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Originally Posted by Ken from Dublin
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...we are nowhere near the technological levels required.
Is that so? I'm an engineer. I have worked in the aerospace industry. No one there doubts the Moon landings, no matter which country they work in. In fact, the only people who express doubts in the technological ability of the Apollo engineers are those who, when pressed even a little bit, can't describe what Apollo was tryingt o
You can't even send astronauts into low earth orbit nearly 40 years later without killing several of them - what is it now? 17 deaths or something?
Two missions lost out of more than 100. That is still better odds than Alaskan crab fishing and still a far greater mission success rate than Apollo.
The dangerous parts of a space mission are, generally, launch and landing. You seem to believe that the distance traveled between those events markedly affects the overall expectation of mission success or survivability. The fact that post-Apollo missions have been largely orbital and largely routine does not mean they are necessarily markedly less dangerous. In fact, humankind's proficiency at manned space flight has increased dramatically since Apollo: we now have paid private excursions into space, and privately-built and -operated suborbital spacecraft.
Yet you believe 12 were sent with 1960's technology to the moon...
You mean that same 1960s technology that gave us ICBMs and launch vehicle designs still in use today? That gave us the Boeing 747, one of the most successful airframes in all of aviation history? That produced the SR-71 -- still the world's fastest airplane (that we know of)?
See, the difference between conspiracy theorists and the people here is that the conspiracists really don't know much about "1960s technology," whereas most of the people here do, and have studied the technological history and descendency of Apollo in depth. There is an
enormous amount of technical information available regarding Apollo, and the world's engineering community still turns to it today to help solve our current problems. According to the conspiracists -- none of whom seems to have an engineering degree or have worked in an engineering discipline -- all that stuff is bogus. Yet the world's practicing engineers, who use it, don't seem to have figured that out yet. Why do you suppose that is?
Carl Sagan - America's most famous astronomer - never promoted the lie in his lifetime...
Straw man. What about all those who did?
...and in one of his last interviews stated that the Apollo program was just about intimidating other nations and beating the Russians...
Arguably it was. That doesn't mean it was faked.
Later on in the same interview he stated that NASA's greatest achievements were the Viking missions to Mars.
He is welcome to his opinion. That doesn't provide proof that Apollo was faked.
In 1994 NASA's chief administrator admitted/let slip in a British TV interview that no astronaut can travel above 400 miles until it can be figured out how to protect them from lethal cosmic radiation.
No, he was speaking in context of the return to the Moon and on to Mars, where the mission lengths will be drastically longer than the 10 days and therefore subject to a more hazardous radiation environment. Can you find a qualified astrophysicist today who doubts that Apollo was successful? I've been asking this for about 10 years, and so far no conspiracy theorist has been able to produce an astrophysicist who believes and can substantiate that the Apollo missions must have been faked because of the supposedly harsh radiation environment.
Most conspiracy theorists don't understand the first thing about radiation, its actual hazards, the nature of its presence in space, or how engineers go about dealing with it.
It's like reading a scientologist blog here...
Not really. You've just spouted the same old uninformed generalities and cherry-picked hogwash that the conspiracy-theory web sites have been shoveling for the past 10-15 years. Nothing new. If you have the temerity to stick around and defend your claims, we'll see how much original thinking you've really done on this problem. Do you have the gumption to test your beliefs against those of actual engineers and scientists?