delay. Similar technology was also used on subsequent Apollo missions. It was also filmed from an automatic 16mm movie camera mounted in a window of the Lunar Module.

Environment

1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation (see radiation poisoning and health threat from cosmic rays). Some conspiracists have suggested that Starfish Prime (a high-altitude nuclear test in 1962) formed another intense layer on the Van Allen belt.

There are two main Van Allen belts - the inner belt and the outer belt - and a transient third belt. The inner belt is the more dangerous one, containing energetic protons. The outer one has less-dangerous low-energy electrons (Beta particles). The Apollo spacecraft passed through the inner belt in a matter of minutes and the outer belt in about hours. The astronauts were shielded from the ionizing radiation by the aluminum hulls of the spacecraft. Furthermore, the orbital transfer trajectory from Earth to the Moon through the belts was chosen to lessen radiation exposure. Even James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen belt, rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too harmful for the Apollo missions. Phil Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem (10 mSv), which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years. The total radiation received on the trip was about the same as allowed for workers in the nuclear energy field for a year and not much more than what Space Shuttle astronauts received.

2. Film in the cameras would have been fogged by this radiation.

The film was kept in metal containers that stopped radiation from fogging the film's emulsion.[89] Furthermore, film carried by uncrewed lunar probes such as the Lunar Orbiter and Luna 3 (which used on-board film development processes) was not fogged.

3. The Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted.

There is no atmosphere to efficiently bind lunar surface heat to devices (such as cameras) that are not in direct contact with it. In a vacuum, only radiation remains as a heat transfer mechanism. The physics of radiative heat transfer are thoroughly understood, and the proper use of passive optical coatings and paints was enough to control the temperature of the film within the cameras; Lunar Module temperatures were controlled with similar coatings that gave them a gold color. Also, while the Moon's surface does get very hot at lunar noon, every Apollo landing was made shortly after lunar sunrise at the landing site; the Moon's day is about Earth days long, meaning that one Moon day (dawn to dusk) lasts nearly fifteen Earth days. During the longer stays, the astronauts did notice increased cooling loads on their spacesuits as the sun and surface temperature continued to rise, but the effect was easily countered by the passive and active cooling systems. The film was not in direct sunlight, so it was not overheated.

4. The Apollo 16 crew could not have survived a big solar flare firing out when they were on their way to the Moon.

No large solar flare occurred during the flight of Apollo 16. There were large solar flares in August 1972, after Apollo 16 returned to Earth and before the flight of Apollo 17.

5. The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts fluttered despite there being no wind on the Moon. This suggests that it was filmed on Earth and a breeze caused the flag to flutter. Sibrel said that it may have been caused by indoor fans used to cool the astronauts since their spacesuit cooling systems would have been too heavy on Earth.

The flag was fastened to a Г-shaped rod (see Lunar Flag Assembly) so that it did not hang down. The flag only seemed to flutter when the astronauts were moving it into position. Without air drag, these movements caused the free corner of the flag to swing like a pendulum for some time. The flag was rippled because it had been folded during storage - the ripples could be mistaken for movement in a still photo. Videos show that when the astronauts let go of the flagpole it vibrates briefly but then remains still.

This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

6. Footprints in the Moondust are unexpectedly well preserved, despite the lack of moisture.

This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

7. The alleged Moon landings used either a sound stage or were filmed outside in a remote desert with the astronauts either using harnesses or slow-motion photography to make it look like they were on the Moon.

While the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon", and a scene from the movie "Apollo 13" used the sound-stage and harness setup, it is clearly seen from those films that when dust rose it did not quickly settle; some dust briefly formed clouds. In the film footage from the Apollo missions, dust kicked up by the astronauts' boots and the wheels of the Lunar Roving Vehicles rose quite high due to the lower lunar gravity, and settled quickly to the ground in an uninterrupted parabolic arc since there was no air to suspend the dust. Even if there had been a sound stage for hoax Moon landings that had the air pumped out, the dust would have reached nowhere near the height and trajectory as in the Apollo film footage because of Earth's greater gravity.

During the Apollo 15 mission, David Scott did an experiment by dropping a hammer and a falcon feather at the same time. Both fell at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time. This proved that he was in a vacuum.

If the landings were filmed outside in a desert, heat waves would be present on the surface in mission videos, but no such heat waves exist in the footage. If the landings were filmed in a sound stage, several anomalies would occur, including a lack of parallax, and an increase or decrease in the size of the backdrop if the camera moved (footage was filmed while the rover was in motion, and yet no evidence of any change in the size of the background is present).

This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

Mechanical issues

1. The Lunar Modules made no blast craters or any sign of dust scatter.

No crater should be expected. The 4,500 kg (10,000 lb) thrust Descent Propulsion System was throttled very far down during the final landing.[99] The Lunar Module was no longer quickly decelerating, so the descent engine only had to support the lander's own weight, which was lessened by the Moon's gravity and by the near exhaustion of the descent propellants. At landing, the engine thrust divided by the nozzle exit area is only about 10 kPa (1.5 psi).[100][101]

Beyond the engine nozzle, the plume spreads, and the pressure drops very quickly. Rocket exhaust gasses expand much more quickly after leaving the engine nozzle in a vacuum than in an atmosphere. The effect of an atmosphere on rocket plumes can be easily seen in launches from Earth; as the rocket rises through the thinning atmosphere, the exhaust plumes broaden very noticeably. To lessen this, rocket engines made for vacuums have longer bells than those made for use on Earth, but they still cannot stop this spreading. The lander's exhaust gasses, therefore, expanded quickly well beyond the landing site. The descent engines did scatter a lot of very fine surface dust as seen in 16mm movies of each landing, and many mission commanders spoke of its effect on visibility. The landers were generally moving horizontally as well as vertically, and photos do show scouring of the surface along the final descent path. Finally, the lunar regolith is very compact below its surface dust layer, making it impossible for the descent engine to blast out a "crater". A blast crater was measured under the Apollo 11 lander using shadow lengths of the descent engine bell and estimates of the amount that the landing gear had compressed and how deep the lander footpads had pressed into the lunar surface and it was found that the engine had eroded between 100 and 150 mm (4 and 6 in) of regolith out from underneath the engine bell during the final descent and landing.

2. The second stage of the launch rocket or the Lunar Module ascent stage or both made no visible flame.

The Lunar Modules used Aerozine 50 (fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide (oxidizer) propellants, chosen for simplicity and reliability; they ignite hypergolically - upon contact - without the need for a spark. These propellants produce a nearly transparent exhaust.[104] The same fuel was used by the core of the American Titan II rocket. The transparency of their plumes is apparent in many launch photos. The plumes of rocket engines fired in a vacuum spread out very quickly as they leave the engine nozzle (see above), further lessening their visibility. Finally, rocket engines often run "rich" to slow internal corrosion. On Earth, the excess fuel burns in contact with atmospheric oxygen, enhancing the visible flame. This cannot happen in a vacuum.

Apollo 17 LM leaving the Moon; rocket exhaust visible only briefly

Apollo 8 launch through the first stage separation

Exhaust flame may not be visible outside the atmosphere, as in this photo. Rocket engines are the dark structures at the bottom center

The launch of a Titan II, burning hypergolic Aerozine-50/N ₂O ₄, 1.9 MN (430,000 lbf) of thrust. Note the near-transparency of the exhaust, even in air (water is being sprayed up from below)

Atlas uses non-hypergolic kerosene ( RP-1) fuel which gives a bright and very visible exhaust, 1.5 MN (340,000 lb f) of thrust

Bright flame from first stage of the Saturn V, burning RP-1

3. The Lunar Modules weighed 17 tons and made no mark on the Moondust, yet footprints can be seen beside them.

On the surface of the Earth, Apollo 11's fueled and crewed Lunar Module, Eagle, would have weighed approximately 17 short tons (15,000 kg). On the surface of the Moon, however, after expending fuel and oxidizer on its descent from lunar orbit, the lander weighed about 1,200 kg (2,700 pounds). The astronauts were much lighter than the lander, but their boots were much smaller than the lander's approximately 91 cm (3 ft) diameter footpads. Pressure (or force per unit area) rather than mass determines the amount of regolith compression. In some photos, the footpads did press into the regolith, especially when they moved sideways at touchdown. (The bearing pressure under Apollo 11's footpads, with the lander being about 44 times the weight of an EVA-configured astronaut, would have been of similar magnitude to the bearing pressure exerted by the astronauts' boots.)

4. The air conditioning units that were part of the astronauts' spacesuits could not have worked in an environment of no atmosphere.

The cooling units could only work in a vacuum. Water from a tank in the backpack flowed out through tiny pores in a metal sublimator plate where it quickly vaporized into space. The loss of the heat of vaporization froze the remaining water, forming a layer of ice on the outside of the plate that also sublimated into space (turning from a solid directly into a gas). A separate water loop flowed through the LCG (Liquid Cooling Garment) worn by the astronaut, carrying his metabolic waste heat through the sublimator plate where it was cooled and returned to the LCG. Five point four kg (12 lb) of feedwater gave about eight hours of cooling; because of its bulk, it was often the limiting consumable on the length of an EVA.

Transmissions

1. There should have been more than a two-second delay in communications between Earth and the Moon, at a distance of 400,000 km (250,000 miles).

2. Typical delays in communication were about 0.5 seconds.

Claims that the delays were only half a second are untrue, as examination of the original recordings shows. Also, there should not be a consistent time delay between every response, as the conversation is being recorded at one end - Mission Control. Responses from Mission Control could be heard without any delay, as the recording is being made at the same time that Houston receives the transmission from the Moon.

3. The Parkes Observatory in Australia was billed to the world for weeks as the site that would be relaying communications from the first moonwalk. However, five hours before transmission they were told to stand down.

4. Parkes supposedly had the clearest video feed from the Moon, but Australian media and all other known sources ran a live feed from the United States.

While that was the original plan, and, according to some sources, the official policy, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) did take the transmission direct from the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek radio telescopes. These were converted to NTSC television at Paddington, in Sydney. This meant that Australian viewers saw the moonwalk several seconds before the rest of the world.[112] See also Parkes radio astronomer John Sarkissian's article, "On Eagle's Wings: The Parkes Observatory's Support of the Apollo 11 Mission"[113] The events surrounding the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying the live television of the moonwalk were portrayed in a slightly fictionalized Australian film comedy "The Dish" (2000).

5. Better signal was supposedly received at Parkes Observatory when the Moon was on the opposite side of the planet.

Missing data

Blueprints and design and development drawings of the machines involved are missing. Apollo 11 data tapes containing telemetry and the high-quality video (before scan conversion from slow-scan TV to standard TV) of the first moonwalk are also missing.

Dr. David R. Williams (NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center) and Apollo 11 flight director Eugene F. Kranz both acknowledged that the original high-quality Apollo 11 telemetry data tapes are missing. Conspiracists see this as evidence that they never existed. The Apollo 11 telemetry tapes were different from the telemetry tapes of the other Moon landings because they contained the raw television broadcast. For technical reasons, the Apollo 11 lander carried a slow-scan television (SSTV) camera (see Apollo TV camera). To broadcast the pictures to regular television, a scan conversion had to be done. The radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia was able to receive the telemetry from the Moon at the time of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Parkes had a bigger antenna than NASA's antenna in Australia at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, so it received a better picture. It also received a better picture than NASA's antenna at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. This direct TV signal, along with telemetry data, was recorded onto one-inch fourteen-track analog tape at Parkes. The original SSTV transmission had better detail and contrast than the scan-converted pictures, and it is this original tape that is missing. A crude, real-time scan conversion of the SSTV signal was done in Australia before it was broadcast worldwide. However, still photos of the original SSTV image are available (see photos). About fifteen minutes of it were filmed by an amateur 8 mm film camera and these are also available. Later Apollo missions did not use SSTV. At least some of the telemetry tapes from the ALSEP scientific experiments left on the Moon (which ran until 1977) still exist, according to Dr. Williams. Copies of those tapes have been found.

Others are looking for the missing telemetry tapes for different reasons. The tapes contain the original and highest quality video feed from the Apollo 11 landing. Some former Apollo personnel want to find the tapes for posterity while NASA engineers looking towards future Moon missions believe the tapes may be useful for their design studies. They have found that the Apollo 11 tapes were sent for storage at the U.S. National Archives in 1970, but by 1984, all the Apollo 11 tapes had been returned to the Goddard Space Flight Center at their request. The tapes are believed to have been stored rather than re-used. Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967, even before the Moon landings.

In November 2006, COSMOS Online reported that about 100 data tapes recorded in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission had been found in a small marine science laboratory in the main physics building at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. One of the old tapes has been sent to NASA for analysis. The slow-scan television images were not on the tape.

In July 2009, NASA indicated that it must have erased the original Apollo 11 Moon footage years ago so that it could re-use the tape. In December 2009 NASA issued a final report on the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes. Senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings during the Apollo missions, was put in charge of the restoration project. After a three-year search, the "inescapable conclusion" was that about 45 tapes (estimated 15 tapes recorded at each of the three tracking stations) of Apollo 11 video were erased and re-used, said Nafzger. In time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Lowry Digital had been tasked with restoring the surviving footage. Lowry Digital president Mike Inchalik said that, "this is by far and away the lowest quality" video the company has dealt with. Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video, which will remain in black and white and contains conservative digital enhancements. The US$230,000 restoration project took months to complete and did not include sound quality improvements. Some selections of restored footage in high-definition have been made available on the NASA website.

Blueprints

Grumman appears to have destroyed most of their LM documentation, but copies of the blueprints for the Saturn V exist on microfilm.

Four mission-worthy Lunar Roving Vehicles (LRV) were built by Boeing. Three of them were carried to the Moon on Apollos 15, 16, and 17, used by the astronauts for transportation once on the Moon, and left there. After Apollo 18 was canceled, the other LRV was used for spare parts for the Apollos 15 to 17 missions. The 221-page operation manual for the LRV contains some detailed drawings, although not the blueprints.

NASA technology compared to USSR

Bart Sibrel cites the relative level of the United States and USSR space technology as evidence that the Moon landings could not have happened. For much of the early stages of the Space Race, the USSR was ahead of the United States, yet in the end, the USSR was never able to fly a crewed spacecraft to the Moon, let alone land one on the surface. It is argued that, because the USSR was unable to do this, the United States should have also been unable to develop the technology to do so.

For example, he claims that, during the Apollo program, the USSR had five times more crewed hours in space than the United States, and notes that the USSR was the first to achieve many of the early milestones in space: the first artificial satellite in orbit (October 1957, Sputnik 1); the first living creature in orbit (a dog named Laika, November 1957, Sputnik 2); the first man in space and in orbit ( Yuri Gagarin, April 1961, Vostok 1); the first woman in space ( Valentina Tereshkova, June 1963, Vostok 6); and the first spacewalk ( Alexei Leonov in March 1965, Voskhod 2).

However, most of the Soviet gains listed above were matched by the United States within a year, and sometimes within weeks. In 1965, the United States started to achieve many firsts (such as the first successful space rendezvous), which were important steps in a mission to the Moon. Furthermore, NASA and others say that these gains by the Soviets are not as impressive as they seem; that a number of these firsts were mere stunts that did not advance the technology greatly, or at all, e.g., the first woman in space. In fact, by the time of the launch of the first crewed Earth-orbiting Apollo flight ( Apollo 7), the USSR had made only nine spaceflights (seven with one cosmonaut, one with two, one with three) compared to 16 by the United States. In terms of spacecraft hours, the USSR had 460 hours of spaceflight; the United States had 1,024 hours. In terms of astronaut/cosmonaut time, the USSR had 534 hours of crewed spaceflight whereas the United States had 1,992 hours. By the time of Apollo 11, the United States had a lead much wider than that. (See List of human spaceflights, 1961-1970, and refer to individual flights for the length of time.)

Moreover, the USSR did not develop a successful rocket capable of a crewed lunar mission until the 1980s - their N1 rocket failed on all four launch attempts between 1969 and 1972. The Soviet LK lunar lander was tested in uncrewed low-Earth-orbit flights three times in 1970 and 1971.

Technology used by NASA

The digital technology on Earth during the time of the Moon landings was just in its infancy. The astronauts had relied on computers to aid in the Moon missions. The Apollo Guidance Computer was on the Lunar Module and the command and service module. Many computers at the time were very large despite poor specs. For example, in 1973, one year after the final Moon landing, the Xerox Alto was released. This computer had 96kB of memory. Most personal computers as of 2019, use 50,000-100,000 times this amount of RAM. Conspiracy theorists claim that the computers during the time of the Moon landings would not have been advanced enough to allow for human space travel to the Moon and back; they similarly claim that other contemporary technology (radio transmission, radar, and other instrumentation) was likewise insufficient for the task.

