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Apollo draft part 3

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in NASA's training mockup of the moon and lander module. Hoax proponents say the entire mission was filmed on sets like this one.

The Apollo moon landing conspiracy theories are a set of related beliefs that the all or part of Apollo Moon landings did not occur as they generally presented and understood but were instead faked in whole or in part by NASA, elements within NASA and/or possibly members of other involved organizations. While a number of theories advanced by various individual exist and some versions of these theories make specific claims that do not agree with items in the list below, some core elements of the moon hoax theories are that:

• NASA and possibly others faked all or part of the Apollo moon missions;
• The Apollo Astronauts did not land on the moon;
• NASA and possible others manufactured, hid, or altered evidence like photos, telemetry tapes, transmissions, rock samples, etc. for the purpose of perpretrating the hoax.

In addition, these hoax theories imply, or openly state, that the current mainstream understanding of the Apollo moon landings (and to varying degrees the mission that supported it) is the result of a deliberate conspiracy created to advance the Apollo mission hoax, thus, maintaining the belief that the moon landings occurred as they are generally presented and understood.

A 1999 Gallup poll indicates that an 'overwhelming majority' of Americans (89%) believe the Apollo landings happened as reported while a small number (6%) believe that 'the US goverment staged or faked the landings.' The mainstream scientific and technical communities reject the claims as baseless. While some hoax proponents dispute the label, the Apollo moon landing hoax claims are generally understood to be a conspiracy theory.

Origins

In his book A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar orbit mission in December 1968, such conspiratorial stories were already in circulation.

Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research Society, challenged the idea that men had landed on the moon, claiming that the landing were "faked in Hollywood studios" with science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke writing the script.

The first of a number of books on the subject was published in 1974, two years after the Apollo flights had come to an end.

Major hoax proponents and theories

The moon hoax theories are a set of interelated beliefs that may be traced for the most part to a relatively small number of out-spoken propropents. Some of the more notable of these proponents are:

Bill Kaysing (1922 – 2005)

Bill Kaysing graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in English and, from 1957 until 1963, worked in technical publications at Rocketdyne, the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. When Kaysing left Rocketdyne in 1963 he began working as a freelance writer, producing books on such subjects as cheap eating and living on houseboats.. Most of these were self published.

In 1974 We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle (Kaysing 2002)(Plait 2002, p. 157). The realease of this self-published book seems to have marked the beginning of Moon hoax movement.

According to Kaysing, a Rocketdyne company report from the late 1950s, stated that the chance of a successful landing on the moon was calculated to be 0.0017 (1 in 600) due, in large measure to, the alleged unreliability of the F-1 rocket engine used in the first stage of the Saturn V:

... the Air Force had 13 consecutive failures with the Atlas D, E, and F in the summer and fall of 1963. This was at the time when the F-1, a much larger engine, was under intensive development. My point is this: if the Atlas couldn't achieve reliability after almost a decade of development, how could a far larger and more powerful rocket engine be successful? (Kaysing 2002, p. 9)

In addition, Kaysing said that if five F-1 engines had actually been used, "it would have been a most spectacular fire bomb." (Kaysing 2002, p. 37). Instead, Kaysing said, seventy-two hours before the launch Saturn V, B-1 rocket engines (more reliable but lower thrust) were placed within the larger F-1 engines. (Kaysing 2002, p. 64)

down to here

However, while F-1 development was problematic, particularly due to combustion instability, the problems were solved in the early 1960s, and by June 1965 it had been test-fired 1,000 times. No 'B-1' engine was ever built, unless a NASA conspiracy managed to build it in secret after failing to make the F-1 work in the open. The development of the Atlas booster was similarly troubled, but records do not show the thirteen consecutive failures of the Atlas that Kaysing claims . It was later used to launch Mercury flights into space with a 100% success record, and also launched numerous sattellites and unmanned space probes: the Atlas-F mentioned had 22 failures, but also 79 successful launches

Kaysing claimed that the supposedly Moon-bound Apollo astronauts didn't even go into orbit: the Saturn V changed course during the launch, dropped the crew in the South polar sea, and then crashed. Communications traffic would be faked at NASA Greenbelt in Washington DC, and the lunar television broadcasts would be filmed at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, or perhaps Area 51 in Nevada. He suggests a "coallition between governments at the highest level" to conceal, amongst other things, the moon hoax .

Kaysing claimed that two NASA engineers admitted that the landing was a hoax:

I received a call from a Margaret Hardin of Portland, Oregon. She said that she had met a hooker in Reno in 1970 who admitted to her that two NASA engineers told her the moon trips were a hoax. (Kaysing 2002, p. 74)

Kaysing contacted the hooker directly in February 1976 and he was "shocked" when she denied knowing anything about the engineers or the hoax. Kaysing also claimed to have met an airline captain who saw a command module being dropped from a cargo plane for a faked 'splashdown', but was unable to provide their name or airline.

Kaysing later sued Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell for libel, after Lovell reportedly said of Kaysing:

"The guy is wacky. His position makes me feel angry. We spent a lot of time getting ready to go to the moon. We spent a lot of money, we took great risks, and it's something everybody in the country ought to be proud of."

In 1997 a judge threw the case out of court (Plait 2002, p. 173).

Bart Sibrel

Bart Sibrel, filmmaker and self proclaimed investigative journalist, created a documentary film A funny thing happened on the way to the Moon.

Sibrel claims that the Moon landings provided the US Government with a public distraction from the Vietnam War, with lunar activities stopping abruptly and planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in Vietnam. However, that assertion is not chronologically correct, because the cancellations of the later flights occurred during the budgeting process in 1970 and 1971, when the War was still raging; and the last mission flew in December of 1972, when the war was still a major ongoing conflict.

One of Sibrel's most significant claims is that:

In my research at NASA I uncovered, deep in the archives, one mislabelled reel from the Apollo 11, first mission, to the Moon. What is on the reel and on the label are completely different. I suspect an editor put the wrong label on the tape 33 years ago and no reporter ever had the motive to be as thorough as I. It contains an hour of rare, unedited, colour television footage that is dated by NASA’s own atomic clock three days into the flight. Identified on camera are Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins. They are doing multiple takes of a single shot of the mission, from which only about ten seconds was ever broadcast. Because I have uncovered the original unedited version, mistakenly not destroyed, the photography proves to be a clever forgery. Really! It means they did not walk on the Moon!

However, analysis of the footage and mission transcripts indicates that the astronauts were practicing for their upcoming live telecast to the world from space, for which they had not been able to rehearse ahead of time.

Sibrel and Aron Ranen claim that Wernher Von Braun was complicit in the hoax, collecting samples to be used as the basis for 'moon rocks' during his trip to Antarctica in 1967.

Sibrel made repeated demands over several years that Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot 'Buzz' Aldrin swear an oath on the Bible that he had walked on the Moon, or admit that it was all a hoax. Aldrin ignored Sibrel, and in September 2002, Sibrel approached Aldrin and a young female relative as they were leaving a building, and called Aldrin "a coward, a liar, and a thief". Aldrin punched Sibrel in the face, saying that he felt forced to defend himself and his companion (Sibrel was about half Aldrin's age and rather taller and larger). Sibrel suffered no permanent injury: in fact, immediately after being hit, he turned to the cameraman and asked, "Did you get that?" The Beverly Hills police investigated the incident, but no charges were filed. CBS News reports that "witnesses have come forward stating that they saw Sibrel aggressively poke Aldrin with a Bible and that Sibrel had lured Aldrin to the hotel under false pretenses so that he could interview him."

Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Ed Mitchell says that when Sibrel came to his home with false History Channel credentials, he did swear to the veracity of the moon landings on Sibrel's bible.

William Brian

William Brian is an engineer and author of the self-published book "Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program".

Brian reportedly claims that "the Moon's surface gravity is 64% of the Earth's surface gravity, not the one-sixth (or 16.7%) value predicted by Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation!" .

He does not dispute that astronauts visited the moon, but claims that "the film speed was adjusted to slow down the action to give the impression that the astronauts were lighter than they actually were. With the slow-motion effects, objects would appear to fall more slowly and the public would be convinced of the Moon's weak gravity."

David Percy

David Percy, TV producer and expert in audiovisual technologies and member of the Royal Photographic Society, is co-author, along with Mary Bennett of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (ISBN 1-898541-10-8) and co-producer of What Happened On the Moon?. He is considered the main proponent of the 'whistle blower theory', arguing that the errors in the NASA photos in particular are so obvious that they are evidence that insiders are trying to 'blow the whistle' on the hoax by deliberately inserting errors that they know will be seen.

