Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations

Different Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landing

Moon landing

A moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both manned and unmanned missions. The first human-made object to reach the surface of the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2 mission on 13 September 1959. The United States's Apollo 11 was the first manned...

s were hoax

Hoax

A hoax is a deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences or April Fools' Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes.-Definition:The British...

es staged by NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

and members of other organizations. Various groups and individuals have made such conspiracy claims since the end of the Apollo program in 1975. The most notable claim is that the six manned landings (1969–1972) were faked and that the Apollo astronauts did not walk on the Moon

Moon

The Moon is Earth's only known natural satellite,There are a number of near-Earth asteroids including 3753 Cruithne that are co-orbital with Earth: their orbits bring them close to Earth for periods of time but then alter in the long term . These are quasi-satellites and not true moons. For more...

. The conspiracy theorists (henceforth conspiracists) argue that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened by manufacturing, destroying, or tampering with evidence; including photos, telemetry

Telemetry

Telemetry is a technology that allows measurements to be made at a distance, usually via radio wave transmission and reception of the information. The word is derived from Greek roots: tele = remote, and metron = measure...

tapes, transmissions, rock samples

Moon rock

Moon rock describes rock that formed on the Earth's moon. The term is also loosely applied to other lunar materials collected during the course of human exploration of the Moon.The rocks collected from the Moon are measured by radiometric dating techniques...

, and even some key witnesses.

There is much third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings and detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims, including photos taken by more recent spacecraft of the moon landing sites. However, polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans surveyed believe that the manned landings were faked, rising to 28% in Russia.

Origins

The first book about the subject, Bill Kaysing

Bill Kaysing

William Charles Kaysing was a writer best known for claiming that the six Apollo moon landings between July 1969 and December 1972 were hoaxes...

's self-published We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was released in 1974, two years after the Apollo Moon flights had ended. The Flat Earth Society

Flat Earth Society

The Flat Earth Society is an organization that seeks to further the belief that the Earth is flat instead of an oblate spheroid. The modern organization was founded by Englishman Samuel Shenton in 1956 and was later led by Charles K...

was one of the first organizations to accuse NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney

Walt Disney

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...

sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...

and directed by Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...

. Folklorist Linda Degh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams

Peter Hyams

Peter Hyams is an American screenwriter, director and cinematographer, probably best known for directing the 1984 science fiction adventure 2010 , Capricorn One, the comic book adaptation Timecop and the Arnold Schwarzenegger horror/action film End of Days.-Family:Hyams was born in New York...

's 1978 film Capricorn One
Capricorn One
Capricorn One is a 1977 science fiction thriller movie about a Mars landing hoax. It was written and directed by Peter Hyams and produced by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment. It stars James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O. J...

, which depicts a hoaxed journey to Mars

Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...

in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, may have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post-Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

era. She notes that this happened during the post-Watergate

Watergate scandal

The Watergate scandal was a political scandal during the 1970s in the United States resulting from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement...

era, when American citizens were inclined to distrust official accounts. Degh 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
A Man on the Moon
A Man on the Moon is a book by Andrew Chaikin, first published in 1994. It describes the voyages of the Apollo program astronauts in detail, from Apollo 8 to 17....

, published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin

Andrew Chaikin

Andrew Chaikin is an American author, speaker and space journalist. He currently lives in Vermont.He is the author of A Man on the Moon, a detailed description of the Apollo missions to the moon...

mentions that at the time of Apollo 8

Apollo 8

Apollo 8, the second manned mission in the American Apollo space program, was the first human spaceflight to leave Earth orbit; the first to be captured by and escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body; and the first crewed voyage to return to Earth from another celestial...

's lunar-orbit mission in December 1968, similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.

Public opinion

There are subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. James Oberg

James Oberg

James Edward Oberg is an American space journalist and historian, regarded as an expert on the Russian space program.-Biography:...

of ABC News
ABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...

stated that claims made that the Moon landings were faked are actively taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent. A 1999 Gallup poll found that 6% of the Americans surveyed doubted that the Moon landings happened and that 5% of those surveyed had no opinion, which roughly matches the findings of a similar 1995 Time/CNN poll. Officials of Fox television

Fox Broadcasting Company

Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly referred to as Fox Network or simply Fox , is an American commercial broadcasting television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Launched on October 9, 1986, Fox was the highest-rated broadcast network in the...

stated that such skepticism increased to about 20% after the February 2001 airing of that network's TV show Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? seen by approximately 15 million viewers. This 2001 Fox special is viewed as having promoted the hoax claims.

A 2000 poll held by the Russian Public Opinion Fund found that 28% of those surveyed did not believe that American astronauts landed on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups. In 2009, a poll held by the United Kingdom's Engineering & Technology
Engineering & Technology
Engineering & Technology is a science, engineering and technology magazine published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology in the United Kingdom...

magazine found that 25% of those surveyed did not believe that men landed on the Moon. Another poll gives that 25% of 18–25-year-olds surveyed were unsure that the landings happened.

Claimed motives of the United States and NASA

Those who believe the landings were faked give several theories about the motives of NASA and the United States government

Federal government of the United States

The federal government of the United States is the national government of the constitutional republic of fifty states that is the United States of America. The federal government comprises three distinct branches of government: a legislative, an executive and a judiciary. These branches and...

. The three main theories are below.

The Space Race
The US government deemed it vital that it win the Space Race

Space Race

The Space Race was a mid-to-late 20th century competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for supremacy in space exploration. Between 1957 and 1975, Cold War rivalry between the two nations focused on attaining firsts in space exploration, which were seen as necessary for national...

against the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. Going to the Moon would be risky and expensive, as exemplified by John F. Kennedy famously stating that the United States chose to go because it was hard.

A main reason for the race to the Moon was the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

. Philip Plait

Philip Plait

Philip Cary Plait is an American astronomer and skeptic who runs the website BadAstronomy.com. He formerly worked at the physics and astronomy department at Sonoma State University. In early 2007, he resigned from his job to write Death from the Skies. On August 4, 2008, he became President of the...

states in Bad Astronomy
Bad Astronomy
Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" is a non-fiction book by the American astronomer Phil Plait, also known as "the Bad Astronomer"...

that the Soviets—with their own competing Moon program

Soviet Moonshot

The Soviet manned lunar programs were a series of programs pursued by the Soviet Union to land a man on the Moon in competition with the United States Apollo program to achieve the same goal set publicly by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961...

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. Bart Sibrel

Bart Sibrel

Bart Winfield Sibrel is a Nashville, Tennessee-based filmmaker who advances the conspiracy theory that the six Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were hoaxes. He has filmed two documentaries on the subject: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon and Astronauts Gone Wild.-Dealings...

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 suddenly canceled."

However, 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

Ussuriysk

Ussuriysk is a city in Primorsky Krai, Russia, located in the fertile valley of the Razdolnaya River, north of Vladivostok and about from both the Chinese border and the Pacific Ocean. Population: -Medieval history:...

and IP-16 in Evpatoria, 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

Vasily Mishin

Vasily Pavlovich Mishin was a Soviet engineer and a prominent rocketry pioneer....

, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered" (Spaceflight, March 1991, vol. 33, 2-3), describes how the Soviet Moon program dwindled after the Apollo landings.

Funding
It is claimed that NASA faked the landings to forgo humiliation and to ensure that it continued to get funding. NASA raised about US$

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

30 billion to go to the Moon, and Bill Kaysing claims 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 President Kennedy's 1961 promise: "achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth". Others have claimed that, with all the known and unknown hazards, NASA would not have risked the public humiliation of astronauts crashing to their deaths on the lunar surface, broadcast on live TV.

Vietnam War
It is claimed that the landings helped the US government because they were a popular distraction from the Vietnam War

Vietnam War

; and so manned landings suddenly ended about the same time that the US ended its role in the Vietnam War.

Claimed motives of the conspiracists

Some have argued that one of the conspiracists main motives is making money from pseudoscience

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

. In November 2002, actor Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks

Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks is an American actor, producer, writer, and director. Hanks worked in television and family-friendly comedies, gaining wide notice in 1988's Big, before achieving success as a dramatic actor in several notable roles, including Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia, the title...

, who starred in the movie Apollo 13
Apollo 13 (film)
Apollo 13 is a 1995 American drama film directed by Ron Howard. The film stars Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Kathleen Quinlan and Ed Harris. The screenplay by William Broyles, Jr...

and produced the documentary From the Earth to the Moon, was asked what he thought of the conspiracy theories. He replied: "We live in a society where there is no law [against] making money in the promulgation of ignorance or, in some cases, stupidity". An unsuccessful attempt was made to sue Apollo 13

Apollo 13

Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST. The landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the service module upon which the Command...

astronaut Jim Lovell

Jim Lovell

James "Jim" Arthur Lovell, Jr., is a former NASA astronaut and a retired captain in the United States Navy, most famous as the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, which suffered a critical failure en route to the Moon but was brought back safely to Earth by the efforts of the crew and mission...

because he said that he went to the Moon.

Conspiracists and their main proposals

Bill Kaysing
Bill Kaysing
William Charles Kaysing was a writer best known for claiming that the six Apollo moon landings between July 1969 and December 1972 were hoaxes...

(1922–2005) – an ex-employee of Rocketdyne
Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne
Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne is a United States company that designs and produces rocket engines that use liquid propellants. Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, headquartered in Canoga Park, California, is a division of Pratt & Whitney, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation...

