That is what scares the hell out of people and prevents them from even considering the possibility that they could have been so thoroughly duped. It’s not being lied to about the Moon landings that people have a problem with, it is the realization that comes with that revelation: if they could lie about that, they could lie about anything.
-From, Wagging the Moon Doggie

1. First, it is ridiculed.

2. Second, it is violently opposed.

3. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer
_______________________________

Moon dust is Moon dust anywhere on the surface. If it can conform a footprint it can also move out of the way for a vectoring blast nozzle trying to land.

oH! yea, the camera that was mounted on the LEM`s leg to get that close up of the first footstep on the moon surface without a blast crater anywhere to be found ?
I can`t imagine it was more than 15 feet in radius away from the center rocket nozzle that put out over 10,000 lbs of landing thrust.

I`m not sure how it survived not only the enormous heat of the thrust nozzle but the enormous sonic reverberations being that close in proximity. From outer space to landing, then take off again to docking the service module and then the astronauts would have had to perform a space walk to retrieve it in space because the LEM did not come home, only the space capsule it was docked to.

Just saying if it were some kind of movie camera of that era with a direct link into the LEM, they would have had to have had a small TV recording studio inside which i highly doubt.

If a man stood 15 feet from the rear side of a jet fighter engine his skin would melt, how did the celluloid film survive in a 1969 Hasslblad movie camera and anything plastic inside or out to make it work?

Like they stated, the computer on board was no more powerful than a modern day pocket calculator, and i`m sure that was a truthful and accurate statement , but that`s all it was, perhaps not enough for a complex space flight or moon landing, but it was never the less still on board.

I see like this, when a persons spouse makes themself become suspect and there is an answer for their every where abouts, that becomes believable to the mind and conscience for two reasons, self protection, and not having to deal with the real truth.
As time goes by and eventually when that person does come forward and the truth is found out, even their own words and self-confessions can`t be believed, the mind won`t allow it, it`s like your being told an April Fool`s joke, the lies and humiliation have been believed and adjusted to for way to long.

I think the Russian`s beat us to the Moon, we lost by default through deciept and Ego.All they had to do is stay home and let us do it. But then there was the first Thanksgiving, Custer, The American Indian, Kennedy, Johnson,Viet Nam, Nixon, Clinton? Why not the Moon? They all put allot of people to work.

Another point I’d like to make, is that human migration and exploration historically happen in waves. It starts as a trickle, just a few, and then others follow. Sometimes the waves are separated by big swaths of time. The colonization of North America is an example. Whether you start with the Vikings or Christopher Columbus, there was a separation in time from the first explorers to the next round, and the next and then colonists. The same is true of space exploration and travel. And in this case, we’re talking about going to the fraking moon and stars, not just croosing the ocean in a boat (which used to be pretty difficult but not today). In the historical persepective 40 years is not that long of a time.

So celebrate! Its a big start. Stop being so pessimistic.

There appear to be stars in this picture! I know he mentioned cosmic rays further down in his post, but if you look just to the left and above the RMS quad you’ll see two bright specks. They don’t appear to be artifacts since it takes some magnification to see them and their edges are still soft. They are also of different brightness.

- Jack

It would’ve been 2.56am Greewich Mean Time, but it was summer time so you need to add an hour.

Step 1: Go to the moon.
Step 2: ????
Step 3. Profit

Why this and not Gagarin’s whistling of Родина слышит, Родина знает or his famous words “The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.”?

“Am I wrong or was the first EVA done on the 21st, the day after the landing?”

Depends on where you were living at the time, thanks to time zones… in the US the landing and EVA both took place on the 20th. Somewhere like Australia, they both took place on the 21st. In places like the UK, the landing took place late on the 20th and Armstrong stepped onto the moon at 3.56am the next day.

3.56am *my* time… somehow, as a 10-year-old bitten by the “space bug,” I managed to keep getting my mum to let me stay up for “just another five minutes” till she gave up, cautioned me not to turn the TV up too loud, and left me to it… the first time I’d tried anything like that, the first time I’d stayed up so late in my life, the first time British TV broadcasted through the night *and* the first time a human stepped onto another world. Not bad for one night…

For me it was time well spent.

I look forward to next year and the 40th anniversary. We should all have a huge celebration somewhere. Forget the fact that we haven’t been back since, just spread the excitement that we will return.

Poetry

However, while they will be debating about what date to use, some date nearby will divide history: the start of the Internet.

The Internet is a big change that we followed through with. And it is big – at least in the same range as the development of the printing press, though one might argue even as big as the development of writing.

One possible date: RFC 1 carries the date 7 April 1969. (ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1.txt)

http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc94/bassmanpedro/Celestion2b.jpg

Depending on how you interpret the lighting, this can look as it should or the cone can appear as a mound with an indentation on top.

“For the record, no matter how hard I try, I can’t make the footprint look raised, even if I rotate it. It just always looks like an indention to me. I do find the lack of stars suspicious, though.”

Go outside during the daytime and look up.

See any stars?

No? Well, I say you’re lying. You’re not really standing on the Earth at all.

“Contact light.”

What is a more forced process is knowledge development, science. It isn’t enough of an incentive without the rest (say, economy) but it is at least focusing our ideas on a desirable future.

Millions of years of evolutionary pressure have made us explorers, engraving the need to seek things out in our genes and in our brains.

We are curious life, but that is quite different. The most successful (longlived) species are stable exploiters of a certain niche. And to a certain extent that is the impression I get from paleoanthropology, it was when humans exploited the new niche as hunterer-gatherers that we migrated around the world.

If anything we have evolved to become tinkerers, most lately in farming as it has left tracks in our genes. (It has forced several instances of lactose tolerance, and enabled light skin variants with alternative D vitamin sources.)

But mostly we see from our genes that we have evolved for social compatibility (immune system, among other things) and sexual compatibility. That would have put a damper on the exploration spirit, I think.

a successful species must either grow or die.

How do you measure success for a species in an evolutionary perspective if not as survival after selection? And in that case the static species, the “living fossils” are most successful. But only by contingency – their niches are preserved.

Another, opposite, measure of success could be species divergence, that species spawns many descendant species. But again it is a matter of contingency – if a species have spawned a descendant by happenstance, the group is now twice as likely to continue speciating, the rich will be richer.

But how is it with cultures? Can they be static, or do they have to change (“grow or die”)?

It’s possible we’ll engineer an intelligent explorer that’s designed for interstellar travel. I think long before we come up with technology and energy resources that would make colonization of other planets in this solar system viable, beyond bold-gesture dabbling, we’ll decide that virtual adventuring is much more practical and democratic. When you realize that our understanding of the universe and its physical laws doesn’t really suggest that wormholes or faster than light travel are anything but interesting mind game diversions, that it takes an earthwide civilization of billions of people to support a handful of people in orbit around this planet now, and that we’d better be applying our technological resources to figuring out how to sustainably maintain human civilzation without destroying Earth’s ecosystems, I think our robotic or genetically engineered surrogates will do any real space exploration – if civilizations stable and far sighted enough exist in the future.

As amazing and exciting as the lunar landings were, they really were barely do-able and were as much a propaganda battle in the Cold War as they were meaningful scientific missions. The Apollo astronauts are heroic explorers and their real stories tell us how close to the edge of failure they were on every mission. I love sci-fi but I’m very aware that it’s fiction.

In my estimation, if humanity could figure out how to live in balance on this planet for, say, half a million years it might then have earned the right and the wisdom to reach ot to other worlds.