Moon landing conspiracy theories

Moon landing conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories which claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six manned landings (1969–72) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon. Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s, that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, Moon rock samples, and even some key witnesses. Much third-party evidence for the landings exists, and detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims have been made. Since the late 2000s, high-definition photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the Apollo landing sites have captured the lander modules and the tracks left by the astronauts. In 2012, images were released showing five of the six Apollo missions' American flags erected on the Moon still standing; the exception is that of Apollo 11, which has lain on the lunar surface since being accidentally blown over by the takeoff rocket's exhaust. Conspiracists have managed to sustain public interest in their theories for more than 40 years, despite the rebuttals and third-party evidence. Opinion polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans and 28% of Russians surveyed believe that the manned landings were faked. Even as late as 2001, the Fox television network documentary Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? claimed NASA faked the first landing in 1969 to win the Space Race. Origins: An early and influential book about the subject of a moon-landing conspiracy, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was self-published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing. Despite having no knowledge of rockets, or technical writing Kaysing, a former U.S. Navy officer with a Bachelor of Arts in English, was hired as a senior technical writer in 1956 by Rocketdyne, the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. He served as head of the technical publications unit at the company's Propulsion Field Laboratory until 1963. Kaysing's book made many allegations, and effectively began discussion of the Moon landings being faked. The book claims that the chance of a successful manned landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%, and that despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings than to really go there. In 1980, the Flat Earth Society accused NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams' 1978 film Capricorn One, which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, might have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post-Vietnam War era. She notes that this happened during the post-Watergate era, when American citizens were inclined to distrust official accounts. Dégh writes: "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance." In A Man on the Moon, first published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar-orbit mission in December 1968, similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation. The Space Race: Motivation for the United States to engage the Soviet Union in a Space Race can be traced to the then on-going Cold War. Landing on the Moon was viewed as a national and technological accomplishment that would generate world-wide acclaim. But going to the Moon would be risky and expensive, as exemplified by President John F. Kennedy famously stating in a 1962 speech that the United States chose to go because it was hard. Hoax theory-debunker Philip Plait says in his book Bad Astronomy, that the Soviets—with their own competing Moon program, an extensive intelligence network and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data—would have cried foul if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing, especially since their own program had failed. Proving a hoax would have been a huge propaganda win for the Soviets. Conspiracist Bart Sibrel responded, "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep spacecraft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly canceled." In fact, the Soviets had been sending unmanned spacecraft to the Moon since 1959, and "during 1962, deep space tracking facilities were introduced at IP-15 in Ussuriisk and IP-16 in Evpatoria (Crimean Peninsula), while Saturn communication stations were added to IP-3, 4 and 14," the latter having a 100 million km range. The Soviet Union tracked the Apollo missions at the Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment." Vasily Mishin, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered," describes how the Soviet Moon program dwindled after the Apollo landings. Also, there was nothing "abrupt" about the Apollo cancelations, which were announced in January and September 1970 for cost-cutting reasons. NASA funding and prestige: It is claimed that NASA faked the landings to forgo humiliation and to ensure that it continued to get funding. NASA raised "about US$30 billion" to go to the Moon, and Kaysing claimed in his book that this could have been used to "pay off" many people. Since most conspiracists believe that sending men to the Moon was impossible at the time, they argue that landings had to be faked to fulfill Kennedy's 1961 goal, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." In fact, NASA accounted for the cost of Apollo to the US Congress in 1973, totaling US$25.4 billion. Mary Bennett and David Percy have claimed in Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, that, with all the known and unknown hazards, NASA would not risk broadcasting an astronaut getting sick or dying on live television. The counter-argument generally given is that NASA in fact did incur a great deal of public humiliation and potential political opposition to the program by losing an entire crew in the Apollo 1 fire during a ground test, leading to its upper management team being questioned by Senate and House of Representatives space oversight committees. There was in fact no video broadcast during either the landing or takeoff because of technological limitations. Vietnam War:The American Patriot Friends Network claimed in 2009 that the landings helped the United States government distract public attention from the unpopular Vietnam War, and so manned landings suddenly ended about the same time that the United States ended its involvement in the war. In fact, the ending of the landings was not "sudden" (see The Space Race above). The war was one of several federal budget items with which NASA had to compete; NASA's budget peaked in 1966, and fell by 42.3% by 1972. This was the reason the final flights were cut, along with plans for even more ambitious follow-on programs such as a permanent space station and manned flight to Mars. The hoax claims: Many Moon-landing conspiracy theories have been put forward: claiming either that the landings did not happen and that NASA employees have lied, or that the landings did happen but not in the way that has been told. Conspiracists have focused on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. The foremost idea is that the whole manned landing program was a hoax from start to end. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was lacking or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible. Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, gave detailed answers to the conspiracists' claims on the laboratory's website. They show that NASA's portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common mistakes as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections. Using the scientific process, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. The 'real landing' hypothesis is a single story since it comes from a single source, but there is no unity in the hoax hypothesis because hoax accounts vary between conspiracists. Number of conspirators involved: According to James Longuski (Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue University), the conspiracy theories are impossible because of their size and complexity. The conspiracy would have to involve more than 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, the 12 men who walked on the Moon, the six others who flew with them as Command Module pilots, and another six astronauts who orbited the Moon. Hundreds of thousands of people—including astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers—would have had to keep the secret. Longuski argues that it would have been much easier to really land on the Moon than to generate such a huge conspiracy to fake the landings. To date, nobody from the United States government or NASA who would have had a link to the Apollo program has said the Moon landings were hoaxes. Penn Jillette made note of this in the "Conspiracy Theories" episode of his contrarian television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in 2005. With the number of people involved, and noting the Watergate scandal, Jillette noted that someone would have outed the hoax by now. Photograph and film oddities: Moon-landing conspiracists focus heavily on NASA photos. They point to oddities in photos and films taken on the Moon. Photography experts (including those unrelated to NASA) answer that the oddities are what one would expect from a real Moon landing, and not what would happen with tweaked or studio imagery. Some of the main arguments and counter-arguments are listed below. 1. In some photos, crosshairs seem to be behind objects. The cameras were fitted with a Réseau plate (a clear glass plate with crosshairs etched on), making it impossible for any photographed object to appear "in front" of the grid. This suggests that objects have been "pasted" over them. This only appears in copied and scanned photos, not the originals. It is caused by overexposure: the bright white areas of the emulsion "bleed" over the thin black crosshairs. The crosshairs are only about 0.004 inches thick (0.1 mm) and emulsion would only have to bleed about half that much to fully obscure it. Furthermore, there are many photos where the middle of the crosshair is "washed-out" but the rest is intact. In some photos of the American flag, parts of one crosshair appear on the red stripes, but parts of the same crosshair are faded or invisible on the white stripes. There would have been no reason to "paste" white stripes onto the flag. 2. Crosshairs are sometimes rotated or in the wrong place. This is a result of popular photos being cropped and/or rotated for aesthetic impact. 3. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high. There are many poor-quality photos taken by the Apollo astronauts. NASA chose to publish only the best examples. The Apollo astronauts used high-resolution Hasselblad 500 EL cameras with Carl Zeiss optics and a 70 mm medium format film magazine. 4. There are no stars in any of the photos; the Apollo 11 astronauts also claimed in a post-mission press conference to not remember seeing any stars. The astronauts were talking about naked-eye sightings of stars during the lunar daytime. They regularly sighted stars through the spacecraft navigation optics while aligning their inertial reference platforms, the Apollo PGNCS. All manned landings happened during the lunar daytime. Thus, the stars were outshone by the sun and by sunlight reflected off the Moon's surface. The astronauts' eyes were adapted to the sunlit landscape around them so that they could not see the relatively faint stars. Likewise, cameras were set for daylight exposure and could not detect the stars. Camera settings can turn a well-lit background to black when the foreground object is brightly lit, forcing the camera to increase shutter speed so that the foreground light does not wash out the image. A demonstration of this effect is here. The effect is similar to not being able to see stars from a brightly lit car park at night—the stars only become visible when the lights are turned off. The astronauts could see stars with the naked eye only when they were in the shadow of the Moon. A special far ultraviolet camera, the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, was taken to the lunar surface on Apollo 16 and operated in the shadow of the Apollo Lunar Module (LM). It took photos of Earth and of many stars, some of which are dim in visible light but bright in the ultraviolet. These observations were later matched with observations taken by orbiting ultraviolet telescopes. Furthermore, the positions of those stars with respect to Earth are correct for the time and location of the Apollo 16 photos. Photos of the solar corona that included the planet Mercury and some background stars were taken from lunar orbit by Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Al Worden. Photos of the planet Venus (which is much brighter than any of the stars) were taken from the Moon's surface by astronaut Alan Shepard during the Apollo 14 mission. 5. The angle and color of shadows are inconsistent. This suggests that artificial lights were used. Shadows on the Moon are complicated by reflected light, uneven ground, wide-angle lens distortion, and lunar dust. There are several light sources: the Sun, sunlight reflected from the Earth, sunlight reflected from the Moon's surface, and sunlight reflected from the astronauts and the Lunar Module. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many directions, including into shadows. Shadows falling into craters and hills may appear longer, shorter and distorted. Furthermore, shadows display the properties of vanishing point perspective, leading them to converge to a point on the horizon. This theory was debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing". 