Deaths of NASA personnel

In a televised program about the Moon-landing hoax allegations, Fox Entertainment Group listed the deaths of ten astronauts and two civilians related to the crewed spaceflight program as part of an alleged cover-up.

Theodore Freeman (killed ejecting from a T-38 which had suffered a bird strike, October 1964)

Elliot See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 crash in bad weather, February 1966)

Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee (killed in a fire during the "plugs-out test" preceding Apollo 1, January 1967)

Edward "Ed" Givens (killed in a car accident, June 1967)

Clifton "C. C." Williams (killed ejecting from a T-38, October 1967)

Michael J. "Mike" Adams (died in an X-15 crash, November 1967. Adams was the only pilot killed during the X-15 flight test program. He was a test pilot, not a NASA astronaut, but had flown the X-15 above 80 kilometres or 50 miles)

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. (killed in an F-104 crash, December 1967, shortly after being selected as a pilot with the United States Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program, which was canceled in 1969)

Thomas Ronald Baron (North American Aviation employee. Baron died in an automobile collision with a train, April 27, 1967, six days after testifying before Rep. Olin E. Teague's House Subcommittee on NASA Oversight hearings held following the Apollo 1 fire, after which he was fired)

Two of the above, X-15 pilot Mike Adams and MOL pilot Robert Lawrence, had no connection with the civilian crewed space program that oversaw the Apollo missions. Baron was a quality control inspector who wrote a report critical of the Apollo program and was an outspoken critic of NASA's safety record after the Apollo 1 fire. Baron and his family were killed as their car was struck by a train at a train crossing. The deaths were an accident. All of the deaths occurred at least 20 months before Apollo 11 and subsequent flights.

As of September 2021, four of the twelve Apollo astronauts who landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 are still alive, including Buzz Aldrin. Also, six of the twelve Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon without landing between 1968 and 1972 are still alive.

The number of deaths within the American astronaut corps during the run-up to Apollo and during the Apollo missions is similar to the number of deaths incurred by the Soviets. During the period 1961 to 1972, at least eight Soviet serving and former cosmonauts died:

Additionally, the overall chief of their crewed-spaceflight program, Sergei Korolev, died while undergoing surgery in January 1966.

NASA response

In June 1977, NASA issued a fact sheet responding to recent claims that the Apollo Moon landings had been hoaxed. The fact sheet is particularly blunt and regards the idea of faking the Moon landings to be preposterous and outlandish. NASA refers to the rocks and particles collected from the Moon as being evidence of the program's legitimacy, as they claim that these rocks could not have been formed under conditions on Earth. NASA also notes that all of the operations and phases of the Apollo program were closely followed and under the scrutiny of the news media, from liftoff to splashdown. NASA responds to Bill Kaysing's book, We Never Went to the Moon, by identifying one of his claims of fraud regarding the lack of a crater left on the Moon's surface by the landing of the lunar module, and refuting it with facts about the soil and cohesive nature of the surface of the Moon.

The fact sheet was reissued on February 14, 2001, the day before Fox television's broadcast of Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? The documentary reinvigorated the public's interest in conspiracy theories and the possibility that the Moon landings were faked, which has provoked NASA to once again defend its name.

Alleged Stanley Kubrick involvement

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick is accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollos 11 and 12, presumably because he had just directed 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is partly set on the Moon and featured advanced special effects. It has been claimed that when 2001 was in post-production in early 1968, NASA secretly approached Kubrick to direct the first three Moon landings. The launch and splashdown would be real but the spacecraft would stay in Earth orbit and fake footage broadcast as "live from the Moon." No evidence was offered for this theory, which overlooks many facts. For example, 2001 was released before the first Apollo landing and Kubrick's depiction of the Moon's surface differs greatly from its appearance in the Apollo footage. The movement of characters on the Moon in 2001 differs from that of the filmed movement of Apollo astronauts, and does not resemble an environment with 1/6 the gravity of Earth. Several scenes in 2001 show dust billowing as spacecraft landed, something that would not happen in the vacuum environment of the Moon. Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, both of whom had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him on 2001. Kubrick also used some 50 mm f/0.7 lenses that were left over from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA. However, Kubrick only got this lens for Barry Lyndon (1975). The lens was originally a still photo lens and needed changes to be used for motion filming.

The mockumentary based on this idea, Dark Side of the Moon, could have fueled the conspiracy theory. This French mockumentary, directed by William Karel, was originally aired on Arte channel in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. It parodies conspiracy theories with faked interviews, stories of assassinations of Stanley Kubrick's assistants by the CIA, and a variety of conspicuous mistakes, puns, and references to old movie characters, inserted through the film as clues for the viewer. Nevertheless, Opération Lune is still taken at face value by some conspiracy believers.

An article titled "Stanley Kubrick and the Moon Hoax" appeared on Usenet in 1995, in the newsgroup "alt.humor.best-of-usenet". One passage - on how Kubrick was supposedly coerced into the conspiracy - reads:

NASA further leveraged their position by threatening to publicly reveal the heavy involvement of Mr. Kubrick's younger brother, Raul, with the American Communist Party. This would have been an intolerable embarrassment to Mr. Kubrick, especially since the release of Dr. Strangelove.

Kubrick had no such brother - the article was a spoof, complete with a giveaway sentence describing Kubrick shooting the moonwalk "on location" on the Moon. Nevertheless, the claim was taken up in earnest; Clyde Lewis used it almost word-for-word, whereas Jay Weidner gave the brother a more senior status within the party:

No one knows how the powers-that-be convinced Kubrick to direct the Apollo landings. Maybe they had compromised Kubrick in some way. The fact that his brother, Raul Kubrick, was the head of the American Communist Party may have been one of the avenues pursued by the government to get Stanley to cooperate.

In July 2009, Weidner posted on his webpage "Secrets of the Shining", where he states that Kubrick's The Shining (1980) is a veiled confession of his role in the scam project. This thesis was the subject of refutation in an article published on Seeker nearly half a year later.

The 2015 movie Moonwalkers is a fictional account of a CIA agent's claim of Kubrick's involvement.

In December 2015, a video surfaced which allegedly shows Kubrick being interviewed shortly before his 1999 death; the video purportedly shows the director confessing to T. Patrick Murray that the Apollo Moon landings had been faked. Research quickly found, however, that the video was a hoax.

Academic work

In 2002, NASA granted US$15,000 to James Oberg for a commission to write a point-by-point rebuttal of the hoax claims. However, NASA canceled the commission later that year, after complaints that the book would dignify the accusations. Oberg said that he meant to finish the book. In November 2002, Peter Jennings said "NASA is going to spend a few thousand dollars trying to prove to some people that the United States did indeed land men on the Moon," and "NASA had been so rattled, [they] hired [somebody] to write a book refuting the conspiracy theorists." Oberg says that belief in the hoax theories is not the fault of the conspiracists, but rather that of teachers and people (including NASA) who should provide information to the public.

In 2004, Martin Hendry and Ken Skeldon of the University of Glasgow were awarded a grant by the UK-based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council to investigate Moon landing conspiracy theories. In November 2004, they gave a lecture at the Glasgow Science Centre where the top ten claims by conspiracists were individually addressed and refuted.

An episode of MythBusters in August 2008 was dedicated to the Moon landings. The MythBusters crew tested many of the conspiracists' claims. Some of the testings were done in a NASA training facility. All of the conspiracists' claims examined on the show were labeled as having been "Busted", meaning that the conspiracists' claims were not true.

Third-party evidence of Moon landings

Imaging the landing sites

Moon-landing conspiracists claim that observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope should be able to photograph the landing sites. This implies that the world's major observatories (as well as the Hubble Program) are complicit in the hoax by refusing to take photos of the landing sites. Photos of the Moon have been taken by Hubble, including at least two Apollo landing sites, but the Hubble resolution limits viewing of lunar objects to sizes no smaller than 55-69 m (60-75 yd), which is insufficient resolution to see any landing site features.

In April 2001, Leonard David published an article on space.com, which showed a photo taken by the Clementine mission showing a diffuse dark spot at the site NASA says is the Apollo 15 lander. The evidence was noticed by Misha Kreslavsky, of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and Yuri Shkuratov of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine. The European Space Agency's SMART-1 uncrewed probe sent back photos of the landing sites, according to Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program. "Given SMART-1's initial high orbit, however, it may prove difficult to see artifacts," said Foing in an interview on space.com.

In 2002, Alex R. Blackwell of the University of Hawaii pointed out that some photos taken by Apollo astronauts while in orbit around the Moon show the landing sites.

The Daily Telegraph published a story in 2002 saying that European astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) would use it to view the landing sites. According to the article, Dr. Richard West said that his team would take "a high-resolution image of one of the Apollo landing sites." Marcus Allen, a conspiracist, answered that no photos of hardware on the Moon would convince him that human landings had happened. The telescope was used to image the Moon and provided a resolution of 130 meters (430 ft), which was not good enough to resolve the 4.2 meters (14 ft) wide lunar landers or their long shadows.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched their SELENE Moon orbiter on September 14, 2007 ( JST), from Tanegashima Space Center. SELENE orbited the Moon at about 100 km (62 miles) altitude. In May 2008, JAXA reported detecting the "halo" generated by the Apollo 15 Lunar Module engine exhaust from a Terrain Camera image. A three-dimensional reconstructed photo also matched the terrain of an Apollo 15 photo taken from the surface.

On July 17, 2009, NASA released low-resolution engineering test photos of the Apollo 11, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 landing sites that have been photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as part of the process of starting its primary mission. The photos show the descent stage of the landers from each mission on the Moon's surface. The photo of the Apollo 14 landing site also shows tracks made by an astronaut between a science experiment (ALSEP) and the lander. Photos of the Apollo 12 landing site were released by NASA on September 3, 2009. The Intrepid lander descent stage, experiment package ( ALSEP), Surveyor 3 spacecraft, and astronaut footpaths are all visible. While the LRO images have been enjoyed by the scientific community as a whole, they have not done anything to convince conspiracists that the landings happened.

On September 1, 2009, India's lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 took photos of the Apollo 15 landing site and tracks of the lunar rovers. The Indian Space Research Organisation launched their uncrewed lunar probe on September 8, 2008 (IST), from Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The photos were taken by a hyperspectral camera fitted as part of the mission's image payload.

China's second lunar probe, Chang'e 2, which was launched in 2010, can photograph the lunar surface with a resolution of up to 7 m (23 ft). It spotted traces of the Apollo landings.

The Apollo program collected 380 kg (838 lb) of Moon rocks during the six crewed missions. Analyses by scientists worldwide all agree that these rocks came from the Moon - no published accounts in peer-reviewed scientific journals exist that dispute this claim. The Apollo samples are easily distinguishable from both meteorites and Earth rocks in that they show a lack of hydrous alteration products, they show evidence of having undergone impact events on an airless body, and they have unique geochemical traits. Furthermore, most are more than 200 million years older than the oldest Earth rocks. The Moon rocks also share the same traits as Soviet samples.

Conspiracists argue that Marshall Space Flight Center Director Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica in 1967 (about two years before the Apollo 11 launch) was to gather lunar meteorites to be used as fake Moon rocks. Because von Braun was a former SS officer (though one who had been detained by the Gestapo), the documentary film Did We Go? suggests that he could have been pressured to agree to the conspiracy to protect himself from recriminations over his past. NASA said that von Braun's mission was "to look into environmental and logistic factors that might relate to the planning of future space missions, and hardware." NASA continues to send teams to work in Antarctica to mimic the conditions on other planets.

It is now accepted by the scientific community that rocks have been blasted from both the Martian and lunar surface during impact events, and that some of these have landed on the Earth as meteorites. However, the first Antarctic lunar meteorite was found in 1979, and its lunar origin was not recognized until 1982. Furthermore, lunar meteorites are so rare that it is unlikely that they could account for the 380 kg (840 lb) of Moon rocks that NASA gathered between 1969 and 1972. Only about 30 kg (66 lb) of lunar meteorites have been found on Earth thus far, despite private collectors and governmental agencies worldwide searching for more than 20 years.

While the Apollo missions gathered 380 kg (840 lb) of Moon rocks, the Soviet Luna 16, Luna 20 and Luna 24 robots gathered only 326 g (11.5 oz) combined (that is, less than one-thousandth as much). Indeed, current plans for a Martian sample return would only gather about 500 g (18 oz) of soil, and a recently proposed South Pole-Aitken basin robot mission would only gather about 1 kg (2.2 lb) of Moon rock. If NASA had used similar robot technology, then between 300 and 2,000 robot missions would have been needed to collect the current amount of Moon rocks that is held by NASA.

On the makeup of the Moon rocks, Kaysing asked: "Why was there never a mention of gold, silver, diamonds or other precious metals on the moon? Wasn't this a viable consideration? Why was this fact never dicussed [ sic] in the press or by the astronauts?" Geologists realize that gold and silver deposits on Earth are the result of the action of hydrothermal fluids concentrating the precious metals into veins of ore. Since in 1969 water was believed to be absent on the Moon, no geologist discussed finding these on the Moon in any great amount.

Missions tracked by independent parties

Aside from NASA, a number of groups and individuals tracked the Apollo missions as they happened. On later missions, NASA released information to the public explaining where and when the spacecraft could be sighted. Their flight paths were tracked using radar and they were sighted and photographed using telescopes. Also, radio transmissions between the astronauts on the surface and in orbit were independently recorded.

Retroreflectors

The presence of retroreflectors (mirrors used as targets for Earth-based tracking lasers) from the Laser Ranging Retroreflector Experiment (LRRR) is evidence that there were landings. Lick Observatory attempted to detect from Apollo 11's retroreflector while Armstrong and Aldrin were still on the Moon but did not succeed until August 1, 1969. The Apollo 14 astronauts deployed a retroreflector on February 5, 1971, and McDonald Observatory detected it the same day. The Apollo 15 retroreflector was deployed on July 31, 1971, and was detected by McDonald Observatory within a few days. Smaller retroreflectors were also put on the Moon by the Russians; they were attached to the uncrewed lunar rovers Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.

Public opinion

In a 1994 poll by The Washington Post, 9% of the respondents said that it was possible that astronauts did not go to the Moon and another 5% were unsure. A 1999 Gallup Poll found that 6% of the Americans surveyed doubted that the Moon landings happened and that 5% of those surveyed had no opinion, which roughly matches the findings of a similar 1995 Time/CNN poll. Officials of the Fox network said that such skepticism rose to about 20% after the February 2001 airing of their network's television special, Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, seen by about 15 million viewers. This Fox special is seen as having promoted the hoax claims.

A 2000 poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation ( ФОМ) in Russia found that 28% of those surveyed did not believe that American astronauts landed on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups. In 2009, a poll held by the United Kingdom's Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of those surveyed did not believe that men landed on the Moon. Another poll gives that 25% of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed were unsure that the landings happened.

There are subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. By 1977 the Hare Krishna magazine Back to Godhead called the landings a hoax, claiming that, since the Sun is 150 million km (93 million mi) away, and "according to Hindu mythology the Moon is 800,000 miles [1,300,000 km] farther away than that", the Moon would be nearly 151 million km (94 million mi) away; to travel that span in 91 hours would require a speed of more than a million miles per hour, "a patently impossible feat even by the scientists' calculations."

James Oberg of ABC News said that the conspiracy theory is taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent. A poll conducted in the 1970s by the United States Information Agency in several countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa found that most respondents were unaware of the Moon landings, many of the others dismissed them as propaganda or science fiction, and many thought that it had been the Russians that landed on the Moon.

In 2019, Ipsos conducted a study for C-Span to assess the level of belief that the 1969 Moon landing was faked. Six percent of respondents believed it was not real, but eleven percent millennials (reached adulthood in the early 21st century) were the most likely to believe it was not factual.

This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

References

Aaronovitch, David (2010) [Originally published 2009 in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape]. Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (1st American ed.). New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN 978-1-59448-895-5.

Brian, William L. (1982). Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, The NASA-Military Cover-Up (1st ed.). Portland, OR: Future Science Research Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-941292-00-9.

Dick, Steven J.; Launius, Roger D., eds. (2007). Societal Impact of Spaceflight (PDF). Washington, D.C.: NASA. ISBN 978-0-16-080190-7. NASA SP-2007-4801. Part 2 available here (PDF).

