Today we have technology that is many orders of magnitude more advanced than what was available in the 1960s.

It's rarely a matter of the level of technology. It's a question of specialization of technology.

Yes, we're more capable these days. We're also more ambitions. Ask someone in the 1960s about the ability to soft-land on an asteroid or rendezvous with a comet and they'll say, "Sorry, we can't do that." But that's what we're attempting these days.

And you can't freely mix manned and unmanned technology. Unmanned technology is developed on a faster scale and takes greater risk of mission failure.

The computer in the Lunar Module had about the same power as a pocket calculator today.

So what? The question is not whether the lunar module computer was as powerful as computers today. The question is whether it was sufficient to perform the tasks assigned to it.

My company makes some of the world's most powerful computers. But I don't want one in my spacecraft. I don't need one in my spacecraft. I want something simple, reliable, rugged, and well-tested. If that means it's older, more trusted machinery, then so be it.

many photos show shadows which are not parallel

... and shouldn't be parallel. Projective geometry is not hard, people.

In fact, all the photos look very much as though they were taken in the dark using very bright spotlights.

Well, as a sometime lighting technician at a local theater I deal with "very bright spotlights" all the time. And in no way have I been able to reproduce all the visible lighting and shadow effects that appear in any of the Apollo photographs that conspiracists say are anomalous this way. I really want to know if the people who make these claims have much experience with theatrical lighting.

One shows a letter "C" carved on a rock

Or a hair on the print, as has been conclusively identified. There is fibrous contamination all over the place in Apollo photography. It just so happens this one is more clearly visible than the others.

... another shows a structure apparently floating in space

The television camera on its tripod. The tripod can be seen in magnifications of the transparency, but isn't generally visible in the low-quality JPEGs used by conspiracists.

Lens flares are also frequently mistaken for "structures".

A third photo shows two astronauts reflected in the visor of a third one.

A joke.

Other artifacts include a photo of the Lunar Rover with crosswires ... which appear behind part of the photo.

Emulsion bleed. Photographers can easily reproduce it.

Other photos show crosswires at the wrong angle.

Cropped and rotated JPEGs -- the fiducials are correct on the transparency.

Yet this [television] camera cannot be seen in a photo taken shortly afterwards showing Buzz Aldrin walking down the ladder.

It's hidden by the landing strut and other elements of the LM structure. If you look at the television pictures of Buzz descending the ladder, you can't see the portion of Armstrong where his camera was mounted. If the television camera can't see the Hasselblad, then the Hasselblad can't see the television camera. Elementary.

There is no crater, nor any sign of disturbance, under the Lunar Module.

Fluid dynamics computations show that a crater would be unexpected. And there is plenty of signs of disturbance. Close-up photos of the area directly beneath the DPS skirt show slightly discolored regolith and radial striations where the dust was swept.

There is no dust on the rocks. Since there is no air on the Moon, there should be just as much dust on the rocks as on the rest of the surface, since there is nothing to blow it away.

Since there is no air on the moon there is nothing to attenuate the ballistic velocities with which dust particles strike a particular surface. Dust does not "settle" in the lunar environment. Dust particles strike the rocks and bounce off.

The point about seismic disturbances is quite valid.

There are no stars in any of the pictures.

Nor should there be, with the camera settings used.

Stars are visible in pictures of space taken in Earth orbit

I've seen hundreds of hours of video and thousands of pictures taken in space and the only ones that show stars are those specifically exposed to show the stars. If the subject of the photography is something else (i.e., the earth, or some piece of hardware) then there are no stars visible.

Yet several photos show backgrounds which disappear into the distance.

Without a clear example we can't be sure what this means. Typical causes are horizon, lambertian illumination, and phase-texture interaction. These occur on earth too, but are not as prominent due to scattered sunlight.

On the Moon, the dust would not cling together, and any footprints would be much less well defined.

Utterly false. Any fine particulate with irregularly shaped particles is impressible regardless of moisture content. E.g., cement.

Although they were apparently operating under one-sixth gravity ... there is no film showing them doing this.

Factually false. There is actually quite a bit of it.

the film would have either melted (in the heat) or snapped (in the cold).

Completely ignorant of thermodynamics. The film never got hot enough to melt, and it was a polyester-based film specially formulated for cold temperatures.

The astronauts themselves apparently had special water-cooled spacesuits.

Space suits were heavily insulated to thermally isolate them from the space environment. However, astronauts generate heat through metabolism, and that heat must be rejected. Human beings are relatively fragile and require very narrow tolerances in their environment. Machinery like cameras does not generate much heat, and can tolerate much higher variances in its environmental factors.

the visors would have cracked if they had been partly in a hot area and partly in a cold area (i.e., if a shadow fell across them).

