Well now your just being combative, I explained this , but i will add detail.
Now I have been watching with curiosity the Mars Rover expiditions. The Rovers send information once a day as they store there camera footage , and system information in memory comsolidate it then transmit when battery power is up . This stream of information comes in at a particular frequency as coded information only deciphered by the recieving computer. It has a set of program rules beging and end , and a number that says how much information is being sent. This Data can not be changed using another program as the end result would show more data than was recieved. So it would be with a lunar probe . I realy dont understand why any of you are threatened with the possibility of concrete proof . As soon as the photos come in , ...Ill have my hat served with fries .Pass the salt

Define "independent." What would that be to you?

Anyway, you are missing the point. I certainly would like to see the landing sites again. But what would be the difference between that and the vast quantity of evidence and images we already have?

That is the question we are asking you. We aren't making an excuse. We are asking you: Given how suspicious you are now, why should we expect you to react any differently if a probe is sent that sends backs still more images? Are you willing to swear that you would accept them as fact? Do you really think the hoax believers would accept them?

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

You know something, Maybe it would have worked . Hell Im not a real Hoaxer after all, Im just a sceptic. Maybe we did land on the moon
But, if the hoax did occur , it was not the scientists that decided to go for it.
It would have been either a military move or political, prehaps even Secret Service. Scientists for the most part are terrible liars.

What about people who died without any surviving family members?

As I keep saying, this would have meant they would have had to have built a complete working Apollo program as well as all the additional technology and hardware needed for a hoax. This would have cost far more, required far more people (thousands more, all of whom were in on the hoax), required far more difficult technology, made the likely event of discovery an additional massive risk, and made the failure of the mission far more likely than just doing it for real. It would have required them to murder the apollo astronauts in the event of the mission failing (which would have been at least as likely as if the program was real considering there weren't humans to correct any problems, such as them picking an impossible primary landing site which they did), so they really had nothing at all to gain from doing a hoax. You say it couldn't have failed, but what percentage of probes that we send out fail on the way? A pretty large percentage, and this is with the far more advanced and reliable probes we have today as opposed to thirty years ago. How many manned missions have failed? Not that many. And if it had failed (which it would have when it tried to land a field full of boulders), then they would have had to murder the astronauts who were supposed to be on it. A failure on a probe with a 2-second response time is basically unrecoverable. But what if it had failed with the people on it? Then either thay would have died (which is no different than if the probe had failed, except it would have been an accident instead of cold-blooded murder), or they would have been able to fix the problem and return safely and no one would have died at all (like happened on Apollo 11). So there is either no difference in the chance of failure, or even a decrease in the chance of failure, if they had done it for real.

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I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

I have always wondered about your Quote at the end of your posts it reminds me of a chapter in DEmon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. Have you read this book?
Independent , you know I would trust and American Probe at this juncture. But Another Country would be better. Realy Trust me , your vindication is assured . I promise I am not a pig head .

Let me get this straight:
The contractors aren't in on it, so they build hardware that can actually fly men to the Moon, land them, and bring them home.

We have the capability to keep men in space for the duration of a lunar mission.

We have the capability to fly spacecraft to the Moon and separate into separate orbiter and lander.

We have the capability to put a lander on the Moon.

And we don't send men to the Moon. . . Why?

"Assured Success" is not an answer. Robotic probes (which, in your scenario are crucial to the hoax) are far more prone to failure than manned spacecraft. This is because men have the ability to fix or work around problems. They can take the controls and fly out of danger. This happened, repeatedly! In mechanical terms, robotic probes lower the chance of success.

"Assured Success" is also preposterous because there is no assurance that the hoax will not be blown. If a manned mission fails, it could (but not necessarily) result in a set-back. At worst, astronauts get killed and it is a public tragedy, but we still keep trying. Since you bring up the subject of "death-threats" presumably your Evil Conspirators^TM won't mind a few dead heroes. If the hoax gets blown, the nation is thoroughly disgraced, and Evil Conspirators^TM go to jail.

Under the conditions which you stipulate, it is cheaper, easier, less risky and more logical to actually attempt to land men on the Moon than to fake it.

[Edited to add: I've been ToSeeked, er... Black Catted!]

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

But you still have not answered why you would trust photos from a probe now when you do not trust photos from the missions then. There is as much of a motive now to preserve the hoax as there was then to commit it. Remember, the US government is still somehow supressing all the thousands of witnesses, so obviously they must still want to preserve the hoax.

