Various groups and individuals

have made claims since the mid-1970s, that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, Moon rock samples, and even some key witnesses.

Many conspiracy theories have been put forward. They either claim that the landings did not happen and that NASA employees (and sometimes others) have lied; or that the landings did happen but not in the way that has been told. Conspiracists have focused on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. The foremost idea is that the whole manned landing program was a hoax from start to end. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was lacking or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible.

Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, gave detailed answers to the conspiracists' claims on the laboratory's website. They show that NASA's portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common mistakes as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections. Using the scientific process, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. The real landing hypothesis is a single story since it comes from a single source, but there is no unity in the hoax hypothesis because hoax accounts vary between conspiracists

THE MOONWALKERS
EVA dates
the mission
age at first step on the moon

Neil Armstrong

21 VII 1969

Apollo 11

38y 11m 15d

Buzz Aldrin

21 VII 1969

Apollo 11

39y 6m 0d

Pete Conrad

19–20 XI 1969

Apollo 12

39y 5m 17d

Alan Bean

19–20 XI 1969

Apollo 12

37y 8m 4d

Alan Shepard

5–6 II 1971

Apollo 14

47y 2m 18d

Edgar Mitchell

5–6 II 1971

Apollo 14

40y 4m 19d

David Scott

31 VII – 2 VIII 1971

Apollo 15

39y 1m 25d

James Irwin

31 VII – 2 VIII 1971

Apollo 15

39y 1m 25d

John W. Young

21–23 IV 1972

Apollo 16

41y 6m 28d

Charles Duke

21–23 IV 1972

Apollo 16

36y 6m 18d

Eugene Cernan

11–14 XII 1972

Apollo 17

38y 9m 7d

Harrison Schmitt

11–14 XII 1972

Apollo 17

37y 5m 8d

According to James Longuski (Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue University), the conspiracy theories are impossible because of their size and complexity. The conspiracy would have to involve more than 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, the 12 men who walked on the Moon, the six others who flew with them as Command Module pilots, and another six astronauts who orbited the Moon. Hundreds of thousands of people—including astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers—would have had to keep the secret. Longuski argues that it would have been much easier to really land on the Moon than to generate such a huge conspiracy to fake the landings. To date, nobody from the United States government or NASA who would have had a link to the Apollo program has said the Moon landings were hoaxes. Penn Jillette made note of this in the "Conspiracy Theories" episode of his contrarian television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in 2005. With the number of people involved, and noting the Watergate scandal, Jillette noted that someone would have outed the hoax by now.

Who filmed Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon?

The Lunar Module did. While still on the steps, Armstrong deployed the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly from the side of the Lunar Module. This housed, amongst other things, the TV camera. This meant that upward of 600 million people on Earth could watch the live feed.

Why there are no stars in any of the photos?

The astronauts were talking about naked-eye sightings of stars during the lunar daytime. They regularly sighted stars through the spacecraft navigation optics while aligning their inertial reference platforms, the Apollo PGNCS.

Why are the footprints in the Moondust so unexpectedly well preserved?

The Moon dust has not been weathered like Earth sand and has sharp edges. This allows the Moondust particles to stick together and hold their shape in the vacuum. The astronauts likened it to "talcum powder or wet sand".

sources: wikipedia and flickr
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