, the company which built the F-1
F-1 (rocket engine)
The F-1 is a rocket engine developed by Rocketdyne and used in the Saturn V. Five F-1 engines were used in the S-IC first stage of each Saturn V, which served as the main launch vehicle in the Apollo program. The F-1 is still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever...

engines used on the Saturn V
Saturn V
The Saturn V was an American human-rated expendable rocket used by NASA's Apollo and Skylab programs from 1967 until 1973. A multistage liquid-fueled launch vehicle, NASA launched 13 Saturn Vs from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida with no loss of crew or payload...

rocket. Kaysing was not technically qualified, and worked at Rocketdyne as a librarian. Kaysing's self published book, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, made many allegations, effectively beginning the discussion of the Moon landings possibly being hoaxed. Kaysing maintains that, despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings, thereby guaranteeing success, than for NASA to really go there. He claimed that the chance of a successful manned landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.017%. NASA and others have debunked the claims made in the book.
Bart Sibrel
Bart Sibrel
Bart Winfield Sibrel is a Nashville, Tennessee-based filmmaker who advances the conspiracy theory that the six Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were hoaxes. He has filmed two documentaries on the subject: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon and Astronauts Gone Wild.-Dealings...

– a filmmaker, produced and directed four films for his company AFTH, including a film in 2001 called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon is a 2001 documentary written, produced, and directed by Nashville, Tennessee-based filmmaker and investigative journalist Bart Winfield Sibrel. Sibrel is a critic of the United States space program and proponent of the theory that the six Apollo lunar...

, examining the evidence of a hoax. The arguments that Sibrel puts forward in this film have been debunked by many sources, including Svector's video series Lunar Legacy, which disproves the documentary's main argument that the Apollo crew faked their distance from the Earth command module
Apollo Command/Service Module
The Command/Service Module was one of two spacecraft, along with the Lunar Module, used for the United States Apollo program which landed astronauts on the Moon. It was built for NASA by North American Aviation...

, while in low orbit. Sibrel has stated that the effect on the shot covered in his film was made through the use of a transparency of the Earth. Some parts of the original footage, according to Sibrel, were not able to be included on the official releases for the media. On such allegedly censored parts, the correlation between Earth and Moon Phases can be clearly confirmed, refuting Sibrel's claim that these shots were faked. Sibrel was punched in the face by Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrin is an American mechanical engineer, retired United States Air Force pilot and astronaut who was the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing in history...

after Sibrel confronted Aldrin with his theories while accusing the former astronaut of being "a coward, and a liar, and a thief". The Los Angeles County district attorney's office refused to file charges against Aldrin, saying that he had been provoked by Sibrel.
William L. Brian – a nuclear engineer who self-published a book in 1982 called Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program
Moongate (book)
Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, The NASA-Military Cover-Up is a self published book by William L Brian which alleges a cover-up by NASA, the United States military and the Russian space program over what was really found during the US and Soviet Moon landings and space...

, in which he disputes the Moon's surface gravity.
David Percy – TV producer and expert in audiovisual technologies and member of the Royal Photographic Society
Royal Photographic Society
The Royal Photographic Society is the world's oldest national photographic society. It was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1853 as The Photographic Society of London with the objective of promoting the Art and Science of Photography...

. He is co-writer, along with Mary Bennett of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (ISBN 1-898541-10-8) and co-producer of What Happened On the Moon?. He is the main proponent of the "whistle-blower" accusation, arguing that mistakes in the NASA photos are so obvious that they are evidence that insiders are trying to 'blow the whistle' on the hoax by knowingly adding mistakes that they know will be seen.
Ralph Rene
Ralph Rene
Ralph René was an American conspiracy theorist, small press publisher and inventor. René was a vocal proponent of the Apollo moon landing hoax theory. René's death was confirmed via a video on AOL. René's last self-published book, on the September 11 attacks, is called World Trade Center Lies and...

– an inventor and 'self taught' engineering buff. Writer of NASA Mooned America (second edition ).
James M. Collier (d. 1998) – American journalist and writer, producer of the video Was It Only a Paper Moon ? (1997).
Jack White – American photo historian known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.
Marcus Allen
Marcus Allen (publisher)
Marcus Allen is the British distributor and publisher of Nexus magazine, about conspiracy theories and paranormal claims. He says his publication offers "news and information that is overlooked, unreported or ignored by the mainstream media." He worked as a photographer in the 1960s, and is a...

– British publisher of Nexus who said that photographs of the lander would not prove that the US put men on the Moon. He said, "Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem – the Russians did that in 1959
Luna 2
Luna 2 was the second of the Soviet Union's Luna programme spacecraft launched to the Moon. It was the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon...

, the big problem is getting people there". He suggests that NASA sent robot missions because radiation levels in space would be deadly. Another variant on this is the idea that NASA and its contractors did not recover quickly enough from the Apollo 1
Apollo 1
Apollo 1 was scheduled to be the first manned mission of the Apollo manned lunar landing program, with a target launch date of February 21, 1967. A cabin fire during a launch pad test on January 27 at Launch Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral killed all three crew members: Command Pilot Virgil "Gus"...

fire, and so all the early Apollo missions were faked, with Apollo 14 or 15 being the first real mission.
Aron Ranen – states in his documentary film Did We Go? (2005) that "right now I'm about 75% believing we went". However, on July 20, 2009, Ranen appeared on Geraldo at Large
Geraldo at Large
Geraldo at Large is a United States television newsmagazine, hosted by Fox News correspondent-at-large and former talk show host Geraldo Rivera.-History:...

(Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel
Fox News Channel , often called Fox News, is a cable and satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation...

) to argue that no one has landed on the Moon.
Clyde Lewis
Clyde Lewis
Clyde Lewis is a talk radio personality and actor. He is the creator and host of Ground Zero, a talk radio show dealing with paranormal and parapolitical topics....

– radio talk show host.
David Groves – works for Quantech Image Processing and worked on some of the NASA photos. Notably he has examined the photo of Aldrin emerging from the lander. He said he can pinpoint when a spotlight was used. Using the focal length of the camera's lens and an actual boot, he allegedly calculated, using ray-tracing, that the spotlight is between 24 to 36 cm (9.4 to 14.2 ) to the right of the camera. This matches with the sunlit part of Armstrong's spacesuit.
Yuri Mukhin
Yury Ignatyevich Mukhin
Yury Mukhin is a Russian conspiracy theorist. He graduated from Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute in 1973.In 1995–2009 he was editor in chief of the Russian newspaper Duel. Mukhin is the main proponent of the denial of the Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre in Russia. He has also...

– Russian opposition politician, publicist and writer of the book The Moon Affair of the USA (2006) in which he denies all Moon landing evidence and accuses the US government of plundering the money paid by the American taxpayers for the Moon program. He also claims the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...

and some Soviet scientists helped NASA fake the landings.
Alexander Popov
Alexander Ivanovich Popov
Alexander Ivanovich Popov is a Soviet physicist and inventor, a laureate of a Gold medal from the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy , senior research associate, Doctor of Physical-Mathematical Sciences....

– Russian doctor of physical-mathematical sciences
Doktor nauk
Doktor nauk is a higher doctoral degree, the second and the highest post-graduate academic degree in the Soviet Union, Russia and in many post-Soviet states. Sometimes referred to as Dr. Hab. The prerequisite is the first degree, Kandidat nauk which is informally regarded equivalent to Ph.D....

and writer of the book Americans on the Moon - A Great Breakthrough or a Space Affair? (Moscow, 2009, ISBN 978-5-9533-3315-3) in which he aims to prove that Saturn V
Saturn V
The Saturn V was an American human-rated expendable rocket used by NASA's Apollo and Skylab programs from 1967 until 1973. A multistage liquid-fueled launch vehicle, NASA launched 13 Saturn Vs from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida with no loss of crew or payload...

was in fact a camouflaged Saturn 1B and denies all Moon landing evidence.
Stanislav Pokrovsky – Russian candidate of technical sciences and General Director of a scientific-manufacturing enterprise Project-D-MSK who calculated that the real speed of the Saturn V rocket at S-IC
S-IC
The S-IC was the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. The S-IC first stage was built by The Boeing Company. Like the first stages of most rockets, most of its mass of over two thousand metric tonnes at launch was propellant, in this case RP-1 rocket fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer...

staging time was only half of what was declared. His analysis appears to assume that the solid rocket plumes from the fusellage and retro rockets on the two stages came to an instant halt in the surrounding air so they can be used to estimate the velocity of the rocket. He ignored high altitude winds and the altitude at staging, 67 km, where air is about 1/10,000 as dense as at sea level, and claimed that only a loop around the Moon was possible, not a manned landing on the Moon with return to Earth. He also allegedly found the reason for this - problems with the Inconel
Inconel
Inconel is a registered trademark of Special Metals Corporation that refers to a family of austenitic nickel-chromium-based superalloys. Inconel alloys are typically used in high temperature applications. It is often referred to in English as "Inco"...

superalloy
Superalloy
A superalloy, or high-performance alloy, is an alloy that exhibits excellent mechanical strength and creep resistance at high temperatures, good surface stability, and corrosion and oxidation resistance. Superalloys typically have a matrix with an austenitic face-centered cubic crystal structure. ...

used in the F-1
F-1 (rocket engine)
The F-1 is a rocket engine developed by Rocketdyne and used in the Saturn V. Five F-1 engines were used in the S-IC first stage of each Saturn V, which served as the main launch vehicle in the Apollo program. The F-1 is still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever...

engine.
Philippe Lheureux
Philippe Lheureux
Philippe Lheureux has written one book on the subject of Moon landing conspiracy theories: Lumières sur la Lune : La NASA a-t-elle menti ?...

– French writer of Moon Landings: Did NASA Lie? and Lights on the Moon: Did NASA Lie? (Lumières sur la Lune: La NASA a-t-elle menti?). He said that astronauts did land on the Moon but to stop other states from benefiting from scientific information in the real photos, NASA published fake images.
Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan
Joseph James "Joe" Rogan is an American comedian, video blogger, actor, writer, podcaster, and martial artist. He is best known for his work on NewsRadio, his work as color commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and his hosting work on Fear Factor.-Acting:In 1994, Rogan co-starred on...

- American comedian, actor, and recreational drug use activist. Vociferous proponent of a number of hoax claims, in particular the alleged unavoidable lethality of the Van Allen radiation belts.