Harrison, Guy P. (2012). 50 popular beliefs that people think are true. Foreword by Phil Plait. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-61614-495-1.

Heiken, Grant H.; Vaniman, David T.; French, Bevan M. (1991). Lunar Sourcebook: A User's Guide to the Moon. Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-33444-6.

Kaysing, Bill (2002) [First published 1976]. We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Randy Reid credited as co-author in 1976 editions. Pomeroy, WA: Health Research Books. OCLC 52390067.

Kranz, Gene (2000). Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-0079-9.

Lheureux, Philippe (2000). Lumières sur la Lune [Lights on the Moon] (in French). Chatou: Éditions Carnot. ISBN 978-2-912-36249-0.

McAdams, John C. (2011). JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books. ISBN 978-1-59797-489-9.

Мухин, Юрий Игнатьевич (2005). Антиаполлон: Лунная афера США [Anti-Apollo: Lunar Scam of the USA] (in Russian). Moscow: Eksmo. ISBN 978-5-699-08657-3.

Попов, Александр Иванович (2009). Американцы на Луне: великий прорыв или космическая афера? [Americans on the Moon: The Great Breakthrough or Space Scam?] (in Russian). Moscow: Veche. ISBN 978-5-9533-3315-3.

René, Ralph (1994). Lucas, Stu (ed.). NASA Mooned America!. Drawings by Chris Wolfer. Passaic, NJ: René. OCLC 36317224.

Scheaffer, Robert (2011). Psychic Vibrations: Skeptical Giggles from The Skeptical Inquirer. Illustrations by Rob Pudim. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace. ISBN 978-1-4636-0157-7. Reprinted from the Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1977.

Scott, David; Leonov, Alexei; Toomey, Christine (2004). Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race. Foreword by Neil Armstrong; introduction by Tom Hanks (1st U.S. ed.). New York: Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN 0-312-30865-5.

Shepard, Alan B.; Slayton, Donald K. (1994). Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon. With Jay Barbree and Howard Benedict; introduction by Neil Armstrong. Atlanta: Turner Publishing. ISBN 978-1-878685-54-4.

副島, 隆彦 (2004). 人類の月面着陸は無かったろう論 [Apollo 11 Has Never Been to the Moon] (in Japanese). Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. ISBN 978-4-198-61874-2.

Wisnewski, Gerhard (2007) [Originally published 2005 in German under the title Lügen im Weltraum, Von der Mondlandung zur Weltherrschaft, Knaur Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich]. One Small Step?: The Great Moon Hoax and the Race to Dominate Earth from Space. English translation by Johanna Collis. Forrest Row: Clairview Books. ISBN 978-1-905570-12-6.

Further reading

Achenbach, Joel (March 2015). "The Age of Disbelief". National Geographic. 227 (3): 30-47. Author examines climate change, evolution, the Moon landing, vaccinations, and genetically modified food

Morrison, David (November 2009). "Moon Hoax Resolved: New Lunar Orbiter Images Show Moon Landers, Astronaut's Tracks". Skeptical Inquirer. 33 (6): 5-6.

Plait, Philip (2002). "17". Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax". John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0471409766.

Steven-Boniecki, Dwight (2010). Live TV from the Moon. Burlington, Ontario: Apogee Books. ISBN 978-1-926592-16-9.

Talcott, Richard (November 2010). "Astronomy Mythbusters". . 38 (11): 56-57. Author examines ten common astronomy myths. See: Myth #10: NASA faked the Moon landings.

External links

Television specials

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Moon landing conspiracy theories - Wikipedia

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Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (1969-1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon.

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The U.S. government was desperate to beat the Russian in the space race.

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It’s now been nearly four decades since Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind” — if, that is, he ever set foot off this planet. Doubters say the U.S. government, desperate to beat the…

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BBC ON THIS DAY | 21 | 1969: Man takes first steps on the Moon

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American Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on the Moon.

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There could very easily be a black backdrop

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There could very easily be a black backdrop

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Link: https://u.osu.edu/vanzandt/2018/04/18/the-apollo-moon-landing-was-a-hoax/

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In July of 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed on the moon along with their rocket Apollo 11. While this was literally a huge step for mankind, many people then and some today believe that the landing never happened and was instead staged. According to The Skeptic's Dictionary, the theory became popular in the 1970's and a couple decades later in 1999, 30 percent of Americans were skeptical of the moon landing. That number today has lowered to 6 percent, but the theory still remains well known throughout the internet and our society. This belief is extraordinary because it uses the appearance of science to persuade people into believing in it. It is also important that the public recognizes that this belief is not true as it discredits the extreme risk that the astronauts took to go to the moon and their success in doing so.

Those who are believers in the idea that the moon landing was a hoax state many reasons as to why it could never have actually happened, and most of them deal with their ideas of how physics works. The most widely known piece of evidence is the fact that the flag placed on the moon by the astronauts seemed to have been waving in the footage taken by the astronauts. If this was the case, as many skeptics of the moon landing believe, then there is no way they were actually on the moon because that would mean there was enough wind to make the flag wave. Since there is no air let alone wind on the moon, then it would have been impossible for this to occur. But to contradict this "fact" many scientists have said that the flag was placed in a bent shape by the astronauts and because there is extremely low gravity on the moon, the flag stayed in the bent position. If you look closely at the footage, you can see the flag in fact doesn't wave at all and instead stays still in its bent position.

A second, lesser known argument for a conspiracy is the idea of the Van Allen Belts. The Van Allen Belts are two regions of high radiation that surround the earth and are located inside the earth's magnetosphere. For the astronauts of Apollo 11 to have passed through these belts would have caused more than a normal amount of radiation exposure, which could lead to radiation sickness. Because the astronauts did not show any symptoms of this, many believe that they did not actually pass through these belts and did not go to the moon. Oppositely, according to NASA, the astronauts were in the Van Allen Belt for only a short time, sustaining .18 rads of radiation- which is about the same dose of radiation one gets from an x-ray. So, although it seems like the hoax believers are presenting scientifically back facts about the Van Allen belts, they are in fact incorrect about the amount of radiation one is exposed to when passing through the belts.

A third attempt to prove that the astronauts did not go to the moon is the fact that there was not a single star in any of the pictures taken when the astronauts landed. This is used as evidence to prove that those pictures were not taken on the moon because, if you are in space, then how could there not be any stars around? With this piece of evidence, there are two sets of conspiracies that emerge about the moon landing: there are those who believe it never happened and then there are also those that believe the astronauts made it to the moon but faked the pictures on earth. But according to astrophysicist Brian Koberlein, this is actually a common phenomenon in photographs. Because the moon is quite bright in comparison to the sky around it, the light of the stars gets drowned out and overpowered by the light of the moon when standing on it. This is why no stars can be seen in any pictures taken on the moon and therefore debunks the conspiracy that the pictures were not taken on the moon.

Those who believe that the moon landing was a hoax, mostly misunderstand how perception works. Because many of the hoax believers state evidence that is not supported by science, they are misinformed about the way that science and physics can alter the perception of something, such as the stars in the night sky or the movement/non-movement of the flag. They also fall victim to the outward appearance of science in the explanations given to support the hoax theories. Several of those who believe it was a hoax also disregard any evidence contradictory to their own ideas and tend to think that the only evidence that is correct is evidence that supports their theory. This belief, although it was largely popular in the decade following the Apollo 11 moon landing, is still widely known today. Because it is so largely spread throughout the media, many people take it as fact since they see the media as a credible source. Those who believe in the hoax today are largely American youth, as they were not around when the moon landing occurred and so they find it easier to believe something that they hear or read claiming the landing was faked. Other hoax believers tend to be those who supported the idea of the faking of the moon landing around the time when it was most popular in the decade following the landing.

Although the conspiracy that the moon landing was faked is a widely known idea, only 6% of U.S. citizens today believe in it. Whether persuaded by what looks like scientific explanations for the phenomena or the misunderstanding of how perception works, hoax believers stand strong in their belief and neglect to listen to any opposing evidence presented to them. Recently, the media has been causing the public to become more exposed to the idea that the landing was faked although there are few that actually take this belief seriously. As a society, it was very important at the time of the space race that we make it to the moon first. Because Apollo 11 made it there first, Americans see this as quite an accomplishment and it is something we are very proud of. Hoax believers fail to recognize this very important achievement, which is detrimental to our society because they are failing to give the astronauts the recognition they deserve. If the number of hoax believers rises, it will be very sad and discouraging to all of those who support the three astronauts and those who helped them make it there.

1. Davis, Scott. "How Do We Know The Moon Landing Really Happened?" www.spacecentre.co.uk/blog-post/know-moon-landing-really-happened/

2. Scudder, Jillian. "Why Aren't The Van Allen Belts A Barrier To Spaceflight?" , Forbes Magazine, 16 June 2017, www.forbes.com/sites/jillianscudder/2017/06/16/astroquizzical-van-allen-belts-barrier-spaceflight/#3d90d44d6f8d

3. Weiner, Sophie. "Why Faking the Moon Landing Was Impossible." Popular Mechanics, 14 Nov. 2017, www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/news/a28814/moon-landing-faking/

4. "Why Do People Persist in Denying the Moon Landings?" www.airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/why-do-people-persist-denying-moon-landings

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In July of 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed on the moon along with their rocket Apollo 11. While this was literally a huge step for mankind, many people then and some today believe that the landing never happened and was instead staged.

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Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (1969-1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon. Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, and Moon rock samples.

Much third-party evidence for the landings exists, and detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims have been made. Since the late 2000s, high-definition photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the Apollo landing sites have captured the Lunar Module descent stages and the tracks left by the astronauts. In 2012, images were released showing five of the six Apollo missions' American flags erected on the Moon still standing. The exception is that of Apollo 11, which has lain on the lunar surface since being blown over by the Lunar Module Ascent Propulsion System.

The conspiracy theories have sustained public interest for more than 40 years. Opinion polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans, 25% of Britons, and 28% of Russians surveyed believe that the crewed landings were faked. Even as late as 2001, the Fox television network documentary Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? claimed NASA faked the first landing in 1969 to win the Space Race.

An early and influential book about the subject of a Moon-landing conspiracy, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was self-published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Despite having no knowledge of rockets or technical writing, Kaysing was hired as a senior technical writer in 1956 by Rocketdyne, the company that built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. He served as head of the technical publications unit at the company's Propulsion Field Laboratory until 1963. The many allegations in Kaysing's book effectively began discussion of the Moon landings being faked. The book claims that the chance of a successful crewed landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%, and that despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings than to really go there.

In 1980, the Flat Earth Society accused NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams' film Capricorn One (1978), which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, might have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post- Vietnam War era. Dégh sees a parallel with other attitudes during the post- Watergate era, when the American public were inclined to distrust official accounts. Dégh writes: "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance." In A Man on the Moon, first published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar-orbit mission in December 1968, similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.

Claimed motives of the United States and NASA

Those who believe the Moon landings were faked give several theories about the motives of NASA and the United States government. The three main theories are below.

Motivation for the United States to engage the Soviet Union in a Space Race can be traced to the then on-going Cold War. Landing on the Moon was viewed as a national and technological accomplishment that would generate world-wide acclaim. But going to the Moon would be risky and expensive, as exemplified by President John F. Kennedy famously stating in a 1962 speech that the United States chose to go because it was hard.

Hoax theory debunker Phil Plait says in his 2002 book Bad Astronomy, that the Soviets - with their own competing Moon program, an extensive intelligence network and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data - would have 'cried foul' if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing, especially since their own program had failed. Proving a hoax would have been a huge propaganda win for the Soviets. Instead, far from calling the landings a hoax, the third edition (1970-1979) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (which was translated into English between 1974 and 1983 by Macmillan Publishers, and was later made available online by TheFreeDictionary.com) contained many articles reporting the landings as factual, such as this article on Neil Armstrong. Indeed their article on space exploration describes the Apollo 11 landing as "the third historic event" of the space age, following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin's flight in 1961.

Conspiracist Bart Sibrel responded, incorrectly asserting that, "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep space craft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly canceled."

In fact, the Soviets had been sending uncrewed spacecraft to the Moon since 1959, and "during 1962, deep space tracking facilities were introduced at IP-15 in Ussuriisk and IP-16 in Evpatoria (Crimean Peninsula), while Saturn communication stations were added to IP-3, 4 and 14," the latter having a 100 million km (62 million mi) range. The Soviet Union tracked the Apollo missions at the Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment." Vasily Mishin, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered," describes how the Soviet Moon program dwindled after the Apollo landings.

Also, there was nothing "abrupt" about the Apollo cancellations, which were made for cost-cutting reasons. These were announced in January and September 1970, two full years before the "late 1972" claimed by Sibrel. (See Vietnam War below.)

NASA funding and prestige

Conspiracy theorists claim that NASA faked the landings to avoid humiliation and to ensure that it continued to get funding. NASA raised "about US$30 billion" to go to the Moon, and Kaysing claimed in his book that this could have been used to "pay off" many people. Since most conspiracists believe that sending men to the Moon was impossible at the time, they argue that landings had to be faked to fulfill Kennedy's 1961 goal, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." In fact, NASA accounted for the cost of Apollo to the US Congress in 1973, totaling US$25.4 billion.

Mary Bennett and David Percy claimed in the 2001 book Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, that, with all the known and unknown hazards, NASA would not risk broadcasting an astronaut getting sick or dying on live television. The counter-argument generally given is that NASA in fact did incur a great deal of public humiliation and potential political opposition to the program by losing an entire crew in the Apollo 1 fire during a ground test, leading to its upper management team being questioned by Senate and House of Representatives space oversight committees. There was in fact no video broadcast during either the landing or takeoff because of technological limitations.

Vietnam War

The American Patriot Friends Network claimed in 2009 that the landings helped the United States government distract public attention from the unpopular Vietnam War, and so crewed landings suddenly ended about the same time that the United States ended its involvement in the war. In fact, the ending of the landings was not "sudden" (see The Space Race above). The war was one of several federal budget items with which NASA had to compete; NASA's budget peaked in 1966, and fell by 42% by 1972. This was the reason the final flights were cut, along with plans for even more ambitious follow-on programs such as a permanent space station and crewed flight to Mars.

Hoax claims and rebuttals

Many Moon-landing conspiracy theories have been put forward, claiming either that the landings did not happen and that NASA employees have lied, or that the landings did happen but not in the way that has been told. Conspiracists have focused on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. The foremost idea is that the whole crewed landing program was a hoax from start to end. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was lacking or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible.

Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, have given detailed answers to conspiracists' claims on the laboratory's website. They show that NASA's portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common mistakes as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections. Using the scientific process, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. The 'real landing' hypothesis is a single story since it comes from a single source, but there is no unity in the hoax hypothesis because hoax accounts vary between conspiracists.

Number of conspirators involved

According to James Longuski, the conspiracy theories are impossible because of their size and complexity. The conspiracy would have to involve more than 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, the 12 men who walked on the Moon, the 6 others who flew with them as command module pilots, and another 6 astronauts who orbited the Moon. Hundreds of thousands of people - including astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers - would have had to keep the secret. Longuski argues that it would have been much easier to really land on the Moon than to generate such a huge conspiracy to fake the landings. To date, nobody from the United States government or NASA linked to the Apollo program has said the Moon landings were hoaxes. Penn Jillette made note of this in the "Conspiracy Theories" episode of his television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in 2005. With the number of people involved, and noting the Watergate scandal, Jillette noted that someone would have outed the hoax by now.

One rebuttal by Sibrel to this claim is that NASA had compartmentalized all of the work on the Apollo program. This would have allowed for only a small number of people to actually know the truth about faking the Moon landings.

Photographic and film oddities

Moon-landing conspiracists focus heavily on NASA photos. They point to oddities in photos and films taken on the Moon. Photography experts (including those unrelated to NASA) have replied that the oddities are consistent with what should be expected from a real Moon landing, and are not consistent with tweaked or studio imagery. Some main arguments and counter-arguments are listed below.

1. In some photos, the crosshairs appear to be behind objects. The cameras were fitted with a Réseau plate (a clear glass plate with a reticle etched on), making it impossible for any photographed object to appear "in front" of the grid. Conspiracists often use this evidence to suggest that objects were "pasted" over the photographs, and hence obscure the reticle.

2. Crosshairs are sometimes rotated or in the wrong place.

3. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.

4. There are no stars in any of the photos; the Apollo 11 astronauts also stated in post-mission press conferences that they did not remember seeing any stars during Extravehicular activity (EVA). Conspiracists contend that NASA chose not to put the stars into the photos because astronomers would have been able to use them to determine whether the photos were taken from the Earth or the Moon, by means of identifying them and comparing their celestial position and parallax to what would be expected for either observation site.

