Okay now, I'm not a Lunar conspiracist, and there's little to no doubt in my mind that 24 Americans flew to the Moon, 12 of whom walked on the surface. Now here is the Question: Does anyone think that the Lunar Landings could have been faked, assuming that anybody was dedicated (or foolish) enough to try to do it? And, if so, how would you pull it off? As for why, it's probably the old Beat the Ruskies/ Distract from Nam/ Demonstrate non-existant U.S. Missile tech/Cause the Prez said so combo. I'll be back in a day or two to discus any potential scenarios, or lack of them.

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Problems that need to be sorted out:

- How are rocks going to be obtained? They must be genuine samples, and include 10kg+ boulders, core samples and fragile clods of compressed lunar soil.

- How are the voice transmissions going to be handled? The astronauts and Mission Control spoke with a 1.5 second delay each way, about live events, using dishes which were pointed straight at the Moon for 8+ hours at a time.

If you wanted to fake Apollo, you'd have to be a lot tighter with things like rock sampling and voice transmission.

For me, I say no. I had the pleasure of discussing the idea of a hoax with Mike Dinn a couple of years ago and we tried to work out a scenario where the telemetry signals could have been faked well enough to fool the worldwide net of the MSFN. Couldn't do it while maintaining real-time conversations with the astronauts about the day's sporting & news events, etc.

The tracking & telemetry to me is the ultimate showstopper.

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I saw an episode of "Conspiricy" on the History Channel that tried it. They tried to do a fake moon landing on video using all of the arguments (shadows, film slowed down, no stars, etc) Long story short, they couldn't do it.

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is it safe to say we didn't have the technology? :wink:

[edited typo, because i still can't type]

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Exactly.

We didn't have the technology to fake it (nor do we now, if ever), but we did have the technology to do it. A simple combination of facts that seems always to be beyond the ken (and barbie) of the HBs. :roll:

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That depends on what you mean. Do you mean, could Apollo as we know it been faked, or could a landing by some other means been faked?

For the first part, I say no way. There is just too much documentation and physical evidence to fake.

For the second part, maybe, but certainly not likely. It would have to be faked in such a way that produced very little evidence, and yet, still be believable. I don't know if that is really possible. For instance, how do you explain to a geologist that you sent a man all the way to the moon and back, and yet he returned without any moon rocks. Furthermore, you would have to fake the transmissions and provide an actual target for tracking. By the time you do all this, you might as well just land a man on the moon for real.

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Building on this idea, let's say we go back in time to 1961 and we're put in charge of faking a manned lunar landing from the onset. Clearly our efforts would not produce Apollo as we know it, but what form would our fake lunar landing take? Could we pull it off and fool the experts? Could we keep it secret?

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I like that idea. Ignoring luner rendezvous, what would other craft look like. What kinds of things would you let out to the public (both information and misinformation)

I don't have that kind of background or imagination, but love to hear about it.

The first thing you do if you are going to fake it is you definitely don't bring any rocks back. Only real lunar rocks will work. If you try to make rocks that appear 4.5 billion years old, you not only have to create them to appear that old by every known dating method, you also have to account for new dating methods that hadn't even been invented. So if you are in charge of a "fake the landings" project, you declare that there will be no rocks returned, perhaps arguing that the "moon bugs" risk is too high, or some such. If you are going to get real rocks by sending an unmanned craft there, aquire the rocks and return them, then it would probably be easier (given the robotic technology of the 60's) to send a couple of people to dig the cores etc.

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I agree. In fact, unless we can obtain it robotically, all science from the Moon is hands off. We just can't risk faking data that can be proven false at some time in the future.

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Ultimately what you produce as evidence will be a product of what you know already you can do, and what you can do using techniques you plan to develop, which then generally become part of the ongoing technical lexicon. Either way, you tailor what you produce to what you can produce. The "show" becomes an expression of your capability. So it's reasonably strong to argue that if the capability doesn't or didn't exist to fabricate the body of evidence, then it wasn't fabricated.

That something is impossible argues conclusively that it wasn't done. However, the reverse is not true: possibility doesn't indicate actuality, and this is what the conspiracists wish to argue. So noting that their argument has a strong converse is tempting, but ultimately serves to validate their line of reasoning (even to refute it directly). If the impossibility premise is ever refuted or even credibly eroded, it would seem then that their original (flawed) argument then becomes valid. The direct refutation is often the most straightforward and easily discernible, but does not always endure over the long term.

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Clavius Moon Base

To fake it you would want to run it similar to the Russians did their whole program, rather then having it live, claim to have done it and then release the Hoaxed data in an after the event release. This way you can release audio, etc, claiming it was live at the time.

Also you only want to do it once. After the first time it is more likely that something will go wrong and you'll get caught, so claim that once it was done the first time there isn't a point in returning.

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

Went there did that.
-or-
Didnt find any rocks, therefore nothing to research>

There is also no chance that you can either fool, or complain complete and perpetual silence from, the thousands of people inside the program who could have figured out the bogosity in progress.

Especially when engineers are involved. Engineers culturally and historically have a very low tolerance for shenanigans such as this, which they regard as exclusively a distasteful hallmark of clueless, inept, and dishonest management.

There are many ways to irritate an engineer, but one of the most effective is to compel him to say he solved problem that he did not in fact solve. Engineers feel these claims will come back to haunt them, sometimes with legal ramifications.

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Clavius Moon Base

[SaidFromASafeDistance]
Just like 2/3 of all scientists.
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=22233
[/SaidFromASafeDistance]

Perhaps it goes without saying that another sure way to irritate an engineer (sounds like a straight line, doesn't it?) is to compel her to say she didn't solve a problem that she did solve. Maybe that's not quite as pertinent to the Apollo hoax question, but valid nonetheless.

