Did the U.S.A really land on the moon? [ ENDS: 05/07/11 ]

[Zak]

The sky should be full of stars in the pictures, yet the sky is pitch black.

There are no air molecules to scatter light from the sun, so the sky is always black.

[Aaron]

Had a discussion about this in business class.

I don't think the USA landed on the moon first, I think they just wanted to beat the rivals, Russia I think it was.. Don't quote me cause I'm not to sure. Anyway, I don't believe it was them who landed first, could of easily been a set-up.

Just my opinion!

[Recursion]

There are no air molecules to scatter light from the sun, so the sky is always black.

wat, no, how would you then get any light on the moon from the sun? LOL. It's simply because the light coming from stars, the closest of which (aside from the sun) is 4.2 light yrs away (~26 trillion miles away), is so weak that standard cameras won't pick it up without a very long exposure time to allow more light to hit the camera sensors.

The poor image quality would have been due to the poor communication between Earth and the Moon or due to the equipment that was specially adapted for use in space.

[N!ck]

Yes, they did. /thread

I think that they produced some fake footage filmed in studios to add to the coverage but they almost certainly went to the moon.

About the moon rock thing: we found moon rocks on Earth,. Also, the flag was supported by a metal pole along the top to stop it from draping and there isn't much reason why it couldn't have been placed by a remote controlled system rather than man.

I also believe that Concorde is/was a greater technical achievement than the Apollo missions .

[Jordy]

Had a discussion about this in business class.

I don't think the USA landed on the moon first, I think they just wanted to beat the rivals, Russia I think it was.. Don't quote me cause I'm not to sure. Anyway, I don't believe it was them who landed first, could of easily been a set-up.

Just my opinion!

Maybe you should look into it (or even just read this thread) before forming an incredibly ill-informed opinion.

And what do you mean you don't believe they landed first? Only Americans have been on the Moon.

[David]

Yes, I believe it did happen. It was tested by MythBusters, you can say that was faked also, but what would be the point in making a show on that subject, just to fake it.. surely they would just ignore fan requests.

They tested two photos taken by Apollo 11, one of the shuttle and some rocks, both having different shadow directions. The other being Buzz Aldrin behind the shuttle, in a shadow, yet clearly visible. They came to the result that it is plausable on the moons surface due to the lunar soil reflecting the sunlight.

They also looked at the American flag flapping around, like a wind was directing it, and the famous footprint. The results were, in pure vacuum conditions, after the manipulation stopped, the momentum caused the flag to flap wildly as if it were being blown by a breeze. This is because there was no resistance from air to dampen the motion. This proved that in a vacuum, a flag does not need wind to flap for a while after a person sets it in motion.
The footprint; The reason for this is that the composition of lunar soil differs from terrestrial sand, meaning it behaves differently when stepped on. Terrestrial soil is weathered and rounded, so the particles do not support each other's weight very well. Lunar soil, because it is not weathered, has a more jagged texture, so the particles "lock" with each other and will hold the shape of the imprint much more clearly.

source here

Some say that the technology (computers and otherwise) simply was not advanced enough back then.

In making this statement, conspiracists often draw parallels to the consumer technology of the 1960s. "If they couldn't make X, then how could they go to the moon?"

First we must remember that NASA was on the cutting edge of technology in the 1950s and 1960s. They had an enormous budget and attracted the top scientists in the country. At the height of the Apollo project there were half a million scientists and engineers working on different aspects of the missions.

In a larger sense, it's easy to lose touch with technology. That is, it's easy to look back to the past and wonder how we ever got along without the miracles we enjoy today. We sit at our gigahertz computers and forget that there was a time when an eight megahertz computer was pretty cool.

Just because we rely today on one particular technology or another in order to do some hard thing, doesn't mean it was impossible to do that thing before our modern technology was invented. For example, nearly all modern clocks use a real-time clock integrated circuit. It does all the timekeeping. In the 1970s we had analog clocks that used synchronous electric motors to precisely drive mechanical gears. Would it be correct to say that accurate timekeeping was impossible before that integrated chip? Of course not. Similarly, old mechanical action clocks used pendulums and springs to keep surprisingly accurate time.

What's the lesson? Just because we choose to use some particular technology today to solve a problem doesn't mean that problem was unsolvable before we had today's technology. Apollo engineers didn't have high-speed portable computers to make self-contained guidance systems, so they just built guidance systems differently. The computer was only one part of the guidance system. When John Glenn orbited the earth in his Mercury capsule, there were no computers with him. Yet his capsule was fully automated.

The moral of the story is that people can be very ingenious working with limited tools.

The reason for the poor quality pictures was done on purpose to avoid proper examinations.

A significant percentage of the lunar surface photographs are blurred, unfocused, incorrectly exposed, or otherwise flawed. These photos weren't generally known to the public until recently because they weren't interesting to editors and publishers of popular works and therefore not cost-effective to duplicate. But now that it's possible to efficiently digitize the many thousands of photographs taken on the moon (even the bad ones) and distribute them cheaply via the Internet, we can see the full gamut of lunar surface photography.

These typically occur at the beginning of a new roll when the astronaut has to advance a few frames to get to fresh film. They're usually out of focus and badly exposed.

Many photographs contain lens flares because they are up-sun segments of panoramas used to document the surroundings of important events in the checklist. These photos are important to the scientists studying the returned samples, but are not usually interesting to the general public. The scientists use them as documentation and ignore any aesthetic flaws they may see.

This sometimes happens to the last picture on the roll when the astronaut removes the film magazine from the camera, especially if the photographer has not wound the film fully into the magazine. These images are said to be "sunstruck".

In 1967, under unknown circumstances, 11 NASA astronauts died. Could this have been done on purpose to avoid leakage of the to be staged mission?

No, this is false. The conspiracy theories are impossible because of their size and complexity. More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, and a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences. Hundreds of thousands of people—including astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers—would have had to keep the secret. 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 US government or NASA who would have had a link to the Apollo program has said the Moon landings were hoaxes. With the number of people that would have had to be involved, someone would have outed the hoax by now.

source for quotes, here

[Cosmic]

This debate has now ended. Thanks to all who took part!