I’m starting to receive a trickle of email informing me that the Mythbusters are tackling the Moon Hoax myth.
Yes, well, I need to divulge a secret: I know about it. I served as an informal advisor on the show. 
Second, no, before you ask: I have no idea how the testing went. They didn’t tell me anything about the results! Grrrrr.
Third, this looks like it’ll be an awesome episode. The build team — Kari, Grant, and Tory — went to Marshall Space Flight Center to use a vacuum chamber there (it was even reported in the local paper). Looks like they’ll be recreating Dave Scott’s famous feather and hammer drop from Apollo 15, as well as the hoax claim that dry lunar regolith can’t hold a footprint, and how the flag can wave in a vacuum.
There’s a NASA video on YouTube about the visit:
Fourth, the show will air on April 25. Mark your calendars! Update: I’ve been told the episode does not air April 25. The air date has not been set yet, but I’ll make sure I announce it when it is!
I know I’ll be watching, especially since I don’t know how exactly they tackled one or two of the issues we discussed. Reproducing the lunar surface in a studio can’t be terribly easy, but they’re a smart group. This should be a lot of fun to watch!
Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to BABloggee Oscar Martinez Jr. for the YouTube vid tip.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:14 am
JayUtah mentioned over on Apollo hoax that he was consulted regarding the lighting of the Aldrin egress photos.
Should be a good show.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Can’t wait! Now I just wonder, will they be using equipment and technology that was available at the time, or will they be using somewhat more advanced tech? Or some combination?
March 11th, 2008 at 9:17 am
I never miss a Mythbusters show, like usual!
Well… I have to download ‘em off torrents though. Because since this is Canada, the Discovery Canada channel airs the new shows what, months later? They are shameful. Shame shame shame. I can’t wait that long.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Wait a minute. I wrote, produced, and directed all the Apollo lunar mission films for MSC. I’d be glad to tell them exactly how we faked it!
March 11th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Why does it not surprise me that they asked you about this, Phil? I mean you and Adam are buddies, right? Well, at least you met him. So it’s only natural that they ask you for help.
Too bad they didn’t get you as an official adviser and put you on camera.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:46 am
If I recall correctly, the flag waving had a good bit to do with inertia. As we all should recall from the Superhero special, Newton’s Laws can be tricky.
*pretend I found the relevant video (testing the grappling hook cannon for the mythmobile) on youtube and posted its link here :P*
Also, just where are they going to work in the obligatory explosions?
And I’m calling it now that the fact they recreate the lunar surface for the experiment will be used as “proof” that the landings were faked.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:58 am
@Uknesvuinng: Well… I wanna know what an explosion would look like on the Moon. <_<
March 11th, 2008 at 10:02 am
uknesvuinngon:
I agree. If they successfully recreate any of it, the hoaxers will say that’s proof that these things could’ve been faked. The problem is, conspiracy theories are inherently unfalsifiable.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I will be watching this show with great anticipation. i do have some doubts about whether we landed on the moon or not. These new satellites that are and will be orbiting the moon should be able to see the big rovers on the moon with no trouble. Right now we can easily see the tiny Mars rovers from Mars orbiting satellites . These new satellites that will be orbiting the moon will end the debate one way or the other within a couple of years.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Do you have that date right? MythBusters has always aired on Wednesdays, but it’s a Friday. If it airs that week my guess would be the 23rd, unless they’ve changed the air date. Which would be incredible, since the Friday night slot is where TV shows go to die, and MythBusters is far too popular for that.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:15 am
@uknesvuinng
“Also, just where are they going to work in the obligatory explosions?”
Maybe some live model version of the game Lunar Lander?
March 11th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Gratz, Phil!
March 11th, 2008 at 10:58 am
@Michael Amato: If you don’t believe man landed on the moon based on currently available pictures of moon buggies on the moon; why would you be convinced based on new images of moon buggies on the moon?
March 11th, 2008 at 11:01 am
I’d better start watching Mythbusters.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:04 am
@Crux Australis
Yes. You have been depriving yourself of a great experience.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Michael A:
One of the Lunar missions (Apollo 11) left a reflective plate on the Moon- that plate has been seen from the Earth.
But really, all the evidence you need is this: If we faked the moon landings, the Soviets would have called us on it.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
I don’t know how i’d never seen video of the hammer and the feather, only heard about it. I paste it here for your viewing pleasure. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6926891572259784994
March 11th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
J. Foudy.
Luckily there is other supporting evidence, but yes, so far, no moon hoax conspiracy theorist has offered any explanation for this besides expanding the conspiracy to bombastic proportions, as if it wasn’t already. Usually at this point the ‘Jewish controlled’ media is said to be involved as well. This isn’t a stereotype this comes from personal experience with these fellow human beings.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
John, just to prove you wrong;
A) The reflective “plate” (i.e. corner cube) could have been placed robotically. After all, the Russians put one there robotically. (Nevermind that the Russians did a lousy alignment job because human alignment at the time was more precise, and nevermind there’s no evidence of a robotic design to accomplish the task, just rely on the handwave of the conspiracist.)
B) The Soviets were having a famine, and the U.S. government worked out a secret deal to send them grain shipments in return for their covert agreement to sustain the U.S. moon landing hoax and let us win the race. However, the Soviets then changed their story and claimed they were never in the race to begin with. Thus they didn’t negate the U.S. hoax claim and invalidate the secret deal, but still saved face. (Um, right, we faked the Moon landings to convince the Soviets we were better than them, then bribed them to go along with our fake. Uh, okay.)
zandperl is right.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
@Michelle - watch the liftoff. The thrust will give you some idea. It’s an explosion of sorts.
Makes me think of a geek think that I’ve always wondered about too. On Star Trek Voyager, the opening credits show the ship skimming a nebula and causing wing vortices. Would that happen?
How much particulate matter do you have to add to a vacuum to see vortices? Do the particles need to be held in a gas?
For example, can you make a smoke ring in a vacuum? If not, at what pressure does it stop working? Etc. Etc. Etc.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Hoaxers: you can never *EVER* get past the impossibility of thousands of people needing to keep a secret for a very long time.
Forget waving flags. Forget footprints. Forget stars not showing up on the pictures. Forget the Van Allen belts. All piffle.
You still need an enormous number of people keeping a massive secret to themselves for 50 years. Not happening. Not in this world.
Everything else is irrelevant.
One hundred thousand people can keep a secret if 99,999 of them are dead.
I’ll watch the show because I love me some Mythbusters, but it’s unnecessary.
Oh, Jeebus, they’re going to end the show by blowing up the moon, aren’t they?
March 11th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
OOh can’t wait! I *heart* the Mythbusters!
March 11th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
“One hundred thousand people can keep a secret if 99,999 of them are
dead.” Love it!
March 11th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
The flag was not “waving.” In all footage of the flag, it appears to move (or “wave”) only when it is actually being *moved by the astronauts.* The flag was not a normal flag - the fabric had a wire mesh sewn into it so that it would appear unfurled on the lunar surface (otherwise, it would have just hung there limply). It was unrolled and held its position as you’ve seen in the pictures, but it never “waved” as if there were winds.
March 11th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Michael Amato said: “i do have some doubts about whether we landed on the moon or not. These new satellites that are and will be orbiting the moon should be able to see the big rovers on the moon with no trouble.”
Oh it was faked all right. Once they realised people might start looking at the Moon seriously, NASA sent up spacecraft which looked like Lunar Module Descent Stages which robotically unloaded various objects around them, to make it look as though astronauts had been there.
*/satire*
Seriously, have you read the Bad Astronomer’s Moon Hoax page? If so, what about it failed to convince you?
March 11th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Truth said: “the fabric had a wire mesh sewn into it so that it would appear unfurled on the lunar surface”
With respect, that’s incorrect. The flag simply hung from a horizontal pole, like a curtain from a railing. It looked windblown because it was suffering the aftereffects of having been packed very tightly.