Ralph Rene

Ralph Rene is an inventor and 'self taught' engineer. Author of NASA Mooned America (second edition ASIN: B0006QO3E2).

Common features of hoax scenarios

There are a number of different versions of the hoax theory. Each is promoted, in large measure, by a few specific individuals. The various theories are commonly based on perceived gaps and inconsistencies in the historical record. Several of these theories and their most readily identifiable proponents are described below:

1. Complete hoax - The idea that the entire human landing program was faked. Various sources argue that either the technology to send men to the moon was insufficient and/or that the Van Allen radiation belts made such a trip impossible.
2. Partial hoax / Unmanned landings - Sibrel typifies this argument when he said that Apollo 11 and subsequent astronauts had faked their moon walk and their orbit around it using trick photography, and that they never got more than halfway to the moon. A subset of this theory is advocated by those who concede the existence of laser mirrors and other human-made objects observable on or from the moon. Marcus Allen represents this argument when he said "I would be the first to accept what [telescope images of the landing site] find as powerful evidence that something was placed on the Moon by man." He goes on to say that photographs of the lander would not prove that America put men on the Moon. "Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem - the Russians did that in 1959, the big problem is getting people there." His argument focusses around NASA sending robot missions because radiation levels in space were lethal to humans. Another variant on this is the idea that NASA and its contractors did not recover quickly enough from the Apollo 1 fire, and so all the early Apollo missions were faked, with Apollo 14 or 15 being the first authentic mission .
3. Manned landings, with backup stagings - Dr. Brian O'Leary once suggested that while the landing took place, NASA created a parallel fake landing in case of accidents or failures, although he now believes otherwise.
4. Manned landings, with cover-ups - William Brian and others believe that, while astronauts did land on the moon, they covered up what they found, be it gravitational anomalies, alien artifacts or alien encounters. Phillip Lheureux, in ‘Lumieres sur la Lune’ (Lights on the Moon) said that astronauts did land on the Moon, but in order to prevent other nations from benefitting from scientific information in the real photos, NASA published fake images.
5. Manned landings and marketing - half of a hoax hypothesis, it argues that the landings were real and nothing was covered up, but that the still images were faked. This was done to give better marketing materials for NASA to the American public, so that future missions would be likely to be funded.
6. Hoax with whistleblowers - a subset of any of the other hoax hypotheses, with deliberate errors introduced by NASA personnel to indicate the hoax.

Hoax proponents suggested motives

Several motives have been hypothesized by hoax proponents for the U.S. government to fake the Moon landings - some recurrent elements are:

1. Distraction - The U.S. government sought to distract the public from the Vietnam War.
2. Cold War Prestige - The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race with the USSR. Going to the Moon, if it were possible, would have been risky and expensive (though John F. Kennedy famously said that we chose to go because it was difficult). Despite close monitoring by the Soviet Union, hoax proponents argue that it would have been easier for the US to fake it and consequently guarantee success than to actually go.
3. Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars to go to the moon. Hoax proponents hypothesize that this could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity.
4. Risk - The available technology at the time was such that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted. This argument assumes that the problems early in the space program were insurmountable, even by a technology team fully motivated and funded to fix the problems.

High level critiques of the hoax theories

Hoax accusations as 'conspiracy theories'

Critics of the theories often characterize them as a conspiracy theory. The hoax accusers themselves often reject that characterization. The 2001 Fox special, which landing believers say is supportive of the hoax theories, uses that term in its title. The accusations proceed as a conspiracy theory since believers claim that that conspirators in the possession of secret knowledge are misleading and/or have misled the public in pursuit of a hidden agenda. The hoax proponents accuse NASA or a group within the NASA of perpetrating the conspiracy.

The Apollo moon landing hoax accusations have been the subject of debunking and, according to the debunkers, have been sufficiently falsified. An article in the German magazine Der Spiegel, places the moon hoax in the context of other well-known 20th century conspiracy theories which it describes as "the rarified atmosphere of those myths in which Elvis is alive, John F. Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy involving the Mafia and secret service agents, the Moon landing was staged in the Nevada desert, and Princess Diana was murdered by the British intelligence services."

The burden of proof

One of the earthrise photos. The Flat Earth Society used these photos as evidence of a faked landing, since they show a spherical earth.

Hoax critics have claimed that a key assumption of hoax proponents is that the burden of proof for the Apollo landings lies entirely with NASA. These critics have countered that in formal logic the burden actually lies upon those who propose a new theory. According to Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Web site, hoax theorists, or pseudoscientists, often focus on a variety of technical minutiae with the expectation that hoax critics should research and address any questions that the hoax proponents raise. Plait says that failure to address a given question is taken by the hoax theorists as proof of some aspect of the Moon landing hoax. However, hoax theorist Bart Sibrel said "by failing to require independent duplication of such an outlandish claim [the Moon landings] after over 30 years have passed, science is degraded to the status of being just another religion."

The scientific method

Application of the scientific method to this scenario would allow each explanation of an event as a separate hypothesis, like this:

Real landing hypothesis: NASA's portrayal of the moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common errors as mislabeled photos and personal recollections.

Hoax hypothesis: NASA's portrayal of the moon landing is an orchestrated hoax.

In this type of evaluation, the question is not "Can every detail about the moon landing be explained?" but "Does the "hoax hypothesis" better fit observable facts than does the "real landing hypothesis," and is it more self-consistent?" . The lack of narrative consistency in the hoax hypothesis occurs since hoax proposals vary from proponent to proponent. The 'real landing' hypothesis is a single story, but there are many hoax hypotheses, each of which addresses a specific aspect of the moon landing, but many of which conflict with each other if taken as a whole. Additionally, the evidence regarding the moon landings is met by hoax believers with dubiety on the part of hoax believers, who say that the NASA story is labeled as unconvincing propaganda made by the establishment to cover up the alleged lie.

An example of such an exchange is the evidence for the landing of the Apollo 11, Apollo 14, and Apollo 15 retroreflectors on the Moon . Scientists can reflect lasers off these to measure the distance between Earth and the Moon (see Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment). Hoax proponents such as Marcus Allen say that because the Russians placed mirrors on the moon using robotic missions , the presence of similar mirrors can also be explained by such things as secret American robotic missions whose express aim was to place retroreflectors on the moon to corroborate that part of the Apollo missions, and therefore the Lunar Ranging Experiments do not provide evidence for Apollo.

Public opinions about the hoax theories

Around the time of Project Apollo, while not asking about whether the landings were faked specifically, soon after the missions, Knight Newspapers (later to become Knight-Ridder) found that more than 30 percent of respondents to their poll were suspicious of NASA's trips to the moon.

According to a 1999 Gallup poll, about 6% of the population of the United States has doubts that the Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon. (Five percent had no opinion, while eighty-nine percent believe the landings took place.) It asked, "[t]hinking about the space exploration, do you think the government staged or faked the Apollo moon landing, or don't you feel that way?" Six percent of respondents answered "yes, staged." (Plait 2002, p. 156) "Although, if taken literally, 6% translates into millions of individuals," Gallup said of this, "it is not unusual to find about that many people in the typical poll agreeing with almost any question that is asked of them; so the best interpretation is that this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread." Fox television's 2001 TV special "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?", airing to 15 million viewers, may have given a boost to the idea, despite the allegation of many errors of fact and presentation in the program by the Web site called "Who mourns for Apollo?". Fox said roughly 20% of the public had doubts about the authenticity of the Apollo program after the show.

James Oberg, an American journalist who reports on NASA (and has worked for them), estimates that "perhaps 10 percent of the population, and up to twice as large in specific demographic groups" believe in the hoax or have some doubts about the Apollo program. "It’s not just a few crackpots and their new books and Internet conspiracy sites," Oberg said in 1999. "There are entire subcultures within the U.S., and substantial cultures around the world, that strongly believe the landing was faked. I’m told that this is official dogma still taught in schools in Cuba, plus wherever else Cuban teachers have been sent (such as Sandanista Nicaragua and Angola)."

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness has published articles on its Web site in favor of the hoax theory.

The late U.S. Senators Alan Cranston (D-California) and Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) were on record as having written to NASA passing on the concerns of their constituents..

Hoax claims examined

A number of the predominent claims of the hoax proponents are treated below:

Missing data

1. Blueprints and design and development drawings of the machines involved, telemetry tapes, the original high quality video of the Apollo 11 moon walk, original tapes containing telemetry and video from the other five missions and other key documents that would help to validate the missions are missing.

a) Dr. David Williams (NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center) and Apollo 11 flight director Gene Kranz both acknowledged that the Apollo 11 telemetry data tapes are missing. Hoax proponents interpret this as support for the case that they never existed.