Examination of the hoax claims

Many conspiracy theories have been forwarded. They either claim that the landings did not happen and that NASA employees (and sometimes others) have lied; or that 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 belt

Van Allen radiation belt

The Van Allen radiation belt is a torus of energetic charged particles around Earth, which is held in place by Earth's magnetic field. It is believed that most of the particles that form the belts come from solar wind, and other particles by cosmic rays. It is named after its discoverer, James...

s, solar flare

Solar flare

A solar flare is a sudden brightening observed over the Sun surface or the solar limb, which is interpreted as a large energy release of up to 6 × 1025 joules of energy . The flare ejects clouds of electrons, ions, and atoms through the corona into space. These clouds typically reach Earth a day...

s, solar wind

Solar wind

The solar wind is a stream of charged particles ejected from the upper atmosphere of the Sun. It mostly consists of electrons and protons with energies usually between 1.5 and 10 keV. The stream of particles varies in temperature and speed over time...

, coronal mass ejection

Coronal mass ejection

A coronal mass ejection is a massive burst of solar wind, other light isotope plasma, and magnetic fields rising above the solar corona or being released into space....

s and cosmic ray

Cosmic ray

Cosmic rays are energetic charged subatomic particles, originating from outer space. They may produce secondary particles that penetrate the Earth's atmosphere and surface. The term ray is historical as cosmic rays were thought to be electromagnetic radiation...

s made such a trip impossible.

Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory is the first science and engineering research national laboratory in the United States, receiving this designation on July 1, 1946. It is the largest national laboratory by size and scope in the Midwest...

, 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 people involved

According to James Longuski (Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue University

Purdue University

Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

), the conspiracy theories are impossible because of their size and complexity. More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, and a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences. 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 US government or NASA who would have had a link to the Apollo program has said the Moon landings were hoaxes. Penn Jillette

Penn Jillette

Penn Fraser Jillette is an American magician, comedian, illusionist, juggler, bassist and a best-selling author known for his work with fellow illusionist Teller in the team Penn & Teller, and advocacy of atheism, libertarian philosophy, free-market economics, and scientific skepticism.-Early...

made note of this in the "Conspiracy Theories" episode of his contrarian television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in 2005. He said that, with the number of people that would have had to be involved, someone would have outed the hoax by now. With the government's track record of keeping secrets (noting Watergate

Watergate scandal

), Jillette said the government could not have silenced everyone if the landings were faked.

Photograph and film oddities

Conspiracists devote much of their efforts to examining NASA photos. They point to oddities in photographs and films taken on the Moon. Photography experts (even 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 appear to be behind objects. The cameras were fitted with a reseau plate

Reseau plate

A Reseau plate is a transparent plate with fiduciary markers placed at the focal plane of a camera just in front of the film to provide a means of correcting images to enable them to be used for precision measurement...

(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 inch 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 misplaced or rotated.

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 photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts. NASA chose to publish only the best examples.

The Apollo astronauts used high resolution Hasselblad
Hasselblad
Victor Hasselblad AB is a Swedish manufacturer of medium-format cameras and photographic equipment based in Gothenburg, Sweden.The company is best known for the medium-format cameras it has produced since World War II....

500 EL/M Data cameras with Carl Zeiss optics and a 70-mm film magazine.

4. There are no star
Star
A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...

s 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.

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 into ink-black when the foreground object is brightly lit, forcing the camera to increase shutter speed in order not to have the foreground light completely 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.

An ultraviolet telescope was taken to the lunar surface on Apollo 16 and operated in the shadow of the lunar module. It captured pictures 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 photographs.

Pictures of the solar corona that included the planet Mercury
Mercury (planet)
Mercury is the innermost and smallest planet in the Solar System, orbiting the Sun once every 87.969 Earth days. The orbit of Mercury has the highest eccentricity of all the Solar System planets, and it has the smallest axial tilt. It completes three rotations about its axis for every two orbits...

and some background stars were taken from lunar orbit by Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Al Worden.

Pictures of the planet Venus
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...

(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
Wide-angle lens
From a design perspective, a wide angle lens is one that projects a substantially larger image circle than would be typical for a standard design lens of the same focal length; this enables either large tilt & shift movements with a view camera, or lenses with wide fields of view.More informally,...

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 different directions, including into shadows. Shadows falling into craters and hills may appear longer, shorter and distorted. Furthermore, shadows display the properties of vanishing point
Vanishing point
A vanishing point is a point in a perspective drawing to which parallel lines not parallel to the image plane appear to converge. The number and placement of the vanishing points determines which perspective technique is being used...

perspective, leading them to converge to a point on the horizon.

This theory was shown to be untrue 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.

Shots were not identical, just similar. What appear 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
Haze
Haze is traditionally an atmospheric phenomenon where dust, smoke and other dry particles obscure the clarity of the sky. The World Meteorological Organization manual of codes includes a classification of horizontal obscuration into categories of fog, ice fog, steam fog, mist, haze, smoke, volcanic...

to obscure distant objects, thus they appear clearer and closer. 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 photographs 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 single astronaut on the surface, and does not take into account that there were two astronauts sharing the workload during 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

Perth, Western Australia

Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....

, with the pseudonym "Una Ronald", said she saw a soft drink

Soft drink

A soft drink is a non-alcoholic beverage that typically contains water , a sweetener, and a flavoring agent...

bottle in the frame while watching one of the manned landings.

No such newspaper reports or recordings have been found. Una Ronald's existence is claimed by only one source. There are also flaws in the story, i.e. the statement that she had to "stay up late" is easily discounted by many witnesses in Australia who watched the event in the middle of their daytime.

10. The book Moon Shot
Moon Shot
Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon is a book written by Mercury Seven astronaut Alan Shepard, with NBC News correspondent Jay Barbree and Associated Press space writer Howard Benedict. Astronaut Donald K. "Deke" Slayton is also listed as an author, although he died before...

contains an obvious composite photograph of Alan Shepard

Alan Shepard

Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr. was an American naval aviator, test pilot, flag officer, and NASA astronaut who in 1961 became the second person, and the first American, in space. This Mercury flight was designed to enter space, but not to achieve orbit...

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 of the book apparently felt were too grainy for their book. The book publishers did not work for NASA.

11. There appear to be "hot spots" in some photographs that look like a huge spotlight was used.

Pits in Moon dust focus and reflect light in a manner similar to tiny glass spheres used in the coating of street signs, or dew-drops on wet grass. This creates a glow around the photographer's own shadow when it appears in a photograph (see Heiligenschein
Heiligenschein
Heiligenschein is an optical phenomenon which creates a bright spot around the shadow of the viewer's head. It is created when the surface on which the shadow falls has special optical characteristics. Dewy grass is known to exhibit these characteristics, and creates a Heiligenschein...

).
If the astronaut is standing in sunlight while photographing into shade, light reflected off his white spacesuit produces 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 take part in the live feed.

Environment

1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt

Van Allen radiation belt

and galactic ambient radiation (see radiation poisoning and health threat from cosmic rays

Health threat from cosmic rays

The health threat from cosmic rays is the danger posed by galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles to astronauts on interplanetary missions.Galactic cosmic rays consist of high energy protons and other nuclei with extrasolar origin...

). Some conspiracists have suggested that Starfish Prime

Starfish Prime

Starfish Prime was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States of America on July 9, 1962, a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Atomic Support Agency ....

(high altitude nuclear testing in 1962) was a failed attempt to disrupt the Van Allen belts.

The spacecraft moved through the belts in about four hours, and the astronauts were protected from the ionizing radiation by the aluminium 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
James Van Allen
James Alfred Van Allen was an American space scientist at the University of Iowa.The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him, following the 1958 satellite missions in which Van Allen had argued that a Geiger counter should be used to detect charged particles.- Life and career :* September...

, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too dangerous for the Apollo missions. Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem
Röntgen equivalent man
Named after Wilhelm Röntgen , the roentgen equivalent in man or rem is a unit of radiation dose equivalent...

(10 mSv
Sievert
The sievert is the International System of Units SI derived unit of dose equivalent radiation. It attempts to quantitatively evaluate the biological effects of ionizing radiation as opposed to just the absorbed dose of radiation energy, which is measured in gray...

), which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level
Sea level
Mean sea level is a measure of the average height of the ocean's surface ; used as a standard in reckoning land elevation...

for three years. The spacecraft passed through the intense inner belt and the low-energy outer belt. The total radiation received on the trip was about the same as allowed for workers in the nuclear energy field for a year.

The radiation is actually evidence that the astronauts went to the Moon. Irene Schneider reports that 33 of the 36 Apollo astronauts involved in the nine Apollo missions to leave Earth orbit have developed early stage cataract
Cataract
A cataract is a clouding that develops in the crystalline lens of the eye or in its envelope, varying in degree from slight to complete opacity and obstructing the passage of light...

s that have been shown to be caused by radiation exposure to cosmic rays during their trip. At least 39 former astronauts have developed cataracts; 36 of those were involved in high-radiation missions such as the Apollo missions.

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
Lunar Orbiter program
The Lunar Orbiter program was a series of five unmanned lunar orbiter missions launched by the United States from 1966 through 1967. Intended to help select Apollo landing sites by mapping the Moon's surface, they provided the first photographs from lunar orbit.All five missions were successful,...

and Luna 3
Luna 3
The Soviet space probe Luna 3 of 1959 was the third space probe to be sent to the neighborhood of the Moon, and this mission was an early feat in the spaceborne exploration of outer space...

(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; Moon lander 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. During the longer stays, the astronauts did notice increased cooling loads on their spacesuits as the sun continued to rise and the surface temperature increased, but the effect was easily countered by the passive and active cooling systems. The film was not in direct sunlight, so it wasn't overheated. Note: The Moon's day
Lunar day
In space exploration, a lunar day is the period of time it takes for the Earth's Moon to complete one full rotation on its axis with respect to the Sun. Equivalently, it is the time it takes the Moon to make one complete orbit around the Earth and come back to the same phase...

is about 29½ Earth days long, meaning that one Moon day (dawn to dusk) lasts nearly fifteen days.

