I wrote this piece quite some time ago and with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing tomorrow, I felt it appropriate to post this to make one clear point -
On July 20th, 1969, man stepped foot on the moon.
No conspiracies, no trickery of light and shadow, no secret movie set. That event was the result of hard work & human ingenuity. The same traits that built the pyramids, that created the Great Wall of China. Humans are smart. Nothing can stop human ingenuity. It's time to give credit where credit is due. So without further adieu, I give you - My Perspective:
Okay, let's see if I have this right:
NASA spends some twenty billion dollars (in 1960's dollar values) on the Apollo program.
NASA has, at the time, some 35,000 employees, and is directly involved with hundreds of contractors and sub-contractors, ranging from Lockheed/Grumman to GM and IBM, involving some 100,000 more people.
NASA launches NINE Saturn boosters, the most powerful on the planet at the time. These launches are watched by tens of thousands of civilians live and in person, plus millions more via TV. Each launch consumes some $25 million in fuel alone. Two were manned flybys, six were successful landings, and one was an incomplete landing.
HAM radio hobbyists worldwide listen to the direct broadcasts from the spacecraft as it makes its journey.
Our direct competitors in the "Space Race", Soviet Russia, has the ground listening stations- for their own (unmanned) Lunar missions- and can listen in on our radio signals and telemetry in "real time".
To properly track the craft, listening stations arrayed literally around the world are involved- Hawaii, Australia, England, Europe, etc- to not only track trajectory, but to relay signals and telemetry, etc. These stations are for the most part NOT manned by Americans and not under NASA's direct control.
Due to the weak nature of the radio signals- it's a 240,000-mile trip- high-gain "dish" type antennas are needed for high-quality signal reception (though HAM operators could listen to the voice-only channels on less powerful Arial type antennas) and transmission of the video and telemetry signals. If these dishes were not precisely aligned- in other words, pointed directly at the moon, the signal would be lost.
(Got a dish-type TV antenna for satellite TV? One can't just point it in a random direction and get a signal- it has to be rather precisely aligned. Roughly half a degree of arc in any direction and the signal is lost, and the satellite is only about 24,000 miles up.)
Astronauts visit the Moon SIX times. Not just once, and each MONTHS apart- and each flight is watched by millions of TV viewers and monitored by thousands of amateur and professional personnel. During these six flights- and indeed the seventh ill-fated flight- literally millions of feet of film are brought back, hours of TV images are beamed back, and the astronauts bring back some 800 pounds of rock, soil and dust samples.
Of the pictures taken, thousands of photos and hours of film were released to the public. Those pictures have been studied, published, republished, studied again, and broadcast around the World. Some of the finest minds of the 60's, '70's, '80's, '90's and today have looked at these photos, watched the video and film and studied them carefully. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking saw the photographs- are you smarter than they?
Of the samples, thousands of geologists and specialists quite literally worldwide have studied them for some forty years. Geologists in Australia, England, France, Germany, Russia and Canada have studied them, as well as Americans from nearly every major scientific institution in America from CalTech and MIT to the University of Michigan. Any one of these geologists can tell that a "moon" rock is entirely different from a "meteor" as collected on Earth. For one thing trace elements and crystalline growth point to extremely slow cooling- as in many years- in an oxygen and nitrogen-free environment. Meteors get red-hot on reentry, where the surface both melts and oxidizes. Moon rocks also show no signs of weathering or erosion, other than by actual impact damage. All of which is beginner's course data for a geology class, and extremely easy to prove or disprove. If you know what you're looking for.
Of the science experiments performed on the moon, several laser reflectors can STILL be utilized by any observatory with a sufficiently powerful telescope. These reflectors allow a measurement from the Earth to the Moon, with accuracy down to centimeters.
When the modules returned to Earth, they were tracked on radar, again by dozens of radar installations, only a few of which were American, and splashed down near, and were recovered by, aircraft carriers that themselves crewed some 5,000 men. On radar, a module dropping from a reentry trajectory is quite different from a "bomb drop" trajectory had the module been dropped from an aircraft.
All through the flight, hundreds of people directly tracked the flight's every system and every move: from the fuel level, to the Astronaut's heartbeat and body temperature, to the direction and orientation, to the cabin temperature to cabin oxygen pressure- and everything in between. These people were watched basically 24 hours a day in Mission Control, by literally thousands of TV, radio and newspaper reporters.
The Soviets were also working on several unmanned missions, a few of which have also returned with soil samples. It's a given they, too, tracked the craft and listened in on transmissions- after all, it was indeed a "race", Russia already had the telemetry receiving stations up and running for their own missions, and, of course, there was the possible angle of political embarrassment had they detected any "fakery".
The Soviets have also been allowed to study our soil samples, to compare them with the small samples their automated systems returned. Seems it would be tough to 'fake' moon soil well enough to fool those that had "the real thing". (Moon soil, by the way, is not "dirt"- it's primarily micro meteoroid particulate, with a lot of pyroclastic material (lava) that's been pummeled to dust by tens of millions of meteor impacts over the last few billion years, as well as particles from the impacts themselves, often in the form of tiny beads of a glassy substance that comes from fused rock blown out by the heat and force of the impact.)
And now, after forty years...
Countless so called "armchair astronauts", skeptics, conspiracy theorists & FOX, the guys who bring us "When Animals Attack", eight weekly versions of cop-chase and car-crash videos, and who *produced* and then marketed and sold the "Alien Autopsy" videos as "the real thing", tells us it's all "fake" because they don't understand the simple technology behind a camera F-stop or a wide-angle lens, we're to believe THEM and ignore all the rest?
Who's kidding who here?