• The website above only states that the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes are missing — and not those of Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 , . For technical reasons, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module carried a Slow-scan television (SSTV) camera. In order to be broadcast to regular television, a scan conversion has to be done. The radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia was in position to receive the telemetry from the Moon at the time of the Apollo 11 moonwalk . Parkes had a larger antenna than NASA's antenna in Australlia, so it got the best picture. It also got 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 there. A crude, real-time scan conversion of the SSTV signal was done in Australia before it was broadcast around the world. The original SSTV broadcast had better detail and contrast than the scan-converted pictures . It is this tape made in Australia before the scan conversion which is missing. Tapes or films of the scan-converted pictures exist and are available. Later Apollo missions did not use SSTV, and their video is also available. At least some of the telemetry tapes from the ALSEP scientific experiments left on the moon (which ran until 1977) still exist, accoring to Dr. Williams.

• Others are looking for the missing telemetry tapes, but for different reasons. The tapes contain the original and highest quality video feed from the lunar landing which a number of former Apollo 11 personnel want to recover for posterity, while NASA engineers looking towards future moon missions believe the Apollo telemetry data may be useful for their design studies. Their investigations have determined that the Apollo 11 tapes were sent for storage at the US 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, and efforts to determine where they were stored are ongoing . Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967 , even before the lunar landings.

b) Hoax proponents say that blueprints for the Apollo lunar module, rover and associated equipment are missing or never existed.

• Although there are some diagrams of the lunar module and moon buggy on the Nasa web site, the hoax examination site 'xenophilia.com' says that "the technical blueprints showing sizes, etc. do seem to be missing" . Collectors and modelers are also frustrated at the lack of original documentation available . Grumman appears to have destroyed most of the documentation , .
• Despite the questions concerning the existence or location of the LEM blueprints, what is said to be an unused flight-worthy LEM is on exhibit at the Cradle of Aviation Museum , LM-13. The lunar module designated LM-13 would have landed on the moon during the Apollo 18 mission, but was instead put into storage when the mission was cancelled: it has since been restored and put on display. Other unused actual lunar modules are on display: LM-2 at the National Air and Space Museum, LM-9 at Kennedy Space Center, and LM-16 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois .

• NASA says that four flight-worthy Lunar Rovers were built, but three were carried to the Moon (and left there) whereas the other one was used for spare parts after Apollo 18 was cancelled: NASA states that the only Lunar Rovers on display are test vehicles, trainers, and models. The "moon buggys" were built by Boeing (the New Encyclopedia Britannica Micropedia, 2005, vol2, pg 319) . The 221-page operation manual for the Lunar Rover contains some detailed drawings , although not the design blueprints.

While the absence of the tapes and design documents does not prove the landings were faked, the massive amount of data in the blueprints and on the telemetry tapes would be very difficult to fake without introducing errors that would be spotted by careful scrutiny if they were available. The absence is said by hoax proponents to add to the preponderance of evidence for the fake. Landing believers say that the missing data can be accounted for by the natural attrition of materials from old projects or events which can happen in any organization.

c) Bart Sibrel said "In my research at NASA I uncovered, deep in the archives, one mislabelled reel from the Apollo 11, first mission, to the Moon. What is on the reel and on the label are completely different. I suspect an editor put the wrong label on the tape 33 years ago and no reporter ever had the motive to be as thorough as I. It contains an hour of rare, unedited, colour television footage that is dated by NASA’s own atomic clock three days into the flight. Identified on camera are Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins. They are doing multiple takes of a single shot of the mission, from which only about ten seconds was ever broadcast. Because I have uncovered the original unedited version, mistakenly not destroyed, the photography proves to be a clever forgery. Really! It means they did not walk on the Moon!"

• According to Clavius.org: "Consulting the transcripts and the unedited video, it is clear that the astronauts are practicing for their upcoming live telecast, for which they had not been able to rehearse ahead of time."

Technological capability of USA compared to the USSR

At the time of Apollo, the Soviet Union had five times more manned hours in space than the US. They were the first to achieve:

1. First manmade satellite in orbit (1957, Sputnik 1).
2. First living being in space (1957, Sputnik 2).
3. First probe to go near the Moon (1959, Luna 1).
4. First probe to impact the Moon (1959, Luna 2).
5. First probe to photograph the back side of the Moon (1959, Luna 3).
6. First man in space (1961, Vostok 1).
7. First man to orbit the earth (1961, Vostok 1).
8. The first to have two spacecraft in orbit at the same time (was not a rendezvous) (1962, vostok 3 and Vostok 4).
9. First woman in space (1963, Vostok 6).
10. The first crew of three astronauts onboard one spacecraft (1964, Voskhod 1).
11. The first spacewalk (1965, Voskhod 2).
12. First unmanned soft landing on the Moon (1966, Luna 9).

In 1967, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 1 died in a fire on the launch pad during training due to a spark in the pure oxygen atmosphere used in the spacecraft. The congressional inquiry found that the entire Apollo program was in shambles and it was a miracle no one was killed sooner. Two years later all of the problems were 'fixed'. Bart Sibrel said that this led NASA to conclude that the only way to 'win' the space race was to fake the landings.

• NASA and others claim that these achievements by the Soviets are not as impressive as the simple list implies, and that they were built on a dangerous program of ballistic rocket research, not a gradual program aimed to get to the moon.

• Before the first Earth-orbiting Apollo flight, the USSR had accumulated 534 hours of manned spaceflight whereas the US had accumulated over 1,992 hours of manned spaceflight. By the time of Apollo 11, the US's lead was much wider than that (see List of human spaceflights, 1961-1986.)

• Most of the 'firsts' above were done by the US within a year afterwards (sometimes within weeks). The US started to achieve many 'firsts' which were important in a mission to the Moon, such as:

1. First manual control of a manned spacecraft (1961, Mercury-Redstone 3)
2. First manned spacecraft to change orbit (1965, Gemini 3).
3. First one-week mission (length of time needed for a round trip to the Moon) (1965, Gemini 5).
4. First rendezvous in space (1965, Gemini 6A).
5. First two-week mission (1965, Gemini 7).
6. First docking with another spacecraft (1966, Gemini 8).
7. First probe to orbit and map the Moon (1966, Lunar Orbiter 1)
8. First successful rocket capable of sending a mission to land on the Moon (1967, Saturn V). (The USSR never had such a rocket, see N1 rocket.)
9. First manned orbit of the Moon (1968, Apollo 8).
10. First successful flight of a spacecraft capable of landing on the Moon (1969, Lunar Module on Apollo 9).
11. First manned landing on the Moon (1969, Apollo 11).

Photographs and films

Critics have said there are various issues with photographs and films apparently taken on the Moon.

Challenges and responses

1. Issues with crosshairs (fiducials) that were etched onto the lenses of the cameras.

a) In some photos, the crosshairs appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them where they should be, as if the photos were altered.

• In photography, the light white color (the object behind the crosshair) makes the black object (the crosshair) invisible due to saturation effects in the film emulsion. The film particles that ought to have been black were exposed by light from the adjacent brightly lit particles. Ironically, this saturation effect would not happen if the crosshairs were drawn on in post, and so is evidence of genuine photos. Attempting to alter photos that already have crosshairs would make the compositing process far more difficult.

The 'classic' Aldrin photo, with reticles not centered.

b) In the 'classic' Aldrin photo, the reticle (etched crosshair on the camera) is too low. Since the crosshairs are in a fixed position on all the images, a lower reticle on this image indicates that the image has been cropped. This is so even on the 70mm duplicate transparency NASA issues. The 70mm transparencies should show the entire 'full' image. Hoax proponents say that the only explanation for this is if the original full transparency needed to be cropped because of an embarrassing artifact like a piece of stage scenery were in shot.

• The actual photo AS11-40-5903 or AS11-40-5903 high resolution is chopped off just above Aldrin. Duplicate transparencies are not necessarily exact copies of the original. The publicly-released version of the photo was cropped and recomposed by NASA within hours of the film being made available, with extra black space added at the top of most released versions for aesthetic reasons. This Web page has NASA's history of the photo.

c) In other photos, the reticles are not in a straight line, or appear in the 'wrong' place, indicating that the photo has been doctored. [1]

• The debunking Web site Clavius.org explains that the methodologies that the conspiracy theorists propose for doctoring the photos with "wrong" reticles are often contradictory and generally require absurd lengths to explain the "inconsistencies" when there are reasonable explanations. In particular, prints were often cropped and rotated, which causes the illusion of reticles occurring off-center or "not straight".

2. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.

