Of course, that wouldn't fool anyone with a directional antenna (e.g., the Soviets) who would wonder why they could hear the CAPCOM when they pointed their receiver toward the moon.

They wouldn't hear the CAPCOM because only the astronauts voices would be relayed by the spacecraft. The CAPCOM voice would be transmitted by a dish on Earth toward the spacecraft. Only those who happened to pick up some of this signal would hear the CAPCOM. That might not be very many people, but I'm just trying to be thorough and complete the illusion of two-way communication.

The problem I see is whether or not the transmission of the astronauts voices to the spacecraft could be hidden from detection.

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I am finding this a fascinating thread. If you were going to do it...how would you?

Here is my two cents

Visually the technology existed. 2001 released two years before showed some excellent Moon scape shots. Now increase the NASA special effect budget by orders of magnitude over what was spent on that film and you start to see what you could get.

Remember this...before anyone got there. We really didn't know what the moon was meant to look like....so an improvement on Kulbricks vision would have gone down a treat with the public

Now the next thing...Apollo? In terms of photogenic spacecraft the landers have to be the ugliest spuds ever to have MADE ON EARTH stamped on them. We want the crisp clean lines of George Pal...Huge fins, massive exhaust flames..rememeber guys we are going with the visual here.

Okay now the crew. This bit NASA got pretty right. Three square jawed American hero types - the fact they were smarter than the average brain surgeon was just a bonus for the producers.

Okay evidence and data. That's easy. It was a damn shame that hatch blew out during re-entry destroyed all the rock samples and accidently sucking the filling cabinet with all the data on it through the air lock

Or or....got me thinking cap on now. The craft was attacked during re-entry by Russian MIGS. Or while on the moon China launched bombs at the guys...and they just barely got away with their lives

Seeing a pattern yet?

If you are going to fake the Moon landing...could we make it a little more interesting for the general public next time. I mean with the exception of the computer issues during the first landing...The rest of flights (With the obvious exception) Where mundane to the extreme.

So NASA When you get round to faking something else...Can have some decent scriptwriters?????

That may look cool to the average couch potato, but if you start deviating from reality to satistify the layman's idea of what things should be. then you'll have all the experts crying fake. You better concentrate on fooling the experts and not worry about the layman.

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And here in lays the ultimate flaw. To fool the experts, you have to marginalises the masses and visa versa. So here in lays the final answer - it could have been done....but never with the finess to pull it off after this amount of time

Something I pondered the other day....How many people alive at the time of the landings...dont believe they happened. And how many people too young to have experienced the events..believe they never happened

This is an interesting question and one I've thought about as well. My feeling is that belief in the moon hoax is more prevalent among younger people, but I have no statistics to support this. It just seems that a disproportionate number of the HBs I've encountered are young people, but then again, it could just mean more young people are Internet users.

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You would probably want to transmit the upward bound "astronaut" audio on a frequency widely separated from the bogus CAPCOM and downward "astronaut" audio to avoid the possibility that someone who was monitoring the downlink might pick them up accidentally while tuning around. Transmitting them in some sort of scrambled format would also be a good idea, so that if someone did happen to pick them up it would at least not be immediately apparent what they were. Of course, if they did happen to be picked up by someone with significant signals intelligence capability and good reason to be monitoring US radio emissions- say the Soviets- you might still be SOL.

Also, would the various telemetry signals be bogused in the same way, or would you derive them from real instruments on the unoccupied spacecraft? What about the medical telemetry?

My thought is that the spacecraft telemetry would be real (there's a real spacecraft enroute to the moon, it just happens to be unmanned). The medical telemetry would have to be faked, but I don't know if it would be best to playback prerecorded data or relay a signal from Earth.

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My big problem is still the rocks.

Even assuming that NASA ws able to obtain and recognise a lunite prior to 1969 it still presents problems.

