The criticisms and refutations by authors
such as David Percy, Ralph Rene, the late James Collier, Bill Ka[y]sing and others take the form of analysis of the photographic
record and video footage shot by NASA astronauts and questions about the viability of other aspects of the operation such as
the flight worthiness of the lunar module (LM) and the radiation risk ...

David Percy (filmmaker), Ralph Rene (carpenter), James Collier (journalist), and Bill Kaysing (librarian) generally do not have the technical expertise to comment on the spaceworthiness of spacecraft and the effects of astrophyisical phenomenon. David Percy, as a professional photographer, is the only one even remotely qualified to discuss Apollo video and photography, but we find that Mr. Percy has little or no skill at photographic interpretation and analysis, which are different fields than photography. Other expert photographers and photo analysts strongly disagree with Mr. Percy's findings and methods.

I would remind the reader that It's up to scientists and claimants of this or that fact to provide proof of their claims.

Agreed. However, the standards which prevail in historical research must be applied to questions of Apollo's historical authenticity. Conspiracy theorists wish to set a higher standard for Apollo defenders. They do not accept a burden of proof themselves.

That's how it works in science. It's called the scientific method.

No. The scientific method entails presenting a falsifiable conclusion -- that is, a conclusion which can be, on the basis of evidence, determined to be true or false. Instead, the conspiracy theorists present a conclusion which cannot be proven false, thereby circumventing the scientific method.

Unfortunately the scientific method does not apply well to historical research. In most cases falsifying the hypothesis means attempting to prove a negative. Thus, conclusions that require proof of a negative in order to falsify them are generally rejected as poor (untestable) hypotheses.

Most of the NASA believers that swallow the NASA story hook line and sinker usually end up making remarks of this kind or worse.

The author dismisses as a "non-argument" the notion that people will believe anything. Unfortunately it is still a phenomenon of belief, and something must be said to explain the propensity of people to believe an unsupported conclusion in the face of a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.

What is to be said for those of us who, contrary to buying NASA's story "hook, line and sinker", have studied NASA's story in great depth with professional expertise and have found it to be fully supported? The standard conspiracy argument is that anyone who rejects the conspiracy must be deluded. In fact, we can reject the conspiracy theory on the basis of careful and critical examination.

Though it's correct that stars will have been absent from the lunar photographic images it is strange that none of the astronauts remarked on the stars in the sky. The stars really will have been a magnificent sight at all times from the Moon.

Bill Kaysing's argument. The author still has not defended his assumption that the stars would have been "magnificent". In fact, at most times the astronaut would have been looking at a glaringly bright lunar surface illuminated by unfiltered sunlight, or similarly sunlit objects. The earth's atmosphere attenuates little light in the visible spectrum.

Astronaut Ed Mitchell said that he could see some stars if he blocked the sources of light and allowed his eyes to get used to the black sky. Astronaut John Young said it was disconcerting to see a black sky with no stars.

Therefore it is difficult to say whether the foot pads would have been covered in dust with any certainty.

We can be pretty certain. The footpads were 1-1.5 meters above the surface when the descent engine was stopped. As seen in the descent 16mm film, the dust fell immediately to the surface. From the study of fluid dynamics we know that the dust driven by the DPS plume hugged the surface, and Buzz Aldrin confirmed this by observation during his debriefing.

The LM cabin will have been filled with the sound from the engine and control thrusters.

No. The author relies on David Wozney's invalid comparison of the space shuttle's RCS and OMS engines. Wozney quotes the description of the shuttle RCS ignition transient. Similar ignition transients were heard by the LM astronauts.

The roaring sound from a rocket engine at steady state is produced by the interaction of the exhaust plume with the surrounding atmosphere. No atmosphere, no roar. In fact, if a rocket engine roars in a vacuum (as heard in the cabin), that would be the sign of a poorly designed engine. Flow noise would indicate imbalances or errors in the chamber construction.

Further, the microphones were designed to cut cabin noise. Anyone who has used a flight microphone knows this.