March 11th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
They consulted me on which cheek was generally lifted to flatulate on the moon. The left, of course.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
The Mythbusters will fail because the Flying Spaghetti Monster will alter the outcome of their experiments with a single touch from his noodly appendage.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
John Foudy, the “reflective plate” was the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. It wasn’t actually a reflective plate but an array of corner reflectors. Each is an arrangement of three mirrors at right angles like the inside of the corner of a cube. This arrangement reflects an incoming beam of light back in the direction it came.
These reflectors were deployed on three Apollo landings: Apollo 11, 14 and 15. The Apollo 15 reflector was larger than the other two. See the Wikipedia article Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. A lot of good scientific results have come from these simple, passive devices.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Hmmm, get rich quick scheme:
Get own TV show. Get popular enough that “disappearing” or sudden unexplained deaths would arouse too much suspicion.
Then, announce an episode to investigate the government’s most closely guarded secrets.
Rake in dough from being paid off to fudge the results and maintain the conspiracy.
Retire in blissful greed. Avoid elevator shafts.
* * * *
We really did go to the moon, though. That’s where we buried Hoffa because he shot (but not fatally) JFK. It’s obvious!
[The most fun you can have with conspiracy theorists is to introduce a bigger, stupider conspiracy. Most will be too uncomfortable to point out the stupidity. A select few will jump right in on it. Just keep raising the stakes and making it stupider. You’ll have a blast!]
March 11th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
One word: retroreflector.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I would like to point out that about 5 years before Fox broke the “Moon Landing Hoax” hoax, that I read almost the same exact story in Weekly World News.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
hey, wait — doesn’t turning it over to the mythbusters imply that the landings are a myth?
Also I really hate their carefully scripted “spontainous ad-libbed conversations” Lame!
(But if they called me to come help, there’d be a me-shaped hole in the air…)
March 11th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
@QD
“Oh, Jeebus, they’re going to end the show by blowing up the moon, aren’t they?”
Actually, I heard they were going to use a high-powered green laser to reflect “BUSTED” off of the full moon. Either that or use explosives to carve it into the moon’s surface.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I have a better idea.
How about the Mythbusters test whether 9/11 could have been caused by the so called “pancake theory”. This is the formal explanation for the buildings’ collapse, in which the superheated jet fuel from the airliners severed entire floors from their central supports. The loose floors in turn smashed into the floors below them, starting a chain reaction and leveling the whole building.
This post is already long winded (and off topic, because i just realized that this is an astronomy blog), but I will conclude with saying that the above-mentioned explanation, although official by the government, has been debunked as impossible by many other sources and runs counterintuitively to reason (jet fuel is not hot enough by a long shot to melt steel).
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I feel we should know the truth, no matter how ugly.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Eric for starters here is your ugly truth for you as debunked by Popular Mechanics…
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html
The jet fuel melted steel explanation is on the fourth page.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Hi Eric,
The initially proposed “pancake” model was abandoned by investigators as additional evidence came to light. It is no longer considered accurate by any government bodies.
Best regards,
Daniel
March 11th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Can you folks please take the 9/11 conspiracy discusssion somewhere where the focus isn’t on the spicy spaciness and awesome astronomicality of the Apollo Hoax? Thanks.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
My last comment was potentially unclear. The floors did still pancake in a sense, but they were not catastrophically severed. The combination of heat and physical damage caused the floors to sag inwards, placing tremendous amounts of stress on the exterior of the structure. The effect of this was magnified by the significant structural damage the building had suffered in that area. This inward force on the shell of the buildings finally caused them to buckle at the weakest point (the impact points).
Unlike a controlled demolition (when every part of the building starts falling at the same time), the segments of the buildings above the points of impact moved first, and essentially crushed the remainder of the structure.
Anyways, ASTRONOMY!
March 11th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
This is going to be very interesting to watch lol, I always had a feeling the landing on the moon was a hoax.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Will they mention the Van Allen radiation belt surrounding the Earth?
March 12th, 2008 at 1:03 am
Look, I know Eddie, Alex and David are awesome musicians, but this rumour that they tied all the Apollo rockets to the ground using their belts must be quashed.
After all, if they had, what would be keeping their pants up?
March 12th, 2008 at 1:21 am
Apollo 11 video fake, all landings real.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:07 am
“If I recall correctly, the flag waving had a good bit to do with inertia.”
Hmm. Generally speaking all motion has “a bit to do with inertia”. Unless, maybe, it’s motion of a photon.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:24 am
never before or after 9/11 has a steel high rise structure collapsed due to fire or heat. many buildings have burned hotter and longer.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Quote: “These new satellites that are and will be orbiting the moon should be able to see the big rovers on the moon with no trouble.”
I know there is a lot of impacts on the moon. Could it be possible that an impact right beneath a rover could launch the rover into space (if you take the small gravitational field of the moon, think it is 6 times smaller than on earth, into account)?
March 12th, 2008 at 2:38 am
Devin, that argument is useless. There has never been a valid comparable. Show me an example of a building on the physical scale of the WTC that suffered a combination of widespread fire and massive structural damage.
I don’t want to risk moving the thread off topic, but it’s quite hard to leave statements like this unchallenged.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:51 am
i kinda like mythbusters …
i need to watch this moon landing episode …
i need to know what happened and if you americans went to the moon or not …
i’ll have to torrent this off the internet on 23rd …
March 12th, 2008 at 3:10 am
Thank you Daniel and Shane for clearing those things up for me.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:15 am
Mythbusters teh s*it
TV doesn’t get any better than this. The moon hoax episode will certainly be interesting. But as someone mentioned earlier the tinfoil hats will use the show as evidence for their crazy theories.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:18 am
I can say with certainty that a large number of people who are questioning the veracity of the lunar landing will no longer doubt once they can see current images of items left on the moon (even if conspiracy theorists say they were doctored! - conspiracy theoriests, btw, are much like Creationists).
I hope you scientist people are revving up some super satellite cameras to get those photos.
March 12th, 2008 at 4:17 am
So really, they’re going to try to prove that the moon landing was real by re-creating/re-enacting the moon mission on earth thus showing that it could be faked?
March 12th, 2008 at 4:39 am
Sounds good, I’ve been waiting for the mythbusters to hit this particular field of nonsense for ages. I just hope Discovery UK pulls its finger out so I don’t have to wait until September to see it.
@Becca: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched later this year will have the resolution (1m) to capture images of the original Apollo landing sites. Obviously though our 10ft tall polymorphic space lizard overlords will simply photoshop these in while removing the giant soul sucking floating crystal towers on the darkside of the moon.
March 12th, 2008 at 4:42 am
Not really. The typical Moon-hoax argument is of the form “X couldn’t happen on the Moon.” What Mythbusters are (presumably) doing is simulating lunar conditions to show that such claims are incorrect. The idea is probably not so much to prove that the landings happened, but that the proposed reasons for doubting this are wrong.
March 12th, 2008 at 5:22 am
I thought the moon was made of cheese.
March 12th, 2008 at 5:37 am
Seth - I would imagine they will prove how it’s NOT possible to fake it in a studio.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:04 am
The hoax thing is getting old, folks.
They’re sending two probes to the moon. One is going to crash into it, the other is going to run circles around it to take a really good look at the topology.
So they’ll be taking pictures. Some of these pictures will contain images of the human activity that has occurred on the moon.
6 teams have landed on the moon [obviously not Apollo 13] and left physical evidence of their presence.
NASA would have to be -very- creative to doctor all the pictures that came back from the moon to reflect all the activity that is supposed to have taken place there if they hadn’t in fact landed. Maybe they could keep a secret back then. It sure won’t happen anymore today.
i don’t believe it can be done anymore. In this day and age it would take a stupid amount of money to maintain the hoax [imagine keeping up lying consistently and continuously about something of that magnitude].
