Moon madness: what more evidence do you want?
Don't let the hoax crowd fool you.
On Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of Apollo 8: Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, became the first pioneers in a new chapter of the space age. Accelerated out of low Earth orbit and onto a trajectory taking them behind the far side of the moon, Borman and his crew gained the knowledge that would later allow Armstrong, Aldrin, and ten others to make landings on the lunar surface.
In July 1969, when Armstrong and Aldrin took their first steps on another world, many people were skeptical as to whether they were really on the moon. It seemed too much like something out of a movie. John Kennedy had proclaimed in 1961, only a short while after Alan Shephard had become the first American in space with a short sub-orbital hop and before John Glenn had orbited the Earth, that America would soon land on the moon, and to people at that time the claim must have seemed ridiculously unattainable. Of course they didn't know how hard Kennedy, and later Johnson, would fund the Apollo project, and between 1961 and 1968 the advances made in rocket science were enormous. Seven years can be a very long time in technological terms if enough people are contributing: just consider the growth of the internet between 1988 and 1995. And in 1968 at least 100,000 people were working towards landing an American on the moon.
So did NASA, under pressure to meet Kennedy's target and to beat the Soviet Union in the space race, feel compelled to fake six moon landings and three moon fly-bys? From 1969 until 1972, with more lunar landings, better TV coverage, more scientific data, better public understanding of space travel, and with all this under the watchful eyes of the Soviet propaganda bureau and the world's radio telescopes, fewer and fewer people doubted the truth of America's great achievement. Yet even today there is still a small but noisy crowd of people who, despite enormous evidence to the contrary, insist that no human being has ever landed on the moon.
So who are these people? The main players in the conspiracy game are:
* Bill Kaysing. Generally considered by astronomers as the Dark Lord of the Apollo conspiracy game, Kaysing has written a book called "We Never Went to the Moon". Kaysing is a professional conspiracy theorist and makes his living by stirring this kind of controversy. In addition to Apollo, he thinks that all early Russian and American space travel was faked, and has even ventured that the space shuttle might be fake too. He accuses NASA of murdering the crews of the Challenger shuttle and Apollo 1, because they refused to go along with the hoax. Click here to read an interview with Kaysing.
* Ralph Rene. Author of 'Nase Mooned America'
* David Percy Co-author of 'Dark Moon', Percy, like Kaysing, is a professional conpiracy theorist.
* Bart Sibrel. Sibrel has released a video called "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon", in which he claims the astronauts never left low Earth orbit (in direct contradiction of Kaysing's claim that they never left the ground). Sibrel is notorious for following Apollo astronauts with a video camera and demanding that they swear on the bible that they walked on the moon. Even though Apollo 14's Ed Mitchell says that he did swear on a bible when confronted, Sibrel claims that no astronaut has ever done so. Click here to download Bart's hilarious appearance on the Daily Show, a satirical programme dedicated to ridiculing cranks (the audio is a bit quiet).
* Fox TV Despite having made an earlier respected documentary about the scientific side of the Apollo missions, in 2001 Fox released a show about how the whole of Apollo might have been faked. Hosted by Mitch Pileggi from the X-files, the show revisited all the old arguments put forward by Kaysing et al. Biased from start to finish, the show totally failed to mention that all the conspiracy arguments have been thoroughly debunked or explained many times by photographers, geologists, and astronomers.
The evidence for a hoax
Most of the evidence put forward by the above parties concerns either minor photographic details which can be explained or debunked, or claims that some part of the Apollo spacecraft wouldn't work, which again can be debunked. There are also a few which are just plainly manufactured to suit the hoaxers' claims. These claims are too long and detailed to go into here, and have been thoroughly investigated at www.badastronomy.com and www.clavius.org so I refer you there if you have any doubts. These sites explain the claims very thoroughly and do a much better job than I could.
The only arguments which need to be looked at by most people are these:
* Waving flag. Of course there is no wind on the moon, so why does the flag appear to wave in some photos? The answer is it was designed to look that way. A normal flag would have hung straight down unattractively, so the astronauts attached a horizontal rod to the top of the flag to give it a more familiar appearance. In any case there cannot be wind, because the astronauts are often shown kicking up dust, and that never gets blown around, nor does it billow into clouds as it would in an atmosphere.
Bart Sibrel has claimed on occasion that the flag can be seen blowing around in some video clips, but he fails to mention that this is because an astronaut is moving it to get it to stick in the hard ground. It should also be noted that in these clips the flag flaps very strangely, undampened by drag, as it never would on Earth. The rate of the flapping is also strikingly slow, slower than a pendulum on Earth would be. This is more evidence that the footage was taken in lunar gravity.