Absorption is mostly irrelevant to the transparent Lexan. Lexan's thermal and mechanical properties are quite sufficient to maintain suit integrity.

most of the electrical equipment would have malfunctioned.

The temperature of the lunar regolith is irrelevant to the operation of electrical equipment. The thermal issue regarding electronics is the heat they generate. This was rejected via a straightforward and well-documented sublimation cooling system.

The scenery on the moon looks very much like that in Nevada

Not to anyone who's ever been to Nevada.

One investigator has suggested that some of the experts which created the film "2001 a Space Odyssey" were recruited to work on the graphics for the NASA moon shot.

If so then why do the Apollo photographs and Kubrick's film show entirely different conceptualizations of the lunar landscape?

Nothing has ever been produced that could not have been created on Earth.

Not according to the geologists that specialize in planetary geology.

What about the laser reflector ... ? All the data has been controlled by NASA.

Factually false. Several countries have successfully used the LRRRs.

How come information about this has been kept secret?

What information?

It's common procedure for conspiracists to allude to "secret" information whose existence is simply conjectured. The "unwillingness" of the custodians of that information to release it is then interpreted as suppression or secrecy.

At times Apollo information has been classified. It is possible, though unlikely, that more classified information exists. That which has been unclassified was formerly classified for appropriate reasons. The authenticity of the Apollo program can be determined using information that was never classified and was available at the time.

Prostitutes in Las Vegas have been interviewed, and have claimed that they had "astronauts" as clients who were working on the "film set" used by NASA.

A highly reliable source.

A pilot reported seeing the Command Module being thrown out of a plane with a parachute, a few minutes before it landed in the sea.

The source of this claim is a caller to a "fringe" radio show claiming to be a commercial airline pilot who witnessed this. Unfortunately the commercial air route is more than 100 miles away from the landing site of the command module in question. The source is obviously unavailable for verification.

Some investigators believe that the crudity of some of the mistakes ... suggests that they were deliberate.

Subversion of support. These "investigators" (mostly professional conspiracy theorists) are trying to explain anomalies which aren't anomalous. If there's no anomaly, there's no need to explain the anomaly.

The "whistle-blower" theory suffers from the very palapable flaw of there not being any substantiable, actual whistle-blowers.

$30 billion buys a lot of secrecy.

Not if you give it to half a million private sector employees.

There would have been no reason for more than a handful of people to have known the true nature of the project.

Only in the minds of conspiracists, who have yet to formulate a workable scenario which fits these constraints.

It would not have been difficult to fake a few conversations with astronauts and readings from the spacecraft's instruments.

Again, no conspiracists has yet postulated how this would actually have been accomplished. They simply claim it would be easy. When the flaws of their simplistic scenario are revealed, they simply make the scenario more and more complicated and convoluted, forgetting that their key premise is the alleged ease with which this could be done.

Indirectly the conspiracists admit it would be very difficult to falsify the stream of telemetry in order to fool all interested parties.

We don't know the true state of the relationship between the USSR and the time: to what extent was the Cold War real ...

To those of us who lived through it, it was very real. And it is very real to any serious historian who has studied it. A theory which requires as its premise a substantial rewrite of recent history is automatically implausible.

In any case all our author can offer as an answer to this very real and devastating question is a load of completely unsubstantiated conjecture. I am not impressed with theories that contain huge, unfilled holes.

According to one theory, NASA then commissioned a report which showed that it was extremely unlikely that a lunar mission would succeed

May we read this report and know who wrote it, or is this simply a "theory"? I am not impressed with people who theorize what would need to be true in order for their conclusions to hold, and then simply proceed as if that theory were really true.

the person writing this report subsequently had an "accident"

This sounds like Thomas Baron. Baron's report was not commissioned by NASA. In fact, it was not commissioned by anybody. It was Baron's personal view from one of many trenches, and it contained elements of truth, elements of hearsay, and Baron's own personal interpretations. Nevertheless Baron tried to ram it down the throat of his employers. After that he became a pawn in a political game played by members of Congress.

Baron never argued that it was unlikely a lunar mission would ever succeed. He simply pointed out the problems he was having at one of his company's sites.

Neither did the Phillips report cast such gloom on the prospects of ever getting to the moon. Phillips and his inspectors were very explicit: it was clear to them that Apollo would not proceed on schedule and on budget at the current rate, but nowhere does it say it would never happen. And neither did NASA per se commission the Phillips report; it was commissioned by George Mueller (a high-ranking NASA official) but not necessarily for agency-wide reference.