The astronauts were talking about naked-eye sightings of stars during the lunar daytime. They regularly sighted stars through the spacecraft navigation optics while aligning their inertial reference platforms, the Apollo PGNCS.

Stars are rarely seen in Space Shuttle, Mir, Earth observation photos, or even photos taken at sporting events held at night. The light from the Sun in outer space in the Earth-Moon system is at least as bright as the sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface on a clear day at noon, so cameras used for imaging subjects illuminated by sunlight are set for a daylight exposure. The dim light of the stars simply does not provide enough exposure to record visible images. All crewed landings happened during the lunar daytime. Thus, the stars were outshone by the sun and by sunlight reflected off the Moon's surface. The astronauts' eyes were adapted to the sunlit landscape around them so that they could not see the relatively faint stars. The astronauts could see stars with the naked eye only when they were in the shadow of the Moon.

A special far ultraviolet camera, the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, was taken to the lunar surface on Apollo 16 and operated in the shadow of the Apollo Lunar Module (LM). It took photos of Earth and of many stars, some of which are dim in visible light but bright in the ultraviolet. These observations were later matched with observations taken by orbiting ultraviolet telescopes. Furthermore, the positions of those stars with respect to Earth are correct for the time and location of the Apollo 16 photos.

Photos of the planet Venus (which is much brighter than any of the stars) were taken from the Moon's surface by astronaut Alan Shepard during the Apollo 14 mission.

5. The angle and color of shadows are inconsistent. This suggests that artificial lights were used.

Shadows on the Moon are complicated by reflected light, uneven ground, wide-angle lens distortion, and lunar dust. There are several light sources: the Sun, sunlight reflected from the Earth, sunlight reflected from the Moon's surface, and sunlight reflected from the astronauts and the Lunar Module. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many directions, including into shadows. Shadows falling into craters and hills may appear longer, shorter and distorted.[65] Furthermore, shadows display the properties of vanishing point perspective, leading them to converge to a point on the horizon.

This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

6. There are identical backgrounds in photos which, according to their captions, were taken miles apart. This suggests that a painted background was used.

Backgrounds were not identical, just similar. What appear as nearby hills in some photos are actually mountains many miles away. On Earth, objects that are further away will appear fainter and less detailed. On the Moon, there is no atmosphere or haze to obscure faraway objects, thus they appear clearer and nearer. Furthermore, there are very few objects (such as trees) to help judge distance. One such case is debunked in "Who Mourns For Apollo?" by Mike Bara.

7. The number of photos taken is implausibly high. Up to one photo per 50 seconds.

Simplified gear with fixed settings allowed two photos a second. Many were taken immediately after each other as stereo pairs or panorama sequences. The calculation (one per 50 seconds) was based on a lone astronaut on the surface, and does not take into account that there were two astronauts sharing the workload and simultaneously taking photographs during an Extra-vehicular activity (EVA).

8. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground. These may be labeled studio props.

The "C"-shaped objects are most likely printing imperfections and do not appear in the original film from the camera. It has been suggested that the "C" is a coiled hair.

9. A resident of Perth, Western Australia, a woman named Una Ronald (a pseudonym created by the authors of the source), said that for two or three seconds she saw a Coca-Cola bottle roll across the lower right quadrant of her television screen that was displaying the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 EVA. She also said that several letters appeared in The West Australian discussing the Coca-Cola bottle incident within ten days of the lunar landing.

No such newspaper reports or recordings have been found. Ronald's claims have only been relayed by one source. There are also flaws in the story, e.g. the statement that she had to stay up late to watch the Moon landing live is easily discounted by many witnesses in Australia who watched the landing in the middle of their daytime.

10. The 1994 book contains an obviously fake composite photo of Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon with another astronaut.

It was used instead of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors seemingly felt were too grainy for their book. The book publishers did not work for NASA, although the authors were retired NASA astronauts.

11. There appear to be "hot spots" in some photos that look like a large spotlight was used in place of the Sun.

Pits on the Moon's surface focus and reflect light like the tiny glass spheres used in the coating of street signs, or dewdrops on wet grass. This creates a glow around the photographer's own shadow when it appears in a photograph (see Heiligenschein).

Some widely published Apollo photos were high-contrast copies. Scans of the original transparencies are generally much more evenly lit. An example is shown below:

12. Who filmed Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon?

Cameras on the Lunar Module did. The Apollo TV camera mounted in the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) of the Apollo Lunar Module gave a view from the exterior. While still on the Module's ladder steps, Armstrong deployed the MESA from the side of the Lunar Module, unpacking, amongst other things, the TV camera. The TV camera was then powered on and a signal transmitted back to Earth. This meant that upwards of 600 million people on Earth could watch the live feed with only a very slight delay. Similar technology was also used on subsequent Apollo missions. It was also filmed from an automatic 16mm movie camera mounted in a window of the Lunar Module.

Environment

1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation (see radiation poisoning and health threat from cosmic rays). Some conspiracists have suggested that Starfish Prime (a high-altitude nuclear test in 1962) formed another intense layer on the Van Allen belt.

There are two main Van Allen belts - the inner belt and the outer belt - and a transient third belt. The inner belt is the more dangerous one, containing energetic protons. The outer one has less-dangerous low-energy electrons (Beta particles). The Apollo spacecraft passed through the inner belt in a matter of minutes and the outer belt in about hours. The astronauts were shielded from the ionizing radiation by the aluminum hulls of the spacecraft. Furthermore, the orbital transfer trajectory from Earth to the Moon through the belts was chosen to lessen radiation exposure. Even James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen belt, rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too harmful for the Apollo missions. Phil Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem (10 mSv), which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years. The total radiation received on the trip was about the same as allowed for workers in the nuclear energy field for a year and not much more than what Space Shuttle astronauts received.

2. Film in the cameras would have been fogged by this radiation.

The film was kept in metal containers that stopped radiation from fogging the film's emulsion.[89] Furthermore, film carried by uncrewed lunar probes such as the Lunar Orbiter and Luna 3 (which used on-board film development processes) was not fogged.

3. The Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted.

There is no atmosphere to efficiently bind lunar surface heat to devices (such as cameras) that are not in direct contact with it. In a vacuum, only radiation remains as a heat transfer mechanism. The physics of radiative heat transfer are thoroughly understood, and the proper use of passive optical coatings and paints was enough to control the temperature of the film within the cameras; Lunar Module temperatures were controlled with similar coatings that gave them a gold color. Also, while the Moon's surface does get very hot at lunar noon, every Apollo landing was made shortly after lunar sunrise at the landing site; the Moon's day is about Earth days long, meaning that one Moon day (dawn to dusk) lasts nearly fifteen Earth days. During the longer stays, the astronauts did notice increased cooling loads on their spacesuits as the sun and surface temperature continued to rise, but the effect was easily countered by the passive and active cooling systems. The film was not in direct sunlight, so it was not overheated.

4. The Apollo 16 crew could not have survived a big solar flare firing out when they were on their way to the Moon.

No large solar flare occurred during the flight of Apollo 16. There were large solar flares in August 1972, after Apollo 16 returned to Earth and before the flight of Apollo 17.

5. The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts fluttered despite there being no wind on the Moon. This suggests that it was filmed on Earth and a breeze caused the flag to flutter. Sibrel said that it may have been caused by indoor fans used to cool the astronauts since their spacesuit cooling systems would have been too heavy on Earth.

The flag was fastened to a Г-shaped rod (see Lunar Flag Assembly) so that it did not hang down. The flag only seemed to flutter when the astronauts were moving it into position. Without air drag, these movements caused the free corner of the flag to swing like a pendulum for some time. The flag was rippled because it had been folded during storage - the ripples could be mistaken for movement in a still photo. Videos show that when the astronauts let go of the flagpole it vibrates briefly but then remains still.

This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

6. Footprints in the Moondust are unexpectedly well preserved, despite the lack of moisture.

This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

7. The alleged Moon landings used either a sound stage or were filmed outside in a remote desert with the astronauts either using harnesses or slow-motion photography to make it look like they were on the Moon.

While the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon", and a scene from the movie "Apollo 13" used the sound-stage and harness setup, it is clearly seen from those films that when dust rose it did not quickly settle; some dust briefly formed clouds. In the film footage from the Apollo missions, dust kicked up by the astronauts' boots and the wheels of the Lunar Roving Vehicles rose quite high due to the lower lunar gravity, and settled quickly to the ground in an uninterrupted parabolic arc since there was no air to suspend the dust. Even if there had been a sound stage for hoax Moon landings that had the air pumped out, the dust would have reached nowhere near the height and trajectory as in the Apollo film footage because of Earth's greater gravity.

During the Apollo 15 mission, David Scott did an experiment by dropping a hammer and a falcon feather at the same time. Both fell at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time. This proved that he was in a vacuum.

If the landings were filmed outside in a desert, heat waves would be present on the surface in mission videos, but no such heat waves exist in the footage. If the landings were filmed in a sound stage, several anomalies would occur, including a lack of parallax, and an increase or decrease in the size of the backdrop if the camera moved (footage was filmed while the rover was in motion, and yet no evidence of any change in the size of the background is present).

This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

Mechanical issues

1. The Lunar Modules made no blast craters or any sign of dust scatter.

No crater should be expected. The 4,500 kg (10,000 lb) thrust Descent Propulsion System was throttled very far down during the final landing.[99] The Lunar Module was no longer quickly decelerating, so the descent engine only had to support the lander's own weight, which was lessened by the Moon's gravity and by the near exhaustion of the descent propellants. At landing, the engine thrust divided by the nozzle exit area is only about 10 kPa (1.5 psi).[100][101]

Beyond the engine nozzle, the plume spreads, and the pressure drops very quickly. Rocket exhaust gasses expand much more quickly after leaving the engine nozzle in a vacuum than in an atmosphere. The effect of an atmosphere on rocket plumes can be easily seen in launches from Earth; as the rocket rises through the thinning atmosphere, the exhaust plumes broaden very noticeably. To lessen this, rocket engines made for vacuums have longer bells than those made for use on Earth, but they still cannot stop this spreading. The lander's exhaust gasses, therefore, expanded quickly well beyond the landing site. The descent engines did scatter a lot of very fine surface dust as seen in 16mm movies of each landing, and many mission commanders spoke of its effect on visibility. The landers were generally moving horizontally as well as vertically, and photos do show scouring of the surface along the final descent path. Finally, the lunar regolith is very compact below its surface dust layer, making it impossible for the descent engine to blast out a "crater". A blast crater was measured under the Apollo 11 lander using shadow lengths of the descent engine bell and estimates of the amount that the landing gear had compressed and how deep the lander footpads had pressed into the lunar surface and it was found that the engine had eroded between 100 and 150 mm (4 and 6 in) of regolith out from underneath the engine bell during the final descent and landing.

2. The second stage of the launch rocket or the Lunar Module ascent stage or both made no visible flame.

The Lunar Modules used Aerozine 50 (fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide (oxidizer) propellants, chosen for simplicity and reliability; they ignite hypergolically - upon contact - without the need for a spark. These propellants produce a nearly transparent exhaust.[104] The same fuel was used by the core of the American Titan II rocket. The transparency of their plumes is apparent in many launch photos. The plumes of rocket engines fired in a vacuum spread out very quickly as they leave the engine nozzle (see above), further lessening their visibility. Finally, rocket engines often run "rich" to slow internal corrosion. On Earth, the excess fuel burns in contact with atmospheric oxygen, enhancing the visible flame. This cannot happen in a vacuum.

Apollo 17 LM leaving the Moon; rocket exhaust visible only briefly

Apollo 8 launch through the first stage separation

Exhaust flame may not be visible outside the atmosphere, as in this photo. Rocket engines are the dark structures at the bottom center

The launch of a Titan II, burning hypergolic Aerozine-50/N ₂O ₄, 1.9 MN (430,000 lbf) of thrust. Note the near-transparency of the exhaust, even in air (water is being sprayed up from below)

Atlas uses non-hypergolic kerosene ( RP-1) fuel which gives a bright and very visible exhaust, 1.5 MN (340,000 lb f) of thrust

Bright flame from first stage of the Saturn V, burning RP-1

3. The Lunar Modules weighed 17 tons and made no mark on the Moondust, yet footprints can be seen beside them.

On the surface of the Earth, Apollo 11's fueled and crewed Lunar Module, Eagle, would have weighed approximately 17 short tons (15,000 kg). On the surface of the Moon, however, after expending fuel and oxidizer on its descent from lunar orbit, the lander weighed about 1,200 kg (2,700 pounds). The astronauts were much lighter than the lander, but their boots were much smaller than the lander's approximately 91 cm (3 ft) diameter footpads. Pressure (or force per unit area) rather than mass determines the amount of regolith compression. In some photos, the footpads did press into the regolith, especially when they moved sideways at touchdown. (The bearing pressure under Apollo 11's footpads, with the lander being about 44 times the weight of an EVA-configured astronaut, would have been of similar magnitude to the bearing pressure exerted by the astronauts' boots.)

4. The air conditioning units that were part of the astronauts' spacesuits could not have worked in an environment of no atmosphere.

The cooling units could only work in a vacuum. Water from a tank in the backpack flowed out through tiny pores in a metal sublimator plate where it quickly vaporized into space. The loss of the heat of vaporization froze the remaining water, forming a layer of ice on the outside of the plate that also sublimated into space (turning from a solid directly into a gas). A separate water loop flowed through the LCG (Liquid Cooling Garment) worn by the astronaut, carrying his metabolic waste heat through the sublimator plate where it was cooled and returned to the LCG. Five point four kg (12 lb) of feedwater gave about eight hours of cooling; because of its bulk, it was often the limiting consumable on the length of an EVA.

Transmissions

1. There should have been more than a two-second delay in communications between Earth and the Moon, at a distance of 400,000 km (250,000 miles).

2. Typical delays in communication were about 0.5 seconds.

Claims that the delays were only half a second are untrue, as examination of the original recordings shows. Also, there should not be a consistent time delay between every response, as the conversation is being recorded at one end - Mission Control. Responses from Mission Control could be heard without any delay, as the recording is being made at the same time that Houston receives the transmission from the Moon.

3. The Parkes Observatory in Australia was billed to the world for weeks as the site that would be relaying communications from the first moonwalk. However, five hours before transmission they were told to stand down.

4. Parkes supposedly had the clearest video feed from the Moon, but Australian media and all other known sources ran a live feed from the United States.

While that was the original plan, and, according to some sources, the official policy, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) did take the transmission direct from the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek radio telescopes. These were converted to NTSC television at Paddington, in Sydney. This meant that Australian viewers saw the moonwalk several seconds before the rest of the world.[112] See also Parkes radio astronomer John Sarkissian's article, "On Eagle's Wings: The Parkes Observatory's Support of the Apollo 11 Mission"[113] The events surrounding the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying the live television of the moonwalk were portrayed in a slightly fictionalized Australian film comedy "The Dish" (2000).

5. Better signal was supposedly received at Parkes Observatory when the Moon was on the opposite side of the planet.

Missing data

Blueprints and design and development drawings of the machines involved are missing. Apollo 11 data tapes containing telemetry and the high-quality video (before scan conversion from slow-scan TV to standard TV) of the first moonwalk are also missing.

Dr. David R. Williams (NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center) and Apollo 11 flight director Eugene F. Kranz both acknowledged that the original high-quality Apollo 11 telemetry data tapes are missing. Conspiracists see this as evidence that they never existed. The Apollo 11 telemetry tapes were different from the telemetry tapes of the other Moon landings because they contained the raw television broadcast. For technical reasons, the Apollo 11 lander carried a slow-scan television (SSTV) camera (see Apollo TV camera). To broadcast the pictures to regular television, a scan conversion had to be done. The radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia was able to receive the telemetry from the Moon at the time of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Parkes had a bigger antenna than NASA's antenna in Australia at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, so it received a better picture. It also received a better picture than NASA's antenna at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. This direct TV signal, along with telemetry data, was recorded onto one-inch fourteen-track analog tape at Parkes. The original SSTV transmission had better detail and contrast than the scan-converted pictures, and it is this original tape that is missing. A crude, real-time scan conversion of the SSTV signal was done in Australia before it was broadcast worldwide. However, still photos of the original SSTV image are available (see photos). About fifteen minutes of it were filmed by an amateur 8 mm film camera and these are also available. Later Apollo missions did not use SSTV. At least some of the telemetry tapes from the ALSEP scientific experiments left on the Moon (which ran until 1977) still exist, according to Dr. Williams. Copies of those tapes have been found.