• The astronauts were trained in the use of their gear, and shots and poses were planned in advance as part of the mission. NASA selected only the best photographs for release to the public, and some of the photos were cropped to improve their composition. There are many badly exposed, badly focused and poorly composed images amongst the thousands of photos that were taken by the Apollo Astronauts. Many can be seen at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Photos were taken on high-quality Hasselblad cameras with Zeiss lenses, using 70 mm medium format film.

3. There are no stars in any of the photos, and astronauts never report seeing any stars from the capsule windows. Yuri Gagarin commented that the stars were astonishingly brilliant (see the external link below), and some NASA photos do show stars. Hoax proponents say that NASA chose not to put the stars into the photos because astronomers would have been able to use them to prove (through parallax measurements) that the photos were not taken from the moon. (See, for instance, the photos above.)

Zarya from the Space Shuttle, no stars visible.

• Stars are also never seen in Space Shuttle, Mir, International Space Station Earth observation photos, or even sporting events that take place at night. The sun in the Earth/Moon area shines as brightly as on a clear noon day on Earth, so cameras used for imaging these things are set for daylight exposure, with quick shutter speeds in order to prevent overexposing the film. The dim light of the stars simply does not have a chance to expose the film. (This effect can be demonstrated on Earth by attempting to view stars from a brightly lit parking lot. You can only see them if you somehow block out all illuminated objects from your field of view, and then let your eyes adjust for night vision. Otherwise, it is like taking a picture of the night sky with exposure settings for a bright sunny day. Science fiction movies and television shows do confuse this issue by depicting stars as visible in space under all lighting conditions.) Stars were seen by every Apollo mission crew except for the unfortunate Apollo 13 (they couldn't see the stars due to the fact that oxygen and water vapor created a haze around the spacecraft). Stars were used for navigation purposes and were occasionally also seen through cabin windows when the conditions allowed. To see stars, nothing lit by sunlight could be in the viewer's field of view. (Plait 2002, pp. 158–60).

No stars visible observing The Moon and Mir from the Space Shuttle Discovery

• Stars are not dramatically brighter in space (above the Earth's atmosphere). Professional astronomer and two-time space shuttle astronaut Ronald A. Parise stated that he could barely see stars at all from space. He had to turn out all of the lights in the shuttle to even glimpse the stars (Plait 2002, p. 160). Even with cameras several times more sensitive than the ones used on Apollo, it takes an exposure of several seconds to show up even the brighter stars. Exposure times of the Apollo photographs were a small fraction of a second, typically 1/250 of a second.
• The ability to determine parallax is limited by the angular resolution of the instrument used. The most advanced dedicated experiment carried out to date — the Hipparcos satellite — achieved resolutions in the milliarcsecond range. Using as baseline the diameter of the Earth's orbit about the Sun (by comparing images taken six months apart), this allowed parallax measurements for stars out to a distance of approximately 1,000 parsecs. However, the distance from Earth to Moon is about a thousand times smaller than that baseline, which means that the detection limit is reduced to about 1 parsec. This is less than the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. Considering further that the resolution of an image taken with a conventional camera is many times lower than Hipparcos's, any such determination is entirely ruled out.

4. The color and angle of shadows and light are inconsistent.

• Shadows on the Moon are complicated because there are several light sources: the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon itself. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many different directions, including into shadows. Additionally, the Moon's surface is not flat and shadows falling into craters and hills appear longer, shorter and distorted from the simple expectations of the hoax believers. More significantly, perspective effects come into play, particularly on rough or angled ground. This leads to non-parallel shadows even on objects which are extremely close to each other, and can be observed easily on Earth wherever fences or trees are found. And finally, the camera in use was fitted with a wide angle lens, which naturally resulted in subtle versions of "fish eye" distortion (Plait 2002, pp. 167–72).

5. Identical backgrounds in photos are listed as taken miles apart.

• Detailed comparison of the backgrounds said to be identical in fact show significant changes in the relative positions of the hills that are consistent with the claimed locations that the images were taken from. Parallax effects clearly demonstrate that the images were taken from widely different locations around the landing sites. Claims that the appearance of the background is identical while the foreground changes (for example, from a boulder strewn crater to the Lunar Module) are trivially explained when the images were taken from nearby locations, akin to seeing distant mountains appearing the same on Earth from locations that are hundreds of feet apart showing different foreground items. Furthermore, as there is no atmosphere on the Moon, very distant objects will appear clearer and closer to the human eye. What appears as nearby hills in some photographs, are actually mountains several kilometers high and some 10-20 kilometers away. Changes in such very distant backgrounds are quite subtle, and can be mistaken for no change at all. As the Moon is also much smaller than the Earth, the horizon is significantly nearer in photographs than Earthbound observers are used to seeing (an eye 1.7 m above completely flat ground will see the horizon 4.7 km away on Earth, but only 2.4 km away on the Moon). This can lead to confusing interpretations of the images.

6. The number of photographs taken is implausibly high. When the total number of official photographs taken during EVA of all Apollo missions is divided by the total amount of time of all EVAs, one arrives at 1.19 photos per minute. That is one photo per 50 seconds. Discounting time spent on other activities results in one photo per 15 seconds for Apollo 11. This is even more remarkable considering that many locations in the photographs are situated miles apart and would have taken considerable travel time, especially in bulky pressure suits. On top of this, the cameras were neither equipped with a viewfinder nor with automatic exposure, which means that taking good pictures would take considerably longer.

• The astronauts were well trained before the mission in the use of photographic equipment. Since there were no weather effects to contend with and the bright sunlight scenes permitted the use of small apertures with consequent large depth of field, the equipment was generally kept at a single setting for the duration of the mission. All that was required of the astronauts was to open the shutter and wind the film to take a picture. In these conditions it is possible to take two photographs a second. The camera was in a bracket mounted on the front of their spacesuit, so they looked straight ahead at what they wanted to photograph; no viewfinder was needed. Also, many of the photographs were stereoscopic pairs or sets of panoramic images, taken immediately after each other. The Apollo Image Atlas (external link below) shows that 70mm magazine S of Apollo 11 has 122 photos taken during the walk on the surface - less than one per minute. In addition, by looking at the photographs in sequence, one can see that very often several of them were taken in rapid succession.

7. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground (the rock is seen in NASA photos AS16-107-17445 and 17446). They could be "prop continuity markers". Hoax proponents say that the first copies of the photos released do show these marks, and that later releases may have been doctored, and that attempts to debunk this problem focus exclusively on one example on the rock, ignoring the second on the ground and the coincidence of two, allegedly identical artifacts on the same photo.

• The "C"-shaped objects are most likely printing imperfections not in the original film from the camera, but only in some of the later generation copies of AS16-107-17446 (and no copies of 17445). One suggestion, as seen in the next link, is that when magnified the 'C' is a coiled hair present on the lens of an enlarger when a print of the photo was taken for NASA's website. (See this link and this link.) Here are the photographs:
• AS16-107-17445 (high resolution)
• AS16-107-17446 (high resolution)

8. A resident of Perth, Australia, with the pseudonym Una Ronald, said she saw a Coke bottle in the frame which was edited out of later versions, and said that many articles appeared discussing this in The West Australian newspaper at the time. Western Australia was the only place in the world that got their feed 'live' without delay.

• No such newspaper reports can be verified. Una Ronald's true identity has been kept secret, and her claims have only been relayed by one source. Analysis shows that what she probably saw was in fact an optical artifact caused by a reflection inside the camera lens. Its motion precisely mirrors Aldrin's in the shot (see Coke Bottle and Una Ronald). The resolution of the video transmissions from the moon were far greater than that of ordinary television, and were converted to standard video by pointing a camera at a video screen, similar to the old kinescope method of recording live TV shows -- a process vulnerable to added reflections at the conversion site. Inverted ghost images of Aldrin appear throughout the video.

9. The 1994 hardback version of Moon Shot by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton contains a photograph of Shepard playing golf on the moon with another astronaut. The picture is an obvious fake, there being no one else to take the shot of the two, and the artwork was poor (such as the grapefruit sized "golf ball"), and yet it was presented as if it were a real photo.

TV image of the actual scene

• The picture is a mockup made from several individual shots from the Hasselblad cameras (which had already been stowed at that point), and does not appear in the 1995 UK paperback version, although at no point is its nature mentioned in the book. It was used in lieu of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors of the book apparently felt were too grainy to present in a book's picture section.
• The Lunar Module and its shadow come from a left/right reversal of AS14-66-9276. The astronaut on the right is a left/right reversal from AS14-66-9240, the TV camera has been removed. The astronaut on the left is a left/right reversal of AS14-66-9241, again with the TV camera removed. The flag is from AS14-66-9232 or one of the similar photos. Some of the equipment came from a photo similar to AS14-67-9361. The golf club, ball, and some shadows have been added. See this webpage for the dialog and discussion of the activity that the faked photo depicts.