__________________
I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

Ahh welll I knew it was too good to last
Ok back to your scenario of killing Astronauts because the mission failed. The Astronaughts were there in the launching Rocket , they did every thing the previous apollos did but step on the Moon. If the mission failed they would be killed in it. As for the detail of almost running out of fuel , well thats all drama.
I thought I did answer you straight the last time I posted you . Assured Success.
As for Apollo 13 and 1 maybe the hoax was compromised , maybe **** happens
The Cost for the hoax, I cant see costing more than several million , cheap considering the prestige

Is there a reason you spell is Astronaughts instead of astronauts?

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

You haven't explained anything. The contractors had prime responsibility for designing and building the flight components. How do you fool all the engineers who designed them? Do you really think that all the engineers at North American building the CM were fooled? What about the engineers at Grummen who built the LM. These guys designed and built these components to work in space and accomplish the task of landing on the Moon. Your idea that only a small cabal perpetrated the hoax is ludicrous.

If you want to get some real education on how Apollo was accomplished, and not the baseless "what if" scenarios you keep positing, there are some very accessible books on the subject. Tom Kelly's book Moon Lander chronicles the development of the LM. Gene Kranz's book Failure is not an Option chronicles the development of Mission Control. Eldon C. Hall's book Journey to the Moon describes the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer.

How do you fool the people who are pointing the antennae to receive data back on Earth. How do you fool all the systems engineers who are monitoring the spacecraft. They would know if the telemetry was fake. Even if you could fake the data, you would still need to do this for the multi-day nature of the voyage. Who created all of this simulated data? Was there a shadow organization of engineers creating fake data? Oh no, the conspiracy just got a whole lot bigger!

What is your basis for this assertion? What specifically prevented the U.S. from stepping foot on the Moon?

__________________
"A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the nonexistent." -- Elbert Hubbard

i have posted answers to all your questions previously. I assure you I know how Apollo occured. I watched it as a boy , and was forever facinated by it. Watching Armstrong set foot on the moon is one of my strongest childhood memories. When I first arrived to this Site It was controled by someone called Moon Man . I read through as much of his information and never agreed with his evidence of Hoax. For some reason Moon Man disappeared , leaving folks to consider That I am truly Moon Man.

In my first Post in this board, I described myself as a sceptic, i would assume that quality is held in high regard in a Science web site. I always , in everything, ask if the information I recieve can be verified. I read News from other countries sometimes if I want to see differing slants. I distrust polls unless I can see that there is are not leading questions, or done for some politcal or product reason. I am Sceptical, I ask Why does that happen, and how can that be?

I will gladly go back and repost my previous posts, as your questions have been asked already and I have answered them.

I Think the most troubling question that you have asked is if a hoax is even possible given special effects needed. Let us prove that a hoax could not be done. To disprove the Hoax, you must pretend your tring to create it.
What problems are you facing , what obstacles do you need to overcome. Pretend money is not an issue. How would you do it.

Well, the evidence points to a moon landing.

If, if, if, what if, what if, what if.

What if we're all living in a dream dreamed up by an alien named Elvis?

What if UFOs visit us in the night, but wipe our memories of their visit?

What if we're all invisible to every other alien, but don't know that until we meet them?

All questions that are fun to stipulate. But none of them should be given any credence. The Moon Hoax theory is one of those types of questions (and isn't a theory anyways).

Ugh. This is the logical error you make.

Let's suppose it was a move made by politicians, and no scientists were involved in it. Why the HELL weren't the SCIENTISTS confused? If a man studies and knows what he's doing, and then the government tells him that something happened that he knows couldn't have happened, then the scientist wouldn't say, "oh, okay.". He'd give facts, figures, and say, "You're either lying or incorrect". If getting to the moon was undoable, scientists would have pointed it out. If we should have done it by remote, scientists would have known. They COULD NOT BE LIED TO, unless EVERYTHING THEY KNEW was ENTIRELY false.

Now.

According to you, it seems that we had all the capabilities to go to the moon. Yet you say we should've used a remote-controlled probe or something.

So why aren't you trying to tell us that submarines are a hoax too? After all, the first submarine didn't use remotes.

__________________
There are few left who
Stare at the skies with wonder
Wishing to know more;
The clouds still drift by above
But the eyes below are blind.
--Laura Lundberg

Check out my writing, maybe.

This is my post to Van Rijn who also corrected me you guys got to look at previus pages once and a while

No?

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

This is good, but there *are* extremes to everything.

That's good. Just be sure to look at the answers too.

Someone more knowledgable than me will go into this. However, I will summarize:

The ability to fake the moon landing would have been pretty hard to do. Everything from how the dust acts, to the movement to the astronauts, to the effects of Zero G, would've been difficult to do.