4. The Apollo 16
Apollo 16
Young and Duke served as the backup crew for Apollo 13; Mattingly was slated to be the Apollo 13 command module pilot until being pulled from the mission due to his exposure to rubella through Duke.-Backup crew:...

crew should not have survived a big solar flare
Solar flare
A solar flare is a sudden brightening observed over the Sun surface or the solar limb, which is interpreted as a large energy release of up to 6 × 1025 joules of energy . The flare ejects clouds of electrons, ions, and atoms through the corona into space. These clouds typically reach Earth a day...

firing out when they were on their way to the Moon. They should have been fried.

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
Apollo 17
Apollo 17 was the eleventh and final manned mission in the American Apollo space program. Launched at 12:33 a.m. EST on December 7, 1972, with a three-member crew consisting of Commander Eugene Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 remains the...

.

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 attached to a Г-shaped rod
Lunar Flag Assembly
The Lunar Flag Assembly was a flag of the United States and flagpole planted on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts. It was specially designed with a horizontal pole to support the flag on the airless Moon, to make it appear similar to how it would look waving in the wind on Earth...

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
Pendulum
A pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. When a pendulum is displaced from its resting equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position...

for some time. The flag was rippled because it had been folded during storage—the ripples could be mistaken for movement in a still photograph. Videotapes show that when the astronauts let go of the flagpole it vibrates briefly but then remains motionless.
This theory was shown to be untrue on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

6. Footprints in the Moon dust are unexpectedly well preserved, despite the lack of moisture.

The Moon dust has not been weathered like Earth sand and has sharp edges. This allows the Moon dust particles to stick together and hold their shape in the vacuum. The astronauts likened it to "talcum powder or wet sand".
This theory was shown to be untrue on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

7. The alleged Moon landings used either a sound stage, or were filmed outside in a remote desert with the astronauts either using harnesses or slow-motion photography to make it look like they were on the Moon.

While the HBO Mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon", and a scene from "Apollo 13" used the sound-stage and harness setup, it is clearly seen from those films that dust rose did not quickly settle (some dust briefly formed clouds). In the film footage from the Apollo missions, dust kicked-up by the astronauts' boots and the wheels of the Moon rovers rose quite high (due to the lunar gravity), and settled quickly to the ground in an uninterrupted parabolic arc (due to there being no air to uphold the dust). Even if there had been a sound stage for hoax Moon landings that had had the air pumped-out, the dust would have reached nowhere near the height and trajectory as the dust shown in the Apollo film footage because of Earth gravity.

During the Apollo 15 mission, David Scott did an experiment by dropping a hammer and a falcon feather at the same time. Both fell at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time. This proved that he was in a vacuum.

This theory was demonstrated to be unsubstantiated on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

Mechanical issues

1. The Moon landers made no blast crater

Explosion crater

An explosion crater is a characteristically shaped hole formed when material is ejected from the surface of the ground by an explosive event just above, at, or below the surface....

s or any sign of dust scatter.

No crater should be expected. The Descent Propulsion System was throttled very far down during the final landing. The Moon lander was no longer quickly decelerating, so the descent engine only had to support the lander's own weight, which was lessened by the Moon's gravity and by the near exhaustion of the descent propellants. At landing, the engine thrust divided by the nozzle exit area is only about 10 kilopascals
Pascal (unit)
The pascal is the SI derived unit of pressure, internal pressure, stress, Young's modulus and tensile strength, named after the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It is a measure of force per unit area, defined as one newton per square metre...

(1.5 PSI
Pounds per square inch
The pound per square inch or, more accurately, pound-force per square inch is a unit of pressure or of stress based on avoirdupois units...

). Beyond the engine nozzle, the plume spreads and the pressure drops very quickly. (In comparison the Saturn V F-1
F-1 (rocket engine)
The F-1 is a rocket engine developed by Rocketdyne and used in the Saturn V. Five F-1 engines were used in the S-IC first stage of each Saturn V, which served as the main launch vehicle in the Apollo program. The F-1 is still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever...

first stage engines produced 3.2 MPa
Pascal (unit)
The pascal is the SI derived unit of pressure, internal pressure, stress, Young's modulus and tensile strength, named after the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It is a measure of force per unit area, defined as one newton per square metre...

(459 PSI) at the mouth of the nozzle.) Rocket exhaust gases expand much quicker after leaving the engine nozzle in a vacuum than in an atmosphere. The effect of an atmosphere on rocket plumes can be easily seen in launches from Earth; as the rocket rises through the thinning atmosphere, the exhaust plumes broaden very noticeably. To lessen this, rocket engines designed for vacuums have longer bells than those designed for use on Earth, but they still cannot stop this spreading. The Moon lander's exhaust gases therefore expanded quickly well beyond the landing site. However, the descent engines did scatter a lot of very fine surface dust as seen in 16mm movies of each landing, and many mission commanders spoke of its effect on visibility. The landers were generally moving horizontally as well as vertically, and photos do show scouring of the surface along the final descent path. Finally, the lunar regolith
Regolith
Regolith is a layer of loose, heterogeneous material covering solid rock. It includes dust, soil, broken rock, and other related materials and is present on Earth, the Moon, some asteroids, and other terrestrial planets and moons.-Etymology:...

is very compact below its surface dust layer, further making it impossible for the descent engine to blast out a "crater". In fact, a blast crater was measured under the Apollo 11 lander using shadow lengths of the descent engine bell and estimates of the amount that the landing gear had compressed and how deep the lander footpads had pressed into the lunar surface and it was found that the engine had eroded between 4 and 6 inches of regolith out from underneath the engine bell during the final descent and landing.^{,pp. 97-98}

2. The second stage of the launch rocket and/or the Moon lander ascent stage made no visible flame.

The Moon landers used Aerozine 50
Aerozine 50
Aerozine 50 is a 50/50 mix of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine . Originally developed in the late 1950s by Aerojet General Corporation as a storable, high-energy, hypergolic fuel for the Titan II ICBM rocket engines, Aerozine continues in wide use as a rocket fuel, typically with...

(fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide
Dinitrogen tetroxide
Dinitrogen tetroxide is the chemical compound N2O4. It is a useful reagent in chemical synthesis. It forms an equilibrium mixture with nitrogen dioxide; some call this mixture dinitrogen tetroxide, while some call it nitrogen dioxide.Dinitrogen tetroxide is a powerful oxidizer, making it highly...

(oxidizer) propellants, chosen for simplicity and reliability; they ignite hypergolically –upon contact– without the need for a spark. These propellants produce a nearly transparent exhaust. The same fuel was used by the core of the American Titan
Titan II GLV
The Titan II GLV or Gemini-Titan was an American expendable launch system derived from the Titan II missile, which was used to launch twelve Gemini missions for NASA between 1964 and 1966...

rocket. The transparency of their plumes is apparent in many launch photos. The plumes of rocket engines fired in a vacuum spread out very quickly as they leave the engine nozzle (see above), further lessening their visibility. Finally, rocket engines often run "rich" to slow internal corrosion. On Earth, the excess fuel burns in contact with atmospheric oxygen. This cannot happen in a vacuum.

3. There should not have been deep dust around the Moon landers; given the blast from the landing engines.

The dust is created by a continuous rain of micro-meteoroid impacts and is typically several inches thick. It forms the top of the lunar regolith, a layer of impact rubble several meters thick and highly compacted with depth. On Earth, an exhaust plume might stir up the atmosphere over a wide area. On the Moon, only the exhaust gas itself can disturb the dust. Some areas around descent engines were scoured clean.

Note: Moving footage of astronauts and the Moon rover kicking-up Moondust clearly show the dust kicking up quite high due to the low gravity, but settling quickly without air to stop it. Had these landings been faked on the Earth, dust clouds would have formed. (They can be seen as a 'goof' in the movie Apollo 13

Apollo 13 (film)

Apollo 13 is a 1995 American drama film directed by Ron Howard. The film stars Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Kathleen Quinlan and Ed Harris. The screenplay by William Broyles, Jr...

when Jim Lovell

Jim Lovell

(played by Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks

) imagines walking on the Moon). This clearly shows the astronauts to be (a) in low gravity and (b) in a vacuum.

4. The Moon landers weighed 17 tons and made no mark on the Moondust, yet footprints can be seen beside them.

The lander weighed less than three tons on the Moon. The astronauts were much lighter than the lander, but their boots were much smaller than the 1-meter landing pads. Pressure (or force per unit area) rather than force determines the amount of regolith compression. In some photos the landing pads did press into the regolith, especially when they moved sideways at touchdown. (The bearing pressure under the lander feet, with the lander being more than 100 times the weight of the astronauts would in fact have been of similar magnitude to the bearing pressure exerted by the astronauts' boots.)

5. The air conditioning units that were part of the astronauts' spacesuits could not have worked in an environment of no atmosphere.

The cooling units could only work in a vacuum. Water from a tank in the backpack flowed out through tiny pores in a metal sublimator plate where it quickly vaporized into space. The loss of the heat of vaporization froze the remaining water, forming a layer of ice on the outside of the plate that also sublimated into space (turning from a solid directly into a gas). A separate water loop flowed through the LCG (Liquid Cooling Garment) worn by the astronaut, carrying his metabolic waste heat through the sublimator plate where it was cooled and returned to the LCG. Twelve pounds [5.4 kg] of feedwater gave about eight hours of cooling; because of its bulk, it was often the limiting consumable on the length of an EVA. Because this system could not work in an atmosphere, the astronauts needed large external chillers to keep them comfortable during Earth training.
Radiative cooling
Radiative cooling
Radiative cooling is the process by which a body loses heat by thermal radiation.- Earth's energy budget :In the case of the earth-atmosphere system it refers to the process by which long-wave radiation is emitted to balance the absorption of short-wave energy from the sun.The exact process by...

meant there would have been no need to drink water, but it could not work below body temperature in such a small volume. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator
Radioisotope thermoelectric generator
A radioisotope thermoelectric generator is an electrical generator that obtains its power from radioactive decay. In such a device, the heat released by the decay of a suitable radioactive material is converted into electricity by the Seebeck effect using an array of thermocouples.RTGs can be...

s could use radiative cooling fins to allow indefinite operation because they operated at much higher temperatures.