Shepard duffed the first ball and hit the second one fairly cleanly. Houston joked to Shepard "That looked like a slice to me, Al.", yet a slice is caused by uneven airflow on the ball. This is impossible without an atmosphere.

• The ball moved only two or three feet. Shepard also stated that the second ball went "miles and miles" (off-camera of the TV broadcast), which was clearly a joke, like the comment about the slice. Shepard later said, "I thought, with the same club-head speed, the ball's going to go at least six times as far. There's absolutely no drag, so if you do happen to spin it, it won't slice or hook 'cause there's no atmosphere to make it turn." A slice comes from hitting the ball off the outer end of the club-head, versus hitting it square in the middle of the club-head, versus hooking it, which is hitting it off the inner end of the club-head. Shepard did, in effect, "slice" the ball at first, and as he notes, being in the virtually non-existent lunar atmosphere, the ball did not curve laterally as an earthbound slice would.

:*See ALSJ, click on "Apollo 14" on the left, under "Second EVA", click on "A nice day for a game of golf", and scroll down to "135:08:17", which has a transcript of the actual dialog. Just above "135:08:17" is a video clip of the golfing sequence. Below "135:09:26" is a discussion of the mock-up photo in Moon Shot. 10. There appear to be "hot spots" in some photographs. Hoax proponents claim this looks like a huge spotlight was used at a close distance. In an Apollo 12 voice recording astronaut Pete Conrad said "That Sun's bright, it's like somebody is shining a spotlight on your hands! I tell you...it really is. It's like somebody's got a super-bright spotlight!" Of one photo of Aldrin, NASA spokesperson Jan Lundberg stated "Yes, it seems like he is standing in a spotlight and I can't explain that. Umm, that escapes me why. So maybe you have to find Armstrong and ask him."

• The "hot spots" are discussed at Clavius.org . Conrad is talking about the Sun.

Ionizing radiation and heat

Challenges and responses

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). Some hoax theorists have suggested that Starfish Prime (high altitude nuclear testing in 1962) was a failed attempt to disrupt the Van Allen belts.

• The Moon is ten times higher than the Van Allen radiation belts. The spacecraft moved through the belts in just 30 minutes, and the astronauts were protected from the ionizing radiation by the metal hulls of the spacecraft. In addition, the orbital transfer trajectory from the Earth to the Moon through the belts was selected to minimize radiation exposure. Even Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, has rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too dangerous for the Apollo missions. Dosimeters carried by the crews showed they received about the same cumulative dosage as a chest X-ray or about 1 milligray. Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem, which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years.(Plait 2002, pp. 160–62)

• The radiation is actually evidence that the astronauts went to the Moon. 33 of 36 of the Apollo astronauts who were on the nine Apollo missions to leave Earth orbit have early stage cataracts that have been shown to be caused by radiation exposure to cosmic rays during their trip. (see Ms. Irene Schneider on The Space Show), the November 20, 2005 show.

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

• The film was kept in metal containers that prevented radiation from fogging the film's emulsion. (Plait 2002, pp. 162–63) In addition, film carried by unmanned lunar probes such as the Lunar Orbiter and Luna 3 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 couple lunar surface heat to devices such as cameras 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 adequate to control the temperature of the film within the cameras; lunar module temperatures were controlled with similar coatings that gave it its 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. During the longer stays, the astronauts did notice increased cooling loads on their spacesuits as the sun continued to rise and the surface temperature increased, but the effect was easily countered by the passive and active cooling systems. (Plait 2002, pp. 165–67)

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

• 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.

Transmissions

Challenges and responses

1. The lack of a more than 2 second delay in two way communications at a distance of a 250,000 miles (400,000 km).

• The round trip light travel time of more than 2 seconds is apparent in all the real-time recordings of the lunar audio, but this does not always appear as expected. There may be some documentary films where the delay has been edited out. Principal motivations for editing the audio would likely come in response to time constraints or in the interest of clarity.

2. Typical delays in communication were on the order of half a second.

• Claims that the delays were only on the order of half a second are unsubstantiated by an examination of the actual recordings.

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

• The timing of the first Moonwalk was moved up after landing.

4. Parkes supposedly provided 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. See also The Parkes Observatory's Support of the Apollo 11 Mission, from "Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia" (The events surrounding the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying the live television of man's first steps on the moon were portrayed in a slightly fictionalized 2000 Australian film comedy The Dish.)

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

• This is not supported by the detailed evidence and logs from the missions.

Mechanical issues

Challenges and responses

1. No blast crater appeared from the landing.

• No crater should be expected. The Descent Propulsion System was throttled very far down during the final stages of landing. The Lunar Module was no longer rapidly decelerating, so the descent engine only had to support the module's own weight, which by then was greatly diminished by the near exhaustion of the descent propellants, and the Moon's lower gravity. At the time of landing, the engine's thrust divided by the cross-sectional area of the engine bell is only about 1.5 PSI (Plait 2002, p. 164), and that is reduced by the fact that the engine was in a vacuum, causing the exhaust to spread out. (By contrast, the thrust of the first stage of the Saturn V was 459 PSI, over the area of the engine bell.) Rocket exhaust gases expand much more rapidly 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. Rocket engines designed for vacuum operation have longer bells than those designed for use at the earth's surface, but they still cannot prevent this spreading. The lunar module's exhaust gases therefore expanded rapidly well beyond the landing site. Even if they hadn't, a simple calculation will show that the pressure at the end of the descent engine bell was much too low to carve out a crater. However, the descent engines did scatter a considerable amount of very fine surface dust as seen in 16mm movies of each landing, and as Neil Armstrong said as the landing neared ("...kicking up some dust..."). This significantly impaired visibility in the final stages of landing, and many mission commanders commented on it. Photographs do show slightly disturbed dust beneath the descent engine. And finally, the landers were generally moving horizontally as well as vertically until right before landing, so the exhaust would not be focused on any one surface spot for very long, and the compactness of the lunar soil below a thin surface layer of dust also make it virtually impossible for the descent engine to blast out a "crater". (Plait 2002, pp. 163–65)

2. The launch rocket produced no visible flame.

• Hydrazine (a fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide (an oxidizer) were the Lunar Module propellants, chosen for their reliability; they ignite hypergolically –upon contact– without a spark. Hypergolic propellants happen to produce a nearly transparent exhaust. Hypergolic fuels are also used by several space launchers: the core of the American Titan, the Russian Proton, the European Ariane 1 through 4 and the Chinese Long March, and the transparency of their plumes is apparent in many launch photos. The plumes of rocket engines fired in a vacuum spread out very rapidly as they leave the engine nozzle (see above), further reducing their visibility. Finally, most rocket engines use a "rich" mixture to lengthen their lifetimes. While the excess fuel will burn when it contacts atmospheric oxygen, this cannot happen in a vacuum.

3. The rocks brought back from the Moon are identical to rocks collected by scientific expeditions to Antarctica.

• Chemical analysis of the rocks confirms a different oxygen isotopic composition and a surprising lack of volatile elements. There are only a few 'identical' rocks, and those few fell as meteorites after being ejected from the Moon during impact cratering events. The total quantity of these 'Lunar Meteorites' is small compared to the more than 840 lb (380 kg) of lunar samples returned by Apollo (although NASA states that only a couple of pounds were actually picked up by astronauts, the rest being collected automatically). Also the Apollo lunar soil samples chemically matched the Russian luna space probe’s lunar soil samples.

4. The presence of deep dust around the module; given the blast from the landing engine, this should not be present.

• The dust around the module is called regolith and is created by ejecta from asteroid and meteoroid impacts. This dust was several inches thick at the Apollo 11 landing site. The regolith was estimated to be several meters thick and is highly compacted with depth. In an atmosphere, we would expect a rocket engine to blast all the surface dust off the ground for tens of meters. However, dust was only removed from the area directly beneath the Apollo landing engine. The important observation here is "atmosphere". Powerful engines set up turbulence in air which lifts and carries dust readily, far beyond the engine itself. However, in a vacuum, there is no air to disturb. Only the actual engine exhaust's direct pressure on the dust can move it. (Plait 2002, pp. 163–65)

5. The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts flapped despite there being no wind on the Moon. Bart Sibrel said "The wind was probably caused by intense air-conditioning used to cool the astronauts in their lightened, un-circulated space suits. The cooling systems in the backpacks would have been removed to lighten the load not designed for Earth’s six times heavier gravity, otherwise they might have fallen over".

