Since so many of you have a vast amount of experience in debating HBers, I was wondering if you could discuss the following.

It seems to me that HBers have no problem with believing anything EXCEPT the moon landings. Do "they" debate:

1) suborbital flight?
2) orbital flight?
3) Gemini missions with EVAs and docking procedures?
4) Apollo missions orbiting the moon?

It just seems convenient to me that they chose ONLY the Apollo landings as their focus for portraying the US as hoaxers.

Truly, what makes landing on the moon SO much more difficult than orbiting it? From a very basic standpoint, with out an atmosphere and with considerably less gravity, landing and taking off from the moon is monumentally easier than doing so on Earth. So...if we have orbited the moon (again, is their doubt about that amongst the HBers?), wouldn't landing on it be the next logical step?

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A lot of them claim that humans have never left Earth orbit, due to the Van Allen Belts and/or the radiation beyond the Van Allen Belts. A few will claim that all space flights are faked, but not many.

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So, then the Soviets are liars, too, then?

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Generally no.
Certain extreme subsets do debate orbital flight up to, and including, that of the space shuttle / space station.
A slightly larger subset debates Gemini and EVAs as well. There are now youtube videos claiming that ISS is a hoax revealed by looking at EVA footage and some have issues with any EVA, even if they will admit that orbital flight is doable.
I would say a very large number and possibly a large majority debate the reality of all the Apollo missions, particularly any that orbited the moon. Their main common complaint is the radiation, which they say would be lethal for any Van Allen Belt crossing mission. They tend to ignore these missions though as it doesn't benefit their conspiracy to admit that NASA gradually worked its way up to a landing, and many will lie by claiming that the LM was never tested before A11.
It would be if they could be forced to admit the former, but sadly most will not.

There's a whole new claim that the Chinese spacewalk was faked because (supposedly) you can see bubbles in the video, indicating it was actually filmed underwater. It's also supposedly of too high quality to have been filmed in space.

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Those who claim spaceflight is fake in general tend to claim that the cold war was a hoax as well, so yes, they would say the Soviets are liars, as well as the Chinese. Interestingly, there are quite a few people who subscribe to Apollo hoax theories who also believe the Chinese manned flights were hoaxed because of common misconceptions perpetrated by Apollo HB's. One of these is the common misconception about the ability of a flag to wave in a vacuum if you shake it; since we don't see flags being waved by ISS astronauts while on EVA they haven't yet claimed the same about ISS in large numbers.

Indeed, the bubbles claim is the main one now transferred to ISS disbelief as well. My understanding is that the ISS video actually shows a piece of insulation being cut away by the astronaut, but I would also think it's possible for a space suit's sublimator thermal control system to accidentally release a small piece of ice debris as well.

This absolutely cracks me up.

First LCROSS images are proof of the Appolo hoax because we should be able to read license plates from orbit, so obviously the "low resolution" is just NASA continuing the cover up.

And now hi res images are impossible, also proving some sort of hoax...

Just further demonstration that, taken as a whole, the HB community will go with whatever claim supports their belief system.

The ISS a hoax? I wonder how they put that image in my telescope....

Oh wait, it's those chem-trails that they are releasing.

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No, 'they' sneak around and stick a little picture on the end of your telescope.

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Sometimes I'd like all the HBers to get together and come up with one story they can all agree on, then start arguing their case. Sibrel says they never left Earth orbit, Kaysing says they never lifted off in the first place, Hoagland says they did go to the Moon but are covering up the alien buildings there.

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Maybe they could all meet over at John Lear's place.

'They' are sneaky, sneaky devils.....

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Defining science can be difficult. It’s a method, a way of looking at things. It’s a compendium of facts, knowledge, data. It’s a tool, used to investigate the world and to make sure we don’t let our biases, egos, and wishes get in the way of finding what’s real. Science (and skepticism) boil off the dross and leave the pure nugget of reality. ~Phil Plait

Now that guy's a piece of work. A while back I ran across a thread he had started on some message board (forget which one) promising to release some major, earth shattering information that he had uncovered. He'd pop in from time to time to drop hints, or say "Now think about what would happen if...".

Assuming the post dates were accurate he had strung those people along for over a year and a half, and a good sized core of people maintained interest the whole way through. And, of course, there never was any information released, legitimate or otherwise.

I don't see the John Lears of the world as so much of a problem as the thousands of people who are willing to be strung along by them like the people in that thread.

