This is a paper I wrote on the subject last year for a school paper. There might be some errors because this was a draft of my Final, as my Final corrected on is not on my comp =/
Did the U.S. Really Land on the Moon?
The year is 1969; the Soviet Union and the United States are in a race to put man on the moon. NASA is under an immense amount of pressure to put a man on the moon. They know that if they don’t then their federal funding will stop. However several flaws are discovered and they realize they cannot make it to the moon. So to save their money and reputation they hire “Stanley Kubrick to film a fake landing in Nevada” while a “dummy Apollo was launched” (Plait 154). Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were forced to go along with this and were kept quiet with money and threats. So NASA got away with faking the lunar landing. Does this sound believable? It does to some people. In fact “about 12 million Americans believe that NASA faked the moon landing” (Plait 156).
The many people who believe that NASA faked the moon landing are called “conspiracy theorists” (Plait 157). The conspiracy theorists’ leader and overall role model is “80 year old Bill Kaysing” (Plait 157). Kaysing has written many articles and gone on several talk shows to preach his belief that NASA never landed on the moon. His most famous written work however is “We Never went to the Moon; America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle” (Plait 157). “Kaysing used to work for Rocketdyne, which is the company that built the engines for the Saturn Rocket which took the Apollo 11 in to space” (Plait 156). He completely refuses to believe a trip to the moon was or is possible, and he has many, many followers. To add to the negative light that NASA gets on the moon landing, “Fox aired a documentary in 2001 called “Conspiracy Theory; Did we land on the moon?” (Earth 1). This show was produced by the same producer who produced X- files and was narrated by X-files’ co-star Mitch Pileggi” (Earth 1). It drew millions of people to the belief that NASA never landed on the moon and faked the whole thing. “A Gallup poll in 1999 found that 6 percent or about 12 million Americans believe the NASA conspiracy theory. The same number was found in a Time/CNN poll” (Plait 156).
The conspiracy theorists believe in several things that make the moon landing fake. First they claim that there are no stars appear in the pictures taken on the Moon. Second, there is no crater in the moon when the Lunar Module landed. Third, the flag rippled and waved in space. Fourth, there is dust on the moon where the Landing Module should have blown it away. There are many other claims as well, but these are the main and most well known ones.
First is the claim by conspiracy theorists that since there are no stars in the pictures then it was faked by NASA. “A clear airless and atmosphereless sky should show millions of bright stars” (Comarow 1). Did NASA forget to put in stars? Did they hope no one would notice? Hoax believers also claim that NASA’s excuse is that the “sun’s light washed out the stars and that when the photo was taken the sun was in the back and shined past the camera” (Comarow 1).
This is a ridiculous claim. Any amateur photographer knows that it is “extremely hard to capture something very bright on a dark background” (Hamilton 1). Well the astronauts were wearing white suit that reflected much of the sun’s light along with the fact that the moon reflected even more of that light. So to capture the astronauts “the camera was set for a short exposure. A short exposure will capture extremely bright objects like the moon and astronaut but not have time to capture dimmer objects like the stars” (Hamilton 1). So the stars are there, but the camera was not able to capture them on film. The answer also lies in simple common sense.
If NASA knew it could not put man on the moon and was willing to spend million if not billions to hire the scientists, crews, and people knowledgeable enough to fake it, would they really forget to put in the stars.
The next claim by the conspiracy theorists is that the Landing Module should have left a crater in the moon when it landed because it exerted 10,000 pounds of thrust. That much thrust should have blown a hole in the ground as it landed. Yes the Lunar Lander’s “engine could exert 10,000 pounds of thrust at maximum” (Plait 164). However the LM did not simply blast it all out like a roman candle. High above the moon the “thrust was set at 10,000 pounds because The Lunar Lander descended extremely fast” (Plait 164). However as the Lunar Module slowed less thrust was needed to support it and the astronauts pulled back on the throttle. By the time the Lunar Module had landed it “had cut its thrust by about 70%” (Plait 164). That is equal to about “7,000 pounds” (Plait 164). That means that only about 3,000 pounds of thrust was used upon the actual landing of the LM. That may still seem like a lot of thrust; however the nozzle of the engine was pretty big. The” bell of the rocket was 54 inches in diameter and had an area of 2,300 square inches” (Plait 164). Therefore the 3,000 pounds of thrust is spread out and “equals only 1.5 pounds per square inch” (Plait 164). That’s not a lot of pressure. In fact that is “less pressure then the astronauts’ boots exerted on the surface of the moon” (Plait 164).