6. There are identical backgrounds in photos which, according to their captions, were taken miles apart. This suggests that a painted background was used. Backgrounds were not identical, just similar. What appears as nearby hills in some photos are actually mountains many miles away. On Earth, objects that are further away will appear fainter and less detailed. On the Moon, there is no atmosphere or haze to obscure faraway objects, thus they appear clearer and nearer. Furthermore, there are very few objects (such as trees) to help judge distance. One case is debunked in "Who Mourns For Apollo?" by Mike Bara. 7. The number of photos taken is implausibly high. Up to one photo per 50 seconds. Simplified gear with fixed settings allowed two photos a second. Many were taken immediately after each other as stereo pairs or panorama sequences. The calculation (one per 50 seconds) was based on a lone astronaut on the surface, and does not take into account that there were two astronauts sharing the workload during an Extra-vehicular activity (EVA). 8. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground. These may be labeled studio props. The "C"-shaped objects are most likely printing imperfections and do not appear in the original film from the camera. It has been suggested that the "C" is a coiled hair. 9. A resident of Perth, Australia, a woman named Una Ronald (a pseudonym created by the authors of the source), said that for two or three seconds she saw a Coca-Cola bottle roll across the lower right quadrant of her television screen that was displaying the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 EVA. She also said that several letters appeared in The West Australian discussing the Coca-Cola bottle incident within ten days of the lunar landing. No such newspaper reports or recordings have been found. Ronald's claims have only been relayed by one source. There are also flaws in the story, e.g. the statement that she had to stay up late to watch the Moon landing live is easily discounted by many witnesses in Australia who watched the landing in the middle of their daytime. 10. The book Moon Shot contains an obvious composite photo of Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon with another astronaut. It was used instead of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors seemingly felt were too grainy for their book. The book publishers did not work for NASA. 11. There appear to be "hot spots" in some photos that look like a huge spotlight was used. Pits on the Moon's surface focus and reflect light like the tiny glass spheres used in the coating of street signs, or dewdrops on wet grass. This creates a glow around the photographer's own shadow when it appears in a photograph (see Heiligenschein). If the astronaut is standing in sunlight while photographing into shade, light reflected off his white spacesuit yields a similar effect to a spotlight. Some widely published Apollo photos were high-contrast copies. Scans of the original transparencies are generally much more evenly lit. An example is shown below: 12. Who filmed Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon? The Lunar Module did. While still on the steps, Armstrong deployed the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly from the side of the Lunar Module. This housed, amongst other things, the TV camera. This meant that upward of 600 million people on Earth could watch the live feed. Environment: 1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation (see radiation poisoning and health threat from cosmic rays). Some conspiracists have suggested that Starfish Prime (a high-altitude nuclear test in 1962) was a failed attempt to disrupt the Van Allen belts. There are two main Van Allen belts – the inner belt and the outer belt – and a transient third belt. The inner belt is the more dangerous one, containing energetic protons. The outer one has less-dangerous low-energy electrons (Beta particles). The Apollo spacecraft passed through the inner belt in a matter of minutes and the outer belt in about 1 1⁄2 hours. The astronauts were shielded from the ionizing radiation by the aluminum hulls of the spacecraft. Furthermore, the orbital transfer trajectory from Earth to the Moon through the belts was chosen to lessen radiation exposure. Even Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too harmful for the Apollo missions. Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem (10 mSv), which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years. The total radiation received on the trip was about the same as allowed for workers in the nuclear energy field for a year and not much more than what Space Shuttle astronauts received. 2. Film in the cameras would have been fogged by this radiation. The film was kept in metal containers that stopped radiation from fogging the film's emulsion. Furthermore, film carried by unmanned lunar probes such as the Lunar Orbiter and Luna 3 (which used on-board film development processes) was not fogged. 3. The Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted. There is no atmosphere to efficiently bind lunar surface heat to devices (such as cameras) that are not in direct contact with it. In a vacuum, only radiation remains as a heat transfer mechanism. The physics of radiative heat transfer are thoroughly understood, and the proper use of passive optical coatings and paints was enough to control the temperature of the film within the cameras; Lunar Module temperatures were controlled with similar coatings that gave them a gold color. Also, while the Moon's surface does get very hot at lunar noon, every Apollo landing was made shortly after lunar sunrise at the landing site; the Moon's day is about 29½ Earth days long, meaning that one Moon day (dawn to dusk) lasts nearly fifteen Earth days. During the longer stays, the astronauts did notice increased cooling loads on their spacesuits as the sun and surface temperature continued to rise, but the effect was easily countered by the passive and active cooling systems. The film was not in direct sunlight, so it was not overheated. 4. The Apollo 16 crew could not have survived a big solar flare firing out when they were on their way to the Moon. No large solar flare occurred during the flight of Apollo 16. There were large solar flares in August 1972, after Apollo 16 returned to Earth and before the flight of Apollo 17. 5. The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts fluttered despite there being no wind on the Moon. This suggests that it was filmed on Earth and a breeze caused the flag to flutter. Sibrel said that it may have been caused by indoor fans used to cool the astronauts since their spacesuit cooling systems would have been too heavy on Earth. The flag was fastened to a Г-shaped rod (see Lunar Flag Assembly) so that it did not hang down. The flag only seemed to flutter when the astronauts were moving it into position. Without air drag, these movements caused the free corner of the flag to swing like a pendulum for some time. The flag was rippled because it had been folded during storage—the ripples could be mistaken for movement in a still photo. Videos show that when the astronauts let go of the flagpole it vibrates briefly but then remains still. This theory was debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".