Why didn't the Russians dispute the moon landing? They have good reason to and it wouldn't stop them to do so if they knew we did land on the moon. They accepted the fact that we did it first. Why would our enemy accept it if it was fake? They would want to discredit us Americans. One other thing since we have never been to the moon before, before the first human did, how would we know ALL the variables to space and how the moon's condition and no atmosphere would come out on video or picture or how things would behave in those conditions? The answer we don't. We have nothing to compare it to. There are to many variables that we don't know about. I know you can use that idea of unknown variables against humans landing on the moon, but that is why it is so amazing and why we have not gone back because we try to and problems came up and stopped us. We need more then a motive to make it true. Anyways i just wanted to say my two cents. Please comment. thanks

Welcome to the BABB.

Some suggestions:

-The Americans didn't dispute Gagarin's flight
-Guess why the Russians got that many wheat from the US

The beauty of being a Twinky is, that you can easily find "explanations" without giving any additional evidence.

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

You are wrong. It is simply a matter of physics.

It is not surprising that the Russians did not take the authencity into question. The scientific method have always been revered in Russia, so I do not think they even considered making propaganda over the matter.

The real reason we haven't been back? According to Jack Schmitt: Politics. We were just getting good at the lunar missions. The hardware bugs were smoothing out and non-equatorial landings were being perfected. But the moon missions were advertised as an "us vs. them" project rather than a purely scientific one. After we got there first, the public facination for the project evaporated. Except for Apollo 13, public interest waned. To the untrained John Q. Public, when the nation spent a goodly chunk of public money and he only sees (to him anyway) a pile of rocks, assorted samples, and some great photography as the result, the aura wears off quickly. He didn't understand that the rewards of the lunar program wouldn't be realized until years later.

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Why does "monosyllabic" have 5 syllables?

Why would the Russians dispute it? They have no motive to.
The Soviet Union sent the first man into space, he did a complete orbit! The first Mercury mission was just up and down.
The Soviet Union did that on the equivient of £200,000 (not adjusted to todays value).
The Soviet Union were the world leaders in research to the long term effects of living in space.
The Soviet Union was also a lot further ahead with the hydrogen bomb than the US, though they were second to test they dropped theirs from a plane. The US one was a fixed structure 4 stories high.

Why would the Soviet Union wish to openly discredit the West? This is not how they acted previously. All their propoganda was directed internally, towards the population. I think that it is your assumption that the Soviet Union would discredit the US to the world based on your experience of western politics, not a study on the history of the Soviet Union.

Most of the mission details were worked out, little was left to chance. But like you I do wonder how much guesswork had to go into choosing a suitable landing site. Could a flat surface be detected from Earth at that time?
It is easy to test the performance of film in a vaccuum. You can be pretty sure of the results. We can use cameras in extreme environments on Earth.

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"The most compelling evidence supporting the existence of other forms of intelligent life is the single fact that they haven't come to visit us" - Douglas Adams

Given that Apollo 11's offical landing site was a boulder field and Armstrong had to find a new spot to set down nearly running out of fuel in the process, I think that answers the question.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Not to mention the Surveyor probes.

No. The official landing site was fine. But due to some unaccounted effects on undocking, Eagle landed some miles long, outside the landing ellipse. Stafford and Cernan had already warned them that at the long end of the landing ellipse they would be going into a boulder field, which they should avoid.
And the computer was trying to bring them down right into a crater with even bigger rocks inside. So Armstrong took over and had to make a long landing even longer.

Harald

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

That reminds me, someone the other day said to me that the reason the Eagle had to land long was because they "got lost" on the way down. Any comments or explanation on that? I know about the boulder field, but this is the first I have heard of they're already being long.

That does not conform to the historical record of the Soviets. For instance, they're teaching of Lamarkian evolution instead of Darwinian evolution, for political purposes. For instance, the incredible hype over their space "firsts" that turn out to be more stunts that actual accomplishments - like they're "rendevous" that was really two ballistically close paths rather than maneuvering together. The attitude and atmosphere of the Cold War strongly suggests that the Soviets would have screamed bloody murder if they thought it was a fake. With regards to scientific method being revered, pseudoscience exploded with the downfall of the USSR.

I disagree. The Soviets were just as interested in external propaganda as internal. The whole space race was about convincing the world which political system was better by showing which had the best technological ability, which translates into best military might. The list of Russian Space Firsts trotted out glosses over the risky nature of their program and the distortions on some of the accomplishments, such as mentioned above. Yes, they were ahead at the beginning - first satellite, first human in space. But the gap wasn't that big.

[nit] Can you say "Lysenko?" http://skepdic.com/lysenko.html [/nit]

RBG

They never got lost. There were some comm problems on the way down, but enough data to track them. AFAIK, because the tunnel was more pressurized on undocking than expected, Eagle became some additional velocity which wasn't accounted for. From timing landmarks, the crew knew that they would come in long.

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Sorry for the politics in the last para of that link.

RBG

Quick nitpick. While the first US Hydrogen explosion was 4 stories high, it was not meant to be a bomb, it was to test to see if the idea for compressing the hydrogen fuel would work. And the Soviet device, while a pretty impressive weapon, was not a hydrogen bomb, per se, but a boosted atomic bomb. It took them several more years before they constructed an actual Hydrogen bomb.

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Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

At least they were still doing this about 12 years ago. That's what my best friend told me, and he went to some dozens of schools all over the USSR before he came to Germany. And no, he's holding no grudge against the country he was born in.
Talk about people with tin foil hats, miracle healers...
As to the scientific side: you'd better not ask me what I heard about Soviet hospitals...

Martina

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German Clavius Translation Team

I'd like to take Tom's intitial idea and run with it a bit in a slightly different form and ask this -

Have there been any claims made by any scientist involved in astronomy or space exploration from any country as to the moon landings being fake? Russian, Chinese, English...?

I believe 100% that the landings were real. I can't believe that if they were fake that every scientist in the world would play along with the lie.

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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

I believe 100% that the landings were real. I can't believe that if they were fake that every scientist in the world would play along with the lie.

I think the usual HB idea is that scientists are easily fooled. In the HBs' view, scientists and engineers really aren't any smarter than average folk, but they certainly are cleverer, having awarded themselves diplomae to prove their superiority. This view of scientists and engineers is being played out in apollohoax.com right now. Reminds me of the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, who only needs a diploma ("Dr. of Thinkology" IIRC) to come up to speed with everyone else.

Actually, I should have said "I know that the moonlandings were 100% real" ops:

I don't like using the "b" word!

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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

In my research group in grad school we had a running joke like that. All any of us had to do was start whistling "If I only had a brain" to get a laugh.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

and straight into a filmset