Related to the claim of no crater is the claim that the thrust of the rocket should have blown away the dust. After all if you blow dust on Earth it will fly away a few feet so even
“3,000 pounds of thrust should have blown away all the dust all around the Lunar Lander” (Comarow 1). However the astronauts’ boots left footprints and the Lunar Module left both dust and imprints. How is this possible without NASA faking the landing on a movie set? This again can be explained by using common sense and basic physics. The dust should not have been there after the Module landed. It should have been blown away and it was but just as far as it could be. You have to remember that the moon is airless. On Earth, if you “dump a bag of flour onto the floor and blow into it the flour will fly everywhere but some will fly and settle much farther then your breath could have carried them” (Plait 165). That’s because there is air on the Earth. Dust weighs almost nothing so it can be carried far simply by the air in the room. On the moon there is no air so dust will fly only as far as the force that blew it can reach. When the LM did land the dust did blow out of the immediate area but quickly settled in the immediate area again.
By far the most famous claim by the hoax believers is that the moon landing must have been faked because the flag waved and rippled. How on Earth could it have moved as “seen in the pictures” (Hamilton 1)? The most obvious solution is that the “air conditioner turned on while NASA was filming” and made the flag ripple (Hamilton 2). Another idea is that the flag simply moved due to the air already present in the room. This piece of evidence has perplexed many people.
To begin with the flag was not rippling. The pictures were taken while the flag was somewhat folded and gave the optical illusion that it was waving. When the flag was “stored for the trip from space to the moon is was crammed in storage” and became wrinkled. (Hamilton 1) When the astronauts pulled out the flag to put it down, two things happened. First the flag was all wrinkled and so the airless moon made it stay the way it was. Second the gravity on the moon is 1/3 the gravity on Earth so the flag could not be pulled downward and the wrinkles stayed in place. Also when the astronauts planted the flag “they had to twist it to get the pole to stick in to the ground”, just as you would have to do with a flag on Earth” (Hamilton 1). Again the physics of space play a role. As the pole and flag were twisted, the flag curled and uncurled resulting in a wrinkled look and with the low gravity and airlessness of space the flag stayed folded and wrinkled.
The Cold War was a time of secrecy and government projects. Many things the government did and worked on during that time are still unknown. Maybe that is why some people still refuse to believe that we landed on the moon. However no matter what claims the conspiracy theorists hold and throw out, they all can be proven wrong with simple science, physics, and common sense. On July 20th 1969, the United States did land on the moon. It was a small step for a man, and a giant leap for mankind.
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It is parenthetically documented using different sources (thus the names that appear in the middle)
The paper does not cover all the things pointed out but it does a lot of key ones. I can still talk about some of the others. ESSPECIALLY since I have done much more research into it and learned more about how the physics work.
For example, "who was holding the camera" ~asked by lawman~ It was on a tripod. No one had to be holding it.
About the Van Allen Radiation belts people bring up:
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 aluminum 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, 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 That is about the same average dose of less than 1 rem, which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years. The radiation is actually evidence that the astronauts went to the Moon.
Another thing someone brought up (I think lawman again) was the weird shadows that can be seen during the photos and video. It looks like there is more then one light source.
There is actually a really logical explanation for this as well.
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. 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.
For more proof, the Mythbusters built a small scale replica of the lunar landing site with a flat surface and a single distant spotlight to represent the Sun. They took a photo and all the shadows in the photo were parallel, as the myth proposed. They then adjusted the topography of the model surface to include a slight hill around the location of the near rocks so the shadows fell on a slope instead of a flat surface. The resulting photograph had the same shadow directions as the original NASA photograph from Apollo 14.
Finally I want to conclude with one of my FAVORITE lines from that paper "If NASA knew it could not put man on the moon and was willing to spend millions, if not billions to hire the scientists, crews, and people knowledgeable enough to fake it, would they really forget to put in the stars.” or for that matter ANYTHING to m