• The astronauts were moving the flag into position, causing motion. Since there is no air on the Moon to provide friction, these movements caused a long-lasting undulating movement seen in the flag. There was a rod extending from the top of the flagpole to hold the flag out for proper display. The fabric's rippled appearance was due to its having been folded during flight and gave it an appearance which could be mistaken for motion in a still photograph. The top supporting rod of the flag was telescopic and the crew of Apollo 11 found they could not fully extend it. Later crews did not fully extend this rod because they liked how it made the flag appear. A viewing of the videotape made during the moonwalk shows that shortly after the astronauts remove their hands from the flag/flagpole, it stops moving and remains motionless. At one point the flag is in view for well over thirty minutes and it remains completely motionless throughout that period (and all similar periods). (See inertia) See the photographs below.

Buzz Aldrin saluting the flag (Note the fingers of Aldrin's right hand can be seen behind his helmet)

Photo taken a few seconds later, Buzz Aldrin's hand is down, head turned toward the camera, the flag is unchanged

6. The Lander weighed 17 tons yet the astronauts feet seem to have made a bigger dent in the dust.

• The astronauts were much lighter than the Lander, but their boots were also much smaller than the lander's pads. As pressure is what makes the 'dent', and is force over an area, you make the pressure much smaller by making the area a little larger. An example would be driving a car (heavy) on sand, then getting a person (light) to walk on the same surface. You will often find the depth of tracks to be about the same.

Moon rocks

Hoax proponents argue that Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica in 1967 (two years prior to the Apollo missions) was in order to study and / or collect lunar meteorite rocks to be used as fake moonrocks. Because von Braun was a former SS officer, it is suggested by hoax proponents (including Aron Ranen), he would have been susceptible to pressure to agree to the conspiracy in order to protect himself from recriminations over the past. NASA does not provide much information about why it said the MSFC Director and three others were in Antarctica at that time, but said that it was "to look into environmental and logistic factors that might relate to the planning of future space missions, and hardware" .

On a related note, Kaysing asked:

Why was there no mention of gold, silver, diamonds, or other precious metals on the Moon? It was never discussed by the press or astronauts (Kaysing 2002, p. 8).

The extensive payload of moon rocks brought back from the Moon are still analyzed by scientists to this day as some of the only samples returned from another body in the solar system. While it is true that rocks dislodged from the Moon by meteoric impacts occasionally land on Earth, and a handful of rocks believed to be from the moon and Mars have been found in Antarctica and other places, there are only a few of these objects in our collections and the rest of the rocks collected on Earth are entirely different in composition and in their detailed structures from those found and returned from the Moon. Scientists currently identify thirty-nine lunar meteorites (lunaites) — far fewer than the number of rocks brought back from lunar missions. (Cooke 2006, p. 67) Furthermore, detailed analysis of the lunar rocks show no evidence of their having been on Earth prior to their return during Apollo. They are also entirely consistent with having been on the Lunar surface since their formation many billions of years ago with the detailed geological context that they were documented to have been sampled from. They are almost entirely composed of heavily shocked rocks consistent with the meteoroid environment on the Moon's surface. Many of them are older than any rocks found to date on Earth.

The first Antarctic meteorite discovery was made by the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson in 1912. A later expedition was mounted in 1969 by a Japanese team. The first United States led team began searches in the mid to late 1970s and discovered more meteorites in 1981, which were identified as being similar to the lunar samples returned by Apollo which in turn are similar to the few grams of material returned from the Moon by Soviet sample return missions (see ANSMET). The total collection of identified Antarctic lunar meteorites presently in the collection at JSC amounts to only about 2.5 kilograms, less than 1% of the 381 kilograms of moonrocks and Regolith returned by Apollo.

The physics of the process is well understood. It is not favourable in orbital dynamics for an object to leave the Moon and impact Earth, the most favourable outcomes are the complete escape of the object (thus entering solar orbit) directly, or a chaotic orbit around the Moon, Earth or both which eventually results in the object being ejected from the system or re-impacting the Moon. The Moon being the least massive object, it becomes a sort of "kink" in Earth's gravity well, and this makes it more likely than Earth to be struck by any incoming object.

Deaths of key Apollo personnel

In a television program about the hoax allegations, Fox Entertainment Group listed the deaths of 10 astronauts and of two civilians related to the manned spaceflight program as having possibly been killed as part of a cover-up.

• Ted Freeman (T-38 crash, 1964)
• Elliott See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 accident, 1966)
• Virgil "Gus" Grissom (supposedly an outspoken critic of the Space Program) (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967). His son, Scott Grissom said the accident was a murder [2].
• Ed White (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Roger Chaffee (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Ed Givens (car accident, 1967)
• C. C. Williams (T-38 accident, October 1967)
• X-15 pilot Mike Adams (the only X-15 pilot killed during the X-15 flight test program in November 1967 - not a NASA astronaut, but had flown X-15 above 50 miles).
• Robert Lawrence, scheduled to be an Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory pilot who died in a jet crash in December 1967, shortly after reporting for duty to that (later cancelled) program.
• NASA worker Thomas Baron (train crash, 1967 shortly after making accusations before Congress about the cause of the Apollo 1 fire, after which he was fired.) Ruled as suicide. Baron was a quality control inspector who wrote a report critical of the Apollo program and was an outspoken critic after the Apollo 1 fire. Baron and his family were killed as their car was struck by a train at a train crossing [3], .
• Lee Gelvani said he almost convinced James Irwin, an Apollo 15 astronaut whom Gelvani referred to as an "informant", to confess about a cover-up having occurred. Irwin was supposedly going to contact Gelvani about it; however he died of a heart attack in 1991, before any such telephone call occurred.

All but one of the astronaut deaths (Irwin's) were directly related to their job with NASA or the Air Force. Two of the astronauts, Mike Adams and Robert Lawrence, had no connection with the civilian manned space program. Astronaut James Irwin had suffered several heart attacks in the years prior to his death. There is no independent confirmation of Gelvani's claim that Irwin was about to come forward. All but one of the deaths occurred at least one or two years before Apollo 11 and the subsequent flights.

Gravity on the moon

The hoax investigation site xenophilia.com claims that versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the 1960s (pre-Apollo missions) have the neutral point between the earth and the moon 20,520 miles from the Moon. In theory, the site claims, "a moon with 1/6 Earth's gravity should have a Neutral Point between 22,078 - 25,193 miles from the Moons surface. Yet after the Apollo missions, Time magazine July 25, 1969 said 'At a point of 43,495 miles from the moon, lunar gravity exerted a force equal to the gravity of the Earth, then some 200,000 miles distant.'" The site claims that the 1973 Encyclopedia Britannica gave a new neutral point distance of 39,000 miles.

• They appear to be confusing the Moon's sphere of influence and the point at which the Moon's gravitation and Earth's are equal. NASA were concerned with the Moon's sphere of influence, which starts around 40,000 miles from the Moon, and marks the point where the Moon's gravity has more influence on the spacecraft's trajectory than the Earth's. The 'Apollo 16 Flight Journal' comments on this: "we're scheduled to cross that mythical line known as the lunar Sphere of Influence, the point of which we begin calculating the increasing of the lunar gravity on the spacecraft. Our displays here in Mission Control shortly after that point are generally switched over to Moon reference from Earth reference. The velocities that we have been watching decrease steadily up to now, will then begin to increase as the spacecraft is accelerated toward the Moon.." The point where the lunar gravity and Earth's gravity are equal is around 25,000 miles, so there's no discrepancy to explain: they appear to be measuring different things.

• Spacecraft from several nations have travelled to or past the Moon, so unless all their space programs are part of the conspiracy, at least one should have told us by now if the mass of the Moon was incorrect. Similarly, if Lunar gravity was four times as high as generally believed, it would be demonstrable on Earth in unexpectedly large tidal motion. The Surveyor program moon landers had an engine thrust of 150 pounds and their landing weight was approximately 660 pounds on Earth. Five of these spacecraft soft-landed on the moon in 1966-68. If the Moon's surface gravity was much larger than one-sixth that Earth's, the spacecraft would not be able to soft-land on the Moon.

• The surface gravity of a moon is not directly related to the position the neutral point between it and the planet it orbits. The neutral point between the Earth and Moon depends on the mass of the Earth, the mass of the Moon, and the current distance between them — which varies between the apogee of 405,500 km and perigee of 363,300 km, due to the Moon's eccentricity of 0.055. In contrast, the surface gravity of the Moon depends only on the gravitational constant, the mass of the Moon, and the radius of the Moon (see the equation at surface gravity). The surface gravity does not depend on the distance to Earth or the Earth's mass, so the neutral point is irrelevant to the Moon's surface gravity. The Moon's surface gravity is very close to one-sixth that of Earth's. (Seeds 1995, p. 378)

• The site fails to note that the flight paths of the Apollo crafts were curved, not straight-line, so the neutral point within their flight paths would be significantly larger than the straight-line neutral point range of 22,000-25,000 miles (for illustration, see the bands of gravitational influence in the diagram accompanying Lagrangian point). The 'Time' article's statement would then be equally as true as the early 1960s 'Britannica'. The statement that the 1973 'Britannica' reported a different figure is currently unverified. The 1966 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia (volume 13, page 650) gives the Moon's surface gravity as one-sixth that of Earth's.