And finally, the astronauts had their helmets on.

However it is known that the LM engine and the space shuttle orbiter both use hypergolic fuel engines of the same type and same fuel ...

Absolutely false. The space shuttle's OMS and RCS use monomethyl hydrazine. The LM used a mixture of hydrazine and unsymmetric dimethyl hydrazine. The word "hydrazine" appearing in all of these does not mean they are identical. MMH and UDMH are related in the same way that gasoline and kerosene are related. They share many common chemical properties, but not necessarily the same combustion products and characteristics.

Further, the visibility of an exhaust plume depends on many things, including the size and construction of the engine and the viewing characteristics.

The Titan2 rocket used exactly the same fuel and oxidizer mix as the LM and yet it produced copious amounts of highly visible flame

Nope. Obviously this author hasn't seen many Titan 2 launches. The Titan 2 at steady state produces a nearly invisible plume. Its ignition transient produces copious amounts of highly visible smoke, but that too is due to interaction with the atmosphere.

Something very wrong there.

Yes, but what's wrong? How about people who can't even solve the most rudimentary physical and chemical equations pertaining to rocket propulsion giving us "authoritative" predictions and comparisons?

NASA is still to this day having trouble with vertical take off and landing rockets.

False.

The last known attempt ended in a crashed landing in 1996.

The crash in question happened after a successful landing, the last of several successful landings. The cause of the crash was an improperly configured landing gear.

The author neglects certain DCX problems, such as a reusable ascent/descent propulsion system, and the fact that it was unmanned.

The LM would have had to balance on one engine output only.

What preposterous ignorance. Rockets since the 1920s have had to "balance on one engine output only". This problem has been solved for decades.

The LM also had 16 small (110 pound) thrusters for attitude control and translation complicating matters considerably

What about the RCS jets would have "complicated" the LM's stability considerably? That's like saying that the brake pedal and accelerator "complicate" the operation of an automobile. This is really getting silly. This author has absolutely no clue what flight dynamics and flight control is about.

The Harrier is much flatter and with a much lower centre of gravity than the LM resulting in a more stable configuration as well.

I disagree. I've done some preliminary moment of inertia analysis on the lunar module. I doubt that the author of this FAQ even knows what that is. In the docked configuration the RCS would have provided considerable rotation moment. In the ascent-only configuration, the center of mass is actually below the center of thrust! The LM is a very stable design.

It can be seen that the Harrier jump jet and the LM are two different kettle of fish entirely.

Agreed, but the author's ceremonial gutting of the Harrier straw man completely ignores the fact that he doesn't know anything about the Apollo lunar module, how it was designed and flown.

The Moon is covered in powdered rock and rubble. The dust has a consistency described as being like cornflour.

For half an inch. Then it's hardpack. Surveyor proved this.

however NASA claims that the regolith (the powdered rock and rubble) that covers the Moon is 5 to 15 metres deep.

But not at the same density.

Instead we see a fairly smooth surface with a few light brush marks underneath the bell.

"Light brush marks"? Obviously this author has little understanding of fluid dynamics. It takes quite a bit of pressure and flow to create just "light brush marks".

There should have been a starburst pattern extending out beyond the footpads.

Wow, that's quite a prediction considering the author hasn't given any fluid dynamics equations or values to support his point, nor even given any understanding that he understands what fluid dynamics is.

I, on the other hand, have done a fair amount of fluid dynamics analysis on the DPS plume. What I see is what I expect. I want the author to give me a much more detailed and quantitative argument before I accept it as an authoritative expectation.

The main engine was not extinguished untill after touch down on some missions NASA say

Absolutely false.

In parts of the rover footage "vertical walls" or "curtain" formations of dust are seen to form in the wake of the dust kicked up by the rear wheels.

Nope, and this doesn't occur on earth. When particulates encounter a sufficiently dense ambient fluid, their trajectories become chaotic. This is not observed in the rover footage. Instead, the particles follow a ballistic trajectory.

