Moon Hoax Conspiracist Nuts

[2046]

From the thread on stupidest things you've ever heard in person:

Funny you should ask . . .

Last weekend at a party two women claimed the moon landings were faked, noting that it's all over the internet. I was shocked, never having heard anyone actually say that in person before. Nuts on the internet are one thing, but I was in the same room with these!

I was about to ask them about their opinion of the Holocaust and 9/11, but decided it was probably best I didn't know any more of their opinions. Besides which, I didn't know all the latest moon hoax BS arguments, since I don't commonly waste my time with such drivel. I waste my time on entirely different forms of drivel. :-)

I did take great pleasure, however, in later correcting one of them when she claimed JFK was killed in 1969. I said that no, we landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, but that JFK was shot November 22, 1963. She tried to argue the JFK date but her attempt to smack me down via pulling it up on her iPhone resulted in her own crow-eating and asking how I knew that.

Needless to say, though that one-up I earned was not via an exercise in rational argumentation, I think it reverberated nicely among the listeners to the earlier moon landing conversation regarding who knew their shit and who didn't.

(Though honestly, I didn't know I remembered the dates with such specificity, but I was able to pull the info out of my ass. Apparently my ass thought she was stupid, too, and let me have the right information. Perhaps it has internet. I dunno.)

And the Good Mr. DiCenso:

For Moon Hoax busting, just go to BadAstronomy.com's pages for the salient issues and how to debunk them. In addition to that, there is also an excellent set of episodes of the Mythbusters and Penn and Teller's Bullshit that deal with this nonsense.
-Mike

Well, their primary point was that NASA had supposedly lost the "original video". My reply was that they'd recently cleaned up the original reels and thus brought them to higher quality, which was all I knew at the time. That's when they said it was all over the internet and whatnot, at which point I said you can't believe everything you read on the internet. I was about to then ask them about the Holocaust and 9/11, but instead I simply changed the subject and they dropped it.

Naturally, I researched things as soon as I could. As it happens, a special camera and transmission system (SSTV) was used to get video back from the moon. Upon reception it was put through a splitter . . . one side went to a recording device, the other side (basically) went to a monitor with a camera in front of it for conversion to TV standards, and then it was transmitted from there to the US and from the US to the world. We have the original recording of the conversion (parts of which were indeed recently remastered, as I said), but not the SSTV recording. I would argue that in both cases we have the original video, but we do not have the raw SSTV. To use that to claim the moon landings were fake is extreme horsecrap.

Considering that the only way at the time to record the raw SSTV radio transmission data by way of a radio telescope required the use of extraordinarily large and expensive tape reels that could only record 15 minutes at a time and were a hot commodity for radio telescopes anyway, the fact that these were lost is sad (since they'd be the best source from which to remaster the best-possible-quality images), but not surprising. After all, they went to the moon and returned and even the Russians acknowledged it, so the video had served its purpose. And we only recently found Apollo 11 Mission Control audio tapes featuring Gene Kranz, for example.

In any case, I did find one thing that the moon hoax nuts seem unable to answer. The Soviets would've had the capability to determine if we faked it (a large conspiracy, knowledge of our tech and if it would work, their own capacity to determine the origin of radio signals, et cetera), and would've had every reason to call us out on faking it if they could prove it. So far the 'best' claim I've seen from the hoax nuts is that the Soviets knew but decided to trade their silence for wheat deals in the 1970s, which is about the weakest possible retort in the history of conspiracy-loon retorts. It basically requires a conspiracy to beat the Russians that the Russians themselves were in on, which makes for both an excessively large conspiracy and a fundamentally retarded one.

During the Cold War, showing the half a billion who watched the moon landing that it was fake would've irrevocably damaged the name of the United States and helped to secure the Soviet Empire's dominance for decades. The world would've started referring to Washington as Hollywood, and the mistrust of the US even from our allies would've been like gold in the bank of the USSR. Our diplomatic position would've been crap, there would've been no Reagan (or if there was, this would've only solidified the Hollywood position), and with a United States that weakened I rather doubt the Empire would've collapsed yet.

The stakes were too high to fail, as the conspiracists claim, but they were also much too high to fake. Failure simply means you try again with tweaks to the infrastructure in place. But to have the fakery exposed means you have absolutely nothing to work with and, far worse, critical damage to your reputation. It is not a sane argument on that basis.

[Mr. Oragahn]

More interesting is perhaps the existence of the Lunokhod program. Not good enough for ENT's intro? :)

[Mike DiCenso]

Lunokhod rovers as impressive as it was, it was merely a second place consolation prize in the face of the overwhelming success overall of the U.S.A's Apollo program, and to help cover the gaping wound which was the failure of the Soviet's own N-1-L3 program.
-Mike

[2046]

More interesting is perhaps the existence of the Lunokhod program. Not good enough for ENT's intro? :)

I'd never heard of it, myself. Chances are the ENT folks hadn't, either. From the sound of things on the Wiki article, it was an extremely impressive design, technologically, and about as functional as Spirit and Opportunity minus the wimpier cameras of the day.