What could possibly be the point?
I’m certain that the government doesn’t tell the public everything, and the recent discoveries of rendition flights for alledged terrorists is a case in point, but to lie about this would bespeak pathological egomania.
Other countries will also be sending probes to the moon, they too will be taking pictures. Are they all supposed to use the same material showing a fake landing?
a moon landing hoax makes no sense.
However: I still have not heard any sane explanation for the collapese of WTC7 if it was not a controlled demolition. All the rest of what happened on that day aside, a symmetrical near free-fall collapse of that building from a bit of fire and some collateral damage. I’m not buying it. Not when the PNAC was begging for a new Pearl Harbor to jump start the empire a few years earlier.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:38 am
For you 9/11 conspiracy people out there, read the book called “The Looming Towers: 9-11 and the road to Al-Queda”
Second read the popular mechanics article
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html
Thirdly, go to college and get a real education and stop being part of the 85% of America that doesn’t have a college degree.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:45 am
So, Kari, Grant, and Tory visited Marshall Space Flight Center?
That means that the moon landing hoax theory is so easy to debunk that the Mythbusters “B” team can handle it without even having to break out the big-guns Jamie and Adam.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:54 am
@john
Well, clearly the international secret organization variously called the Illuminati, the Templars, the Masons, etc. control all of the governments in the world. That’s how every space program can be touched up to keep conflicting reports from popping up.
In fact, how do we even know that a person has really been up in space? All the footage of people climbing into their rockets and shuttles and whatnot could have been cut from studio-produced footage, and all those launches have just been to shoot the documentary evidence for any government secret into the sun!
Sounds stupid enough. Maybe I should devote my energies to spreading conspiracies.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:06 am
for further proof backing up todd
see southpark episodes “the mystrey of the urinal duece” and “The Hair Club For Men” easter episode, lol.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Finally proof. I knew it
March 12th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Five years ago I’d never heard of either of these conspiracy theories (is there another word besides “theory” to use? One that I could use on this blog? I hate that it gets used in the same way as “the theory of evolution”.)
Now these arguments seem to come up in every blog, youtube video, or mention of either subject. Crazy.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Shoeshine - I didn’t even think of that! Good one!
I love Mythbusters, and I cannot wait to watch this one!
March 12th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Awesome!! I love that show!
March 12th, 2008 at 8:09 am
The popular mechanics article that people keep referencing has been debunked OVER and OVER and OVER again…if that is all you have to disprove ‘conspiracy theorists’ claims that building 7 had to be a controlled demolition, you are in serious trouble. Even the government itself in the 9/11 commission report says there is no rational explaination as to why building 7 fell that day.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:13 am
“Thirdly, go to college and get a real education and stop being part of the 85% of America that doesn’t have a college degree.”
Hey now, don’t go lumping me in with hoax believers and conspiracy theorists just because I don’t have a degree. Me can read good.
Also, that’s a pretty ignorant comment to use as some kind of brand that only college graduates can think rationally. How many college graduates said they believe in Intelligent Design not too long ago at some televised debates?
March 12th, 2008 at 8:22 am
My cat’s breath smells like cat food.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:29 am
I always figured the flag waving was because there was a small wire inside the flag’s cloth to give it the illusion that it was waving. *shrugs*
March 12th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Eric posts:
[[jet fuel is not hot enough by a long shot to melt steel]]
It doesn’t have to be. Steel weakens considerably from heat long before it reaches the melting point.
My physics degree perhaps doesn’t qualify me to say this, but note that I worked for four years at the USX Edgar Thompson Works in Braddock PA.
Or just look up an engineering reference on steel.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:50 am
wow his stuff is wrong astronomer ??
Phil is such a nincompoop he has no idea of what science really is , he makes constant mistakes that an astronomer should know . he is a retarded idiot pretending to be important , he doesn’t even work !!
March 12th, 2008 at 8:52 am
devin posts:
[[never before or after 9/11 has a steel high rise structure collapsed due to fire or heat. many buildings have burned hotter and longer.]]
I understand the World Trade Towers were somewhat larger and heavier than usual. Does anybody know?
March 12th, 2008 at 8:56 am
john posts:
[[ I still have not heard any sane explanation for the collapese of WTC7 if it was not a controlled demolition. All the rest of what happened on that day aside, a symmetrical near free-fall collapse of that building from a bit of fire and some collateral damage.]]
How about the fact that it was hit by flaming debris from WTC1 and WTC2?
In a controlled demolition, they blow out the first floor and let gravity collapse the rest. There’s no controlled demolition that works from the top down.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:58 am
My understanding is they did some work on a few of these with NTS in california(the footprint part?) the company that swung that Ford F150 around by the recovery hooks in that superbowl commercial.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Whoever said
“Hoaxers: you can never *EVER* get past the impossibility of thousands of people needing to keep a secret for a very long time.”
A little info for that guy. If you can’t keep a lie that a lot of people know about for a long time, how do you explain like every religion that has ever been fabricated. Clearly those lies have duped a lot of people and for a long time. And a bunch of people kept quiet and pushed the lie.
I guess scientology is also real because you could never push a big lie like that.
BTW
My dad worked for Grumman for the original manned mission to the moon. Of course he laughs when i propose the possible idea to him that it may have been faked. Just because he was an engineer who designed the instrument panels doesnt mean he knows whether or not we landed. So there were very many people working on these projects. But like with many huge projects, many of these people have small pieces they are responsible for and have no idea how the end result works with all of these pieces together.
Either way if it was so freakin easy for us to get there almost 40 years ago with our powerful computers no better than a Timex Sinclair why havent we gone back. And why do we need like 20 years of planning to make it back.
Do a little research also into which admin was in charge of the executive branch at the time we made it to the moon manned.
It comprised some of the sleaziest members of office ever. Maybe only rivaled by the current administration of today. Oh wait, they were many of the same people.
Shady…
March 12th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Can’t wait!
Unfortunately, in Finland, I think the show is shown with quite a bit of delay. Not sure though. If that is the case, I guess I’ll just have to rely on the Internets to find the episode.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Good. I am sick of the moon hoax chumps. Mirrors on the moon, moon rocks and corroboration from all over the world just isn’t enough for them. Hopefully this episode will kick a few in touch. Unfortunately I think most are too stubborn.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Dick said, “If you can’t keep a lie that a lot of people know about for a long time, how do you explain like every religion that has ever been fabricated. Clearly those lies have duped a lot of people and for a long time. And a bunch of people kept quiet and pushed the lie.
Because it’s not a secret. It’s faith. Read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. You’ve got an entirely different animal there. For your analogy to parse, the people involved in the Moon Hoax would have to believe that it actually happened.
Actually, it’s the conspiracy theories that have taken on the aspect of religions. Dawkin’s other book, The Selfish Gene, might help you gain illumination on where your thought processes have gone awry.
The reason we haven’t gone back is simply because there has been no will to do so, and the effort requires an infrastructure that simply isn’t there anymore. There isn’t a rocket/vehicle combo in production today that has the capability of a lunar orbit insertion and safe return.
We probably have the technology today to solve world hunger and most of the world’s health problems. Are we doing it? The will isn’t there.
Seriously: if you buy into these conspiracy theories you are flirting with mental illness. Get help and get educated. Here’s a good site:
http://www.clavius.org/
March 12th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Good. I am sick of the moon hoax chumps. Mirrors on the moon, moon rocks and corroboration from all over the world just isn’t enough for them. Hopefully this episode will kick a few in touch. Unfortunately I think most are too stubborn.
Sadly, it’s a form of mental illness.
The beginnings of belief in a onspiracy theory may be a simple search for meaningfulness deriving from some sort of disillusionment or psychological projection or a host of other reasons.
