I’ve heard some hoaxers claim that Russia went along with the moon landing hoax to induce fear in their populace, but honestly did they really need a moon landing for that? We had tons of nuclear weapons pointed at each other. I’d be a lot more afraid of a dozen nuclear weapons then a few (unarmed) lunar landers. And if they exposed the moon landing as a hoax, they would have been able to shoot for being first to land on the moon.

In the end, the “Moon Hoax” theory requires too many people to have been fooled or kept silent in some fashion for far too long. Surely, of the thousands upon thousands who were either in on the hoax or initially fooled by it, *someone* would come forward with hard evidence of fakery by now!

Let’s go back in time.

It’s the sixties. We’re at the height of the Cold War / Space Race. Everyone is watching everyone else. Looking for a loophole, a propaganda mistake. The Russians love to embarrass the Americans by putting a satellite / dog / man into space before the USA and would have been watching the American efforts closely and undisguised glee.

We watch their rockets go up and we watch them come down. They do the the same to us – except in the early days they went down a lot more than up. The Russians liked this.

If the Apollo missions were staged in the desert why then didn’t the Russians shout loud and often about the USA’s moon shot not going to the moon? Surely they would have seen it just stay in orbit?

The propaganda power it would have given them to proclaim (with evidence) that the Capitalist Pigs had failed to deliver would have been breathtaking.

I’ll tell you why. It’s because the Apollo Moon landings actually happened. QED.

I have read Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. But that’s about all I remember. The Mars series excellent is you haven’t read it, but most of the Moon stuff is in the first novel and focused on training for Mars (which is a great use for a Moon base, IMHO, but that’s another post entirely) .

Thanks!

BTW, Phil, I am looking forward to meeting you this weekend at Comic Con. I should have said something when I was in the Mythbusters line last year and you came out and talked to some people just 5 feet in front of me!

Pana-Vue Moon Landing Slides Apollo 11 – July 20th, 1969
6 sleeves, 5 slides each: from liftoff, to footprints, to Aldrin and Armstrong planting the flag to Aldrin with solar wind package and experiment pack – Very Cool!!!

My $1 garage sale buy is now a family heirloom.
Especially since I attended Apollo High School back when we received an Apollo capsule from NASA that was used in training the frogmen…

“The crew is the tip of the iceberg. In Apollo 11, there were 400,000 people underneath that all had to do their job or we weren’t going to make it. And I think every crew realized that. It was a team effort of NASA that got us to the Moon.” – Charlie Duke, Capcom Apollo 11

So I retract my “good enough to fool hundreds of professionals, a rival space-going nation, and millions of people” statement. Instead, replace that with “good enough to fool hundreds *OF THOUSANDS* of professionals, a rival space-going nation, and millions of people.”

Gotta love good ol’ reality denying Neil. I don’t what argument he presented that Phil was unable to refute. I certainly didn’t see anything. Perhaps Phil didn’t directly post a response to one of his “proofs” and thus (in the Bizarro-world of Neil’s brain), Neil won that round. Nevermind, of course, that his point was likely shot down repeatedly by other commenters and/or by Phil’s many pages detailing the facts. Likely, the important point (in Neil’s mind) was that Phil didn’t personally address him directly in the proper (as defined by Neil) manner. That’s about the only way that I could see Neil “winning.”

>”It looked phony to me,” said Wilson. “It was a pathetic setup of a sound stage.”

and

>Only the astronauts and a small control team knew the landing was a fake. Even mission control thought the journey was legit, he said.

So it was both a pathetic fake and yet one good enough to fool hundreds of professionals, a rival space-going nation, and millions of people. With the level of organization and technical expertise that they would have needed to fake the Moon landing and keep it “real looking” to the present day (look at the state of the art of special effects of 1969 and tell me they don’t look fake now), the simplest answer is that the “sound stage” was located some 240,000 miles away ON THE MOON!

The Russians would not care. I don’t think NASA’s budget would get slashed for it.

Keep asking that question.

My next question would be: “what would be the motive of all the people involved (astronauts, mission planners, people at mission control) never to reveal that it was all a hoax”.

Maybe I could get all hoax-believer-like and shout: “I demand (credible) answers on these questions”.

Unfortunately many of the commenters are just as nuts.

Over on WIRED, there’s an article about the Landing… guess who shows up in the comments, and trashes Phil and BAblog as “the Zionist NASA shill Phil Plait’s disgraceful Bad Astronomy site. Sure, he has glib answers to the same worn out dunce claims about Apollo but he had to censor me when I shut him up with a sound argument that he couldn’t refute.”

Link to article and comments:http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/07/dayintech_0720

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http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid271557392?bctid=30020544001

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