6. Although Apollo 11 had made a landing well outside its target area, Apollo 12 made a pin-point landing, within walking distance (less than 200 meters) of the Surveyor 3
Surveyor 3
Surveyor 3 was the third lander of the American unmanned Surveyor program sent to explore the surface of the Moon. Launched on April 17, 1967, Surveyor 3 landed on April 20, 1967 at the Mare Cognitum portion of the Oceanus Procellarum...

probe, which had landed on the Moon in April 1967.

The Apollo 11 landing was several kilometers to the southeast of the middle of their intended landing ellipse, but still within it. Armstrong took semi-automatic control of the lander and directed it further down range when it was noted that the intended landing site was strewn with boulders near a moderate sized crater. By the time Apollo 12 flew, the cause of the mistake in the landing site was found, procedures were bettered and allowed Apollo 12 to make its pin-point landing. Apollo 11 fulfilled its role by simply landing safely on the Moon's surface and a pin-point landing was not needed on its mission.
The Apollo astronauts were highly skilled pilots, and the lander was a maneuverable craft that could be accurately flown to a specific landing point. During the powered descent phase the astronauts used the PNGS (Primary Navigation Guidance System) and LPD (Landing Point Designator) to predict where the lander was going to land, and then they would manually pilot it to a chosen point with great accuracy.

7. All six lunar landings happened during the first Presidential administration of Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon

Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...

and no leader of any other state has claimed to have landed astronauts on the Moon, even though the mechanical means of doing so should have become progressively much easier after almost 40 years of steady or even swift technological development.

Other states and later US Presidents were less interested in spending large sums to be merely the second state/President to land men on the Moon. Had Nixon's administration faked the Moon landings, the Soviets would have been happy to argue for a hoax as a propaganda victory, but the Soviets never did. Further exploration by the US or USSR, such as founding a Moon base, would have been much more costly and maybe too provocative to be in any state's self-interest during the Cold War.

The development of the Saturn V rocket, the Apollo CSM and LM and the flights up to Apollo 8
Apollo 8
Apollo 8, the second manned mission in the American Apollo space program, was the first human spaceflight to leave Earth orbit; the first to be captured by and escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body; and the first crewed voyage to return to Earth from another celestial...

(which orbited the moon) were made before Richard Nixon became president in January 1969. Furthermore, Nixon did not personally care much for the program started by the man who defeated him in the 1960 Presidential Election, and his administration pushed for NASA to cancel Apollo 18, 19, and 20 in favor of the space shuttle
Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle was a manned orbital rocket and spacecraft system operated by NASA on 135 missions from 1981 to 2011. The system combined rocket launch, orbital spacecraft, and re-entry spaceplane with modular add-ons...

program.

Transmissions

1. There should have been more than a two-second delay in communications between Earth and the Moon, at a distance of 400000 km (248,549.1 mi).

The round trip light travel time of more than two seconds is apparent in all the real-time recordings of the lunar audio, but this does not always appear as expected. There may also be some documentary films where the delay has been edited out. Reasons for editing the audio may be time constraints or in the interest of clarity.

2. Typical delays in communication were about 0.5 seconds.

Claims that the delays were only half a second are untrue, as examination of the original recordings show. It should also be borne in mind that there should not be a straightforward, consistent time delay between every response, as the conversation is being recorded at one end - Mission Control. Responses from Mission Control could be heard without any delay, as the recording is being made at the same time that Houston receives the transmission from the Moon.

3. The Parkes Observatory

Parkes Observatory

The Parkes Observatory is a radio telescope observatory, 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia. It was one of several radio antennas used to receive live, televised images of the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969....

in Australia was billed to the world for weeks as the site that would be relaying communications from the Moon, then five hours before transmission they were told to stand down.

The timing of the first Moonwalk was changed after the landing. In fact, delays in getting the Moonwalk started meant that Parkes did cover almost the entire Apollo 11 Moonwalk.

4. Parkes supposedly provided the clearest video feed from the Moon, but Australian media and all other known sources ran a live feed from the United States.

While that was the original plan, and, according to some sources, the official policy, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) did take the transmission direct from the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek
Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station
Honeysuckle Creek was a NASA tracking station near Canberra, Australia, which played an important role in supporting Project Apollo. The station was opened in 1967 and closed in 1981....

radio telescope
Radio telescope
A radio telescope is a form of directional radio antenna used in radio astronomy. The same types of antennas are also used in tracking and collecting data from satellites and space probes...

s. These were converted to NTSC
NTSC
NTSC, named for the National Television System Committee, is the analog television system that is used in most of North America, most of South America , Burma, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and some Pacific island nations and territories .Most countries using the NTSC standard, as...

television at Paddington
Paddington, New South Wales
Paddington is an inner-city, eastern suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Paddington is located 3 kilometres east of the Sydney central business district and lies across the local government areas of the City of Sydney and the Municipality of Woollahra...

, in Sydney. This meant that Australian viewers saw the Moonwalk several seconds before the rest of the world. See also The Parkes Observatory's Support of the Apollo 11 Mission, from "Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia". The events surrounding the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying the live television of the Moonwalk were portrayed in a slightly fictionalized Australian film comedy The Dish
The Dish
The Dish is a 2000 Australian film that tells the story of how the Parkes Observatory was used to relay the live television of man's first steps on the moon, during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969...

(2000).

5. Better signal was supposedly received at Parkes Observatory when the Moon was on the opposite side of the planet.

This is not supported by the detailed evidence and logs from the missions.

Missing data

Blueprint

A blueprint is a type of paper-based reproduction usually of a technical drawing, documenting an architecture or an engineering design. More generally, the term "blueprint" has come to be used to refer to any detailed plan....

s and design and development drawings of the machines involved are missing. Apollo 11 data tapes containing telemetry

Telemetry

and the high quality video (before scan conversion) of the first Moonwalk are also missing. See the documentary film Did We Go? (2005).

Tapes

Dr. David Williams (NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center

Goddard Space Flight Center

The Goddard Space Flight Center is a major NASA space research laboratory established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center. GSFC employs approximately 10,000 civil servants and contractors, and is located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. GSFC,...

) and Apollo 11 flight director Eugene F. Kranz

Eugene F. Kranz

Kranz's book, titled Failure Is Not an Option, published five years after the movie, stated, "...a creed that we all lived by: "Failure is not an option."" . The book has three index references for the phrase, but none of those give any indication of the phrase being apocryphal...

both acknowledged that the Apollo 11 telemetry data tapes are missing. Conspiracists see this as evidence that they never existed. The Apollo 11 telemetry tapes were different from the telemetry tapes of the other Moon landings because they contained the raw television broadcast. For technical reasons, the Apollo 11 lander carried a slow-scan television

Slow-scan television

Slow-scan television is a picture transmission method used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color.A technical term for SSTV is narrowband television...

(SSTV) camera (see Apollo TV camera

Apollo TV camera

Television cameras used on the Apollo Project's missions varied in design, with image quality improving significantly with each design. A camera was carried in the Apollo Command Module...

). To broadcast the pictures to regular television, a scan conversion

Scan conversion

Scan conversion or scan rate converting is a video processing technique for changing the vertical / horizontal scan frequency of video signal for different purposes and applications...

had to be done. The radio telescope

Radio telescope

A radio telescope is a form of directional radio antenna used in radio astronomy. The same types of antennas are also used in tracking and collecting data from satellites and space probes...

at Parkes Observatory

Parkes Observatory

in Australia was able to receive the telemetry from the Moon at the time of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk. Parkes had a larger antenna than NASA's antenna in Australia at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station

Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station

Honeysuckle Creek was a NASA tracking station near Canberra, Australia, which played an important role in supporting Project Apollo. The station was opened in 1967 and closed in 1981....

, so it received a better picture. It also received a better picture than NASA's antenna at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex

Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex

The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex — commonly called the Goldstone Observatory — is located in California's Mojave Desert. Operated by ITT Corporation for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, its main purpose is to track and communicate with space missions. It includes the Pioneer...

. This direct TV signal, along with telemetry data, was recorded onto one-inch fourteen-track analog tape at Parkes. The original SSTV transmission had better detail and contrast than the scan-converted pictures, and it is this tape that is missing. A crude, real-time scan conversion of the SSTV signal was done in Australia before it was broadcast worldwide. However, still photographs of the original SSTV image are available (see photos). About fifteen minutes of it were filmed by an amateur 8 mm film

8 mm film

8 mm film is a motion picture film format in which the filmstrip is eight millimeters wide. It exists in two main versions: the original standard 8mm film, also known as regular 8 mm or Double 8 mm, and Super 8...

camera and these are also available. Later Apollo missions did not use SSTV. At least some of the telemetry tapes from the ALSEP

Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package

The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package comprised a set of scientific instruments placed by the astronauts at the landing site of each of the five Apollo missions to land on the Moon following Apollo 11...

scientific experiments left on the Moon (which ran until 1977) still exist, according to Dr Williams. Copies of those tapes have been found.

Others are looking for the missing telemetry tapes for different reasons. The tapes contain the original and highest quality video feed from the Apollo 11 landing. Some former Apollo personnel want to find the tapes for posterity, while NASA engineers looking towards future Moon missions believe the tapes may be useful for their design studies. They have found that the Apollo 11 tapes were sent for storage at the US National Archives in 1970, but by 1984 all the Apollo 11 tapes had been returned to the Goddard Space Flight Center at their request. The tapes are believed to have been stored rather than re-used. Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967, even before the Moon landings.

On November 1, 2006 Cosmos Magazine reported that about 100 data tapes recorded in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission had been found in a small marine science laboratory in the main physics building at the Curtin University of Technology

Curtin University of Technology

Curtin University is an Australian university based in Perth, Western Australia, with additional campuses in regional Western Australia and at Miri , Sydney and Singapore...

in Perth, Australia

Perth, Western Australia

. One of the old tapes has been sent to NASA for analysis. The slow-scan television images were not on the tape.