Once the conspiracy theory takes root, other common human fallacies begin to kick in, such as confirmation bias and a form of cognitive dissonance caused by the conflict of what their irrational needs makes them want to believe and what the last remining shreds of their ability to reason tells them is actually true.
Because most of the conspiracy faithful these days got their beliefs from the internet, community reinforcement plays a huge role in sustaining the broken thought patterns.
Christopher Hitchens called the conspiracy theories “the exhaust fumes of democracy.” They are unavoidable, especially in a technological, information saturated society such as ours. There are always going to be a subset of people with minds that cannot operate effectively in such an environment.
When a major and traumatic event hits that society, those individuals will flounder even more, looking for an extraordinary explanation to an extraordinary event when the truth turns out to be sad, pathetic and relatively mundane. They’d be pitiable people if they didn’t act like such utter and complete asswipes, earning only contempt instead of sympathy for their delusions.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:00 am
As to WTC7, go to the 1/29/08 episode and read or listen to it. Pretty clear description of why it fell with no need for any kind of conspiracy.
As to the Moon Hoax, I hardly know what to say. To believe we didn’t land on the Moon requires such an extraordinary level of disregard for logic and reason that it always just leaves me sputtering. There is no argument against the Moon landing — for a conspiracy — that even comes remotely close to making sense. Fortunately, the Moon Hoax argument is so brainless that I can’t imagine there’s a danger of it infecting schools as Creationism has done.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Oops. I mean go to the 1/29/08 episode of Skeptoid, as skeptoid.com.
Sorry.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Quiet_Desperation
Dont most of the religions start out as a lies? Or are they all correct? So someone started that lie and others beleieved it. So the people behind going to the moon didnt beleive in it before we “proved” we could get there? Isnt that faith also. And to say we dont have the infrastructure to go back to the moon, is total bs. Did we just go thru a dark age or have we just advanced technologically in the last 40 years.
Yes, we may have let it go and no longer been interested. But what created our new formed interest?
And if you think anyone who questions what we are told is a conspiracy theorist whacko, then you are a tool my friend. Go shave your head join the military and die in Iraq because you were told that the war is just. Dont question anything. The goverment said we did it, so it has to be right.
No unlike you, I am creator of tools, not a tool itself. I am a scientist, inventor, as well as someone who beleieve in God. I dont let either of my beleifs alter my understanding of the world. And as I scientist I was taught to question.
And by the way. Your world hunger analogy is wrong at best. Because we have never solved world hunger. According to the current beleifs shared by many in the US(note I said in the US), we made it to the moon. So you can say been there done that for the moon but not for the world hunger.
Are you going to tell me next that The Gulf of Tonkin incident was not faked. That was a conspiracy as well. You are aware that was a huge lie and was propogated for a long time until declassified info proved it true a little bit back.
So go shave your head and join The Neocon retards in their quest to dummy down our society. I bet you beleive that global warming is also a conspiracy theory.
You need to get re-educated because someone messed up your way of thinking a long ago.
Learn to think on your own and then you can post with your own idea, not Dawkin’s.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Dick, your false choice between “believe in the conspiracy” or “you’re a tool/fool who believes everything the government says” is lazy and wrong — a typically trite logical fallacy — but it’s no doubt comforting for people who do not have the wit or fortitude to face unpleasant reality, and look to this conspiracy foolishness as a way to pretend to sophistication.
You’re looking for the easy way to explain difficult truths, which usually means the wrong way. By buying into this crap, you are the one being led down the path of darkness. Not me.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:33 am
@ Scott
“The popular mechanics article that people keep referencing has been debunked OVER and OVER and OVER again…”
Umm… no it hasn’t. Please point to which reputable scientific journal or study debunks this.
“Even the government itself in the 9/11 commission report says there is no rational explaination as to why building 7 fell that day.”
Ummm… no they don’t. You are paprphrasing and spinning what was actually said into what will fit your claim. Just because Rosie says it doesn’t make it true.
I know I’ve said this before a million times, but I urge you…. PLEASE PLEASE learn to think for yourself, read for yourself, do the research and follow the science and don’t just simply beat the drum cause someone gave you the stick.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:34 am
*sigh*… the word above should be “paraphrasing”.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:40 am
@ Dick
“A little info for that guy. If you can’t keep a lie that a lot of people know about for a long time, how do you explain like every religion that has ever been fabricated. Clearly those lies have duped a lot of people and for a long time. And a bunch of people kept quiet and pushed the lie.”
The answer is quite simple really… plausible delusion. I think George Costanza put it best: “It’s not a lie if you believe it”.
This is defferent than forcing people to keep a secret and hold up a lie about something they SAW the truth of and KNOW the truth of. There’s a huge difference between that and the example you gave.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:48 am
@ Dick
“Either way if it was so freakin easy for us to get there almost 40 years ago with our powerful computers no better than a Timex Sinclair why havent we gone back. And why do we need like 20 years of planning to make it back.”
THIS is the most common and ignorant claim I hear from moon haox woo-woos. When anyone who has ever really read anything about the moon landings and what actually took place knows that it was ANYTHING but “so freakin’ easy”. In fact, ask anyone involved with Apollo 11 and they will tell you that if not for an inordinate amount of moxie from the flight crew, quick “think on your feet” individuals, and just plain dumb luck, that mission would have ended in tragedy. Interviews with some of the people involved point out that if the Apollo missions had continued as they were, there is no dout there would have been a tragic failure at some point.
And that is (one of) the reason(s) it has taken us so long to even consider returning. Honestly, the safety concerns for the Apollo missions do not come close to what we consider an absolute necessity for any manned space-flight now. The justification for the cost of returning, from a political standpoint anyhow, has not been there. It’s not the lack of ability, Dick. If we *had* to get there and money was no object… it’d happen it short order.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:55 am
The Moon landings and religion are, indeed, entirely different animals. Fear not, I will not post any of Dawkin’s ideas — I have read exactly zero of his books. These ideas are my own, though I’m definitely not the only person to have thought of them.
The one common thread to the persistence of mainstream religions is that the majority of the claims are untestable — in most cases, because they involve events either outside of the universe or in the distant not-well-corroborated past. (I’m a Christian. I am thus often embarrassed at claims that Jesus existed because he’s mentioned in all of these other famous texts — i.e. his existence and his claim to being the Messiah were corroborated by non-Christian contemporaries. But the problem is that these texts aren’t actually contemporaries, and are at best third-hand accounts. They don’t prove the existence of Jesus so much as they do the existence of early Christians. But I digress.)
So how is Christianity any different from the Apollo program? I believe both are real. But they are very different. Christianity is centered around an untestable claim: a bunch of guys 2,000 years ago started telling their friends that they’d seen this popular and controversial rabbi come back to life and that he’d told them he was the son of God, sent to forgive the world all of its sins and preach a message of ultimate love. Were those guys lying? Maybe. But it can’t be tested. Couldn’t be tested then either; the Jews and Gentiles to whom they preached really had no way of knowing if the apostles were on the level or if they were complete nutbags. Jesus was already dead by that time, after all, and had allegedly ceased appearing to people.
The Apollo program is a different kettle of fish. Rather than a small bunch of people starting a fairy tale and convincing people to believe in it, this was the work of tens of thousands of people over a full decade. They would all have to have colluded, and colluded for a long period of time. I suppose if you were a small child or not even born yet, it might seem like it did for the early Christians — somebody trying to convince you that something really happened a while ago. But for a lot of people still alive today, it happened during their adult lifetimes. During their actual *careers*, in many cases. It’s really not comparable to Christianity.