Involvement of the Soviet Union

A primary reason for the race to the moon was the Cold War - a competition of worldwide political and economic status and influence between the US and the USSR that dominated the history of the 20th century. The Soviets, with their own competing moon program and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data, could be expected to have cried foul if the USA tried to fake a Moon landing (Plait 2002, p. 173), especially as they themselves had been unsuccessful in their own man-on-the-moon program. They would have scored enormous status in the eyes of the rest of the world by doing so. Conspiracy theorist Ralph Rene said that the USSR was bought off with secret shipments of grain.

Given the lack of supporting evidence from any Communist bloc countries since the openness and revelations following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this is seen by many as a strong argument against such a hoax. For more on conspiracy theories within the Soviet space program, see Soviet space program conspiracy accusations.

Bart Sibrel said, in response, that "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep spacecraft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly cancelled."

• However, the Soviet Union had been sending unmanned 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 range. This does not prove they could track foreign spacecraft, but as they had the ability to track their own it is likely they could at least receive radio transmissions from Apollo.

• Apollo 18 and Apollo 19 were cancelled on September 2 1970, due to budget cuts by the US Congress. . Apollo 20 had been cancelled earlier on January 4 1970 . (See Cancelled Apollo missions.)

Individuals featured in the controversy

More proponents of the moon hoax

• Charles T. Hawkins, author of How America Faked the Moon Landings,
• Philippe Lheureux, French author of Moon Landings: Did NASA Lie?, and Lumières sur la Lune (Lights on the Moon): La NASA a t-elle menti!.
• James M. Collier (d. 1998) American journalist and author, producer of the video Was It Only a Paper Moon? in 1997.
• Jan Lundberg a technician for Hasselblad.
• Howard McCurdy space historian at American University.
• Jack White American photo historian known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
• Marcus Allen (publisher) - British publisher of Nexus magazine said that photographs of the lander would not prove that the US put men on the moon. "Getting to the moon really isn't much of a problem - the Russians did that in 1959 - the big problem is getting people there." [4]
• Aron Ranen directed Did we go? (co-produced with Benjamin Britton and selected for the 2000 "New Documentary Series" Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the 2000 Dallas Video Festival Awards and the 2001 Digital Video Underground Festival in San Francisco). He received a Golden Cine Eagle and two fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts.
• Clyde Lewis, radio talk show host.
• Dr. David Groves (who works for Quantech Image Processing) and worked on some of the NASA photos. He said he can pinpoint the exact point at which the artificial light was used. Using the focal length of the camera's lens and an actual boot, he has calculated (using ray-tracing) that the artificial light source is between 24 and 36 cm to the right of the camera [5], [6].

People accused of involvement in the hoax

• Deke Slayton, NASA Chief Astronaut in 1968: Some hoax proponents (for example, the 'NASA Scam' website, and Clyde Lewis ) say that Slayton was one of the primary leaders of the hoax. He visited the film set of "2001 A Space Odyssey", in the UK, which he referred to as "NASA East".
• Michael J Tuttle: Some hoax proponents say that he took the job of producing fake photographs in 1994 . Prior to the widespread availability of the internet, only a small subset of the photos currently in existence were seen. Some hoax proponents believe many of the photos were created in the mid 1990s.
• Stanley Kubrick, and his younger brother Raul Kubrick (alleged to be associated with the American Communist Party) are accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollo 11 and 12 . It has been claimed, without any evidence, that in early 1968 while 2001: A Space Odyssey, (which includes scenes taking place on the Moon), was in post-production, NASA secretly approached Kubrick to direct the first three Moon landings. In this scenario the launch and splashdown would be real but the spacecraft would have remained in Earth orbit while the fake footage was broadcast as "live" from the lunar journey. Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, both of whom had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him. Kubrick used some 50mm f/0.7 lenses that were left over from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA , .
• Douglas Trumbull is accused of leading the special effects team for the faking of the Apollo 11 and 12 missions .

Other evidence and issues

NASA book commission and withdrawal

In 2002, NASA commissioned James Oberg $15,000 to write a point-by-point rebuttal of the hoax claims, and, in the same year, cancelled their commission in the face of protests by hoax skeptics that the book would dignify the accusations. Oberg said that he intends (funding allowing) to finish the project. , In November 2002 Peter Jennings (ABC’s World News Tonight anchor) 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.” Jennings said "(NASA) had been so rattled (that it) hired (somebody) to write a book refuting the conspiracy theorists."

Academic work

In 2004, Drs Martin Hendry and Ken Skeldon at Glasgow University were awarded a grant by the UK based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council to investigate 'Moon Hoax' theories.

Attempts to view the landing site

Leonard David published an article on space.com, on 27 April 2001 showing a picture taken by the Clementine mission which shows a diffuse dark spot at the location of the lunar module Falcon. The resolution is not high enough to see what it is. The evidence was noticed by Misha Kreslavsky, of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and Yuri Shkuratov of the Kharkov Astronomical Observatory in the Ukraine.

The European Space Agency's modern moon probe, the SMART-1 unmanned probe, sent back imagery to the ESA of the Apollo Moon 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 the website "space.com'. No photos have so far been released, according to the website.

The Daily Telegraph published a story in 2002 (see ref.) saying that European astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT, the most powerful telescope in the world) would use the telescope to view the remains of the Apollo lunar landers. 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 moon hoax believer, pointed out in the story that no images of hardware on the moon would convince him that manned landings had taken place (Allen believes robot missions placed objects there). The article greatly overstates the power of the VLT (it can show details only as small as 130m) and so it is not surprising that no images sharp enough to resolve the lander have been forthcoming[7]. Such photos, if and when they become available, would be the first non-NASA produced images of the site at that definition.

Hubble can resolve objects as small as 280 feet, (86 metres), again, not good enough to settle this issue.

Apollo hoax in popular culture and parody

• Sir David Attenborough, as part of a BBC special celebrating its 40th anniversary said "(Apollo) was an enormous event, of course, and overtook the country and the BBC television centre too. We devoted 24 hours of television to it, from the big studio ... And it was thrilling - we cleared all the programmes and, of course, the Americans had a reserve spacecraft ready, in case something went wrong with the first one."

• President Clinton in his 2004 autobiography, My Life, states (on page 156): "Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the decade was out. The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that "them television fellers" could make things look real that weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time."

• In 1978, the film Capricorn One was released. Its story portrayed a NASA attempt to fake a landing on Mars.

• In 1971, there was a brief sequence in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, in which part of the action takes place in a "Moon" setting where astronauts were being trained.

• A television drama called The News-Benders, the key plot device of which stipulated that all major technological advances since 1945 had been faked in some way, aired in January 1968; it postulated a "Moon landing" falsified with models. It was written by British writer Desmond Lowden.