By all rights, it should get a nod for its technical proficiency, but given that the story is usually told in the context of the Space Race and Apollo was the US march across the finish line (with the shuttles as the next chapter), I suppose the Soviet Moonwalker probes don't quite fit the usual narrative.

[Mike DiCenso]

I'am not bothered about the omission of Lunokhod as much as I am about them leaving out achivements like Sputnik 1 and Yuri Gagarin's flights.
-Mike

[2046]

<hoaxist> Those things didn't happen either.</hoaxist>

Funny that I rather doubt they think that. They think we can do LEO and presumably orbit the moon, but not actually land on it? WTF?

[Mike DiCenso]

Actually, most of the Moon hoax conspiracy types do acknowledge that those other events happened as it helps to give more reason for the U.S.A to fake the manned lunar landings aside from simple Cold War politics.

Or they use unmanned missions like Lunokhod to show that things like the lunar retroreflectors that Apollo astronauts placed on the Moon could have been landed at those sites by automated vehicles, and as you can read in the linked to article, the Lunokhod missions did carry them as well, though not ones of the same caliber as the Apollo retroreflectors since weight was more of a concern than it was for the manned missions.

Also as far as how difficult is between LEO and translunar, it is enough that you have to significantly increase the size of chemical rockets to a manned mission. That's why the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union had to build monster rockets like the Saturn V and the N-1. Once you get into LEO, you have to have also carried up enough fuel to accelerate the payload on it's way, and the payload in turn has to carry enough fuel to not only go into Lunar orbit, but also land on it, come back to lunar orbit and then break out of lunar orbit and return to Earth.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Well, depending on latest theories, landing on the moon can end with the module sinking or bouncing off. After all, we know it's made out of cheese or something.
Thankfully, in space, no can smell your cheese, so that's a plus.

More interesting is perhaps the existence of the Lunokhod program. Not good enough for ENT's intro? :)

By all rights, it should get a nod for its technical proficiency, but given that the story is usually told in the context of the Space Race and Apollo was the US march across the finish line (with the shuttles as the next chapter), I suppose the Soviet Moonwalker probes don't quite fit the usual narrative.

A pity, because on the long run, they actually won!

[Mike DiCenso]

I must've missed that all-important event somehow. ;-)
-Mike

[Trinoya]

To be fair, their space contributions IE: Functional and creative use of tape on a space station to keep it up a decade after it should have blown apart, will be much more valuable in the long run than moon rocks.

Of course moon rocks are cooler.

[Praeothmin]

Well, I have no doubt we had the capability to go to the moon in the 1960s, however I don't believe man has landed on the moon for one reason:
The moon doesn't exist, that's the hoax.
They invented a satellite for Earth because they were jealous that all the other planets in the Solar system had one, and we didn't.

So no, man did not land on the moon, because there is no moon... :)

[Mike DiCenso]

To be fair, their space contributions IE: Functional and creative use of tape on a space station to keep it up a decade after it should have blown apart, will be much more valuable in the long run than moon rocks.

Of course moon rocks are cooler.

The Soviet Salyut, Mir and U.S.A's Skylab were all in a sense after thoughts. Perhaps they should have been done sooner instead of the manned lunar programs along with efforts to produce economical, fully resusable launchers and spacecraft. But that is not what happened. We can also postulate an alternative history where the Russians put more effort into making the N-1 work properly (actually doing things like funding the full up "battleship" stand testing of the first stage, for instance) and they land a man on the Moon immediately behind Apollo 11 or 12 and continue to do so during the U.S.A's standdown after the near disaster of Apollo 13, with the Soviets planning further lunar spectaculars to one-up the U.S.A by building long-duration bases there. The U.S.A, with the continuing competion funds NASA with the money for what it originally intended to do post-Apollo with the launching of a massive 12 man space station built in LEO from 100 modules launched by upgraded Saturn Vs, and serviced by a fully reusable space shuttle. The big space station becomes a stepping off point for setting up a permanent lunar base and then manned missions to Mars by the mid-1980s or early 1990s.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Thinking of it -and I suppose that's something rather mundane to ask- does anyone know where to get post 2000 nice HD shots of the lunar landings, seen from orbit, if possible?

[2046]

Here you go.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Here you go.

Oh nice, but... I'm disappointed. See, I kinda got used to the Google Earth sort of LOD, and I've been amazed by the resolution you can get over the major cities. It's nuts (and might be a legitimate source of privacy concerns). But the LRO images are so crappy. :/
I checked a couple of things about the LRO. It took snaps at an altitude of 50 km. That's very close. Google Earth uses data collected by satellites which couldn't hover at altitudes lower than LEO no matter what.
They literally sent that thing for some recon mission for future landings, got that close to the Moon, they had no atmosphere to care about, and yet they didn't bother a better camera inside that damned thing. Frankly, that's almost too stupid for words, and I have hard times a suit would be that snappy to cut corners on the camera side of things.
Are there no other pictures? Wasn't there some Indian satellite thrown around the Moon at some point? Or maybe I'm thinking of some other mission...