Basically, where your argument breaks down is that the people who worked on the Apollo program would not be analogous to modern Christians (or even ancient Christians). They would be analogous to the original apostles — i.e. the actual hoaxers, if one believes it to be a fraud. And there’s the problem with most conspiracy theories. Such frauds can be quite successful. Scientology is an excellent example; there is considerable evidence that it really did begin as a deliberate fraud. But only a select few are in on that reality. The audience is kept mum. If Christianity started out as an honest-to-goodness hoax, it would’ve been the apostles who would’ve been the culprits. A small, tightly knit group capable of colluding on something like this. You can’t expect tens of thousands of people to collude successfully. And yes, your dad would’ve had to be in on the hoax. Perhaps you never properly appreciated the complexity of his work, but it’s awfully hard to be involved in this sort of thing and not suspect something is amiss if it’s all just a hoax. And even if not the low-level flunkies (I doubt your dad was just a flunky, but I don’t know), there were an awful lot of high-level folks involved. Far too many for a successful conspiracy, and that’s even ignoring the tantalizing promise of rewards for turning traitor and selling the conspiracy out to the Soviet Union. The USSR would’ve loved that.
There are too many people who would’ve had to have been in on the conspiracy, basically. And that’s where the analogy to religion breaks down, because most of those are started by a small number of individuals, or in some notable cases only one individual.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Devin-
90 West and 7 World Trade both burned longer than the two towers-
World Trade also collapsed
90 West didn’t and has been refurbished- fire protection in 90 West was a case of early 20th century engineering overkill- ceramic/clay tiles were individually affixed to the structural elements (kind of like the Space Shuttle) , the cost to do that today would be prohibitive,
7 World Trade had the same type of spray on fire retardant crap that the towers had…
I was in 90 West 3 weeks after 9/11, the interior was mostly* completely gutted (it was pretty damn eerie, especially the blackened misshapen file cabinets with the fine dark gray ash inside…)…
* A few floors in the middle were largely intact- it burned from the bottom up and from the top down, the FDNY managed to put the fire out at both ends before the 12th through 14th floors were gutted… On the 13th floor the ceiling tiles had absorbed a ton of water, and fell as large soggy lumps on the floor of the 13th floor…
March 12th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Way back, about 2000 or 2001, CBC did an excellent hour long documentary that dissected the various pieces of ‘evidence’ used in the ‘Moon Landing Hoax” to illustrate how conspiracy theorists construct (and ‘prove’) their ‘theories’, and how to spot the inconsistencies. As I recall, their debunking of this particular case used some original sets - sets which were used in the filming of various sci-fi movies. It may be worthwhile the check CBC’s archives if such are available.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
@ Dick
Wow… OK… time to wrestle with the pigs…
“Dont most of the religions start out as a lies? Or are they all correct? So someone started that lie and others beleieved it. So the people behind going to the moon didnt beleive in it before we “proved” we could get there? Isnt that faith also.”
So many things wrong with those two statements I don’t even know where to begin. First, as a person of faith, as you state later in your post, your first line comes off quite sarcastically. So basing a point on sarcasm is a bad way to start. But to answer you… no… I don’t believe religion starts out INTENTIONALLY as a means of deception. I think it’s a uniquely human way of trying to make sense of the world we can not, or could not explain, and to help calm the deep seeded feeling of isolation. We also seem to have an inherent need to find purpose. Religion has always served as a means to provide answers to these problems. Again, I don’t think any religion was intentionaly started as an attempt at deception, nor do I think you can find any claim of one that does (except scientology, perhaps… chuckle).
Second, I don’t think there was an inherent “faith” involved in getting to the moon. More like a hypothesis that it could be done based on the technology available and the knowledge of the time. We would put that hypothesis to the test, succeed, or fail and retry based on new information. No faith required.
“And if you think anyone who questions what we are told is a conspiracy theorist whacko, then you are a tool my friend.”
Hmmm… ok… good, sound, logical, fair, and factually backed argument. Well done, sir.
“Go shave your head join the military and die in Iraq because you were told that the war is just.”
Complete and total non-sequitor. The only person making a comparison between believing the moon hoax and what you just said is YOU. Belief in one is not required for the other to be considered. At this point you are just spouting. I think many of us here do have questions and concerns behind the reasons for the Iraq war and the need to continue it… It’s still totally beside the point for this conversation.
“Are you going to tell me next that The Gulf of Tonkin incident was not faked. That was a conspiracy as well. You are aware that was a huge lie and was propogated for a long time until declassified info proved it true a little bit back.”
Logical fallacy. Assuming that all, or even ANY of the “conspiricies” you are talking about are valid because this one was found to have substance is just.. well… dumb. Unless you can tie this event directly to any of those, there is no relevence in the comparison. All your example shows is that the government is capable of deceptive and questionable behavior. We already knew that. But we also know what we know about the other things like the Towers and the Moon landing because of our own observations and the science behind them… not because of what the Gov’t told us. That’s the difference.
The world really is a much easier place to get along in when you reject paranoia and start thinking for yourself. Give it a try.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Have you ever heard the expression why has no one else done it before.
I guess the Chinese have no desire to get there. Because there is no way they could have the technology, man power, money, manufacturing, and or military infrastructure to build a ship capable of sending someone to the moon.
Only us. No other country.
So if the Chinese make it there, I will be more inclined to beleive our original “footage” was in fact authentic.
I never once said I am 100% convinced it was faked. I am merely stating there are enough factors there for a scientific mind to question it. One alone being that noone else did it. Just like machine guns, satellites, ballistic missles, nukes, etc. every one of these “military” acheivements will be copied by others. Why not that?
And if you say it cant be done see the Chinese argument.
We are not the only country with smart people. There are many others.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Dick, you continue to use non-relevant arguments that no-one here is making but you.
“We are not the only country with smart people. There are many others.” So? This proves or even supports that we might not have done it? Gimme a break. This isn’t even an argument.
“So if the Chinese make it there, I will be more inclined to beleive our original “footage” was in fact authentic.”
So the Chinese didn’t do it, so that somehow supports that it can’t be done? That’s absurd logic. You want a list of things that other countries have achieved that the Chinese have not, or HAD not at the time of their achievment? Does that prove that all those achievments were faked? Do you not see how totally nuts your argument here is?
“I never once said I am 100% convinced it was faked. I am merely stating there are enough factors there for a scientific mind to question it.”
Actually, no there aren’t. All the “scientific” factors point without a doubt to the landing being quite real. It’s not the “scientific mind” that questions this. It’s the easily manipulated mind.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
NASA cooperated with their experiments. Enough said.
March 12th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
“Just like machine guns, satellites, ballistic missles, nukes, etc. every one of these “military” acheivements will be copied by others. Why not that?”
Expense and utility.
“Only us. No other country.”
At the time pretty much, just us and the Soviets had:
1: The scientific know how; AND
2: The economic and industrial capacity; AND
3: The ability and willingness to spend the time and money.
The Soviets gave up because we beat them to it, their heavy lifter had more bugs to work out than our Saturn V had. Reaching the moon was more a political goal than anything else.
Anyway, assuming China continues on their current path, they’ll probably go there too, because it’s a huge national prestige issue to them. Asking why China didn’t do it 30 years ago is absurd, all that shows is you know nothing about China.
But then again, questioning whether or not the moon landings were faked is all the evidence one needs to determine whether or not you know anything about anything. Celtic Evolution is 100% correct, there are no factors which would lead someone with a “scientific mind” to question the moon landings- Big Foot’s existence is FAR more likely than the moon landings having been faked.
March 12th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Dont most of the religions start out as a lies?
Dick, the religion analogy is completely BROKEN. It does not parse. Give it up. There is evidence we went to the Moon. It is not faith to think so. I explained specifically why we haven’t been back to the Moon (lack of will and no launcher/vehicle combo in production) and you trot out some nonsense about a dark age.
Yes, we may have let it go and no longer been interested. But what created our new formed interest?
