Talkin' to Penn, Schoolin' Joe Rogan

Well done, Dr. Plait.

When Joe brought up the old, "How come we aren't going to the Moon anymore?" argument, I groaned out loud. "Hey, you only did this enormously difficult task six times. Maybe you never did it at all!"

Well, just because we aren't nuking cities in Iraq today doesn't mean we never nuked any cities in Japan over sixty years ago.

After all, if NASA wanted to convince the world they went to the moon, why keep launching mission after mission? They could have done Apollo 11 on this magical sound stage, declare that the mission was so dangerous that it was too risky to try again, and end the whole business. Instead, according the hoaxers, NASA kept launching over and over, using the sound stage six times, each time inviting more opportunity for someone to blow the whistle. Seven times, actually, if you include Apollo 13; if the other Apollo missions were 'hoaxes that succeeded' then I suppose Apollo 13 was a 'hoax that failed to succeed.' Or maybe it's a 'hoax that succeeded to fail.'

Funny how nobody thought the missions were faked while they were going on.