__________________
There are few left who
Stare at the skies with wonder
Wishing to know more;
The clouds still drift by above
But the eyes below are blind.
--Laura Lundberg

Check out my writing, maybe.

In addition, if NASA (or Nixon, or whomever you think was calling the shots) was willing to kill their own people to keep this amazing secret, why didn't they take out Kaysing, Sibrel, et cetera when they started to become pests?

Hey, this guy is actually looking at some of the 'records'. Go! And make sure it looks like an accident...

As we keep on saying, it DOES NOT HAVE ASSURED SUCCESS. Sending a probe has a much higher risk of failure than sending a manned mission, but does not have any less risk to the astronauts (assuming the government is willing to kill people to cover up the hoax, as you have said). Why go to all this extra trouble and expense when there is more risk of failure than to do it for real? Sending something to the moon has a significant risk of failure, whether it is manned or otherwise, but if there are problems on a manned mission they can be fixed. If there are problems on a probe the mission is over. You CANNOT do this mission without sending something to the moon, there must be something that can bounce radio signals back to Earth, land on the moon, collect massive amounts of moon rocks and core samples, place the reflector, and then get the rocks and core samples back. So there is not assured success by any stretch of the imagination.

__________________
I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

I've read the entire thread. You haven't answered any of the questions except with "what if" scenarios. Where's the evidence?

Why should we do that when there's plenty of evidence that the events in question really occurred? I'm about as skeptical as they come and I've never come across anything that led me to think Apollo was faked.

So this is just as an academic exercise? Money is always an issue in the real world. Without real world constraints, what good are your conclusions?

__________________
"A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the nonexistent." -- Elbert Hubbard

Ok , I think this gets to the core of the problem with Moon Hoaxes and General conspiracy in general. Why do they exist, why do people distrust goverment programs. Here on this board I think the general feeling is that most people are ignorant of science. To that fact I can not argue yet I dont believe that this is the reason for distrust. We do know our Government is capable of deciet, scandal, misinforming, and Whole sale fabrications.

I became suspect when such an enormous task is achieved in such a short time, when the reasons seem to be Military based. The space program was spurred by the Russians make no mistake. We were frightened by the possibility of Nuclear bombs raining down from the heavens as the Russians beat us in every space endevor. The Moon was a military objective, and it certainly was leaked that the moon could possibly be used as a missle site.
We were at war in a sense with Russia, We met thier fighters in Korea, and in Nam. I Believe it was Kissenger(personel opinion) who advised Kennedy that a 'Space Race' would bankrupt Russia eventualy. I do believe the space Race did just that. Landing on the Moon was too important to our Military and national security to fail.
Maybe your right, I realy hope so. I simply have those nagging questions is all.
Why havent we returned with our improved technology
When I was a kid , I used to tell people how we were all going to be living on the moon soon. 35 years later we havent even been back there.

Just because they are capable, does not automatically mean that they are always completely 100% corrupt, and always hoaxing people in general. You COULD be a troll, just trying to send us in circles. However, I am not going to make that assumption.

Right.

So wouldn't we want to be actually capable of going to the moon for real?

Right. So we got together a bunch of engineers and contractors, and told them to do it right. However, what about the Apollo 1 failure? That gets rid of your theory right there -- that made NASA seem bad, and your point seems to be that they would want to seem to make NO mistakes.

Everything points to me being right.

Return to do what, exactly? Also, after the cold war, NASA funding was slashed. The idea of Moon Bases was scrapped as a result.

Funding issues.

__________________
There are few left who
Stare at the skies with wonder
Wishing to know more;
The clouds still drift by above
But the eyes below are blind.
--Laura Lundberg

Check out my writing, maybe.

How do you pre-tape the results of that day's sporting contests?

Not just going toward the moon. It would have to travel to the moon, complete a burn to enter an orbit about it. Then part of that probe would then have to separate from the main craft, complete a de-orbit burn, and land. Then later, it would have to launch from the moon, rendezvous with the main craft and return to Earth. We know this must have happened, because the spacecraft were tracked by various parties (including the Soviets) and observed doing this very thing.

SAY!! I just had a thought! Doesn't that sequence sort of describe exactly what happened on the Apollo missions???

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

This whole thread reminds me of something I read about back in 1988. A Soviet general (Russia was still Soviet Union back then, for all you young whippersnappers ) on a visit to Smithsonian stood before Apollo display and said in a wondering tone "So they really did land!"