The Bush Administration’s edict, which sadly led to better space science programs losing out funding.
And if you think anyone who questions what we are told is a conspiracy theorist whacko, then you are a tool my friend.
Well, then it’s a good thing I didn’t say that, isn’t it?
I was talking specifically about the Moon Hoax and the 9/11 fools.
Here come the Strawman, folks. Remember the marching brooms from Fantasia? Same thing.
Go shave your head join the military and die in Iraq because you were told that the war is just. Dont question anything. The goverment said we did it, so it has to be right.
I was and am completely opposed to the Iraq war.
I follow no rigid ideology, and base my views on the specific facts at hand for any situation as well as historical experience and critical thinking. If you had to label me, I probably fall in the realm of libertarianism, but not because is set out to become a Libertarisn.
Personally, I think our government is becoming corrupt beyond redemption.
But we still went to the Moon and you are still delusional.
Your real problem is that I am questioning *YOU*, and you can’t handle it as shown by you very quick degradation to a schoolyard level of spittle launching.
And by the way. Your world hunger analogy is wrong at best. Because we have never solved world hunger. According to the current beleifs shared by many in the US(note I said in the US), we made it to the moon. So you can say been there done that for the moon but not for the world hunger.
You’ve once against utterly misunderstood what I said.
Are you going to tell me next that The Gulf of Tonkin incident was not faked.
And the Strawmen go marching on…
In fact, I had considered mentioning it as an example of how conspiracies in the government leak. The truth about that incident was known well before 2005. For pity’s sake, Adml. Stockdale was casually mentioning the ships firing at nothing (as seen from his plane) in his book back in the early 1980’s.
So go shave your head and join The Neocon retards in their quest to dummy down our society. I bet you beleive that global warming is also a conspiracy theory.
Again with the head shaving!
I am not a global warming denier, or whatver they are called these days.
You need to get re-educated
Oooo! Maybe I can go to a re-education camp! Would you like that, Dick? The black helicopters can take me there.
because someone messed up your way of thinking a long ago. Learn to think on your own and then you can post with your own idea, not Dawkin’s.
Translation: Dick will never ever read anything that might challenge his pseudo-religious belief system.
Well, people educate themselves with books, right?
Or do you mean I should go to ideological websites run by lunatics and read the 9-point, single spaced, paragraphless screeds? No, wait, actually I *have*! You see, I listen to ALL sides in a controversy.
I simply have found you side, when viewed fully in the light, lacking in facts, rationality, self criticism and even a hint of sanity.
I’ve held off on this, but you really are a nasty, vile piece of work, Dick. If you are any older than 15 you should be utterly ashamed of what you have made of yourself. You have willfully allowed your mind to be poisoned beyond redemption.
OK, I’m done with you. I need to go hose off the bottoms of my shoes.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but the Gulf of Tonkin isn’t really a valid argument in favor of world-spanning conspiracy theories.
The conspiracy around the Gulf of Tonkin Incident began unraveling within just a few years, and by 1981 to 1984, the truth was already fairly well known. By the time the records were declassified, the facts of the matter were already pretty well known.
In other words, with as many people as were directly involved in the GoT Incident, it didn’t take long - even with the threat of a Top Secret classification - for the facts to come out.
To then claim that the GoT Incident is proof that the government can force people to keep a secret is disingenuous. It can’t.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
the lunar landing was not faked. the flag waves because the astronaut who planted it, set it up that way. there is a taped interview and video of him in the act! the flags apparently have a mechanism that unrolls the flag for ease of storage. this mechanism jammed so the astronaut is shown to have broken the casing of the mechanism and manually pulled the flag out. because of the vacuum of space, fabrics retain any and all wrinkles put into them. basically, his fumbling around made the flag look like crap. so in an effort to hide it, he is seen taking his hands and forming a wave in the flag. he said it was the only way to make it look patriotic with all the wrinkles, like its waving in the wind.
many materials behave differently in low gravity and vacuum. lunar dust can certainly retain its shape since there is little gravity pulling it down and no atmostphere. it doesnt collapse or spread back out because there is little force acting on it.
i certainly hope mythbusters observe the fact that simply applying vacuum to moondust wont recreate its moon-bound behavior.
it is also widely known that the originals of the moon landing photos have been lost. the only ones remaining were copies sent to various news agencies across the world. nearly all of these photos have been edited. almost all of them underwent some form of editing to remove camera reticles. the reason the moon photos look edited is because they are! we just dont have the originals! and this is not a conspiracy either. moon photos were available up until the 80’s when they were lost when nasa moved alot of its material to the national archives. most think an enterprising office worker took them home as a valuable souvenier or that they were left in an opened canister and left to degrade and the incompetence of the staff at the time is being hidden. this doesnt equal a conspiracy of any kind.
also… just because the mythbusters come to a conclusion doesnt mean its science fact. open your mind to the fact that the greatest conspiracy may in fact be that there never was a conspiracy.
March 12th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
[…] Bustin’ the moon hoax […]
March 12th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
[…] el 25 de abril en una fecha aun sin confirmar y contaran con la colaboración de Phil Plait de Bad Astronomy Blog como […]
March 12th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
With a universe so vast, we should think ourselves so small if we’re still limited to only having been as far as the Moon.
March 12th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
i certainly hope mythbusters observe the fact that simply applying vacuum to moondust wont recreate its moon-bound behavior.
Never fear. Jamie and Adam will hack together a rig from a block of milled aluminum, plastic wrap and ballistics gel that will reduce the Earth’s gravity in the shop to that of the Moon.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Myth busters is a fun show: at least when it comes to blowing things up. But I am concerned that they do not have a good enough background in science or history to address this topic properly. They have made mistakes in the past, only to have a re-do show on the same topic.
Most of us who were alive in the ’60s will ever doubt the reality of the moon landings. I watched the Apollo landings as a kid. As a young engineer I worked with several engineers that actually worked on the Apollo program.
But I can almost understand how the moon landing must seem like a myth to a cynical and uneducated young mind.
It really was an amazing accomplishment – I just wish that we had not scaled back, and had kept on exploring and then colonizing space. After the public lost interest in the space program, the politicians kept spending less and less, until we have reached the point where now the moon landing seems almost like a myth.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Why the hell does it even matter if they hoaxed the moon landing or not, we can get there now which is what matters, we needs to stop worrying about things that happened in the past so we can move on and focus on future progress.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
No point in arguing now, just watch the show. Then i’m sure this topic will return with a vengeance.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Frac says: “On Star Trek Voyager, the opening credits show the ship skimming a nebula and causing wing vortices’s. Would that happen? How much particulate matter do you have to add to a vacuum to see vortices? Do the particles need to be held in a gas?”
I haven’t seen anyone else answer this, so I’ll go ahead even though it’s from a hundred posts up.
You might want to search this blog for a little essay I did on vacuum a year or more ago. In it I describe some of the characteristics of gas flow at very low pressures. Here’s the short version:
At the pressures we have here on the Earth’s surface (and for a good deal lower), we have a condition known as “viscous flow.” That means that the gasses surrounding us act like a fluid. The molecules are jammed so closely together (the “mean free path” between them is on the order of millionths of an inch/cm) that any energy imparted into them (e.g. sound waves) will be carried along by them bumping into each other. This is what you need for the kinds of vortices you mention.
When you get down to pressures on the order of millionth of a millimeter of mercury you are in a regime called “molecular flow.” Here the molecules are on the order of a few inches/cm apart and act like ping-pong balls bouncing off of each other and any surface they encounter in straight lines. Any energy put into them, like by a spaceship passing, would simply cause them to bounce off in random directions according to the angle and direction of travel of whatever surface hit them.
In between, there’s a regime called “Knudsen flow” which is a transition between viscous and molecular. Most vacuum systems try to stay out of that because it’s neither fish nor fowl, and difficult to control what happens in it.