On July 16, 2009, NASA indicated that it must have erased the original Apollo 11 Moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the tape. On December 22, 2009 NASA issued a final report on the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes. Senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings during the Apollo missions, is now in charge of the restoration project. After an extensive three-year search, an "inescapable conclusion" was that about 45 tapes (estimated 15 tapes recorded at each of the three tracking stations) of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused, said Nafzger. In time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Lowry Digital has been tasked with restoring the surviving footage. President of Lowry Digital Mike Inchalik stated that, "this is by far and away the lowest quality" video the company has dealt with. Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video, which will remain in black and white and contain conservative digital enhancements. The $230,000 restoration project that will take months to complete will not include sound quality improvements. Some selections of restored footage in high definition have been made available on the NASA website.

Blueprints

The website Xenophilia.com documents a hoax claim that blueprints for the Apollo Lunar Module

Apollo Lunar Module

The Apollo Lunar Module was the lander portion of the Apollo spacecraft built for the US Apollo program by Grumman to carry a crew of two from lunar orbit to the surface and back...

, Lunar rover

Lunar rover

The Lunar Roving Vehicle or lunar rover was a battery-powered four-wheeled rover used on the Moon in the last three missions of the American Apollo program during 1971 and 1972...

, and associated equipment are missing. There are some diagrams of the Lunar Module and Lunar Rover on the NASA website and on Xenophilia.com. Grumman appears to have destroyed most of their documentation, but copies of the blueprints for the Saturn V

Saturn V

The Saturn V was an American human-rated expendable rocket used by NASA's Apollo and Skylab programs from 1967 until 1973. A multistage liquid-fueled launch vehicle, NASA launched 13 Saturn Vs from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida with no loss of crew or payload...

exist on microfilm.

An unused Lunar Module is on show at the Cradle of Aviation Museum

Cradle of Aviation Museum

The Cradle of Aviation Museum is an aerospace museum located in East Garden City, New York on Long Island to commemorate Long Island's part in the history of aviation. It is located on land once part of Mitchel Air Force Base which, together with nearby Roosevelt Field and other airfields on the...

. The Lunar Module designated LM-13 would have landed on the Moon during the Apollo 18 mission, but was instead put into storage when the mission was canceled. Other unused Lunar Modules are on show: LM-2 at the National Air and Space Museum

National Air and Space Museum

The National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution holds the largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the world. It was established in 1976. Located in Washington, D.C., United States, it is a center for research into the history and science of aviation and...

and LM-9 at Kennedy Space Center

Kennedy Space Center

The John F. Kennedy Space Center is the NASA installation that has been the launch site for every United States human space flight since 1968. Although such flights are currently on hiatus, KSC continues to manage and operate unmanned rocket launch facilities for America's civilian space program...

.

Four mission-worthy Lunar Rovers were built. Three of them were carried to the Moon on Apollo 15, 16, and 17, and left there. After Apollo 18 was canceled, the other Rover was used for spare parts for the Apollo 15 to 17 missions. The only rovers on display are test vehicles, trainers, and models. The "Moon buggies" were built by Boeing

Boeing

The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...

. The 221-page operation manual for the Lunar Rover contains some detailed drawings, although not the blueprints.

An original Saturn V rocket is on display at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The rocket components are also on public display, as is much of the original equipment used on the Apollo missions.

Technology

Bart Sibrel cites the relative level of US and USSR space technology as evidence that the moon landings could not have occurred: for much of the early stages of the "space race", the USSR was ahead of the US, yet in the end, the USSR was never able to fly a manned craft to the moon, let alone land one on the surface. It is argued that, because the USSR was unable to achieve this, the US should have also been unable to develop the technology to do so.

For example, he claims that, during the Apollo Program, the USSR had five times more manned hours in space than the US, and notes that the USSR was the first to achieve many of the early milestones in space: the first man-made satellite in orbit (October 1957, Sputnik 1

Sputnik 1

Sputnik 1 ) was the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth's orbit. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1s success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space...

);According to the 2007 NOVA
NOVA (TV series)
Nova is a popular science television series from the U.S. produced by WGBH Boston. It can be seen on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, and in more than 100 other countries...

episode "Sputnik Declassified", the United States could have launched the Explorer 1 probe before Sputnik, but the Eisenhower administration hesitated, first because they were not sure if international law meant that national borders kept going all the way into orbit (and, thus, their orbiting satellite could cause an international uproar by violating the borders of dozens of nations), and second because there was a desire to see the not yet ready Vanguard satellite program

Project Vanguard

Project Vanguard was a program managed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory , which intended to launch the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit using a Vanguard rocket as the launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral Missile Annex, Florida....

, designed by American citizens, become America's first satellite rather than the Explorer program, that was mostly designed by former rocket designers from Nazi Germany. A transcript of the appropriate section from the show is available at "A Blow to the Nation". the first living creature in orbit (a dog named Laika

Laika

Laika was a Soviet space dog that became the first animal to orbit the Earth – as well as the first animal to die in orbit.As little was known about the impact of spaceflight on living creatures at the time of Laika's mission, and the technology to de-orbit had not yet been developed, there...

, November 1957, Sputnik 2

Sputnik 2

Sputnik 2 , or Prosteyshiy Sputnik 2 ), was the second spacecraft launched into Earth orbit, on November 3, 1957, and the first to carry a living animal, a dog named Laika. Sputnik 2 was a 4-meter high cone-shaped capsule with a base diameter of 2 meters...

); the first man in space and in orbit (Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961....

, April 1961, Vostok 1

Vostok 1

Vostok 1 was the first spaceflight in the Vostok program and the first human spaceflight in history. The Vostok 3KA spacecraft was launched on April 12, 1961. The flight took Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut from the Soviet Union, into space. The flight marked the first time that a human entered outer...

); the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova

Valentina Tereshkova

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova is a retired Soviet cosmonaut, and was the first woman in space. She was selected out of more than four hundred applicants, and then out of five finalists, to pilot Vostok 6 on the 16 June, 1963, becoming both the first woman and the first civilian to fly in...

, June 1963, Vostok 6

Vostok 6

-Backup crew:-Reserve crew:Vostok VI-Mission parameters:*Mass: *Apogee: *Perigee: *Inclination: 64.9°*Period: 87.8 minutes9090...

); and the first spacewalk (EVA

Extra-vehicular activity

Extra-vehicular activity is work done by an astronaut away from the Earth, and outside of a spacecraft. The term most commonly applies to an EVA made outside a craft orbiting Earth , but also applies to an EVA made on the surface of the Moon...

) (Alexei Leonov in March 1965, Voskhod 2

Voskhod 2

Voskhod 2 was a Soviet manned space mission in March 1965. Vostok-based Voskhod 3KD spacecraft with two crew members on board, Pavel Belyaev and Alexei Leonov, was equipped with an inflatable airlock...

).

However, most of the Soviet gains listed above were matched by the USA within a year, and sometimes within weeks. In 1965 the US started to achieve many firsts (such as the first successful space rendezvous

Space rendezvous

A space rendezvous is an orbital maneuver during which two spacecraft, one of which is often a space station, arrive at the same orbit and approach to a very close distance . Rendezvous requires a precise match of the orbital velocities of the two spacecraft, allowing them to remain at a constant...

), which were important steps in a mission to the Moon. Additionally, NASA and others say that these gains by the Soviets are not as impressive as the simple list implies; that a number of these firsts were mere stunts that did not advance the technology greatly, or at all (e.g. the first woman in space). In fact, by the time of the launch of the first manned Earth-orbiting Apollo flight (Apollo 7

Apollo 7

Apollo 7 was the first manned mission in the American Apollo space program, and the first manned US space flight after a cabin fire killed the crew of what was to have been the first manned mission, AS-204 , during a launch pad test in 1967...

), the USSR had made only nine spaceflights (seven with one cosmonaut, one with two, one with three) compared to 16 by the US. In terms of spacecraft hours, the USSR had 460 hours of spaceflight; the US had 1,024 hours. In terms of astronaut/cosmonaut time, the USSR had 534 hours of manned spaceflight whereas the US had 1,992 hours. By the time of Apollo 11, the US’s lead was much wider than that. (See List of human spaceflights, 1960s and refer to individual flights for the length of time.)

Additionally, the USSR did not develop a successful rocket capable of a manned lunar mission until the 1980s — their N1 rocket failed on all four launch attempts between 1969 and 1972. The Soviet LK Lander

LK Lander

The LK was a Soviet lunar lander and counterpart of the American Lunar Module . The LK was to have landed up to two cosmonauts on the Moon...

Moon lander was tested in unmanned low-Earth-orbit flights three times in 1970 and 1971.

Deaths of NASA personnel

In a television program about the hoax allegations, Fox Entertainment Group

Fox Entertainment Group

The Fox Entertainment Group is an American entertainment industry company that owns film studios and terrestrial, cable, and direct broadcast satellite television properties...

listed the deaths of ten astronauts and of two civilians related to the manned spaceflight program as having possibly been killed as part of a cover-up.

Theodore Freeman
Theodore Freeman
Theodore Cordy Freeman was a NASA astronaut and a captain in the United States Air Force. He was killed in the crash of a T-38 jet, marking the first fatality among the American astronaut corps...

(killed ejecting from T-38
T-38 Talon
The Northrop T-38 Talon is a twin-engine supersonic jet trainer. It was the world's first supersonic trainer and is also the most produced. The T-38 remains in service as of 2011 in air forces throughout the world....

which had suffered a bird strike
Bird strike
A bird strike—sometimes called birdstrike, avian ingestion , bird hit, or BASH —is a collision between an airborne animal and a man-made vehicle, especially aircraft...

, October 1964)
Elliot See and Charlie Bassett
Charles Bassett
Charles Arthur "Art" Bassett, II was an American engineer and United States Air Force officer. He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1963 and assigned to Gemini 9 but died in an airplane crash during training for his first spaceflight.-Early life and education:Bassett was born in Dayton, Ohio,...