After his hosts' jaws separated from the floor, the general explained as follows: "We knew they reached the Moon. We tracked every flight on radar, not just followed telemetry. But LEM's were too small for our radars at that distance, so I always thought every mission just stayed in lunar orbit for several days each time. Even though Soviet government accepted the landings as real*, I never really believed it until today."

My guess is that Comrade General's nineteen years of disbelief was based on the fact that launching from lunar surface and matching trajectories with an orbiter in one shot is indeed hard -- harder than landing alone, and MUCH harder than just etering lunar orbit. Without pre-positioned tracking stations on the Moon, it was very likely beyond Soviet technology of late 60's and early 70's. Comrade General simply did not want to believe that Americans were that far ahead in target tracking -- a very obvious military advantage.

Of course, his higher-ups in Politbureau did believe -- and who knows, maybe if and when they were considering extending Soviet Empire to Western Europe, those six unerring rendezvous between LEM's and Apollo orbiters weighed on the "con" side.

*And did its best to minimize their importance

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Moon Man did not "disappear". He was banned because he refused to answer questions that others gave to him, refused to acknowledge evidence that disproved his assertions, repeated the same disproven statements over and over again, and other such things.

Being a skeptic is generally a good thing. But in the end it comes down to the evidence. A reasonable skeptic ultimately bases his or her decision on what the evidence says. If the evidence show to a very strong degree that something occured, and there is no valid evidence to the contrary, then the skeptic tentatively accepts the truth of the assertion. Evidence is the key. A skeptic who refuses to accept something despite massive amounts of evidence supporting it, or who refuses to give up a belief despite massive amounts of evidence against it, it is no longer skepticism.

Here are some problems:
You must build a chamber that is several square miles in size, can be depressurized to a hard vacuum, and somehow has 1/6 the gravitational acceleration of Earth. The behavior of the dust kicked up by the astronauts, the rover, and the assent module of the lander could not be duplicated without there being a nearly perfect vacuum, and its trajectory based on the force involved could not be duplicated without reducing the force of gravity significantly (pardon the misnomer). Thin ropes and pulleys do not work on dust. There are continuous takes of the rover covering several miles of terrain, in a vacuum, and in 1/6 of Earth' gravity, so the chamber would have to have been large enough to allow it to do this. We do not have the technology to do any of this today, not to mention 30 years ago. Reducing the force of gravity is, as far as we know, not physically possible.

You must have been able to eliminate gravity entirely for hours at a time for the scenes in the capsule on the way to the moon and back. You could not have it in Earth orbit because they would have been out of contact about half the time as they orbitted to the far side of the Earth. The "vomit comet" sort of sinusoidal aircraft maneuver can only work for about 30 seconds at a time, but they had hours of continuous footage. Once again, eliminating gravity hear on Earth is physically impossible to the best of our knowledge. There are scenes with liquid floating, this cannot be faked using ropes, pulleys, or air pressure.

You must have a robot capable of over a significant range, collecti huge amounts of space rock over this wide range (orders of magnitude more than any probe has ever done), somehow be able to identify geologically interesting rocks with relatively low-resolution and slow cameras, somehow drill core samples 8 feet deep, somehow place a reflector as perfectly as a human and far better than any other robot, and do it all without any human input. Remember how quickly the mars rovers move? Not very fast, because human operators have to input the movement, wait for the signal to arrive, wait for the rover to carry out the movement, wait to get the response back, then look around and figure out the next movement. There simply would not have been enough time in the mission for the probe to do all the stuff it was supposed to do with humans guiding every tiny step. So it would have to have done it on its own. Modern robots cannot do this reliably. Remember how much trouble they had with the first DARPA robot desert race? With state-of-the-art modern technology, on Earth, with almost unlimited weight and size, no robot could get more than 7 miles in a well-known environment. And all they had to do was follow a road. But 30 years ago it was no problem for a completely automated robot to do tasks far more complicated with perfect reliability in a far more difficult environment and significant weight and size restrictions. We are dealing with something modern technology could never do. And they had to have designed, built, programmed, and paid for such a complicated and advanced robot without anybody finding out about it ever.

They would have had to somehow send the probe back on the exact correct trajectory, then somehow magically made the probe disappear and a capsule with astronauts in it appear in the exact same place with the exact same trajectory, which would then splash down with the astronauts inside. The capsule with the astronauts would have needed the exact right trajectory and velocity, perfect enough to fool every scientists on Earthw who was monitoring the descent, and would have had to occupy the exact same place as the probe (probably withing a couple feet at most) at the exact same time (within a very small fraction of a second). Two objects of that size occuping places this close within such a small amount of time going at those speeds with those limitation on maneuverability is not possible without teleportation. The probe would also have to have had the exact same mass as the astronauts, its mass would have had to go down by the weight of two astronauts during the time the probe was on the Moon but gone up again by the weight of the astronauts and the rock when they got back in. Plus this second probe would have had to somehow completely change its trajectory with neither the fuel nor time to do so, completely missed all the people watching for the first probe, but somehow not changed its course enough to bounce off Earth's atmosphere or burn up, and splashed down without Russia or any other country's radar picking it up (note it also had to hide itself from US military intelligence looking for Russian missiles), and been recovered without anybody knowing it.