Small particles of dust encountering atmosphere will have their ballistic flight path impeded to the point where sideways velocity drops to zero.

Not necessarily, but the trajectories will probably become chaotic.

In the Grand Prix footage the trajectories are primarily vertical because that's how they came off the wheel. The author relies on an affirmed consequent.

Also it's just not good enough to ascribe the cloud like appearance of the dust kicked up by the rover to "random motions".

I don't ascribe it to "random motions". In fact, I believe the motion is characteristically ballistic and not random. The author simply gives his subjective opinion that it looks like it's hitting air, when to my eye it looks exactly the opposite.

If you drive the wheels over coarse sand you will see the same thing.

Along with clouds of airborne dust, which are completely absent in the Apollo footage.

Jodrell Bank and sundry government scientists might have pointed their antennae at the Moon but none of that will prove man set foot on the Moon.

But when those station operators have interactive conversations with the people at the other end of the transmission, that's a pretty good indicator that someone's home. And when the time frame for those conversations doesn't allow for a double relay, the hoax argument collapses.

The only means of detecting a fraud would have been from the "leakage"

No. A central tenet of the hoax movement is the inability of spacecraft to pass safely through the Van Allen belts. The Soviets knew from their Zond experiments just how much radiation was there and what kind of shielding would be necessary. The Soviets also knew how the Apollo spacecraft were built. They even recovered an Apollo CM boilerplate. The Soviets are not dumb. They would know that the CM design would not work.

That would not have proven a problem however as microwave links are highly directional and thus inherantly very "leak proof"

Well, first, at 2 GHz the S-band radio communications are just barely microwaves. Second, the beam dispersal is between 0.5 and 3 degrees.

The answer to that is, why should the deployment and docking trials of the LM be any more real than the Moon landings?

Speculation piled on top of speculation.

If the LM wasn't fit to land on and takeoff from the Moon ...

The "proof" that it wasn't is nothing more than uneducated lay opinion.

So, aside from the fact that the operational suitability of the LM for such missions was in doubt given the history of the training vehicles

The only doubters are, again, untrained layman who can only handwave. By "history of the training vehicles" I suppose the author means the crash of the LLTV piloted by Armstrong. Strangely the conspiracy theorists never refer to the dozens upon dozens of completely successful LLTV flights and refer only to the one that was compromised by a technical failure.

the fact that even today it is beyond NASA's reach to have a rocket land and take off vertically with any reliability ...

Again, total ignorance of the facts. The DCX was much more ambitious than the lunar module and took off and landed successfully a number of times prior to its demise.

"According to an expert at DERA in the UK: Radiation is the biggest show stopper affecting mankinds exploration of the universe. ..."

And it is, because the missions being contemplated now are months or years long, not a maximum of two weeks as were the Apollo missions.

the thin-walled Apollo craft (from 8 through to 12) travelled during a solar maximum period, a time when there was a likelyhood of three or four severe flares per mission.

Um, what likelihood, exactly? Statistical probability gives us the ability to predict the likelihood of a solar flare occurring within a given two-week period. Where are the computations that prove how dangerous the Apollo missions actually were?

Even NASA admits that should there have been a severe flare while astronauts were on the Moon

Where exactly did NASA say this? This is contrary to what I've seen from NASA on the subject. NASA considered the probability of a relevant SPE during an Apollo mission to be relatively low.

They mislead the reader! It takes millions of years for anything to "boil up" from the depths of the Sun. It's just not possible to accurately predict when a solar flare will occur.

I am certainly not misleading the reader. At least not to the egregious extent to which Percy et al. are misleading the reader. An x-ray precursor provides the means of knowing as much as 36 hours in advance of the arrival of the damaging particles.

What good does that do? Depends on what phase of the mission the astronauts are currently in. During cruise flight the best option is to turn the tail of the CSM into the wavefront and hope for the best. During lunar EVA this provides enough time for the astronauts to return to the LM, ascend, and rendezvous with the heavier-shielded CSM. The CSM in lunar orbit is exposed to the particle wavefront for only half the time, and with the tail turned into the "wind" there would be a passable chance of survival.