Of course there is an alternative universe where we didn't really go and NASA faked the whole thing. I doubt even in that universe that the secret could be kept forever and it would be discovered. Unfortunately, in that universe there are also woo-woos who claim that it really wasn't faked and they really did go, but the fake fake-landing is covering up the secret that they really went.

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Yes ...

And Also in this Universe, a Benevolent Alien Flies around Fighting Crime, Wearing a Red Cape and Blue Tights ...

What can I say ...

It's Just About, as Likely.

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From a purely technical viewpoint I don't see how NASA could have faked,

1) The transmissions to and from the moon, and the translunar coast phase.

2) The moon rocks. There's more to these rocks than just dating. They have cosmic ray tracks through them. They formed in a near vacuum. They formed in a 1/6 gravity environment. I don't see how to fake that.


I also think that the HBs overlooked the post-mission analysis that thousands of engineers performed. They looked at all the engineering data that was sent back to see how well the equipment they designed performed and also to see how well the models and predictions compared to the actual case. For example, temperatures, pressures, oxygen usage, power draw, etc. There is no way that a couple of people in some back room could come up with data that not only fooled the people who designed the equipment and the people who have examined it since.

Even the simple things... the urine dumps were visible from Earth... how are you gunna fake those??

Um ...

A Convienent Cliff ...

And a REALLY, Strong Breeze?

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And, as sailors instinctively remember, from the correct direction!

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Several people have brought these points up. So clearly, if you're going to really fake it well enough to pass, you'll have to send an unmanned vessel to gather samples and return, as well as relay communications during the trip. Unfortunately, since humans are so good at on-the-fly problem solving, and the robotic technology of the 60's was pretty limited, this ends up being a much trickier feat than actually sending people.

I would have sent some men surreptitiously to the moon, had them go around snapping pictures of some craters and mountains, then sneak back. I would have then used those pictures as backdrops to the fake landings in the studio...

....oh...wait...never mind...

That is sooooo twisted!!! #-o

:wink:

And, as Jay pointed out previously, there's no evidence at all - not even the HBs allege any - that such a large-scale robotic retrieval program existed. So you're stuck with saying an enormous program with tons of evidence was a fake, but a big program with no evidence at all did happen. It takes a very... let us say, accommodating mind to believe this.

That's why it's important to remain focused on a true inductive case instead of a deductive one.

If something is deemed impossible, you can deduce that it did not occur. But the real question here is purely inductive: is it more likely the moon rocks were retrieved by an unmanned program for which there is no evidence whatsoever, or by a manned program for which evidence abounds?

The deductive case wants to accept some conclusion by default after refutation fails. On this point, where unmanned spacecraft cannot be categorically ruled out, the refutation is weak. A better case puts both hypotheses on equal a priori footing and examines the evidentiary merits.

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Clavius Moon Base

I'm back.

So, It appears that the main problems are:

1)The Telemetry and Voice/Data transmissions that were tracked from Earth

2)The Sample Returns

3)The Loyalty (or lack of) of everyone and anyone who was in on the Hoax.

4)The Photograpghic and video archives

Okay, while #3 has me completly stumped, and #4 is still a tough one in my mind, the first two might be possible. Lets say that we're back in 1961 and we decide that it's too risky to allow a manned mission to traverse the Van Allen Belts(this was basically the senario that I was thinking of, but Bob B. explained it better than I did). Hyptheticaly, lets just say that we're in a Parallel Universe 1961, and that in this Alternate Reality the Van Allen Belts are a tad stronger than they are in this one. For simplicity's sake, we'll keep the overall mission specs the same. My Idea would be that after the Saturn V launches, the Command & Service Modules stay in LEO, while the LEM and the attatched equipment boost out of orbit onto a translunar trajectory, transmitting either a recorded record of events, or an encrypted transmission being sent from Earth(so that they could switch tapes incase of an Emergency, like a Mission such as Apollo 13) Problem #1 so far solved. After Lunar Orbit Insertion, The LEM lands unmanned(as it more or less was designed to, but didn't always due to computer overloads). A robotic arm hidden away on the descent stage unfurls, and loads all of the samples that are within reach through the door on the acscent stage. Problem #2 Since we've all seen the video of Apollo 17 taking off from the Moon, we can assume that some sort of remotely operated robotic device was inuse by the end of the Missions, and not unimaginably, in the earlier days as well. The Ascent Module takes off, reaches Lunar Orbit, boosts back to LEO, and docks with the Command Module, in which the three Astronauts would have been waiting for the previous 9 or 10 days. The Crew then quickly transfers the Samples from the AM, and returns to a glorious reception on Earth. Does this part of the scenario work, or is it way too ambitous to try on 1969 tech?

As for #4, the only way for sure way to simulate an Astronaut walking in 1/6th gravity is to recreate it the best way you can, by cutting Earth's Gravity down, and the best way to do that, as far as I know, is to descend rapidly. So basicaly, you fit an entire sound & lighting stage into an airplane, and then descending at a fraction of the angle that planes like the former "Vomit Comet" fly at. Of course, the longest stretch that you'll be able to film at will be about 20 or 30 seconds, and the working conditions would be a b*tch, so this might not really be practical.

Understand, I don't actually believe that this happened. I was just curious as to whether or not it potentialy could have happened, had anyone actually tried. Since there is no exidence even suggesting that this did happen, it would be ridiculous to deal with this in any other way than a hypothetical or fictional context.

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