Others are looking for the missing telemetry tapes for different reasons. The tapes contain the original and highest quality video feed from the Apollo 11 landing. Some former Apollo personnel want to find the tapes for posterity while NASA engineers looking towards future Moon missions believe the tapes may be useful for their design studies. They have found that the Apollo 11 tapes were sent for storage at the U.S. National Archives in 1970, but by 1984, all the Apollo 11 tapes had been returned to the Goddard Space Flight Center at their request. The tapes are believed to have been stored rather than re-used. Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967, even before the Moon landings.

In November 2006, COSMOS Online reported that about 100 data tapes recorded in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission had been found in a small marine science laboratory in the main physics building at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. One of the old tapes has been sent to NASA for analysis. The slow-scan television images were not on the tape.

In July 2009, NASA indicated that it must have erased the original Apollo 11 Moon footage years ago so that it could re-use the tape. In December 2009 NASA issued a final report on the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes. Senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings during the Apollo missions, was put in charge of the restoration project. After a three-year search, the "inescapable conclusion" was that about 45 tapes (estimated 15 tapes recorded at each of the three tracking stations) of Apollo 11 video were erased and re-used, said Nafzger. In time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Lowry Digital had been tasked with restoring the surviving footage. Lowry Digital president Mike Inchalik said that, "this is by far and away the lowest quality" video the company has dealt with. Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video, which will remain in black and white and contains conservative digital enhancements. The US$230,000 restoration project took months to complete and did not include sound quality improvements. Some selections of restored footage in high-definition have been made available on the NASA website.

Blueprints

Grumman appears to have destroyed most of their LM documentation, but copies of the blueprints for the Saturn V exist on microfilm.

Four mission-worthy Lunar Roving Vehicles (LRV) were built by Boeing. Three of them were carried to the Moon on Apollos 15, 16, and 17, used by the astronauts for transportation once on the Moon, and left there. After Apollo 18 was canceled, the other LRV was used for spare parts for the Apollos 15 to 17 missions. The 221-page operation manual for the LRV contains some detailed drawings, although not the blueprints.

NASA technology compared to USSR

Bart Sibrel cites the relative level of the United States and USSR space technology as evidence that the Moon landings could not have happened. For much of the early stages of the Space Race, the USSR was ahead of the United States, yet in the end, the USSR was never able to fly a crewed spacecraft to the Moon, let alone land one on the surface. It is argued that, because the USSR was unable to do this, the United States should have also been unable to develop the technology to do so.

For example, he claims that, during the Apollo program, the USSR had five times more crewed hours in space than the United States, and notes that the USSR was the first to achieve many of the early milestones in space: the first artificial satellite in orbit (October 1957, Sputnik 1); the first living creature in orbit (a dog named Laika, November 1957, Sputnik 2); the first man in space and in orbit ( Yuri Gagarin, April 1961, Vostok 1); the first woman in space ( Valentina Tereshkova, June 1963, Vostok 6); and the first spacewalk ( Alexei Leonov in March 1965, Voskhod 2).

However, most of the Soviet gains listed above were matched by the United States within a year, and sometimes within weeks. In 1965, the United States started to achieve many firsts (such as the first successful space rendezvous), which were important steps in a mission to the Moon. Furthermore, NASA and others say that these gains by the Soviets are not as impressive as they seem; that a number of these firsts were mere stunts that did not advance the technology greatly, or at all, e.g., the first woman in space. In fact, by the time of the launch of the first crewed Earth-orbiting Apollo flight ( Apollo 7), the USSR had made only nine spaceflights (seven with one cosmonaut, one with two, one with three) compared to 16 by the United States. In terms of spacecraft hours, the USSR had 460 hours of spaceflight; the United States had 1,024 hours. In terms of astronaut/cosmonaut time, the USSR had 534 hours of crewed spaceflight whereas the United States had 1,992 hours. By the time of Apollo 11, the United States had a lead much wider than that. (See List of human spaceflights, 1961-1970, and refer to individual flights for the length of time.)

Moreover, the USSR did not develop a successful rocket capable of a crewed lunar mission until the 1980s - their N1 rocket failed on all four launch attempts between 1969 and 1972. The Soviet LK lunar lander was tested in uncrewed low-Earth-orbit flights three times in 1970 and 1971.

Technology used by NASA

The digital technology on Earth during the time of the Moon landings was just in its infancy. The astronauts had relied on computers to aid in the Moon missions. The Apollo Guidance Computer was on the Lunar Module and the command and service module. Many computers at the time were very large despite poor specs. For example, in 1973, one year after the final Moon landing, the Xerox Alto was released. This computer had 96kB of memory. Most personal computers as of 2019, use 50,000-100,000 times this amount of RAM. Conspiracy theorists claim that the computers during the time of the Moon landings would not have been advanced enough to allow for human space travel to the Moon and back; they similarly claim that other contemporary technology (radio transmission, radar, and other instrumentation) was likewise insufficient for the task.

Deaths of NASA personnel

In a televised program about the Moon-landing hoax allegations, Fox Entertainment Group listed the deaths of ten astronauts and two civilians related to the crewed spaceflight program as part of an alleged cover-up.

Theodore Freeman (killed ejecting from a T-38 which had suffered a bird strike, October 1964)

Elliot See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 crash in bad weather, February 1966)

Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee (killed in a fire during the "plugs-out test" preceding Apollo 1, January 1967)

Edward "Ed" Givens (killed in a car accident, June 1967)

Clifton "C. C." Williams (killed ejecting from a T-38, October 1967)

Michael J. "Mike" Adams (died in an X-15 crash, November 1967. Adams was the only pilot killed during the X-15 flight test program. He was a test pilot, not a NASA astronaut, but had flown the X-15 above 80 kilometres or 50 miles)

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. (killed in an F-104 crash, December 1967, shortly after being selected as a pilot with the United States Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program, which was canceled in 1969)

Thomas Ronald Baron (North American Aviation employee. Baron died in an automobile collision with a train, April 27, 1967, six days after testifying before Rep. Olin E. Teague's House Subcommittee on NASA Oversight hearings held following the Apollo 1 fire, after which he was fired)

Two of the above, X-15 pilot Mike Adams and MOL pilot Robert Lawrence, had no connection with the civilian crewed space program that oversaw the Apollo missions. Baron was a quality control inspector who wrote a report critical of the Apollo program and was an outspoken critic of NASA's safety record after the Apollo 1 fire. Baron and his family were killed as their car was struck by a train at a train crossing. The deaths were an accident. All of the deaths occurred at least 20 months before Apollo 11 and subsequent flights.

As of September 2021, four of the twelve Apollo astronauts who landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 are still alive, including Buzz Aldrin. Also, six of the twelve Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon without landing between 1968 and 1972 are still alive.

The number of deaths within the American astronaut corps during the run-up to Apollo and during the Apollo missions is similar to the number of deaths incurred by the Soviets. During the period 1961 to 1972, at least eight Soviet serving and former cosmonauts died:

Additionally, the overall chief of their crewed-spaceflight program, Sergei Korolev, died while undergoing surgery in January 1966.

NASA response

In June 1977, NASA issued a fact sheet responding to recent claims that the Apollo Moon landings had been hoaxed. The fact sheet is particularly blunt and regards the idea of faking the Moon landings to be preposterous and outlandish. NASA refers to the rocks and particles collected from the Moon as being evidence of the program's legitimacy, as they claim that these rocks could not have been formed under conditions on Earth. NASA also notes that all of the operations and phases of the Apollo program were closely followed and under the scrutiny of the news media, from liftoff to splashdown. NASA responds to Bill Kaysing's book, We Never Went to the Moon, by identifying one of his claims of fraud regarding the lack of a crater left on the Moon's surface by the landing of the lunar module, and refuting it with facts about the soil and cohesive nature of the surface of the Moon.

The fact sheet was reissued on February 14, 2001, the day before Fox television's broadcast of Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? The documentary reinvigorated the public's interest in conspiracy theories and the possibility that the Moon landings were faked, which has provoked NASA to once again defend its name.

Alleged Stanley Kubrick involvement

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick is accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollos 11 and 12, presumably because he had just directed 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is partly set on the Moon and featured advanced special effects. It has been claimed that when 2001 was in post-production in early 1968, NASA secretly approached Kubrick to direct the first three Moon landings. The launch and splashdown would be real but the spacecraft would stay in Earth orbit and fake footage broadcast as "live from the Moon." No evidence was offered for this theory, which overlooks many facts. For example, 2001 was released before the first Apollo landing and Kubrick's depiction of the Moon's surface differs greatly from its appearance in the Apollo footage. The movement of characters on the Moon in 2001 differs from that of the filmed movement of Apollo astronauts, and does not resemble an environment with 1/6 the gravity of Earth. Several scenes in 2001 show dust billowing as spacecraft landed, something that would not happen in the vacuum environment of the Moon. Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, both of whom had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him on 2001. Kubrick also used some 50 mm f/0.7 lenses that were left over from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA. However, Kubrick only got this lens for Barry Lyndon (1975). The lens was originally a still photo lens and needed changes to be used for motion filming.

The mockumentary based on this idea, Dark Side of the Moon, could have fueled the conspiracy theory. This French mockumentary, directed by William Karel, was originally aired on Arte channel in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. It parodies conspiracy theories with faked interviews, stories of assassinations of Stanley Kubrick's assistants by the CIA, and a variety of conspicuous mistakes, puns, and references to old movie characters, inserted through the film as clues for the viewer. Nevertheless, Opération Lune is still taken at face value by some conspiracy believers.

An article titled "Stanley Kubrick and the Moon Hoax" appeared on Usenet in 1995, in the newsgroup "alt.humor.best-of-usenet". One passage - on how Kubrick was supposedly coerced into the conspiracy - reads:

NASA further leveraged their position by threatening to publicly reveal the heavy involvement of Mr. Kubrick's younger brother, Raul, with the American Communist Party. This would have been an intolerable embarrassment to Mr. Kubrick, especially since the release of Dr. Strangelove.

Kubrick had no such brother - the article was a spoof, complete with a giveaway sentence describing Kubrick shooting the moonwalk "on location" on the Moon. Nevertheless, the claim was taken up in earnest; Clyde Lewis used it almost word-for-word, whereas Jay Weidner gave the brother a more senior status within the party:

No one knows how the powers-that-be convinced Kubrick to direct the Apollo landings. Maybe they had compromised Kubrick in some way. The fact that his brother, Raul Kubrick, was the head of the American Communist Party may have been one of the avenues pursued by the government to get Stanley to cooperate.

In July 2009, Weidner posted on his webpage "Secrets of the Shining", where he states that Kubrick's The Shining (1980) is a veiled confession of his role in the scam project. This thesis was the subject of refutation in an article published on Seeker nearly half a year later.

The 2015 movie Moonwalkers is a fictional account of a CIA agent's claim of Kubrick's involvement.

In December 2015, a video surfaced which allegedly shows Kubrick being interviewed shortly before his 1999 death; the video purportedly shows the director confessing to T. Patrick Murray that the Apollo Moon landings had been faked. Research quickly found, however, that the video was a hoax.

Academic work

In 2002, NASA granted US$15,000 to James Oberg for a commission to write a point-by-point rebuttal of the hoax claims. However, NASA canceled the commission later that year, after complaints that the book would dignify the accusations. Oberg said that he meant to finish the book. In November 2002, Peter Jennings said "NASA is going to spend a few thousand dollars trying to prove to some people that the United States did indeed land men on the Moon," and "NASA had been so rattled, [they] hired [somebody] to write a book refuting the conspiracy theorists." Oberg says that belief in the hoax theories is not the fault of the conspiracists, but rather that of teachers and people (including NASA) who should provide information to the public.

In 2004, Martin Hendry and Ken Skeldon of the University of Glasgow were awarded a grant by the UK-based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council to investigate Moon landing conspiracy theories. In November 2004, they gave a lecture at the Glasgow Science Centre where the top ten claims by conspiracists were individually addressed and refuted.

An episode of MythBusters in August 2008 was dedicated to the Moon landings. The MythBusters crew tested many of the conspiracists' claims. Some of the testings were done in a NASA training facility. All of the conspiracists' claims examined on the show were labeled as having been "Busted", meaning that the conspiracists' claims were not true.

Third-party evidence of Moon landings

Imaging the landing sites

Moon-landing conspiracists claim that observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope should be able to photograph the landing sites. This implies that the world's major observatories (as well as the Hubble Program) are complicit in the hoax by refusing to take photos of the landing sites. Photos of the Moon have been taken by Hubble, including at least two Apollo landing sites, but the Hubble resolution limits viewing of lunar objects to sizes no smaller than 55-69 m (60-75 yd), which is insufficient resolution to see any landing site features.

In April 2001, Leonard David published an article on space.com, which showed a photo taken by the Clementine mission showing a diffuse dark spot at the site NASA says is the Apollo 15 lander. The evidence was noticed by Misha Kreslavsky, of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and Yuri Shkuratov of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine. The European Space Agency's SMART-1 uncrewed probe sent back photos of the landing sites, according to Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program. "Given SMART-1's initial high orbit, however, it may prove difficult to see artifacts," said Foing in an interview on space.com.

In 2002, Alex R. Blackwell of the University of Hawaii pointed out that some photos taken by Apollo astronauts while in orbit around the Moon show the landing sites.

The Daily Telegraph published a story in 2002 saying that European astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) would use it to view the landing sites. According to the article, Dr. Richard West said that his team would take "a high-resolution image of one of the Apollo landing sites." Marcus Allen, a conspiracist, answered that no photos of hardware on the Moon would convince him that human landings had happened. The telescope was used to image the Moon and provided a resolution of 130 meters (430 ft), which was not good enough to resolve the 4.2 meters (14 ft) wide lunar landers or their long shadows.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched their SELENE Moon orbiter on September 14, 2007 ( JST), from Tanegashima Space Center. SELENE orbited the Moon at about 100 km (62 miles) altitude. In May 2008, JAXA reported detecting the "halo" generated by the Apollo 15 Lunar Module engine exhaust from a Terrain Camera image. A three-dimensional reconstructed photo also matched the terrain of an Apollo 15 photo taken from the surface.

On July 17, 2009, NASA released low-resolution engineering test photos of the Apollo 11, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 landing sites that have been photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as part of the process of starting its primary mission. The photos show the descent stage of the landers from each mission on the Moon's surface. The photo of the Apollo 14 landing site also shows tracks made by an astronaut between a science experiment (ALSEP) and the lander. Photos of the Apollo 12 landing site were released by NASA on September 3, 2009. The Intrepid lander descent stage, experiment package ( ALSEP), Surveyor 3 spacecraft, and astronaut footpaths are all visible. While the LRO images have been enjoyed by the scientific community as a whole, they have not done anything to convince conspiracists that the landings happened.

On September 1, 2009, India's lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 took photos of the Apollo 15 landing site and tracks of the lunar rovers. The Indian Space Research Organisation launched their uncrewed lunar probe on September 8, 2008 (IST), from Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The photos were taken by a hyperspectral camera fitted as part of the mission's image payload.

China's second lunar probe, Chang'e 2, which was launched in 2010, can photograph the lunar surface with a resolution of up to 7 m (23 ft). It spotted traces of the Apollo landings.

The Apollo program collected 380 kg (838 lb) of Moon rocks during the six crewed missions. Analyses by scientists worldwide all agree that these rocks came from the Moon - no published accounts in peer-reviewed scientific journals exist that dispute this claim. The Apollo samples are easily distinguishable from both meteorites and Earth rocks in that they show a lack of hydrous alteration products, they show evidence of having undergone impact events on an airless body, and they have unique geochemical traits. Furthermore, most are more than 200 million years older than the oldest Earth rocks. The Moon rocks also share the same traits as Soviet samples.

Conspiracists argue that Marshall Space Flight Center Director Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica in 1967 (about two years before the Apollo 11 launch) was to gather lunar meteorites to be used as fake Moon rocks. Because von Braun was a former SS officer (though one who had been detained by the Gestapo), the documentary film Did We Go? suggests that he could have been pressured to agree to the conspiracy to protect himself from recriminations over his past. NASA said that von Braun's mission was "to look into environmental and logistic factors that might relate to the planning of future space missions, and hardware." NASA continues to send teams to work in Antarctica to mimic the conditions on other planets.