* Radiation. The hoax proponents claim that bands of radiation around the earth, named the Van Allen belts after their discoverer, would have killed the astronauts. How the hoaxers decided this is unknown, because Prof. James Van Allen himself says that this claim is ludicrous. The belts do not cover the entire earth, but form two doughnut shaped rings at a certain distance from the equator. The Apollo spacecraft passed through only the edge of one of the belts, and were moving at their fastest when close to Earth. Prof. Van Allen assures us that the astronauts would not have received a harmful dose of radiation in such a short time.
Sibrel and Kaysing have also claimed that when the Soviets sent animals through the Van Allen belts, they all died. This is a blatant lie, and in my opinion, the most damning evidence that they are not sincere in their claims.
Zond 5 was launched by the USSR in September 1968, carrying a payload of living specimens on a free-return trajectory around the moon. It splashed down safely 7 days later, with the creatures unharmed.
* Taking off from the moon. Some hoax believers
have said that to take off from the moon in its 1/6 gravity would
require 1/6 the fuel that it takes to achieve orbit from the Earth. This
is completely wrong; the relationship between gravity strength and fuel
is nothing like so simple. The first thing to understand is that at its
launch from earth, the Saturn V rocket had to lift both stages of the
lunar module, the command/service module, the trans-lunar 3rd stage, and
its own weight, and the 1000+ tonnes of fuel for all of those. The lunar
module ascent stage only had to lift itself and two people from the
moon, and into a lower orbit.
By rearranging a formula from Clavius,
which gives the maximum ability of a spacecraft to change its velocity,
we find that the fuel needed to propel it to a certain speed is:
Mf = Md * e ^
(dV/Ve) - Md
Where Mf is the mass of fuel, Md is the "dry" mass of
the craft (ie containing no fuel), dV is the total velocity change the
spacecraft must make, Ve is the exhaust velocity of the engine, and e is
the natural logartihm constant (about 2.718).
The dry mass of the LM ascent stage is 2189kg, the
exhasut velocity of its engine is 3048 m/s, and the dV it must make to
achieve lunar orbit is about 1900 m/s, but since some spare fuel is
advisable we'll call it 2100.
This gives a required fuel mass of 2171 kg. The Saturn
V at launch has a mass of over 2000 tonnes, so we can see here that the
hoax believers are utterly wrong in their estimate of a 1:6 ratio.
[Re-written 28/8/03 to correct some unit errors and
add the calculation. I initially estimated that the fuel for taking off
into lunar orbit would be about 2% that from earth, but as we can even
that figure was too high.]
* No stars visible Another thing that hoax believers rely on is that no stars are visible in pictures taken on the moon. The explanation is very simple: stars are very faint and cannot be photographed in sunlight. All the moon landings took place during local daytime, and although the stars are there, they are very faint compared to the reflective lunar surface and bright white spacesuits. If necessary the stars could have been registered with a long exposure time, but this would have overexposed the lunar surface and the astronauts to the point where they wouldn't be any more than white areas on the film.
Summary
Don't let the hoaxers fool you. Most of them have made
their livings from telling this story, and cannot now risk losing face
by properly examining their evidence, so they just uncritically restate
it over and over. As conspiraciy theories go this one is pretty old and
tired, but it still pops up from time to time as the Fox programme
showed. The makers of these items do not help the public to get a
realistic picture, because they incorrectly imply that the scientific
community is equally split over the issue of Apollo by trying to give
boths sides an equal hearing.
The Americans may have taken huge risks to reach the moon first, but so did the Soviets with their test flights. And even after losing the most important piece of propaganda in the entire cold war, neither the USSR nor China ever contested America's achievement. They couldn't, because the evidence is too overwhelming. Thousands of people watched the Saturn V rockets take off from Florida. Independent astronomers, with degrees in orbital mechanics, watched the craft orbit the Earth and relight their engines to move into a trajectory to meet the moon. Geologists examined the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks and formed new theories about the moon's origin.
Conspiracy theorists are forced to explain this evidence with wild ideas involving robotic probes, worldwide multi-billion dollar bribes, and airless low gravity film studios, all of which would nullify any motive for a hoax. If they could send unmanned craft, why not just spend the bribe money putting astronauts inside? Which is exactly what NASA did.
Essential Links
smaug.org.uk 2003
Tom Evans