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
21 VII 1969
Apollo 11
38y 11m 15d
21 VII 1969
Apollo 11
39y 6m 0d
19–20 XI 1969
Apollo 12
39y 5m 17d
19–20 XI 1969
Apollo 12
37y 8m 4d
5–6 II 1971
Apollo 14
47y 2m 18d
5–6 II 1971
Apollo 14
40y 4m 19d
31 VII – 2 VIII 1971
Apollo 15
39y 1m 25d
31 VII – 2 VIII 1971
Apollo 15
39y 1m 25d
21–23 IV 1972
Apollo 16
41y 6m 28d
21–23 IV 1972
Apollo 16
36y 6m 18d
11–14 XII 1972
Apollo 17
38y 9m 7d
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.
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.
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.
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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