About the best you can do is say they correlate with high sunspot numbers

No, that is not the best I can say. Predicting SPEs is big business for satellite operators.

That's right, they gambled with the astronauts lives.

Yes, they did, just as they gambled by putting them on a rocket filled with explosive fuel, just as test pilots do every day when they test experimental technology, and just as you and I do every day when we climb into our cars and drive at freeway speeds.

The conspiracy theorists have this odd notion that Apollo would be acceptable only if it could have been made perfectly safe. Nothing about Apollo was safe. It was dangerous, daring, and bold, and that's why it is worth our admiration.

When the chance of encountering severe solar flares was 3 or 4 per mission

Huh? Severe SPEs during a solar maximum do not occur at a rate of 3 or 4 per two-week period. Perhaps if all the events (including the benign ones) were considered you might come up with that figure.

But the command module didn't have the sheilding to protect against a severe flare.

As such, no. However the skin of the CM was thicker than the LM's. The real genius of the plan was the fact that by orbiting the moon the astronauts' exposure would have been cut in half. And if you turn the CSM so that the bulk of the SM is between the astronauts and the sun, you can cut the exposure even less.

NASA and its astronauts knew of the dangers and accept them. There were many aspects of Apollo missions that were simply unavoidably dangerous. The space shuttle still requires perfect operation during the first two minutes of flight, when under SRB power. This unmitigatable risk is accepted by the people who fly it.

The Moon relects only 7% of the sunlight that falls upon it ...

The albedo argument again. Albedo is not the be-all and end-all of reflectivity. 7% of sunlight is still very, very bright. 2-year-old asphalt has about 7% albedo and that's still enough to hurt your eyes. 7% of sunlight is still very photographically significant.

The alternative to the surface reflection hypothesis is that studio lighting was used. However, the conspiracy theorists cannot show any evidence that studio lighting is responsible for the fill lighting other than their rejection of all other potential sources. And there are many photos (e.g., the Aldrin egress photos) that clearly show the direction of fill lighting as below the astronaut.

They must have used a spotlight to take that photograph because the hotspot cannot have been caused by the heiligenschein effect.

Affirmed consequent. Just because heiligenschein causes hot spots does not mean that all hot spots are caused by heiligenschein.

Many images look like the background is dropped in to the foreground

I see this every day. I live in mountainous country.

In some NASA film footage included in the late Jim Collier's video "Was it only a paper Moon?" Young and Duke of Apollo 16
can be seen against exactly the same backdrop on two different EVA's (EVA1 and EVA2)

Collier uses secondary sources. It is correct in the primary source; the secondary footage was edited improperly and we have known about this for decades.

"Ordinary ektachrome slide film will shatter at -4F".

Not if it's on the Estar base. Most conspiracy theorists don't know the difference between emulsion and base. The emulsion is the chemical substance that records the image, and the base is the mechanical substrate on which the emulsion is coated. You can paint the Ektachrome emulsion on any transparent surface.

"Ordinary" Ektachome "film" would probably refer to the E-6 process emulsion on a cellulose base. That would indeed shatter at low temperatures. However the Estar base is a polyester base and was formulated for high-altitude reconnaissance photography and is good to temperatures near -50 F.

Wrong. There is plenty of heat in the vacuum and especially close in to a star. Heat is energy and there is plenty of it in the "vacuum" of space in the form of an energy flux.

This is a monumental piece of misdirection. The author is attempting to describe radiant heat transfer, and gets the flux right, but he neglects to mention that the "energy flux" is completely stopped by anything opaque. Stand in the shade and that "energy flux" is irrelevant.

EM radiation is not heat. It can be produced by heat and converted to heat, but it is not heat itself.

Claims that astronauts landed on the Moon
during the "lunar morning" in order to "avoid noon day heat" are ridiculous.