How do you create a rock that displays the following things:

- Micrometeor pits
- Radio-isotopes at the correct ratios and in the correct positions in the rock.
- Formation in 1/6 Earth Gravity
- Slow crystal formation showing cooling over large time periods.
- Absence of water in formation
- Evidence of long term Solar radiation exposure.

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

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

Easy. You just use NASA's "radiation oven." I know, because Bill Kaysing said so!

just to contribute to the unofficial poll--I'm 28. this means I was -7 during the Apollo 11 mission. in fact, my parents hadn't even met yet. I've discussed this with people even younger than I, and we all agree that HBs are lacking a certain level of common sense if they really believe it. however, I think my generation seems to have been raised lacking a certain level of common sense, so that may be your explanation right there.

(oh, and the Discovery Channel's poll declared last night that Neil Armstrong is the 25th-greatest American. interestingly, Buzz didn't make the list. and, of course, the average person probably has no idea who Michael Collins is.)

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"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Der! He's the guy played by Liam Neeson in that movie about the war which led to Irish independence in 1922! :wink:

Present company excluded. :wink:

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I Hear ya', there ...

I'm 27, and while My Parents HAD Already Met, they were still Dating Other People.

There is a Point to The Age Question, though; I Only Know One Person Over the Age of 30, Who is an HB, and she's Not Exactly all there, as Far as Common Sense Goes!

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But, but...

All the ringleaders of the Hoax Proponent gang are old guys -- the youngest being BS, and he was certainly alive in the Apollo era.

An army of children led by seniors?
#-o

I know I've seen this question come up on this forum before, and I recall someone saying that there were people who watched the landings on TV and just refused to believe it. But I don't know how common that really was, and it was way before my time.

This is just my own opinion and not an accusation, but I think the old ringleaders are taking advantage of the naiveness and gullibility of the younger generation to swindle them.

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Could it have been faked? No way in the world, for two reasons:

1. A trip to the moon is just too scientifically complex to be faked with any reasonable accuracy.

2. Humans are terrible secret-keepers. If the moon landings were secretly faked, we would've known about it long ago. The Russians especially would've been all over it.

- Maha "three may keep a secret...." Vailo

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Come, My MINIONS!!!!

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Why do I get this vision of ZaphodBeeblebrox sitting in a antique style leather armchair, strking a white fluffy cat?

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

'Cause, Strangely Enough, I AM ...

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Well, short of actually returning samples from the Moon,(which is basically what we're trying to find a way of getting out of doing anyway) perhaps one could try to pass off a piece of Meteoroid as a moon rock, but as far as I can see, that's going to be as much of a feat as actualy landing on the moon, if not more so. I don't think that meteorites would work, since they'd show clear signs of heating, and since their outer surfaces are usually vaporized upon entry, the micrometeor pitting would be gone. So that means that we'd be forced to choose from one of the "free range" variety. Snagging one, or part of one, orbiting Earth, would be hell to do, because as far as I know, the handful or so of asteroids orbiting Earth are out of range to any of the manned missions except perhaps Apollo (actually, I can't recall if any of the Earth orbiting asteroids are inferior or supperior to the moon, in relation to Earth.) Not to mention that I don't even know if a meteoroid would work as substute for a lunar sample.

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I'm afraid it wouldn't. The lunar rocks show evidence of having been formed in a low (but not zero), anhydrous environment. Also, their chemical composition would be quite different having been formed from different source materials. I have never heard of an asteroid containing anorthosite, for example.

And there is still the problem with the kilograms of soil samples. (I don't want to begin to discuss the problems with using the Apollo spacecraft to somehow capture a passing asteroid even if you knew where & when to look, and completely ignoring the fact that in your hypothesis the CSM remains in LEO...)