- Jack
March 12th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
John Foudy says: “The Soviets gave up because we beat them to it, their heavy lifter had more bugs to work out than our Saturn V had.”
There was a little more to it than that.
The N1 (their moon rocket) development was under the development of Sergei Korolev, their “chief designer” and the direct analog of Wernher von Braun on the Apollo program. More than anyone else he was responsible for all of the initial Soviet successes in space, from Sputnik through the early manned missions.
He went into the hospital for minor surgery in 1966 and basically was killed on the operating table by an incompetent doctor. The actual cause is variously reported as a heart attack, cancer or hemorrioids (really! Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev )
In typical bureaucratic form, the politburo turned N1 development over to the competing design bureau who not only bungled it badly, but managed to kill more of Russia’s top aerospace engineers and scientists in a launch pad explosion.
In a most literal sense, they shot themselves in the foot on this one.
- Jack
March 12th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Dick said: “So there were very many people working on these projects. But like with many huge projects, many of these people have small pieces they are responsible for and have no idea how the end result works with all of these pieces together.”
It’s a popular hoax argument to suggest that only a few dozen people at the very top would have had a broad enough knowledge to need to be in on a hoax, and that the remaining several hundred thousand employees and contractors could have been kept in the dark. But it’s quite unrealistic.
Take your Dad. He mightn’t have needed to know much beyond his own responsibilities. But what about his manager? Suppose a change is proposed in a system. How is it going to affect other LM systems? Is it going to affect Command Module systems? People would ask questions and seek information. In other words, there would have been thousands of employees and contractors who would have needed to know details of projects other than their own.
“Either way if it was so freakin easy for us to get there almost 40 years ago with our powerful computers no better than a Timex Sinclair why havent we gone back.”
It’s very easy for me to book a return air ticket to the USA and a bus trip for while I’m there. But both money (my lack of it) and public will (my wife wouldn’t be too thrilled to be left alone with the baby for a few weeks) essentially rule my American holiday out as something for me to do. So it is with going to the Moon. NASA doesn’t have the money to do it, and public will is such that Congress wasn’t likely to give it to them.
“And why do we need like 20 years of planning to make it back.”
I’m sure NASA could do it a lot faster if they were given a budget proportionate to what they had in the 1960s.
“Do a little research also into which admin was in charge of the executive branch at the time we made it to the moon manned.”
Well, there was a Democratic President in power when Apollo was actually being developed, and when Apollo 8 got to the Moon, and a Republican President in power when Apollos 11 to 17 landed on the Moon. Which administration are you talking about?
March 12th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Dick said: “The goverment said we did it, so it has to be right.”
No. Engineers and scientists said we did it. And as they have evidence to support what they say, I’d tend to believe them.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Dick said: “I am merely stating there are enough factors there for a scientific mind to question it.”
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with questioning whether Apollo was real. What’s wrong is to unthinkingly dismiss the evidence supporting the reality of Apollo.
“One alone being that noone else did it. Just like machine guns, satellites, ballistic missles, nukes, etc. every one of these “military” acheivements will be copied by others. Why not that?”
Money.
Because no other country was willing to spend US$25 billion (1960s money) on such a project. Apollo was hideously expensive, and most countries don’t have an economy the size of the USA.
“We are not the only country with smart people. There are many others.”
Quite true. But other countries don’t have US$175 billion in today’s money to redo Apollo.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Devin asked: “Why the hell does it even matter if they hoaxed the moon landing or not?”
Because if people believe Apollo was hoaxed, what other silly things might they believe.
Fighting against the Apollo Hoax belief is about making people think critically. And if you can make people think critically about one thing, they might think critically about other things too.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog » Mythbustin’ the Moon Hoax… Part I The show will air on April 25. Mark your calendars! (tags: mythbusters moon hoax myth nasa) Posted by Richard@Home Filed in 15 […]
March 13th, 2008 at 12:21 am
I haven’t seen anyone else answer this, so I’ll go ahead even though it’s from a hundred posts up.
Actually, I think there’s an even easier answer.
Think of a nebula like a moderate fog. It’s thick and bright at a distance, but up close you can’t even see it. If you’ve ever been in a large field in a fog, there’s a seemingly clear area of air in a circle around you. As you move, it seems like the clear patch moves with you. I always thought a nebula is similar. You’ll only see the parts of it at a distance.
And people sometimes forget all those pretty pictures are enormous time lapses.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:11 am
I don’t know where you got that from, but it is simply not true.
All the photos taken on the Moon’s surface, more then 10,000, are available as high resolution scans at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html
In in depth analysis of Apollo Hoax claims can be found at the Moon Base Clavius site.
http://www.clavius.org
March 13th, 2008 at 3:57 am
[…] que ya comentamos en el blog hace un tiempo. Entre los invitados a participar está Phil Plait de Bad Astronomy Blog, que es posiblemente el sitio de internet que mejor explica desde un punto de vista científico […]
March 13th, 2008 at 4:16 am
[…] por el blog Bad Astronomy, proximamente veremos el resultado de este […]
March 13th, 2008 at 5:03 am
[…] las palomitas! Llega la prueba definitiva: nuestros admirados Cazadores de Mitos comprobarán si se pudo haber simulado que el hombre llegó a la Luna en un próximo episodio que se emitirá el 25 de […]
March 13th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Dick: If you can’t keep a lie that a lot of people know about for a long time, how do you explain like every religion that has ever been fabricated.
Apples and oranges. Faith, by definition, makes untestable claims. Historical claims like “The Apollo program took us to the Moon” are testable.
Dick: My dad worked for Grumman for the original manned mission to the moon. Of course he laughs when i propose the possible idea to him that it may have been faked. Just because he was an engineer who designed the instrument panels doesnt mean he knows whether or not we landed. So there were very many people working on these projects. But like with many huge projects, many of these people have small pieces they are responsible for and have no idea how the end result works with all of these pieces together.
Unfortunately for your suggestion, engineers are not stupid. If you give them a task like building a machine that will take people to the Moon, they will try to figure out the challenges involved and come up with ways to solve them.
Basically, by the time you’re done, you have a machine which some very smart people have worked hard on and which they believe will take us to the Moon. So why not go?
Dick: Either way if it was so freakin easy for us to get there almost 40 years ago with our powerful computers no better than a Timex Sinclair why havent we gone back.
It was never “freakin easy”. I suggest you look at the NASA NTRS document server, where you can get all manner of technical documentation for free. The amount of ingenuity, understanding, effort, courage, and determination required to solve the problems they did is nothing short of staggering.
We haven’t gone back because the people don’t want us to go back. The political will simply isn’t there. Comparison of the budget alone should be enlightening. Following the careers of Senators Proxmire and Mondale with respect to the space program should also shed light on the subject.
Dick: And why do we need like 20 years of planning to make it back.
Because going to the Moon is hard. We have to build the infrastructure necessary to build the machines to take us there, with a whole lot less money and political will than we had the first time we went.
Consider the things you need to build a Saturn V and look around. Not only do we not have the tools to build a Saturn V — we don’t even have the tools to build the tools to build a Saturn V.
Honestly, we probably wouldn’t be going back if NASA hadn’t received a Presidential order to do so. America is much more apathetic about the idea right now than it was a few decades ago.
Dick: Do a little research also into which admin was in charge of the executive branch at the time we made it to the moon manned.
“I believe we went to the Moon” is not the same thing as “I believe that the government tells me the truth”. First of all, it wasn’t just the government that told us that we went; even individuals with their home radio equipment were able to follow Apollo to the Moon. Second, there’s a lot of room between “the government does not tell us the truth” and “everything the government says is a lie”.
Do a little research yourself into the non-governmental entities that congratulated us on our accomplishment based on their own evidence that we made the trip.