Not to someone who understands thermodynamics. "Heating up" is a matter of arriving at equilibrium, and heat transfer modes on the lunar surface are limited.

surface temperatures ... may reach 200 degrees fahrenheit on Earth in places like deserts and so forth [in a few hours].

Insolation on earth is radically different because the angle of insolation changes rapidly, presenting an increasingly favorable form factor for absorption. The sun rises very slowly over the lunar surface, a mere 12.5 degrees per day. That change is accomplished in less than one hour on earth.

Angle is everything, as any thermodynamicist can tell you.

It is fairly obvious from this that surface temperatures on the Moon can rapidly heat to more than +200F in much less than 24 hours of sunlight depending on angle of incidence. (emphasis mine)

Yes, exactly. Perhaps this author would like to do the calculus which compares insolation on earth versus insolation on the moon. Such a computation would be required in order to support the author's statement. Earlier the author reminded us that those who make a proposition are responsible for defending it. Here is a proposition that has a clearly outlined and clearly lacking defense.

This whole point is nothing but a bunch of vigorous handwaving. He clearly understands very little about practical thermodynamics.

For a recently landed lunar module standing vertically on the ground and presenting a surface that is perpendicular to the Sun's rays (which it will be during the lunar morning) the heating effect will be rapid and similar to that for level ground at midday.

This would be true if the polished aluminum and aluminized mylar of the lunar module had the same thermodynamical properties as the lunar surface. The author forgets that the equilibrium temperatures cited for the lunar surface are only valid for the surface material itself, not for any old object on the lunar surface.

The author takes albedo into account earlier. At 7% albedo, 93% of the sun's radiant energy (at some wavelength or group of wavelengths) is absorbed. What about aluminized mylar (albedo 50%) and polished aluminum (albedo 93%)?

These are all arguments that can be supported by thermodynamic computations, but where are they? As our resident thermodynamicist JR Keller has said, I have yet to see anyone who knew anything about thermodynamics.

It's just not true that it will take years, industrial diamonds are manufactured in much less time.

But gemologists are not fooled by industrial diamonds. The point is not that the process cannot be accelerated. The point is that if you accelerate the process, you lose the ability to fool experts.

Except of course that lunar evolution is still undecided. We know so much about the Moon from the samples that we still aren't sure exactly how the Moon formed.

Irrelevant. The author confuses uncertainty on a macro scale with perfect certainty on a smaller scale. Every geologist I have consulted is absolutely sure of what should constitute lunar surface samples and would recognize it if he saw it.

Again the author handwaves his way around unanimous expert opinion.

The trouble is that many facets of the Apollo story do not [stand up to scrutiny]

They do, to reasonable scrutiny. Inconsistencies based on the ignorance of the conspiracy theorists and selectively considered evidence are not legitimate questions.

Conspiracy theorists bring up the same arguments again and again, each time ignoring the clear refutations. This does not constitute ongoing scrutiny. It only constitutes ongoing closed-mindedness.

The Apollo samples have to match the known
Earthly samples.

No. There are aspects of meteoritic samples which should not be expected in lunar surface samples.

why should we believe that the samples were retreived manually just because they (NASA) say so?

Because the Soviet samples were undiscriminated. The Apollo samples consist of several sampling techniques (rake samples, bulk samples, chip samples, and core samples) and in many cases were specifically ordered by backroom geologists. The geologist says, "Hey, pick up that rock right there," and the astronaut does it. Then the geologist examines that precise sample.

"30 billion dollars were spent in sending man to the moon but all the paper work has been flushed down the toilet" [Collier]

Collier is dismayed that some of the design and manufacturing documents for Apollo spacecraft were destroyed. Collier is unaware of just how much and what kind of documentation accompanies such a project, nor what was destroyed. The amount of material that remains is colossal and astounding. I can find more information, faster, on the Apollo spacecraft than I can on, say, the Boeing 737 -- a relatively common machine.

The amount of historical material remaining from Apollo is monumental, and it's obvious that Collier nor any other conspiracy theorist has bothered to explore it.