I am sure there are other problems, but this is all from me for now.

__________________
I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

Van Rijn gave me that chore last night , how to simulate the Dust. I've been thinking about it all day.
My criteria; must be capable given standard technology in late sixties early seventies. No CGI, must fit other visual effects
My first thought was filming underwater, afterall People are in atmospheric suits , walking motion could be duplicated and I have observed ocean silt behave like the moon dust. I have seen films of Alvins deep Sea dives, Except for the stuff floating around the stark desolation of the Deep ocean bottom is very simular to the Moon. But the brightness of the moon poses a problem and visibility, and depth preception would be off. I have seen video of Astonauts traversing away from the camera , if underwater the astronaut would become blurry. So I threw that one out.

I tell you what , you be devils advocate for once and you come up with an idea

Yeah...good point....let's silence the risk by killing three astronauts inside the spacecraft itself, leading to a hostile Congressional Enquiry, potential withdrawal of funding, massive public embarrassment to both NASA and the contractors North American and a near 2-year delay in the programme at a time when the end of the decade was looming.

If this comment wasn't so distasteful, it would be ridiculous.

__________________
"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

I'm not sure if this has been pointed out yet in this thread, but...

Hoax believers will latch onto the outrageous possibility that the Moon landings were faked, but vehemently deny the outrageous possibility that it actually happened.

Double standards are their best friend.

I Still Think, my Idea, Has The Highest Degree, of Success ...

Pay Off, EVERYONE, Then All, you Have to Do, Is Put a Notice, in The Paper, that Says, "We did it!"

Quick, Simple, and Dirty; Plus, No One, has To Die!

__________________
If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Just some idle thoughts on apparent contradictions...

But,
A high earth orbit would place the astronauts in the Van Allen Belts for an extended time. Wouldn't they be Crispy Critters by the time they splashed down?

In what?

'cause you just sent their capsule to the moon. The Apollo program used a Saturn SIVB, a CM, and a LM... all of which went to the moon.

But one of the major tenets of HBers is that we didn't have the computer power to land the LM with a crew on board. How could we manage to land it remotely with that limited capability?

How did that "something else" get there undetected? How did they manage to dock with it when - as HBers claim - docking was "impossible?"

But, they splashed down in the CM which you sent to the moon w/o them.

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

Exactly who would be doing the threatening in this conspiracy? With what method would they prove to not make it a bluff? When did NASA acquire the services of these jackbooted thugs?

Do you realize that when you have to start making threats to loved ones in order to maintain the shroud of secrecy over a conspiracy, it becomes not just a lie, but a felony offense punishable by prison time? It expects us to believe in a whole new side of NASA for which we have no evidence.

__________________
My son is my universe.

It seem appear obvious that you have never been SCUBA diving. I have, pretty extensively over the last 7 years (I am advanced open water certified). The bottom of the ocean is nothing like the moon. Not only does dust not fly up in an arc and come right back down like you saw in the videos, but it billows up and forms clouds farm more readily than it does in the atmosphere, and the clouds often stay visible for significantly longer. It is also very difficult to leave footprints at all underwater, not to mention the extremely crips, easily identifiable footprints we see in the videos that last for hours. There is also the issue of viscosity, water is extremely viscuous. Ever tried running when you are waist deep in the water? It is practically impossible, the water is too viscous and retards your motion far too much. Add a much larger surface area for the suit, and have them completely submerged, and add all those folds that increase resistance, and it will be difficult to walk slowly for any length of time without wearing yourself down, not to mention jump around like they did on the moon. This would also effect the rover, and rocks and tools that the astronauts pick up and then drop. It would also be pretty much impossible to avoid eddies and currents in the water from the bulky suits moving, which would stir up large amounts of silt. There is also the optical issue, as you stated. Not only is the water darker, but it absorbs lower-frequency light much faster than higher-frequency, so you would see significant distortion of the the colors (i.e. everything white would appear blue or green and anything red would appear black or at least very dark red). And going deeper would not solve these problems, the increased pressure would make things more difficult and exacerbate many of the problems.

__________________
I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page