It is now accepted by the scientific community that rocks have been blasted from both the Martian and lunar surface during impact events, and that some of these have landed on the Earth as meteorites. However, the first Antarctic lunar meteorite was found in 1979, and its lunar origin was not recognized until 1982. Furthermore, lunar meteorites are so rare that it is unlikely that they could account for the 380 kg (840 lb) of Moon rocks that NASA gathered between 1969 and 1972. Only about 30 kg (66 lb) of lunar meteorites have been found on Earth thus far, despite private collectors and governmental agencies worldwide searching for more than 20 years.

While the Apollo missions gathered 380 kg (840 lb) of Moon rocks, the Soviet Luna 16, Luna 20 and Luna 24 robots gathered only 326 g (11.5 oz) combined (that is, less than one-thousandth as much). Indeed, current plans for a Martian sample return would only gather about 500 g (18 oz) of soil, and a recently proposed South Pole-Aitken basin robot mission would only gather about 1 kg (2.2 lb) of Moon rock. If NASA had used similar robot technology, then between 300 and 2,000 robot missions would have been needed to collect the current amount of Moon rocks that is held by NASA.

On the makeup of the Moon rocks, Kaysing asked: "Why was there never a mention of gold, silver, diamonds or other precious metals on the moon? Wasn't this a viable consideration? Why was this fact never dicussed [ sic] in the press or by the astronauts?" Geologists realize that gold and silver deposits on Earth are the result of the action of hydrothermal fluids concentrating the precious metals into veins of ore. Since in 1969 water was believed to be absent on the Moon, no geologist discussed finding these on the Moon in any great amount.

Missions tracked by independent parties

Aside from NASA, a number of groups and individuals tracked the Apollo missions as they happened. On later missions, NASA released information to the public explaining where and when the spacecraft could be sighted. Their flight paths were tracked using radar and they were sighted and photographed using telescopes. Also, radio transmissions between the astronauts on the surface and in orbit were independently recorded.

Retroreflectors

The presence of retroreflectors (mirrors used as targets for Earth-based tracking lasers) from the Laser Ranging Retroreflector Experiment (LRRR) is evidence that there were landings. Lick Observatory attempted to detect from Apollo 11's retroreflector while Armstrong and Aldrin were still on the Moon but did not succeed until August 1, 1969. The Apollo 14 astronauts deployed a retroreflector on February 5, 1971, and McDonald Observatory detected it the same day. The Apollo 15 retroreflector was deployed on July 31, 1971, and was detected by McDonald Observatory within a few days. Smaller retroreflectors were also put on the Moon by the Russians; they were attached to the uncrewed lunar rovers Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.

Public opinion

In a 1994 poll by The Washington Post, 9% of the respondents said that it was possible that astronauts did not go to the Moon and another 5% were unsure. A 1999 Gallup Poll found that 6% of the Americans surveyed doubted that the Moon landings happened and that 5% of those surveyed had no opinion, which roughly matches the findings of a similar 1995 Time/CNN poll. Officials of the Fox network said that such skepticism rose to about 20% after the February 2001 airing of their network's television special, Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, seen by about 15 million viewers. This Fox special is seen as having promoted the hoax claims.

A 2000 poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation ( ФОМ) in Russia found that 28% of those surveyed did not believe that American astronauts landed on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups. In 2009, a poll held by the United Kingdom's Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of those surveyed did not believe that men landed on the Moon. Another poll gives that 25% of 18- to 25-year-olds surveyed were unsure that the landings happened.

There are subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. By 1977 the Hare Krishna magazine Back to Godhead called the landings a hoax, claiming that, since the Sun is 150 million km (93 million mi) away, and "according to Hindu mythology the Moon is 800,000 miles [1,300,000 km] farther away than that", the Moon would be nearly 151 million km (94 million mi) away; to travel that span in 91 hours would require a speed of more than a million miles per hour, "a patently impossible feat even by the scientists' calculations."

James Oberg of ABC News said that the conspiracy theory is taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent. A poll conducted in the 1970s by the United States Information Agency in several countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa found that most respondents were unaware of the Moon landings, many of the others dismissed them as propaganda or science fiction, and many thought that it had been the Russians that landed on the Moon.

In 2019, Ipsos conducted a study for C-Span to assess the level of belief that the 1969 Moon landing was faked. Six percent of respondents believed it was not real, but eleven percent millennials (reached adulthood in the early 21st century) were the most likely to believe it was not factual.

This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

References

Aaronovitch, David (2010) [Originally published 2009 in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape]. Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (1st American ed.). New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN 978-1-59448-895-5.

Brian, William L. (1982). Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, The NASA-Military Cover-Up (1st ed.). Portland, OR: Future Science Research Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-941292-00-9.

Dick, Steven J.; Launius, Roger D., eds. (2007). Societal Impact of Spaceflight (PDF). Washington, D.C.: NASA. ISBN 978-0-16-080190-7. NASA SP-2007-4801. Part 2 available here (PDF).

Harrison, Guy P. (2012). 50 popular beliefs that people think are true. Foreword by Phil Plait. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-61614-495-1.

Heiken, Grant H.; Vaniman, David T.; French, Bevan M. (1991). Lunar Sourcebook: A User's Guide to the Moon. Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-33444-6.

Kaysing, Bill (2002) [First published 1976]. We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Randy Reid credited as co-author in 1976 editions. Pomeroy, WA: Health Research Books. OCLC 52390067.

Kranz, Gene (2000). Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-0079-9.

Lheureux, Philippe (2000). Lumières sur la Lune [Lights on the Moon] (in French). Chatou: Éditions Carnot. ISBN 978-2-912-36249-0.

McAdams, John C. (2011). JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books. ISBN 978-1-59797-489-9.

Мухин, Юрий Игнатьевич (2005). Антиаполлон: Лунная афера США [Anti-Apollo: Lunar Scam of the USA] (in Russian). Moscow: Eksmo. ISBN 978-5-699-08657-3.

Попов, Александр Иванович (2009). Американцы на Луне: великий прорыв или космическая афера? [Americans on the Moon: The Great Breakthrough or Space Scam?] (in Russian). Moscow: Veche. ISBN 978-5-9533-3315-3.

René, Ralph (1994). Lucas, Stu (ed.). NASA Mooned America!. Drawings by Chris Wolfer. Passaic, NJ: René. OCLC 36317224.

Scheaffer, Robert (2011). Psychic Vibrations: Skeptical Giggles from The Skeptical Inquirer. Illustrations by Rob Pudim. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace. ISBN 978-1-4636-0157-7. Reprinted from the Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1977.

Scott, David; Leonov, Alexei; Toomey, Christine (2004). Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race. Foreword by Neil Armstrong; introduction by Tom Hanks (1st U.S. ed.). New York: Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN 0-312-30865-5.

Shepard, Alan B.; Slayton, Donald K. (1994). Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon. With Jay Barbree and Howard Benedict; introduction by Neil Armstrong. Atlanta: Turner Publishing. ISBN 978-1-878685-54-4.

副島, 隆彦 (2004). 人類の月面着陸は無かったろう論 [Apollo 11 Has Never Been to the Moon] (in Japanese). Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. ISBN 978-4-198-61874-2.

Wisnewski, Gerhard (2007) [Originally published 2005 in German under the title Lügen im Weltraum, Von der Mondlandung zur Weltherrschaft, Knaur Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich]. One Small Step?: The Great Moon Hoax and the Race to Dominate Earth from Space. English translation by Johanna Collis. Forrest Row: Clairview Books. ISBN 978-1-905570-12-6.

Further reading

Achenbach, Joel (March 2015). "The Age of Disbelief". National Geographic. 227 (3): 30-47. Author examines climate change, evolution, the Moon landing, vaccinations, and genetically modified food

Morrison, David (November 2009). "Moon Hoax Resolved: New Lunar Orbiter Images Show Moon Landers, Astronaut's Tracks". Skeptical Inquirer. 33 (6): 5-6.

Plait, Philip (2002). "17". Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax". John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0471409766.

Steven-Boniecki, Dwight (2010). Live TV from the Moon. Burlington, Ontario: Apogee Books. ISBN 978-1-926592-16-9.

Talcott, Richard (November 2010). "Astronomy Mythbusters". . 38 (11): 56-57. Author examines ten common astronomy myths. See: Myth #10: NASA faked the Moon landings.

External links

Television specials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Moon landing conspiracy theories - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (1969-1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/10/12/fact-check-no-buzz-aldrin-did-not-say-moon-landing-fake-apollo-11/8236597001/

If there was only 20 seconds of fuel left, how would they have gotten back?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The claim: Video shows Buzz Aldrin admitting the moon landing didn't happen

An Instagram post claims to show astronaut Buzz Aldrin admitting that the famous 1969 moon landing "didn't happen."

The Oct. 4 post features a video showing an audience member asking Aldrin, who is seated on a stage, what the "scariest moment" of his journey to the moon was. He appears to respond by saying, "It didn't happen. It could have been scary."

"Buzz Aldrin yet again admitting the moon landing 'didn't happen,'" reads the post's caption. "How many times does he have to say it before the sheep believe him?"

The post was liked more than 500 times in a week.

But the claim is false.

A review of Aldrin's full comments reveals he was saying that there was no "scariest moment" during the mission, not that the moon landing "didn't happen." The full clip shows him talking extensively about the details of the mission.

Follow us on Facebook! Like our page to get updates throughout the day on our latest debunks

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the claim for comment.

The post takes clip of Aldrin out of context

The clip featured in the Instagram post was taken from a Q&A Aldrin did at the Oxford Union in March 2015.

The Union describes itself as "the world's foremost debating society," but there's no debating whether the moon landing happened. NASA, museums, newspapers and libraries house a trove of information about the mission. This includes an array of documents, photos, videos and rock samples.

The full video of the event, which can be found on YouTube, shows that while Aldrin initially said "it didn't happen" in response to the question about the "scariest moment," he was not referring to the mission itself. Upon further prompting, he recounts how at one point while on the moon he discovered a broken circuit breaker on the floor of the lunar module. The Instagram video cuts off these remarks.

"I looked down and below this sort of dust there was something that didn't look like it belonged there," says Aldrin. "There was a circuit breaker, a broken circuit breaker."

Fact check: Viral image shows coal mining machine, not lithium mining

Aldrin said to fix the problem, he used a pen to push the circuit breaker in, which sent electrical power to the ascent engine to lift the spacecraft back to Earth.

USA TODAY has previously debunked claims that video footage, a lunar footprint and WikiLeaks proved the moon landing to be a hoax.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that a video shows Aldrin admitting the moon landing didn't happen. In the full video, Aldrin tells stories about his experiences on the moon. There is widespread documentation that the moon landing happened.

Our fact-check sources:

Buzz Aldrin's website, accessed Oct. 7, Q&A AT THE OXFORD UNION

History, Dec. 3, 2019, When Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong Were Nearly Stranded on the Moon

History, Jan. 30, 2019, 1969 Moon Landing

PolitiFact, Oct. 6, Aldrin didn't say the moon landing was a hoax

Nixon Library, accessed Oct. 10, Apollo 11: One Giant Leap for Mankind

NASA's Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal, accessed Oct. 10, Mobility and Photography

NASA's Apollo 11 Flight Journal, accessed Oct. 10, Apollo 11 Mission Documents

Oxford Union, June 6, 2015, Buzz Aldrin - Q&A on YouTube

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fact Check: Video shows Aldrin recalling Apollo 11 moment, not saying moon landing was fake

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An Instagram post claims to show astronaut Buzz Aldrin admitting that the famous 1969 moon landing "didn't happen." The Oct. 4 post features a video showing an audience member asking Aldrin, who is seated on a stage, what the "scariest moment" of his journey to the moon was.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-do-we-know-we-went-to-the-moon#gref

# data[].attributes.body
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Moon landing conspiracy theories - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
“Moon hoax” redirects here. Not to be confused with Great Moon Hoax.

# data[].attributes.headline
It could have been a Hollywood-like cinematic production shot

# data[].attributes.subject
It could have been a Hollywood-like cinematic production shot

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/10/12/fact-check-no-buzz-aldrin-did-not-say-moon-landing-fake-apollo-11/8236597001/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The claim: Video shows Buzz Aldrin admitting the moon landing didn't happen

An Instagram post claims to show astronaut Buzz Aldrin admitting that the famous 1969 moon landing "didn't happen."

The Oct. 4 post features a video showing an audience member asking Aldrin, who is seated on a stage, what the "scariest moment" of his journey to the moon was. He appears to respond by saying, "It didn't happen. It could have been scary."

"Buzz Aldrin yet again admitting the moon landing 'didn't happen,'" reads the post's caption. "How many times does he have to say it before the sheep believe him?"

The post was liked more than 500 times in a week.

But the claim is false.

A review of Aldrin's full comments reveals he was saying that there was no "scariest moment" during the mission, not that the moon landing "didn't happen." The full clip shows him talking extensively about the details of the mission.

Follow us on Facebook! Like our page to get updates throughout the day on our latest debunks

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the claim for comment.

The post takes clip of Aldrin out of context

The clip featured in the Instagram post was taken from a Q&A Aldrin did at the Oxford Union in March 2015.

The Union describes itself as "the world's foremost debating society," but there's no debating whether the moon landing happened. NASA, museums, newspapers and libraries house a trove of information about the mission. This includes an array of documents, photos, videos and rock samples.

The full video of the event, which can be found on YouTube, shows that while Aldrin initially said "it didn't happen" in response to the question about the "scariest moment," he was not referring to the mission itself. Upon further prompting, he recounts how at one point while on the moon he discovered a broken circuit breaker on the floor of the lunar module. The Instagram video cuts off these remarks.

"I looked down and below this sort of dust there was something that didn't look like it belonged there," says Aldrin. "There was a circuit breaker, a broken circuit breaker."

Fact check: Viral image shows coal mining machine, not lithium mining

Aldrin said to fix the problem, he used a pen to push the circuit breaker in, which sent electrical power to the ascent engine to lift the spacecraft back to Earth.

USA TODAY has previously debunked claims that video footage, a lunar footprint and WikiLeaks proved the moon landing to be a hoax.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that a video shows Aldrin admitting the moon landing didn't happen. In the full video, Aldrin tells stories about his experiences on the moon. There is widespread documentation that the moon landing happened.

Our fact-check sources:

Buzz Aldrin's website, accessed Oct. 7, Q&A AT THE OXFORD UNION

History, Dec. 3, 2019, When Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong Were Nearly Stranded on the Moon

History, Jan. 30, 2019, 1969 Moon Landing

PolitiFact, Oct. 6, Aldrin didn't say the moon landing was a hoax

Nixon Library, accessed Oct. 10, Apollo 11: One Giant Leap for Mankind

NASA's Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal, accessed Oct. 10, Mobility and Photography

NASA's Apollo 11 Flight Journal, accessed Oct. 10, Apollo 11 Mission Documents

Oxford Union, June 6, 2015, Buzz Aldrin - Q&A on YouTube

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fact Check: Video shows Aldrin recalling Apollo 11 moment, not saying moon landing was fake

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An Instagram post claims to show astronaut Buzz Aldrin admitting that the famous 1969 moon landing "didn't happen." The Oct. 4 post features a video showing an audience member asking Aldrin, who is seated on a stage, what the "scariest moment" of his journey to the moon was.

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Bill Kaysing claims that the Apollo landing is fake

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Bill Kaysing claims that the Apollo landing is fake

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/10/one-giant-lie-why-so-many-people-still-think-the-moon-landings-were-faked

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It took 400,000 Nasa employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 - but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His name was Bill Kaysing.

It began as "a hunch, an intuition", before turning into "a true conviction" - that the US lacked the technical prowess to make it to the moon (or, at least, to the moon and back). Kaysing had actually contributed to the US space programme, albeit tenuously: between 1956 and 1963, he was an employee of Rocketdyne, a company that helped to design the Saturn V rocket engines. In 1976, he self-published a pamphlet called We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, which sought evidence for his conviction by means of grainy photocopies and ludicrous theories. Yet somehow he established a few perennials that are kept alive to this day in Hollywood movies and Fox News documentaries, Reddit forums and YouTube channels.

Despite the extraordinary volume of evidence (including 382kg of moon rock collected across six missions; corroboration from Russia, Japan and China; and images from the Nasa Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the tracks made by the astronauts in the moondust), belief in the moon-hoax conspiracy has blossomed since 1969. Among 9/11 truthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers, flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers and Sandy Hook conspiracists, the idea that the moon landings were faked isn't even a source of anger any more - it is just a given fact.