Still got some snags to overcome! :wink:

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It's been a while since anyone posted here, but I had an idea. Would laser telecommunication with a spacecraft be possible in 1969? If you could directly beam the astronauts' voices to the ship, so that they could be transmitted back to Earth to work with Capcom's transmitions, you would probably avoid Soviet detection. It might be safest to relay as much of the telemetry as possible, so that incase the spacecraft were to get reoriented so as not to be able to recieve the laser, people wouldn't wonder why some Data was coming through, but not others. But since you're using an ACTUAL spacecraft, that ACTUALLY has to fly, you'd still need to transmit the real data somehow. So either you transmit the real data as the Apollo telemetry, or you scramble it somehow on some other frequency. Of course, this means that you might be heard by the Ruskys, but you could hope that spacecraft data would mean less to them than hearing Astronauts voices from coming Earth before they came from the craft.

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G'day Gryfin210

You still have the problem of the time delay. If your astronauts are on Earth, but pretending to be at the Moon, you have to transmit their conversations from the Earth to the Moon to be re-broadcast back to the Earth. In other words, the delay would be twice as long as it should be. Sooner or later this would be noticed on Earth.

In the case of Apollo, there are cases where you can faintly hear the Capcom's voice repeating about 2.5 seconds after he speaks. This is because the sound of his voice in the astronauts' earpieces is loud enough that it's re-transmitted through their microphones back to Earth. If something like this happened when the astronauts are on Earth but pretending to be on the Moon, then people would be asking why the re-broadcast is happening 5 seconds after, rather than 2.5 seconds.

So, we have the Astronauts on Earth at some secret location (lets say Area 51). When the Astronaut speaks into the mic, his voice goes in two directions. One is transmitted by laser to the Unmanned spacecraft in lunar orbit. The same transmision is also sent via wire to Mission Control, but with a time delay equal to that of what it takes for voice transmisions to make it to the Moon. The laser transmisions recieved by the spacecraft are replayed on the proper radio frequencies back toward Earth. When Capcom responds back to the astronauts, his voice is electronicaly delayed before being radioed to the spacecraft and before being wired to Area 51. The real Astronaut/CapCom conversation happens over wires. The radio transmissions are just for show. Also, this would mean that the conversation inside the control room would happen ~ 1.5 seconds before the radio conversation is picked up by the outside world. If anyone smart enough walked into the Mission Control Room with a sensitive enough radio, they might wonder why Capcom was moving his lips ~1.5 sec before you heard his voice over the airwaves, but other than that, it should hold up to and outside scrutiny. Would this work? Now if I could only figure out how to do the rocks...

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-Calvin

Man, that's one complicated system, and I'm not sure that you've got it properly sorted out. Most importantly, you've got the astronauts and Capcom caught between two incompatible time delays. On the one hand, if they're talking directly, the delay is non-existant. But if the signals go from the Earth to the Moon and back, it introduces twice the delay that would be appropriate. As they speak, the extra delay is going to become more and more apparent the longer conversations carry on.

But you've still missed one other important factor. You've got the signals going to a spacecraft orbiting the Moon. It won't be much good if it's behind the Moon. The only alternative is to have two spacecraft orbiting the Moon, on opposite sides of the Moon, or you've got to land a relay on the Moon's surface, which we already know is harder than landing with someone flying the dang machine.

Finally, as you've already pointed out, the system has the lips of the Capcom out of sync with his words. That would be a killer. There were media there watching everything, and people from the history unit there as well. NASA ran the whole thing in the hardest way to get away with a hoax. The Soviet system was much better - do what you want in privacy and tell the world about it later.

I believe more difficult to make convincing conspiracy then to go to moon.

I recently purchased the 'Apollo 11' DVD set.

There is one shot taken from the CSM, where the LM is ascending from the moon's surface. It's several minutes long and at first the LM isn't even visible. Over the course of the footage it approaches and, I think, finally docks with the CSM.

I've watched it several times and am convinced that such footage would be impossible to fake given 1969 film technology. It's such realistic footage that it makes even George Lucas's current work look lame.

Has anyone else seen this footage? I, for one, think it totally blows away the conspiracy argument. Not that you guys need much help in that area.

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I have the Apollo 11 DVD, but haven't gone through it all yet. Another neat bit is just at the end of the EVA. Armstrong jumps up the ladder, a jump of around 4 feet from a standing position.

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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