The only report which seems to cast doubt on ever reaching the moon is one claimed by Bill Kaysing. This was supposedly an internal report written by Rocketdyne in 1959 which gave a very low estimate of the probability of successfully reaching the moon. Now in 1959 the probability of doing that was indeed very low. But what about the probability of doing it ten years and 30 billion dollars later? The report -- if it even exists -- has very limited applicability.

However, JFK had already publically committed the country to going to the Moon.

And this goal would be satisfied by a genuine landing too. It all rests on whether conspiracists can prove NASA was unable to get to the moon. And so far they can't.

They were several hundred metres in the air, and NASA controlled all access and television pictures.

False. Close-out was by contractors, not by NASA henchmen.

The American goverment has a track record of lying to its people. There is no reason whatsoever to take anything which it says at face value.

Fallacy of specialization. The U.S. government is not a single entity with uniform, monolithic behavior and characteristics. Elements of the U.S. government have lied on occasion. That does not prove that NASA lied on this occasion.

The U.S. government tells the truth sometimes too. When a composite entity displays varied behavior, there is simply no basis for a presumption either way. Conspiracists wish to avoid responsibility for proof by this type of innuendo: they might be lying, therefore they are lying.

Unfortunately with no presumption, positive proof is required in each case. This is not simply a matter of faith belief. This is a matter of investigation and proof. The conspiracists must show in this specific case that NASA is lying. They may not simply claim guilt by association.

NASA is a government organisation with close links to the military.

Such as?

The second document is an article which appeared in Fortean Times (number 94).

The Fortean Times received a record number of letters in response to this article, many of them from professional photographers lambasting Percy for his ignorance.

It is written by David Percy, an award winning film and TV producer:

Percy overstates his credentials. I have discovered at least one instance where he has claimed credit for another's work. Further, I have been able to find only one award Percy has actually won: a rather insignificant yearly award from an obscure filmmaking organization.

But this is largely irrelevant. None of David Percy's claimed credentials, real or otherwise, establishes him as an expert photographic interpreter or photogrammetrist. Photographic interpretation does not require the same skills as photography itself. Percy's claims relate to a science called photogrammetry, and Percy demonstrates almost no understanding of the principles of that science.

The author suggests that the reason why some of the shadows are not parallel is because the photos were taken with short-angle lenses. However, this would produce a completely different kind of distortion.

It is unclear what this author intends by the term "short angle lens". He apparently confuses the concept of short focal length and wide-angle field of view, which are orthogonal ideas. Nevertheless his confusion casts doubt on his ability to understand and deal with the rebuttal.

Short lenses capture a wide field of view, which will in turn embody a wide variation in the phase angle. Phase angle determines shading and shadow direction as seen from any one point. The rebuttal is highly valid in the general case -- shadows should not appear parallel under most photographic conditions with short lenses.

The Apollo 12 photo used as a counterexample to the rebuttal is not very relevant. There is a difference in appearance between foreground and background, and in this case it has little to do with phase angle. However, other principles of projective geometry and photogrammetry apply; the photo is not anomalous, but not necessarily because the short-lens rebuttal applies.

Another, even stronger, argument made by David Percy is that the angle which the Sun make to the horizon is simply incorrect.

Percy's ad hoc method of measuring sun elevation is completely absurd, mathematically invalid, and entirely useless. His claim to expertise is largely eliminated by such preposterous methodology. Photogrammetric rectification establishes plausible shadow angles for Apollo 11 photographs.

NASA's answers are:
a) because they are out of focus

This is obviously an inappropriate rebuttal. The zone-focus technique taught to astronauts would have almost always correctly focused objects at infinity.

because stars are not visible in daylight on Earth, either. ...
Stars are not visible on Earth during the daylight because sunlight is scattered by particles in the atmosphere.

Correct. Look at any point in the day sky and you'll see sunlight that got to you from that direction after having been scattered by the atmosphere. We know that the atmosphere itself doesn't attenuate visible light enough to obscure stars because we can see the stars fine at night. So why can't we see stars through the scattered light from the sun? Because that scattered light is too bright, and our eyes adjust to receive that light, not the dim light from the stars behind it. Take away scattered sunlight and all other sources of light and you can see the stars.

There is no atmosphere on the Moon, so this wouldn't happen.

Correct, but irrelevant. Just because atmospheric scattering doesn't supply enough light to "stop down" your eyes doesn't mean that other effects won't cause your eyes to adjust. Standing on the day side of the moon you will have a hard time looking anywhere without seeing something lit up by the sun. The only way to avoid this is to look directly up so that your view is comprised totally of the sky, and wait for your eyes to adjust. Ed Mitchell did this on Apollo 14, and he saw a few stars.