Dick: Have you ever heard the expression why has no one else done it before.
Yes. And 99.44% of the time, the answer is “Money”.
Dick: I never once said I am 100% convinced it was faked. I am merely stating there are enough factors there for a scientific mind to question it.
There is enough room to question anything — but not necessarily enough room for a scientific mind.
Dick: One alone being that noone else did it. Just like machine guns, satellites, ballistic missles, nukes, etc. every one of these “military” acheivements will be copied by others. Why not that?
Did 400,000 people collaborate over the course of a decade to make machine guns? Satellites? Nukes? No? How close have other military programs come?
Of course, the fact that NASA is a civilian agency makes this a false analogy from the start, but you really need to consider the colossal effort necessary to make landing on the Moon a possibility.
How many countries have built Great Walls? How many countries have built Giza-size pyramids (or Giza-size funerary monuments of any kind)? Does the fact that these things are not ubiquitous imply anything about the intelligence of the people who did or the intelligence of the people who did not? I sincerely hope you wouldn’t think so, and I hope you can see why we wouldn’t think so.
Dick: And if you say it cant be done see the Chinese argument.
How many people have the Chinese launched in the past five years again?
Okay. And how does that compare to how many people were launched in the first five years of our manned space program? (Here’s a hint: in the first five years, we had completed the Mercury and Gemini programs; the Mercury program alone launched twice the number of people of the entire Chinese manned space program so far.)
What does that tell you about the emphasis on speedy progress in both cases?
Dick: We are not the only country with smart people. There are many others.
No one has claimed that we are. But how many countries have even come close to matching the funding or manpower of our space program during the race to the Moon?
Regrettably, intelligence is not the only prerequisite for getting people to the lunar surface and back. Anyone who’s actually worked as an engineer to build something new in order to solve a previously unsolved problem understands that intimately.
Your flippant assumption that a successful lunar program implies that a lunar program is easy is a grave insult to the hundreds of thousands of people who worked hard to make it happen.
March 13th, 2008 at 6:33 am
[…] las palomitas! Llega la prueba definitiva: nuestros admirados Cazadores de Mitos comprobarán si se pudo haber simulado que el hombre llegó a la Luna en un próximo episodio que se emitirá el 25 de […]
March 13th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Shoeshine - I didn’t even think of that! Good one!
I love Mythbusters, and I cannot wait to watch this one!
March 13th, 2008 at 8:45 am
The N1 (their moon rocket) development was under the development of Sergei Korolev, their “chief designer” and the direct analog of Wernher von Braun on the Apollo program. More than anyone else he was responsible for all of the initial Soviet successes in space, from Sputnik through the early manned missions.
He went into the hospital for minor surgery in 1966 and basically was killed on the operating table by an incompetent doctor. The actual cause is variously reported as a heart attack, cancer or hemorrioids (really! Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev
There’s even more to it than that.
Korolev had actually been in poor health for many years; it was almost a miracle that he survived Stalin’s purges at all. He had been sent to the worst of the gulags, courtesy of Stalin’s paranoia and a backstabbing colleague who, to be fair, was mainly trying to make sure he didn’t get sent to the gulag himself. He did hard labor in a salt mine (IIRC), a job which killed most of the workers in under six months. When he was rescued by a knowledgeable aerospace expert (who arranged for Korolev’s slave labor sentence to be relocated from the gulag to an aerospace design bureau), he had chronic lung problems. The Wikipedia article says that he was released after a few months in the gulag, but this is misleading — he was never at liberty. Right up until his dying day, he officially did not exist, and was still serving his sentence of forced labor. He was just fortunate that someone had realized that his intellectual labor was a lot more valuable than his physical labor.
There are other reasons why the N1 failed, including time wasted on the back-and-forth between the N1 and the UR-500 (which eventually became Proton), and the bickering between competing bureaus and the competing political factions who sponsored them. The Nedelin Catastrophe was also a factor — over a hundred of Russia’s best and brightest rocket engineers and technicians were killed in the explosion of the first R-16 ICBM. The delays in Soyuz were yet another factor. Had Soyuz 1 not been sent up unready, resulting in the highly public death of a cosmonaut, perhaps the spacecraft would’ve been ready earlier. So much time was wasted early on that everything got pushed far too close the deadlines, and so unready technologies got pressed into service. Even if Korolev had survived to 1969, and seen the N-1 through all the way, it may not have made a difference in the end. After all, even if the N-1 test flights had succeeded, they did not yet have the L-3 lunar complex ready. At best, they could’ve managed a lunar swing-round flight aboard a Proton. And those were blowing up a lot too; no one was ready to risk humans aboard one.
The Russians could’ve beaten us, if they’d been more focused. That was their biggest problem.
March 13th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Calli Arcale: The Russians could’ve beaten us, if they’d been more focused. That was their biggest problem.
Yeah. Considering the emphasis on political muscle-flexing, one of the weirdest things about the race to the Moon is that the Americans took a one-official-group-only approach, and the Soviets took an approach that looked a lot more like competition. It’s just odd, considering the different economic ideologies.
I wonder if this has lessons for us as we sit on the cusp of privatized space travel.
March 13th, 2008 at 11:34 am
NASA put work out to contractors, much the same thing.
March 13th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
What I am saying is that it is 100% impossible to prove that we made it manned vs unmanned.
Maybe we can prove we made it unmanned(as in we made it there). But to state there is scientific evidence to prove we made it there manned vs unmmanned is just complete utter bs.
If they can make it there unmanned. they can fake that a man was in the rockets that made it there. End of story.
And until other countries start making it there, it will make skeptics, like myself, wonder about why others cant do it yet.
I’m not saying it was easy. I never said it was easy. I’m just saying the majority of military know how gets leaked to other countries at some point. Thats why our technologies were so close to the Russians and visa versa in many ways.
And to think that NASA was started as and still is a complete civilian program is naive at best.
It operates under the umbrella of a civilan program. But dont fool yourself this collosal amount of money spent in space was part of our arms race.
Why else did we decide to put satelites up in space, just so that we can get 200 channels of reality tv.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
[…] Set to air April 25th. The build team — Kari, Grant, and Tory — went to Marshall Space Flight Center to use a vacuum chamber there. Looks like they’ll be recreating Dave Scott’s famous feather and hammer drop from Apollo 15, as well as the hoax claim that dry lunar regolith can’t hold a footprint, and how the flag can wave in a vacuum.http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/03/11/mythbustin-the-moon-hoax-part-i/ […]
March 13th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Regarding the flag: It was starched and had a spring-steel wire running along the top edge to hold it up. The starch gave it a somewhat rumpled appearance but gave it added rigidity. There’s naturally no air on the Moon to make it flutter; the appearance of some atmospheric drag on the flag while it was being set up is from the wire vibrating. It stops as soon as the wire stabilizes, and never moves again even as astronauts hop nearby (activity that would have caused it to flutter in an atmosphere).
Regarding the regolith holding a footprint: Until the landing took place, nobody really knew what the lunar surface would be like. Some were worried that the dust would completely swallow the landing module; others that the surface would be too hard even for the module’s shock-absorbers. Of course, the large feet on the lander acted as snowshoes, distributing the weight over as large an area as possible. The famous photograph of the footprint served not only as an historical record, but also showed the flour-like consistency of the regolith at the landing site. Incidentally, that dust is the color of asphalt and sticks to everything! Lunar rovers break down quickly because their moving parts get clogged with Moon grit.
Some said they wanted to see what an explosion on the Moon looked like. (This may have been a joking reference to the TV show, which I have never seen; I don’t have cable TV.) Explosions can be caused by different things, yielding different effects — but there are several differences one can count on between a lunar and a terrestrial explosion. A lunar explosion would lack flames. (Combustible gases may combust, but only as long as they have sufficient den