The podcast kingpin Joe Rogan is among the doubters. So too is the YouTuber Shane Dawson. A sociology professor in New Jersey was exposed last year for telling his students the landings were fake. While Kaysing relied on photocopied samizdat to alert the world, now conspiracists have the subreddit r/moonhoax to document how Nasa was "so lazy" it used the same moon rover for Apollo 15, 16 and 17; or how "they have been trolling us for years"; or to bring up the fact there is "one thing I can't get my head around ..."

"The reality is, the internet has made it possible for people to say whatever the hell they like to a broader number of people than ever before," sighs Roger Launius, a former chief historian of Nasa. "And the truth is, Americans love conspiracy theories. Every time something big happens, somebody has a counter-explanation."

Bill Kaysing, the man who started the moon-hoax conspiracy. Photograph: www.billkaysing.com

It turns out British people love conspiracy theories, too. Last year, the daytime TV show This Morning welcomed a guest who argued that no one could have walked on the moon as the moon is made of light. Martin Kenny claimed: "In the past, you saw the moon landings and there was no way to check any of it. Now, in the age of technology, a lot of young people are now investigating for themselves." A recent YouGov poll found that one in six British people agreed with the statement: "The moon landings were staged." Four per cent believed the hoax theory was "definitely true", 12% that it was "probably true", with a further 9% registering as don't knows. Moon hoaxism was more prevalent among the young: 21 % of 24- to 35-year-olds agreed that the moon landings were staged, compared with 13% of over-55s.

Kaysing's original queries are fuelling this. One is the fact that no stars are visible in the pictures; another is the lack of a blast crater under the landing module; a third is to do with the way the shadows fall. People who know what they are talking about have wasted hours explaining such "anomalies" (they are to do with, respectively, camera-exposure times, the way thrust works in a vacuum and the reflective qualities of moondust). Yet until his death in 2005, Kaysing maintained that the whole thing was a fraud, filmed in a TV studio. "It's well documented that Nasa was often badly managed and had poor quality control," he told Wired in 1994. "But as of 1969, we could suddenly perform manned flight upon manned flight? With complete success? It's just against all statistical odds."

He was right about that at least. When the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 in October 1957 (followed one month later by Sputnik 2, containing Laika the dog), the US space programme was all but non-existent. Nasa was founded in 1958 and managed to launch Alan Shepard into space in May 1961 - but when John F Kennedy announced that the US "should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth", it seemed a stretch. By the mid-60s, Nasa was consuming more than 4% of the US federal budget, but while the Soviets were achieving more firsts - the first woman in space (1963), the first extra-vehicular activity, ie spacewalk (1965) - the Americans experienced various setbacks, including a launchpad fire that killed all three Apollo 1 astronauts.

If you have ever been to the Science Museum in London, you will know that the lunar module was basically made of tinfoil. Apollo 8 had orbited the moon in 1968, but, as Armstrong remarked, correcting course and landing on the moon was "far and away the most complex part of the flight". He rated walking around on the surface one out of 10 for difficulty (despite the problems he had with the TV cable wrapping around his feet), "but I thought the lunar descent was probably a 13".

That is until you compare it with the difficulty of maintaining a lie to the entire world for five decades without a single slip from any Nasa employee. You would also have to imagine that 2019-era special effects were available to Nasa in 1969 and not one of the 600 million TV viewers noticed anything amiss. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a decent indication of what Hollywood special effects could do at the time - and it's extremely shonky. It genuinely was simpler to film on location.

If we pass over "World war two bomber found on moon" - a Sunday Sport front page from 1988 - the moon-hoax theory entered the modern era in 2001, when Fox News broadcast a documentary called Did We Land on the Moon? Hosted by the X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi, it repackaged Kaysing's arguments for a new audience. Launius, who was working at Nasa at the time, recalls much banging of heads against consoles. "For many years, we refused to respond to this stuff. It wasn't worth giving it a hearing. But when Fox News aired that so-called documentary - stating unequivocally 'We haven't landed on the moon' - it really raised the level. We began to receive all kinds of questions."

Most of the calls came not from conspiracists, but from parents and teachers. "People were saying: 'My kid saw this, how do I respond?' So, with some trepidation, Nasa put up a webpage and sent out some materials to teachers."

A particular bugbear in the Fox News documentary was a poll claiming that 20% of Americans believed the moon landing was faked. Launius says that polls tend to put the figure at between 4% and 5%, but it's easy to phrase poll questions to achieve a more eye-catching result. "Every time there's a hearing in a serious periodical - even an offhand comment in a movie - it just seeds this stuff." He cites a scene in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) in which a schoolteacher informs Matthew McConaughey's character that the moon landings were hoaxed in order to win the propaganda war against the Soviet Union. "It's a throwaway in the film. But it really did churn up a big response."

Oliver Morton, the author of The Moon: A History for the Future, believes the persistence of the moon hoax isn't surprising. Given an implausible event for which there is lots of evidence (Apollo 11) and a plausible event for which there is zero evidence (the moon hoax), some people will opt for the latter. "The point of Apollo was to show how powerful the American government was in terms of actually doing things," he says. "The point of moon-hoax theory is to show how powerful the American government was in terms of making people believe things that weren't true." But the hoax narrative was only really possible as Apollo never led anywhere - there were no further missions after 1972. "As the American mind turns back to paranoia in the 1970s, it becomes more pleasing to believe in this," he says.

Bond's to blame ... Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever. Photograph: Allstar/UNITED ARTISTS

James Bond has to take a small share of the blame. In Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Sean Connery busts into a Nasa facility by way of a Las Vegas casino. A chase ensues across a film set dressed up to look like the moon, complete with earthbound astronauts. But here it's more like a visual joke, a way of justifying a moon buggy chase across the Nevada desert. By the time of Peter Hyams' Kaysingian conspiracy thriller Capricorn One (1978), the idea that the government was fooling everyone was no laughing matter. Here it's about a Mars mission that goes wrong. The authorities opt to fake it and kill the astronauts (one of whom is played by OJ Simpson) to prevent them revealing the truth. In the post-Watergate era, the idea that the government could lie on this scale had become much more plausible.

Apollo marked a turning point between the optimism of the 60s and the disappointments of the 70s. "We can put a man on the moon so why can't we do X?" became a common refrain. As Morton says: "Yes, the government can set itself an extraordinary goal and go on to achieve it, but that doesn't mean it can win the war in Vietnam, or clean up the inner cities, or cure cancer or any of the things that Americans might have actually wanted more. The idea that the government isn't really powerful, it just pretends it is - you can see how it feeds into the moon hoax."

Moon-hoax theories tend to be about what didn't happen rather than what did. Conspiracists are divided on whether the earlier Apollo, Mercury, Gemini and Atlas missions were also fakes, whether Laika or Yuri Gagarin ever made it into space, and what role Kubrick played. But while the first generation of lunar conspiracists were motivated by anger, these days it's more likely to be boredom. The line between conspiracy and entertainment is far more blurry.

Still, while irritating for those involved - Buzz Aldrin punched moon conspiracist Bart Sibrel in 2002 - in one sense the conspiracy idea is harmless, at least compared with misinformation about vaccinations or mass murders. Morton notes that it is one of the few conspiracy theories that isn't tainted by antisemitism. Nor does it seem to be one to which Donald Trump, the ultimate product of news-as-entertainment, subscribes. The dynamics of the modern internet have clearly not helped: look up Apollo videos on YouTube and before long moon-hoax documentaries start lining up in the autoplay queue. But there is little evidence that Russian disinformation agents have spread moon conspiracies as they have anti-vaxxing propaganda, for example. Although, if you think about it, it would make perfect sense for them to do so: a neat way of restoring Russian prestige while establishing continuity between the cold war and the information wars.

Then again, the USSR had the means to expose the Americans at the time; it was listening in. "We were there at Soviet military base 32103," the Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov recently recalled. "I swear to God we sat there with our fingers crossed. We hoped the guys would make it. We wanted this to happen. We knew those who were on board and they knew us, too."

The growing strength of the hoax theory is "one of the things that happens as time recedes and these events are lost", laments Launius. "We've seen it with the second world war and the Holocaust. A lot of the witnesses are passing from the scene and it's easy for people to deny that it took place. Who is left to counteract things that are untrue? Mythologies develop and become the dominant theme."

Perhaps the hardest thing to believe in is the idea that humans might have accomplished something transcendent - something that even brought out the best in Nixon. "Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man's world," he said in his telephone call to Aldrin and Armstrong on the moon. "And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth."

We have less faith in ourselves these days. Most moon conspiracists treat the whole thing as a joke, a rabbit hole to go down from time to time. Perhaps if Nasa returns to the moon - possibly as early as 2024, depending on Trump's whims - it will be replaced in time by Mars conspiracies.

Still, you could see the persistence of the moon conspiracy as a compliment to the Apollo scientists. "In a way, the moon hoaxers are taking the Apollo missions far more seriously than most people do," says Morton. "It's a sign that they really care. They think that Apollo really mattered." The truth is that the moon landings didn't really change life on Earth. Not yet anyway.

This article was amended on 10 and 11 July 2019. An earlier version said that Nasa launched Alan Shepard into orbit in May 1961. However, that flight was suborbital. In addition, Nasa was consuming more than 4% of the US federal budget in the 1960s, not more than 4% of the country's GDP as an earlier version said. This has been corrected.

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One giant ... lie? Why so many people still think the moon landings were faked

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It took 400,000 Nasa employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 - but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His name was Bill Kaysing.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Kaysing

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https://askanearthspacescientist.asu.edu/top-question/moon-landing

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The Apollo 11 mission was an important event for the United States and the world. Astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the lunar module and onto the surface of the moon. They took the first steps of any woman or man on this surface.

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This cite claims that the American flag wasn’t moving, through in the video Neil Armstrong took, the flag was clearly blowing by “Wind”

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This cite claims that the American flag wasn’t moving, through in the video Neil Armstrong took, the flag was clearly blowing by “Wind”

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https://www.popsci.com/proof-moon-landing-not-fake/

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Boston Celtics point guard Kyrie Irving recently closed the book on his dalliance with promoting flat-Earthism ( Earth is still round, by the way!) but perhaps he unwittingly started a new and unwelcome trend. On The Ringer's "Winging It" podcast, Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry, apropos of nothing, seemingly came out as a moon landing truther, wantonly asking his fellow basketball players around 46:46 mark, "We ever been to the moon?" Asked if he really didn't think humans landed on the moon, the two-time MVP doubled down and made his position clear.

It's totally possible Curry and co. were just goofing off, but it sure doesn't sound like he and the others were tongue-in-cheek. And if he was joking, the flames are already stoked-more people are bound to come out of the woodwork and say that they, too, believe the moon landings were faked. Anyone who's ever spent time on the internet should know that these gentlemen are far from alone in questioning the veracity of human spaceflight.

But the evidence that we went to the moon exists, and it's not all that complicated to understand. Here are 7 ways to prove humans have been to the moon and back.

We Have a Piece of the Moon Here to Study

Perhaps the most critical piece of evidence that tells us humans have been to the moon and back is the fact that we brought back samples of the moon to Earth, and they are very clearly unlike what we can find on our own planet. Throughout six different Apollo missions, NASA astronauts brought back about 842 pounds of moon rocks for scientists to study-the oldest of which are 4.5 billion years old, or 200 million years older than Earth's oldest rocks. Analyses and experiments have definitely shown over and over that these aren't geological materials you can just collect on the fly from Earth. They're almost completely void of volatiles (chemical elements and compounds with low boiling points found in terrestrial crust and atmosphere, like nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water, etc.), as well as hydrated materials. These rocks simply do not exist on the modern-day Earth.

You Can See The Landing Sites for Yourself

Even today, you can still spot the landing sites for the Apollo missions on the surface of the moon. Images collected by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbit (LRO) and published in 2011 sharply illustrate the touchdown points of the Apollo 12, 14, and 17 lunar landers as astronauts made their way to the ground, as well as the paths taken by those crews as they walked and rode around the surface of the moon. A year later, NASA went on to publish other LRO images of the old Apollo 11 site.

But wait, you say: what if the space agencies just faked those photos? Besides JAXA, plenty of other independent institutions outside of NASA, as well as amateur astronomers from around the world, have reported sightings of the remnants and signs of the past Apollo missions. If you have a pretty powerful telescope and a clear view of the full moon, you may have an opportunity to see the evidence of these missions yourself.

Regolith is Reflective

Moon landing conspiracy theorists love to pore over the photographic evidence collected during Apollo 11 and pinpoint parts of the photos that allegedly debunk the whole landing outright. One of these points is the fact that objects in the lunar module's shadow are illuminated, which means there must have been multiple light sources during the filming, instead of just the sun as we were were told-right?

Not quite. Lunar dust-regolith-is a reflective material, and sunlight bounces off of it like it would a mirror, lighting up any surrounding objects nearby. (You can understand this dynamic in better detail by viewing what graphics card maker NVIDIA did in 2014, when demonstrating the power of their latest products by creating new renderings of the Apollo 11 photographs.)

Somewhat relatedly, the existence of unparallel shadows in these photos has also often been an argument that multiple stage lights were used to film the footage. This is also easy to debunk since you can easily recreate this with an uneven surface on Earth.

The Stars Are Still Around

Another argument in favor of a fake moon landing is that there are no stars depicted in photos of the event. If the moon has no atmosphere, we should be able to see an entire sky lit up by distant stars, right? But that ignores some basic technological constraints behind photographing things on the moon. In such a dark background with objects so brightly lit by the sun, the aperture of the camera needed to be kept small in order to photograph the lander and the astronauts clearly and sharply, and not as blurred objects from the Blair Witch Project or something. This invariably leaves the camera unable to pick up on any faint starlight in the background sky.

Lunar Rovers Have Seen What Astronauts Have Seen

The same landscapes and scenes captured by the Apollo astronauts have also been captured in recent years by the robotic orbiters and rovers we've sent to the lunar surface. Japan's SELENE (Kaguya) orbiter, for instance, has been able to snap up images that, when put together, illustrate the base of the Apennine Mountains also photographed during Apollo 15.

From Apollo 15 NASA

A composite photo reconstructed from images taken by SELENE JAXA

The Flag Wasn't Moving

Perhaps one of the most talked about pieces of evidence to suggest the moon landing was faked has to do with the alleged movement of the flag. Footage of the U.S. flag moving after it was planted has always been cited as evidence that there's wind blowing through the cloth-wind that can't exist on the moon.

In truth, the flag is not flapping. It's disturbed as it's being planted, and those disturbances are causing ripples to move through the cloth-there's no denying that. It's not fluttering in the wind. NASA even has a gif that shows the flag still between two different images.

The flag is still up there-and looks like it's in a gust of wind, thanks to wires placed inside to keep the cloth upright-and it's been still for decades now.

The Retroreflectors Are Still There As Well

Laser ranging retroreflectors (LRRRs) are mirrors that were once used as targets for Earth-based lasers, as a part of NASA's Lunar Laser Ranging Experiments conducted during the Apollo program. (Russia also had a retroreflector experiment program as well.) Basically, you fire a laser at those objects and measures the time it takes for the laser to hit the reflectors and bounce back. The results of the those experiments allowed us to learn that the moon is spiraling away from Earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year; 20 percent of the inner core of the moon is probably liquid; and flesh out some nuances about how gravitational forces work, among other things. The results of those experiments could only be made possible by the installation of those reflectors on the lunar surface.

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7 easy ways you can tell for yourself that the moon landing really happened

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Boston Celtics point guard Kyrie Irving recently closed the book on his dalliance with promoting flat-Earthism ( Earth is still round, by the way!) but perhaps he unwittingly started a new and unwelcome trend.

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https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/apollo-11-moon-landing-conspiracy-theories-endured-debunked/story?id=64339363

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Sure, you could believe what people tell you.

Or you could believe that the moon landing was all a stunt pulled off by famous director Stanley Kubrick, who created technology that helped it look like man was pioneering space, according to some conspiracy theorists, who said it was really filmed in Area 51 in Nevada.

The fact that there were no stars in the background of pictures of the moon landing supports theories, in the minds of some, that it never really happened.

And so does the flag -- it looks like it's flapping in the wind! To some, that was clearly an oversight made by Hollywood producers who forgot there wouldn't be any wind blowing on the lunar surface.

Despite all scientific evidence debunking the aforementioned suggestions, various conspiracy theories about the moon landing have lingered for five decades, even before the dark underbelly of the internet became home to so many similarly false ideas.

NASA has tried its best to tamp down on moon-landing conspiracy theories through the years. The organization's efforts, much like the theories themselves, didn't start immediately after Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969.