(T-38 crash in bad weather, February 1966)
Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom
Gus Grissom
Virgil Ivan Grissom , , better known as Gus Grissom, was one of the original NASA Project Mercury astronauts and a United States Air Force pilot...

, Edward Higgins "Ed" White
Edward Higgins White
Edward Higgins White, II was an engineer, United States Air Force officer and NASA astronaut. On June 3, 1965, he became the first American to "walk" in space. White died along with fellow astronauts Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee during a pre-launch test for the first manned Apollo mission at...

, and Roger B. Chaffee
Roger B. Chaffee
Roger Bruce Chaffee was an American aeronautical engineer and a NASA astronaut in the Apollo program. Chaffee died along with fellow astronauts Gus Grissom and Ed White during a pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission at Cape Kennedy...

(Apollo 1
Apollo 1
Apollo 1 was scheduled to be the first manned mission of the Apollo manned lunar landing program, with a target launch date of February 21, 1967. A cabin fire during a launch pad test on January 27 at Launch Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral killed all three crew members: Command Pilot Virgil "Gus"...

fire, January 1967)
Edward "Ed" Givens
Edward Givens
Edward Galen "Ed" Givens Jr was an United States Air Force officer and a NASA astronaut. He was selected in 1966 by NASA as a member of the 'Original 19' group....

(car accident, June 1967)
Clifton "C. C." Williams
Clifton Williams
This article is about the American astronaut. For the composer, see Clifton Williams .Clifton Curtis 'C.C.' Williams was a NASA astronaut, a Naval Aviator, and a Major in the United States Marine Corps who was killed in a plane crash; he had never been to space...

(killed ejecting from T-38, October 1967)
Michael J. "Mike" Adams
Michael James Adams
Michael James Adams was an American aviator, engineer and USAF astronaut. He was the first US space mission fatality, according to the US definition.-Military experience:...

(X-15 crash, November 1967. The only pilot killed during the X-15 flight test program. He was a test-pilot, not a NASA astronaut, but had flown the X-15 above 50 miles)
Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr.
Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr.
Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. was a United States Air Force officer and the first African-American astronaut.-Early years:...

(F-104
F-104 Starfighter
The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter is a single-engine, high-performance, supersonic interceptor aircraft originally developed for the United States Air Force by Lockheed. One of the Century Series of aircraft, it served with the USAF from 1958 until 1969, and continued with Air National Guard units...

crash, December 1967, shortly after being selected as a pilot with the Air Force's (later canceled) Manned Orbiting Laboratory program.
NASA worker Thomas Ronald Baron (automobile collision with train, April 1967, shortly after making accusations before Congress about the cause of the Apollo 1 fire, after which he was fired). Baron was a quality control inspector who wrote a report critical of the Apollo program and was an outspoken critic after the Apollo 1 fire. Baron and his family were killed as their car was struck by a train at a train crossing. Ruled as an accident.
Brian D. Welch, a leading official in NASA's Public Affairs Office and Director of Media Services, died a few months after appearing in the media to debunk the Fox pro-Moon hoax television show cited above. His obituary claims he died of a heart attack at the relatively young age of 42. Conspiracists find his age at death suspiciously young and would note that heart attacks can be induced, for example, through the stress of torture or through ingestion of certain chemicals. Brian Welch's death is a blow against the alleged Hoax Conspirators since he was a debunker of hoax claims. Conspiracists would argue his death was to prevent any public reversal of his position after he had served his role of debunking hoax claims and to stop his leaking of any inside info about a hoax.

All of the astronaut deaths were directly related to their jobs with NASA or with the Air Force. Two of them, X-15 pilot Mike Adams and MOL pilot Robert Lawrence, had no connection with the civilian manned space program of which Apollo was a part. All of the deaths listed occurred at least 20 months before Apollo 11 and the subsequent flights.

As of September 2011, nine of the twelve Apollo astronauts who landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 still survive, including Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong

Neil Alden Armstrong is an American former astronaut, test pilot, aerospace engineer, university professor, United States Naval Aviator, and the first person to set foot upon the Moon....

and Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin is an American mechanical engineer, retired United States Air Force pilot and astronaut who was the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing in history...

. Also, nine of the twelve Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon without landing between 1968 and 1972 still survive, including Michael Collins

Michael Collins (astronaut)

Michael Collins is a former American astronaut and test pilot. Selected as part of the third group of fourteen astronauts in 1963, he flew in space twice. His first spaceflight was Gemini 10, in which he and command pilot John Young performed two rendezvous with different spacecraft and Collins...

. There is no evidence to support Gelvani's claim that Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin

James Irwin

James Benson Irwin was an American astronaut and engineer. He served as Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 15, the fourth human lunar landing; he was the eighth person to walk on the Moon.-Early life:...

was about to come forward before his death, by a heart attack, in 1989. Irwin had suffered several heart attacks in the years before his death.

The number of deaths within the American astronaut corps during the run-up to Apollo and while the Moon landings were happening is similar to the number of deaths suffered by the Russians. During the period 1961 to 1972, at least eight Russian serving and former cosmonauts are known to have died:

Valentin Bondarenko
Valentin Bondarenko
Valentin Vasiliyevich Bondarenko was a Soviet fighter pilot and cosmonaut. He died during a training accident in Moscow, USSR, in 1961. A crater on the Moon's far side is named for him.-Education and military training:...

(ground training accident, March 1961)
Grigori Nelyubov
Grigori Nelyubov
Grigori Grigoyevich Nelyubov was a Soviet cosmonaut who was likely to have been the third or fourth person in space before his dismissal from the Soviet space program....

(suicide, February 1966)
Vladimir Komarov
Vladimir Komarov
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov was a Soviet test pilot, aerospace engineer and cosmonaut in the first group of cosmonauts selected in 1960. He was one of the most highly experienced and well-qualified candidates accepted into "Air Force Group One"....

(Soyuz 1
Soyuz 1
Soyuz 1 was a manned spaceflight of the Soviet space program. Launched into orbit on April 23, 1967 carrying cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Komarov, Soyuz 1 was the first flight of the Soyuz spacecraft...

accident, April 1967)
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961....

(MiG-15 crash, March 1968)
Pavel Belyayev
Pavel Belyayev
Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev , , was a Soviet fighter pilot with extensive experience in piloting different types of aircraft...

(complications following surgery, January 1970)
Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov
Vladislav Volkov
Vladislav Nikolayevich Volkov was a Soviet cosmonaut who flew on the Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 11 missions. The second mission terminated fatally.-Biography:...

, and Viktor Patsayev
Viktor Patsayev
Viktor Ivanovich Patsayev was a Soviet cosmonaut who flew on the Soyuz 11 mission and had the unfortunate distinction of being part of the second crew to die during a space flight...

(Soyuz 11
Soyuz 11
Soyuz 11 was the first manned mission to arrive at the world's first space station, Salyut 1. The mission arrived at the space station on June 7, 1971 and departed on June 30, 1971. The mission ended in disaster when the crew capsule depressurized during preparations for re-entry, killing the...

accident, June 1971).

Also, the overall chief of their manned-spaceflight program, Sergei Korolev, died while undergoing surgery in January 1966.

Stanley Kubrick involvement

Stanley Kubrick is accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollo 11 and 12, presumably because he had just directed 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...

which is partly set on the Moon and featured advanced special effects. It has been claimed that when 2001 was in post-production

Post-production

Post-production is part of filmmaking and the video production process. It occurs in the making of motion pictures, television programs, radio programs, advertising, audio recordings, photography, and digital art...

in early 1968, NASA secretly approached Kubrick to direct the first three Moon landings. The launch and splashdown would be real but the spacecraft would remain in Earth orbit and fake footage broadcast as "live" from the Moon's surface. No evidence was offered for this theory, which ignores many facts. For example, 2001 was released before the first Apollo landing and Kubrick's depiction of the Moon's surface is vastly different from its appearance in Apollo video, film and photography. Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway

Frederick I. Ordway III

Frederick Ira Ordway III is a space scientist and well-known author of visionary books on spaceflight. He owns a large collection of original paintings depicting astronautical themes. Ordway was educated at Harvard and completed several years of graduate study at the University of Paris and other...

and Harry Lange

Harry Lange (film designer)

Hans Kurt Lange was a German film production designer and art director.Lange was born in 1930 in Eisenach, Thuringia. After World War II, Thuringia became part of Soviet-controlled East Germany; Lange escaped across the border to West Germany, where he studied art before moving to the United...

, both of whom had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him on 2001. Kubrick also used some 50 mm f/0.7 lenses that were left over from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA. However, Kubrick only got this lens for Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon is a 1975 British-American period romantic war film produced, written, and directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray which recounts the exploits of an 18th century Irish adventurer...

(1975). The lens was originally a still-photo lens and needed changes to be used for motion filming. There is a mockumentary

Mockumentary

A mockumentary , is a type of film or television show in which fictitious events are presented in documentary format. These productions are often used to analyze or comment on current events and issues by using a fictitious setting, or to parody the documentary form itself...

based on this idea, Dark Side of the Moon
Dark Side of the Moon (documentary)
Dark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the...

, but it could have fueled the conspiracy theory. There was a similar hoax article originally posted as a humor piece, but which has been quoted as in earnest by conspiracy theorist Clyde Lewis.

Academic work

In 2002, NASA granted US$

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

15,000 to James Oberg

James Oberg

James Edward Oberg is an American space journalist and historian, regarded as an expert on the Russian space program.-Biography:...

for a commission to write a point-by-point rebuttal of the hoax claims. NASA canceled the commission later that year, after complaints that the book would dignify the accusations. Oberg stated that he meant to finish the book. In November 2002 Peter Jennings

Peter Jennings

Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings, CM was a Canadian American journalist and news anchor. He was the sole anchor of ABC's World News Tonight from 1983 until his death in 2005 of complications from lung cancer...

said "NASA is going to spend a few thousand dollars trying to prove to some people that the United States did indeed land men on the Moon," and "NASA had been so rattled, [they] hired [somebody] to write a book refuting the conspiracy theorists". Oberg says that belief in the hoax theories is not the fault of the conspiracists, but rather that of teachers and people (including NASA) who should provide information to the public.