• In 2002, William Karel released a spoof documentary film, Dark Side of the Moon, 'exposing' how Kubrick was recruited to fake the Moon landings, and featured interviews with, among others, Kubrick's widow and a number of American statesmen including Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. It was an elaborate joke: interviews and other footage were presented out of context and in some cases completely staged, with actors playing interviewees who had never existed (and in many cases named after characters from Kubrick's films, just one of many clues included to reveal the joke to the alert viewer).
• Norman Mailer in 1969 wrote "The event (Apollo 11 moonwalk) was so removed, however, so unreal, that no objective correlative existed to prove it had not been an event staged in a television studio---the greatest con of the century--- and indeed a good mind, product of the iniquities, treacheries, gold, passions, invention, deception, and rich worldly stink of the Renaissance could hardly deny that the event if bogus was as great a creation in mass hoodwinking, deception, and legerdemain as the true ascent was in discipline and technology. Indeed, conceive of the genius of such a conspiracy. It would take criminals and confidence men mightier, more trustworthy and more resourceful than anything in this century or the ones before. Merely to conceive of such men was the surest way to know the event was not staged."
• In the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds are Forever, Agent 007 steals what appears to be a moon buggy from a model moon set, and drives it off to escape from an enemy compound. This scene may have helped to spread the idea of the moon landings being a hoax(Kaysing 2002, p. 62).
• In the 1992 movie Sneakers, the character “Mother,” played by Dan Aykroyd mentions “Just like they faked the Apollo moon landing.”
• On an episode of Fox TV's Family Guy, a flashback shows the ending of filming the hoax, with Neil Armstrong walking out of the studio and a pedestrian seeing him. When the pedestrian asks why he is not in space, Neil Armstrong kills him. In the episode "If I'm Dyin', I'm Lyin'," Peter said that his "healing powers" were a fake, "like the moon landings".
• On Roswell That Ends Well, an episode of Futurama, when the crew is mysteriously flung back in time to 1947, President Truman requests that Zoidberg, an alien, be taken to Area 51 for study. When informed that Area 51 is the location for the faked moon landing, he orders that NASA be invented and get to work.
• The video game Duke Nukem 3D contains a level (Episode 3 Level 5) with a motion picture studio containing a lunar landscape set.
• Worms 3D, a video game by UK Software developers Team17, contains a level depicting a movie sound stage with moon landscape and a lunar landing module.
• One level in Midway's remake of the classic arcade shooter, Area 51, takes place on a moon landing set, complete with a cardboard-cutout astronaut, fake LEM, lunar lander, and lunar rover.
• The Men From Earth song "I Faked The Moon Landing" tells an imaginary story of someone's deathbed confession to assisting with the hoax. Among the many references in the song to popular hoax accusations is the line "that wasn't Buzz next to the LEM / just a guy who looked like him."
• The group Looper have a song called "Dave the Moon Man" on their album, Up A Tree. It features a character who doesn't believe in the moon landings and repeats several of the arguments mentioned here.
• The video for the Rammstein song "Amerika" depicts the band on a movie set wearing NASA suits and a theme of the video is the faking of the moon landing.
• On an episode of Friends, Joey asks Phoebe for a good lie, and she responds, "Okay, how about the whole 'man-landing-on-the-moon' thing? I mean, you can see the strings, people!!"
• The book The Loony: a novella of epic proportions (published in April 2005) by Christopher Wunderlee tells the story of an astrophysicist's role in assisting NASA in faking the lunar landings. The book details the implications of 'knowing the truth' and the massive cover-up.
• A 2006 commercial for Red Bull features astronauts who, after drinking Red Bull, "have wings" and are unable to actually set foot on the moon. They are instructed by Houston to return to Earth so the scene can be shot in a studio instead.
• On an episode of The PJs, Thurston said that if people can fake a moon landing, anything's possible.
• In the movie studio in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, there is a fake moon landing set in one of the warehouses.
• Also in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas there is a "caller" on one of the radio stations on the game said "Of course we never landed on the moon, it was just a big hoax".
• On the June 7, 2006 edition of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert said "Tonight's guest is a pioneer in Mars exploration. Hopefully tonight he'll explain how they faked a space landing there too." This was followed by laughter from the audience.
• In the movie Looney Tunes: Back In Action, as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are in Area 52 they browse the videotape shelf, one of the videotapes searched had "MOON LANDING DRESS REHEARSAL".
• In the movie RV, a character comments that the family's vacation spot is "where NASA faked the moon landings."
• On the July 27, 2006 episode of the Colbert Report, Colbert said "And here's the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum, where you can see the original rocks from the soundstage where they faked the moon landing. It's a part of Hollywood history." This was followed by laughter from the audience.

See also

• Capricorn One, fictional movie about a Mars landing hoax
• Dark Side of the Moon (also known as Opération Lune)
• Jim Lovell - was unsuccessfully sued by Kaysing for libel.
• Soviet space program conspiracy accusations
• Nazi Moon base
• Lloyd Mallin, who wrote a book in the early 1970s saying that all of the Soviet space exploits were faked.

References

• Newsweek (1969). Where are they Now? the Flat Earthers, vol 73, Jan 13, 1969, pg 8.

• ^{Cooke 2006} Bill Cooke (August 2006). "The Great Interplanetary Rock Swap". Astronomy. 34 (8): 64–67.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

• ^{Kaysing 2002} Kaysing, Bill (2002). We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Health Research Books. ISBN 0-7873-1254-0487-5. ISBN 0-7873-1254-0487-5. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: length (help)

• ^{Plait 2002} Plait, Philip (2002). Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" (see chapter 17). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-40976-6.

• Robert J. Schadewald (1980). "The Flat-out Truth: Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A Fraud! Says This Prophet", Science Digest, vol 83, July 1980, pg. 58-63. (available online)
• John Noble Wilford (1969). "A Moon Landing? What Moon Landing?", New York Times, December 18, 1969, p. 30.

• ^{Seeds 1995} Seeds, Michael (1995). Horizons: Exploring the Universe. Wadsworth. ISBN 0-534-24889-6.

• The Daily Telegraph (2002). World's biggest telescope to prove Americans really walked on Moon, The Daily Telegraph, November 24, 2002 [8]

External links

• National Geographic: Conspiracy Moon Landing

Television specials

• Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? (2001) (TV) at IMDb
• Opération lune (2002) (TV) at IMDb

Hoax allegation links

• Conspiration.co.uk
• A group forum website suggesting that there was a religious motive behind the moon hoax
• Can One man prove we went to the moon in 1969? Documentary by Aron Ranen
• Bart Sibrel is the producer of "Astronauts Gone Wild," a documentary confronting nine Apollo astronauts with his accusations that the moon landings were not authentic. Includes footage of the verbal assault on Mr. Aldrin and his physical assault on Mr. Sibrel. His other videos also try to prove the moon landings were faked.
• Bill Kaysing
• Ralph Rene is author of "NASA Mooned America," a popular book on the moon hoax allegation.
• Moon Wide Web
• Photo analysis by Jack White
• The Apollo Hoax Presents a clearinghouse of what the authors say is "evidence proving the moon landings were faked".
• The Apollo 11 Hoax Conspiracy Evidence, Motives and photos to argue that the landings were faked.
• Xenophilia - a relatively thorough examination of many of the hoax claims
• Crank Dot Net list of websites about Apollo mostly hoax supporters but may include some parodies and anti-hoax materials

Hoax rebuttal links

• The Apollo Hoax web site is run by Neil Atkinson in England UK
• The Bad Astronomy Web site is run by astronomer Phil Plait
• Who mourns for Apollo? Richard Hoagland's Moon Hoax rebuttal page.
• Point by point rebuttal of hoax allegations
• Clavius website established to debunk the hoax arguments
• Lunar reflection analysis supporting the presence of retroreflectors
• A rebuttal to one typical moonlanding hoax webpage
• Humans Walked on the Moon
• Did We Land On the Moon?
• Did we land? (different from above)
• Straight Dope
• Snopes.com on fake footage
• Are Apollo Moon Photos Fake?
• HardyArt
• NASA Stooge
• Did we really land on the moon? by Michael Shermer
• The great Moon hoax NASA about the rocks
• Debunking The 'Debunkers' - Why the Apollo Moon Hoax is a Cheap, Cheesy Scam
• Did We Go To The Moon?
• Article about how Apollo 11 astronauts put an array of mirrors pointing toward Earth on the Moon

Neutral links

• BBC-Did we land men on the moon?

• Moon Landing Hoax
• About the lunar retroreflector experiment
• McDonald Laser Ranging Station that bounces light signals off the retroreflectors
• Telescope to challenge moon doubters
• BBC news report: Nasa pulls Moon hoax book
• Wired artice The Wrong Stuff Not quite neutral, but reports both sides
• NASA site explaining lunar surface shadows

Source material

• The Project Apollo Archive – Collection of publicly released Apollo photography
• Clip of Apollo 11 press conference
• The Apollo Image Atlas at The Lunar and Planetary Institute – Thumbnails of images taken during the Apollo Saturn missions
• Description by ground station engineers at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station of receiving images from Apollo 11 from the Moon
• Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
• Parkes radio telescope and Apollo 11
• Video of Nixon talking to the Apollo 11 astronauts
• Aldrin hopping, television
• Aldrin hopping, movie camera
• Apollo 15 dropping a hammer and a feather
• Gagarin quote about seeing stars
• Seeing stars in space
• Flat Earth Society (reprinted from 1980 Science Digest article)
• Telescopic Tracking of the Apollo Lunar Missions
• Space debris shows photo of water dump from video screen
• Apollo 15 landing site
• Apollo 11 Tapes Search for original Apollo 11 EVA tapes, television details
• Technical drawings of Apollo capsule and Lunar Module
• Locations of Apollo hardware
• Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft

Spoofs

• Parody with The Clangers
• The Mad Revisionist - This web site says the Moon Landings are a hoax because the moon does not exist. See also [9]