"There was basically no prominent belief, or widespread belief ... in the moon landing conspiracy theory until the late 1970s," said Jack Singal, a University of Richmond physics professor who discusses conspiracy theories in his science classes.

Singal pointed to the book "We Never Went to the Moon," which was self-published in 1974 by Bill Kaysing, a former engineer who's since died.

"That was the first kind of salvo in this, and it was very gradual in comparison, again, to other prominent conspiracy theories," Singal said.

Speculation about the moon landing in the late 1970s came at a time when trust in government was starting to dip.

Trust in government was at a peak of 77% in October 1964, according to Pew Research, which has been studying the public's trust in government since 1958.

That high figure was reported a year after President John F. Kennedy's assassination -- itself the subject of several conspiracy theories.

In October 1968, the year before the moon landing, average public trust in government dipped to 62%, and the year after the landing, in December 1970, it decreased further to 54%.

The public's trust decreased steadily until 1980, reaching a then-low of 27%. By comparison, public trust in government as of March 2019 was just 17%.

NASA made an effort to beat back the growing conspiracy theories by releasing a fact sheet in June 1977 titled "Did U.S. Astronauts Really Land on the Moon?" The first line of the release answered it succinctly: "Yes. Astronauts did land on the Moon."

The two-page memo specifically cites Kaysing's book before going on to refute its claims that the Defense Intelligence Agency set up a fake set to stage the landing in Nevada.

"From time to time we are asked the question above as a result of at least one book and recurring articles in various publications based either on its content or individuals' expressions of their opinions. Apart from the fact that millions of people saw the Apollo series on television and heard them on radio in real time, perhaps the lunar material is as irrefutable proof as any that the Moon missions were not 'faked,'" the NASA release states. Lunar material refers to any rocks taken from the moon.

NASA re-issued the same statement in February 2001, showing the longevity of the conspiracy theories.

Sean Potter, a NASA media relations specialist, responded to ABC News' inquiry by running through another list of evidence disputing conspiracy claims.

"When people question or have questions about the Apollo landings, we invite them to examine the evidence for themselves: 842 pounds of astronaut-collected Moon rocks studied by scientists worldwide for decades. You can still bounce Earth-based lasers off the retro-reflector mirrors placed on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the landing sites in 2011. An estimated 400,000-plus people worked on the Moon landings, meaning a lot of eyes were watching this take place from inside the NASA community, and all the Apollo missions were independently tracked by the United States' chief adversary during the Cold War, the Soviet Union, who would not have sent NASA a letter of congratulations if the landings never happened," Potter told ABC News.

"Despite all this evidence, when conspiracy theorists still doubt the authenticity of the Moon landings, they probably also should ask why they question the landings in the first place," Potter said.

Singal said that the overarching conspiracy theory that the moon landing didn't happen "is an atypical one, for the reason that most conspiracy theories provide an explanation for a tragic event or some sort of randomness in the world."

The Sept. 11 attacks and the assassination of JFK are some of the clearest examples of so-called typical conspiracy theory-generating events, Singal said, noting that in those cases, conspiracy theories "provide an alternate explanation for what is a scary and tragic event and they attribute the scary and tragic event not to the perpetrators but to a sort of larger and more shadowy force."

He suggested that as it wasn't a tragedy, true moon landing conspiracy theorists are likely deeper into their theories instead of just passing inquisitors.

"My speculation," Singal said, "is that the moon landing is not a gateway conspiracy theory in the sense that it's probably not the first conspiracy theory that enthusiasts embrace."

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Why the Apollo 11 moon landing conspiracy theories have endured despite being debunked numerous times

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Sure, you could believe what people tell you. Or you could believe that the moon landing was all a stunt pulled off by famous director Stanley Kubrick, who created technology that helped it look like man was pioneering space, according to some conspiracy theorists, who said it was really filmed in Area 51 in Nevada.

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Was the Moon Landing faked? | Neil deGrasse Tyson | Big Questions

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Butser hill (A documentary film maker) claimed that it was fake.

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Butser hill (A documentary film maker) claimed that it was fake.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1a3zdLLzxA

- There were shadows that was from artificial light
- It was all taken in slow motion
- In 1978, there was a film of a moon landing so it could have been easily created again.

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Inside the moon landing conspiracy: Was it real or fake? | 60 Minutes Australia

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Here’s some videos pointing out some good evidence against the fake news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MVEqNM5pbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ultbR7D7W5k Arguments absolutely anhialated:

1: Why was the flag moving? The flag was to mark that America had succeeded. But there’s no air in space, nor wind. So they added a second pole too the top. So that the flag could suspend. Not only that Buzz and Neil both shared the flag making the flag cloth move significantly. Which if you don’t know, in space a moving object never stops unless blocked.

2:Why did Neil and Buzz not die of the radiation curves created by earth?
Simple, firstly, the moon is way way far away. So far out that it avoids the radiation completely. Secondly, the ship was well insulated and cleverly constructed. This allowed both Neil and Buzz to be completely fine.

3: Why are the shadows wrong? If you have ever looked up in the night sky and seen the moon, you see its bright. That’s because the moon material is quite reflective. Which is why you can be bright, whilst still in the shadow.

4:Why are there no stars in the back? This is because the cameras contrast had to be bright so that you could see the astronauts. Because of the adjusted bright contrast, the stars in the background of space were unfocused and unseen. If the contrast was dark, you could see them.

5: What about the C on the rock? Bro go to the original image its not there. Probably photoshopped to be honest. Some goofy person decided to do that.

6: Why are there markings of Neil and Buzz, but not of the moon lander? Dude, they left the moon lander on the moon.

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Was the moon landing faked? Arguments behind popular conspiracy theories

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Logical Fallacy: Chance of A is bigger than chance of A and B happening together

Apples and Oranges Fallacy

Burden of truth fallacy: Just because something isn’t proven false that doesn’t mean that the thing is true (The burden of truth means that the one presenting the claim must also support the evidence)

Causation≠Correlation

Middle Ground Fallacy: a compromise between right and wrong is still wrong

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The Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969 was one of the most astonishing achievements in human history. That day, an estimated 530 million TV viewers watched U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take their first steps on the moon. Afterward, the two men and third crew member Michael Collins flew safely back to Earth and landed in the Pacific Ocean.

Yet just a few years later, some people claimed the "giant leap for mankind" had been faked. Conspiracy theories that the moon landing was actually a hoax that the U.S. government had staged to win the space race with the Soviets began to gain traction in the mid-1970s. Although these claims were false and easily debunked, they have persisted to this day.

Most of the deniers' "proof" is based on perceived anomalies in the images transmitted back to Earth from the moon's lunar surface. "With few exceptions, the same arguments just keep coming up over and over again," says Rick Fienberg, the press officer for the American Astronomical Society, who holds a PhD in astronomy. He has some first-hand knowledge of this: nearly 40 years ago, Fienberg debated one of the first prominent moon landing deniers, Bill Kaysing, on TV.

The initial claims the moon landing was staged came at a time when the Pentagon Papers and Watergate had eroded Americans' trust in their government. But faking the success of the Apollo 11 mission would require deception on a grand scale-and would be practically impossible to pull off, says Fienberg.

"About 400,000 scientists, engineers, technologists, machinists, electricians, worked on the Apollo program," Fienberg points out. "If in fact the main motivation for believing in the moon hoax that is you don't trust the government, you don't trust our leaders, you don't trust authority, how can you feel that 400,000 people would keep their mouths shut for 50 years? It's just implausible."

Here, we break down some of the most enduring conspiracy theories about the moon landing-and why there's no evidence to support them.

1. The moon landing is fake because the American flag looks like it is flapping in the wind.

If you look at the American flag in still pictures from the Apollo 11 mission, it appears to be flapping in the wind. But how can that be, since there's no wind on the moon?

The simple answer is, it isn't flapping, Fienberg says. That's because it isn't an ordinary flag. If the astronauts had planted a regular flag on the moon, it would've hung slack like flags do on Earth when there's no wind. This wouldn't make for a very appealing photo, so NASA designed special flags for astronauts to take with them ( all six Apollo missions that made it to the moon planted an American flag there).

These flags had a horizontal rod inside to make them stick out from the flagpole. The Apollo 11 astronauts had trouble extending the rod all the way, and in still pictures, this creates a ripple effect that makes the flag look like it's waving in the wind. In video images of the flag, you can see it only moves while the astronauts are grinding it into the moon's surface. After the astronauts step away, it stays in the same bent shape because of the partially-extended rod.

2. The moon landing is fake because you can't see the stars.

"One of the first arguments I heard and one of the easiest to debunk...is the fact that there are no stars in the lunar sky," Fienberg says. Or rather, there are no stars in the pictures that Armstrong and Aldrin took on the moon. But if you've ever used a camera before, it's easy to understand why.

"All of the exposures of the astronauts on the moon are daylight exposures," he explains. "The surface was brightly illuminated [from the sun]. And the astronauts are wearing bright white space suits that are highly reflective."

The exposure on the astronauts' cameras was too short to capture the space suits and the moon's surface while also capturing the comparatively dimmer stars. The same thing happens if you go onto someone's back porch at night and turn on the lights. Even though you can see the stars from where you're standing, a quick-exposure camera won't be able to capture them.

3. The moon landing is fake because the shadows aren't right.

In images from the moon landing, it is possible to see certain objects even though they are in shadow. Skeptics argue that if the sun were the only source of light, this wouldn't be the case. Therefore, the fact that you can see some objects in shadow must be the result of special Hollywood lighting.

The problem with this theory is that although the sun is the main source of illumination on the moon, it isn't the only source of illumination. Another source is the lunar ground, which reflects the sun's light. In the Apollo 11 pictures, "the sunlight is being scattered or reflected off the ground every which way, and some of it-a small fraction but enough to be able to see-scatters into the shadows," Fienberg says.

This is why, in some images, you can make out a plaque that Armstrong and Aldrin left on the moon even though it's lying in shadow.

4. The moon landing is fake because you can't see Armstrong's camera.

In one of the pictures from the moon landing, you can see Armstrong clearly reflected in Aldrin's visor. Some skeptics have pointed out that Armstrong does not appear to be holding a camera, so someone else must be taking the picture. But that isn't true.

Armstrong couldn't walk around the moon with a regular hand-held camera. In his bulky suit, he needed something that was easy to manipulate. The camera he used on the moon was mounted on the front of his suit, which is where his hands are in the reflection.

5. The moon landing is fake because Stanley Kubrick filmed it.

Director Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odysseywowed audiences in 1968 for creating a realistic image of outer space. It was so compelling that some conspiracy theorists later wondered if the government had actually hired Kubrick to film the moon landing in a soundstage (possibly like the one James Bond ran through in the 1971 film Diamonds Are Forever).

The thing is, the moon landing footage didn't look real because Kubrick filmed it-Kubrick's movie 2001 looked real because Kubrick enlisted astronomical artists and aerospace engineers to help him with it. The only "evidence" that Kubrick filmed the moon landing has itself proved to be a hoax.

Denial of America's great progress in space exploration and belief in these myths is "more of an ideological thing-a political thing-than it is a scientific thing," Fienberg notes.

To those who know the moon landing was real, conspiracy theories that it was a hoax may seem silly and innocuous. But their consequences aren't: they spread misinformation, make people susceptible to other false theories and could earn you a punch from Buzz Aldrin.
READ MORE: The Craziest Titanic Conspiracy Theories, Explained READ MORE: The Soviet Response to the Moon Landing? Denial There Was a Moon Race at All READ MORE: Why the Air Force Almost Blasted the Moon with an H-Bomb
READ MORE: The Amazing Handmade Tech That Powered Apollo 11's Moon Voyage
Watch the full episode of Moon Landing: The Lost Tapes.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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The Wildest Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories, Debunked | HISTORY

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Claims the Apollo 11 mission was staged began soon after astronauts first set foot on the moon in 1969.

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Dramatic flag fluttering despite no large actions

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Dramatic flag fluttering despite no large actions

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Made by:
Lin and Lyrica

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Astronomers would have died if they went out of the radiation field surrounding our Earth. There is a zone of charged particles called the ‘Van Allen’ radiation belt. This radiation belt has a magnetic field where high energy trapped particles from the Sun tend to get confined(meaning it gets restricted or becomes a limited space). Except there are some conspiracies that the people survived because the spacecraft’s hull shielded the radiation and they took the weaker part of the outer belt. But what if Van Allen’s theory was wrong, and because the person in the spacecraft died through the radiation field, the government hid it and fake filmed the moon. There weren't any live streams that time, so people you wouldn’t know until you actually go up to the moon.

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The flag was not moving when the astronaut move which is impossible in earth 

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In this short 44 seconds video, we can clearly see that the flag, is moving because of air. There aren’t any stars on the video too. The moon landing was faked.

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NASA | "Plant the Flag" - Partially Restored Apollo 11 Video

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[10 Hours] American Flag Waving - Video & Audio [1080HD] SlowTV

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In this video the flag isn’t moving
This video is provided by NASA, a trustable source

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Restored Apollo 11 Moonwalk - Original NASA EVA Mission Video - Walking on the Moon

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http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860871_1860876_1860992,00.html

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It’s now been nearly four decades since Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind” — if, that is, he ever set foot off this planet. Doubters say the U.S. government, desperate to beat the…

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https://www.arabiaweather.com/en/content/how-did-the-apollo-11-flag-appear-in-space-despite-the-absence-of-air-on-the-moon

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رنا السيلاوي محرر أخبار - قسم التواصل الاجتماعي

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How did the `Apollo 11` flag appear in space despite the absence of air on the moon

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طقس العرب - بعد أن نجحت ناسا بالهبوط على سطح القمر عام 1969، شغل الحدث نقاشات واسعة تشكك بالإنجاز لأكثر من نصف قرن حتى الآن، وأحد الأدلة التي تستشهد بها نظرية المؤامرة هو رفرفة العلم الأمريكي على سطح…

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The sky on the moon is black as night not because it is night, but because there's no atmosphere to scatter the daylight the way ours does on Earth. But make no mistake: there is every bit as much sunlight at midday on the moon as there is on our home planet. That makes the lunar surface incredibly bright. The scenery on the moon was the most important thing to capture in the Apollo photographs, so the camera was adjusted to make the most out of that scenery. As a result, the relatively dim stars in the background didn't register in any of the shots.

Resources: https://www.discovery.com/science/apollo-50th-anniversary/why-aren-t-there-stars-in-the-moon-landing-photos-

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Why Aren't There Stars in the Moon Landing Photos?

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Why Aren't There Stars in the Moon Landing Photos?

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https://www.discovery.com/science/apollo-50th-anniversary/why-aren-t-there-stars-in-the-moon-landing-photos-

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Why Aren’t There Stars in the Moon Landing Photos?

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A vocal minority believes that the moon landing was all an elaborate hoax filmed on a sound stage in Hollywood, but it’s no hoax. Here’s why...

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https://www.canva.com/design/DAFQrKyZ3LI/Jmxq3MbRwe3cpVr00YUrSw/view?utm_content=DAFQrKyZ3LI&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

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The simple answer is, it isn’t flapping, Fienberg says. That’s because it isn’t an ordinary flag. If the astronauts had planted a regular flag on the moon, it would’ve hung slack like flags do on Earth when there’s no wind. This wouldn’t make for a very appealing photo, so NASA designed special flags for astronauts to take with them (all six Apollo missions that made it to the moon planted an American flag there).These flags had a horizontal rod inside to make them stick out from the flagpole. The Apollo 11 astronauts had trouble extending the rod all the way, and in still pictures, this creates a ripple effect that makes the flag look like it’s waving in the wind. In video images of the flag, you can see it only moves while the astronauts are grinding it into the moon’s surface. After the astronauts step away, it stays in the same bent shape because of the partially-extended rod.

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The simple answer is, it isn’t flapping, Fienberg says. That’s because it isn’t an ordinary flag. If the astronauts had planted a regular flag on the moon, it would’ve hung slack like flags do on Earth when there’s no wind. This wouldn’t make for a very appealing photo, so NASA designed special flags for astronauts to take with them (all six Apollo missions that made it to the moon planted an American flag there).These flags had a horizontal rod inside to make them stick out from the flagpole. The Apollo 11 astronauts had trouble extending the rod all the way, and in still pictures, this creates a ripple effect that makes the flag look like it’s waving in the wind. In video images of the flag, you can see it only moves while the astronauts are grinding it into the moon’s surface. After the astronauts step away, it stays in the same bent shape because of the partially-extended rod.