Agreed.

Something I meant to bring up before he got banned (again) even our own "famous" IDW has claimed on GLP that Apollo 11 was faked but the later landings were not - but then flips back to all of them being faked (possibly because his "evidence" such as the radiation has to be applied to all the missions).

Just bringing that up as:
1. An example of inconsistency even from a single H.B.
2. Another kind of claim, some Apollo missions were faked but other were not.

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The classic example is the legendary CosmicDave, who both claimed that the landings were faked and that the astronauts found aliens on the Moon.

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I'd like to bring them all together, but for a different reason. Not only do I doubt that they could come up with a single story, I suspect the fights they would have among themselves would make the ones they have with us look like nothing. The worse thing for someone who knows the TRUTH (TM) is another True Believer who KNOWS the wrong flavor of THE TRUTH.

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As I posted in another thread, I know a guy IRL with a similar set of beliefs. No matter how many times I point it out to him, he doesn't see the contradiction.

Regarding Gemini, some HBs prefer to ignore it completely rather than debate it (Dave McGowan, Cosmic Dave, Bart Sibrel and probably others). Cosmic Dave has a new timeline of "space firsts" on his site that does not mention any of the firsts accomplished during Project Gemini. These HBs want to say that the Soviets were too far ahead in the Space Race for the Americans to catch up, but the Gemini program contradicts this claim, so they ignore it. They might also want to say that parts of the Apollo missions like rendezvous and docking and entering the Van Allen belts would be too difficult to accomplish, so of course they're not going to mention that all of these things were accomplished during Gemini.

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

I believe that some of them genuinely don't know about Gemini, but I do know there are some who do and are just intellectually dishonest in some way. The former is a sign that a lot of them just don't do any research. The latter is a sign that, well, some of them are intellectually dishonest. Alas.

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Gillian

"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!"

For some of us who were alive then, the "Gemini years" (march 65 through november 66) were the golden age of spaceflight. Imagine it, there were 10 Gemini missions in a little over a year and a half. There was literally a new space mission going up approximately every other month. Now that might not seem like that many compared to the number of shuttle flights flown, but remember the times...our only experience in space up to that point was Project Mercury...6 missions (May 61 through May 63) in exactly 2 years.

I'm a big fan of the Gemini years.

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I still prefer my late Grandmother's version:

That they couldn't possibly go to the moon (it was too far away) so they filmed it all in a studio, and yet the weather had got all screwed up by sending people to the moon.

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Dave

Anyone seen my marbles? Anyone ... ?

Some of them claim we gave the Soviets large shipments of grain to buy their silence. One of the more ridiculous smokescreens these people throw down the pike.

Oh, yes, I'm arguing with someone else who recently through out, "You realize the Cold War was a fake, too, right?" But then he thinks we're all living in the Matrix, anyway.

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Logically, if we're living in the Matrix, the Cold War was a fake, as is everything else!

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Gillian

"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!"

The ones I run into have very fluid beliefs. They'll have no trouble accepting sub-orbital, orbital, even ISS -- until it becomes part of an argument for Apollo. Then, suddenly, even the lowly rocket engine no longer works.

I have found, in general, that the hoax believers are marvelously capable of holding multiple contradictory ideas at one time.

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

It's easy to hold multiple contradictory viewpoints when your mind set is to run away from some undesired proposition. There are many directions that are "away." The mind set that seeks truth goes toward something. It may deviate here and there in order to accommodate uncertainty, but seeking the truth means seeking a goal that can be only one thing.

That is the difference between conspiracy theorists and truth-seekers.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

A lot of the technical arguments do indeed argue against all spaceflight.

Essentially, if you can't accept Apollo rocketry, then you can't accept any rocketry.

The same would also go for heat control too.

Yes, except he was a bit more insulting about how he said it.

This Cold War Vet just about got banned for slamming a few unpleasent realities back into his face...

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I just saw Hayley's comet, she waved, Said "why you always running in place? Even the man in the moon disappeared, Somewhere in the stratosphere" - Shinedown

http://worldsofothersuns.home.comcast.net/

Right now, I have a standing challenge for that Pravda forum gang to answer how the lunar dust seen flying in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk5GiF_mX5w this video, originally posted there by ToSeek, can behave that way on Earth. They avoid this issue entirely and just keep throwing other junk in to argue about.

There seems to be no limit to the wilful ignorance these people will display. It disturbs me that such minds exist.

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