In 2004, Martin Hendry and Ken Skeldon of the University of Glasgow

University of Glasgow

The University of Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Located in Glasgow, the university was founded in 1451 and is presently one of seventeen British higher education institutions ranked amongst the top 100 of the...

were awarded a grant by the UK based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council

Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council was one of a number of Research Councils in the United Kingdom. It directed, coordinated and funded research in particle physics and astronomy for the people of the UK...

to investigate Moon landing conspiracy theories. In November 2004, they gave a lecture at the Glasgow Science Centre

Glasgow Science Centre

Glasgow Science Centre is a visitor attraction located on the south bank of the River Clyde in Glasgow, Scotland. It is a purpose-built science centre composed of three principal buildings which are the Science Mall, an IMAX cinema and the Glasgow Tower...

where the top ten claims by conspiracists were individually addressed and refuted.

MythBusters special

An episode of MythBusters
MythBusters
MythBusters is a science entertainment TV program created and produced by Beyond Television Productions for the Discovery Channel. The series is screened by numerous international broadcasters, including Discovery Channel Australia, Discovery Channel Latin America, Discovery Channel Canada, Quest...

in August 2008 was dedicated to NASA

NASA

, and each myth addressed during the show was related to the Moon landings, such as the pictures and video footage. A few members of the MythBusters crew were allowed into a NASA training facility to test some of the myths. All of the hoax-related myths examined on the show were labeled as having been "Busted", meaning that the myths were not true.

Imaging the landing sites

Conspiracists claim that observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope

Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope that was carried into orbit by a Space Shuttle in 1990 and remains in operation. A 2.4 meter aperture telescope in low Earth orbit, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared...

should be able to photograph the landing sites. This implies that the world's major observatories (as well as the Hubble Program) are complicit in the hoax by refusing to take pictures of the landing sites. Photos of the Moon have been taken by Hubble, including at least two Apollo landing sites; but the Hubble resolution limits viewing of lunar objects to sizes no smaller than 60-75 yards (55–69 meters), which is insufficient resolution to see any landing site features.

Leonard David published an article on space.com

Space.com

Space.com is a space and astronomy news website. Its stories are often syndicated to other media outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo!, and USA Today.Space.com was founded by former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs and Rich Zahradnik, in July 1999...

, on April 27, 2001 which showed a photo taken by the Clementine mission

Clementine mission

Clementine was a joint space project between the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and NASA...

showing a diffuse dark spot at the site NASA says is the Apollo 15

Apollo 15

Apollo 15 was the ninth manned mission in the American Apollo space program, the fourth to land on the Moon and the eighth successful manned mission. It was the first of what were termed "J missions", long duration stays on the Moon with a greater focus on science than had been possible on previous...

lander. The evidence was noticed by Misha Kreslavsky, of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

, and Yuri Shkuratov of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory

Ukrainian T-shaped Radio telescope, second modification

The Ukrainian T-shaped Radio telescope, second modification is the world's largest radio telescope at decametre wavelengths. It was built in the early 1970s near the village of Grakovo , 65 km south-east from Kharkov, Soviet Union...

in Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

. The European Space Agency

European Space Agency

The European Space Agency , established in 1975, is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 18 member states...

's SMART-1

SMART-1

SMART-1 was a Swedish-designed European Space Agency satellite that orbited around the Moon. It was launched on September 27, 2003 at 23:14 UTC from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana. "SMART" stands for Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology...

unmanned probe sent back photos of the landing sites, according to Bernard Foing

Bernard Foing

Bernard Foing is a scientist at the European Space Agency , Executive Director of the and was Principal Project Scientist for SMART-1, the first European mission to the Moon.-Biography:...

, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program. "Given SMART-1’s initial high orbit, however, it may prove difficult to see artifacts", said Foing in an interview on space.com.

In 2002 Alex R. Blackwell of the University of Hawaii

University of Hawaii

The University of Hawaii System, formally the University of Hawaii and popularly known as UH, is a public, co-educational college and university system that confers associate, bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees through three university campuses, seven community college campuses, an employment...

pointed out that some photos taken by Apollo astronauts while in orbit around the Moon show the landing sites.

The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...

(London) published a story in 2002 saying that European astronomers at the Very Large Telescope

Very Large Telescope

The Very Large Telescope is a telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The VLT consists of four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2m across, which are generally used separately but can be used together to...

(VLT) would use it to view the landing sites. According to the article, Dr Richard West

Richard Martin West

Richard Martin West is a Danish astronomer working at the European Southern Observatory .He discovered numerous comets, including the spectacular "Comet West" and the periodic comets 76P/West-Kohoutek-Ikemura and 123P/West-Hartley.He also discovered a number of asteroids, including the Trojan...

said that his team would take "a high-resolution image of one of the Apollo landing sites". Marcus Allen

Marcus Allen (publisher)

Marcus Allen is the British distributor and publisher of Nexus magazine, about conspiracy theories and paranormal claims. He says his publication offers "news and information that is overlooked, unreported or ignored by the mainstream media." He worked as a photographer in the 1960s, and is a...

, a conspiracist, answered that no photos of hardware on the Moon would convince him that manned landings had happened. As the VLT is capable of resolving equivalent to the distance between the headlights of a car as seen from the Moon, it may be able to photograph some features of the landing sites. Such photos, if and when they become available, would be the first non-NASA-produced photos of the sites at that definition.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

The , or JAXA, is Japan's national aerospace agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on October 1, 2003, as an Independent Administrative Institution administered by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the...

(JAXA) launched their SELENE

SELENE

SELENE , better known in Japan by its nickname after the legendary Japanese moon princess, was the second Japanese lunar orbiter spacecraft. Produced by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science and the National Space Development Agency , both now part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration...

Moon orbiter on September 14, 2007 (JST) from Tanegashima Space Center

Tanegashima Space Center

The is one of Japan's space development facilities. It is located on Tanegashima, an island located 115 km south of Kyūshū. It was established in 1969 when the National Space Development Agency of Japan was formed...

. SELENE orbited the Moon at about 100 kilometres (62.1 mi) altitude. In May 2008 JAXA reported detecting the "halo" generated by the Apollo 15 lunar module engine exhaust from a Terrain Camera image. A 3D reconstructed photo also matched the terrain of an Apollo 15 photo taken from the surface.

On July 17, 2009 NASA released low-resolution engineering test photos of the Apollo 11, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 landing sites that have been photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

The Lunar Precursor Robotic Program is a program of robotic spacecraft missions which NASA will use to prepare for future human spaceflight missions to the Moon. Two LPRP missions, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite , were launched in June 2009...

as part of the process of starting its primary mission. The photos show the descent stage of the landers from each mission on the Moon’s surface. The photo of the Apollo 14 landing site also shows tracks made by an astronaut between a science experiment (ALSEP

Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package

) and the lander. Photos of the Apollo 12 landing site were released by NASA on September 3, 2009. The Intrepid lander descent stage, experiment package (ALSEP), Surveyor 3

Surveyor 3

Surveyor 3 was the third lander of the American unmanned Surveyor program sent to explore the surface of the Moon. Launched on April 17, 1967, Surveyor 3 landed on April 20, 1967 at the Mare Cognitum portion of the Oceanus Procellarum...

spacecraft, and astronaut footpaths are all visible. While the LRO images have been enjoyed by the scientific community as a whole, they have not done anything to convince conspiracists that the landings happened.

Moon rocks

The Apollo Program collected 382 kilograms (842.2 lb) of Moon rock

Moon rock

s during the six manned missions. Analyses by scientists worldwide all agree that these rocks came from the Moon — no published accounts in peer-reviewed scientific journals exist that dispute this claim. The Apollo samples are easily distinguishable from both meteorites and Earth rocks in that they show a lack of hydrous alteration products, they show evidence for having been subjected to impact events on an airless body, and they have unique geochemical traits. Furthermore, most are more than 200 million years older than the oldest Earth rocks. The Moon rocks also share the same traits as Soviet samples.

Conspiracists argue that Marshall Space Flight Center Director Wernher von Braun

Wernher von Braun

Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun was a German rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect, and one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany during World War II and in the United States after that.A former member of the Nazi party,...

's trip to Antarctica in 1967 (about two years before the Apollo 11 launch) was to gather lunar meteorite

Lunar meteorite

A Lunar meteorite is a meteorite that is known to have originated on the Moon.-Discovery:In January 1982, John Schutt, leading an expedition in Antarctica for the ANSMET program, found a meteorite that he recognized to be unusual...

s to be used as fake Moon rocks. Because von Braun was a former SS

Schutzstaffel

The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...

officer (though one who had been detained by the Gestapo

Gestapo

The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...

), the documentary film Did We Go? suggests that he could have been pressured to agree to the conspiracy to protect himself from recriminations over his past. NASA said that von Braun’s mission was "to look into environmental and logistic factors that might relate to the planning of future space missions, and hardware". NASA continues to send teams to work in Antarctica to mimic the conditions on other planets.

It is now accepted by the scientific community that rocks have been blasted from both the Martian and Lunar surface during impact events

Impact crater

In the broadest sense, the term impact crater can be applied to any depression, natural or manmade, resulting from the high velocity impact of a projectile with a larger body...

, and that some of these have landed on the Earth as meteorites. However, the first Antarctic lunar meteorite was found in 1979, and its lunar origin was not recognized until 1982. Furthermore, lunar meteorites are so rare that it is unlikely that they could account for the 382 kilograms of Moon rocks that NASA gathered between 1969 and 1972. Only about 30 kilograms of lunar meteorites have been found on Earth thus far, despite private collectors and governmental agencies worldwide searching for more than 20 years.

While the Apollo missions gathered 382 kilograms of Moon rocks, the Soviet Luna 16

Luna 16

-External links:*...

, Luna 20

Luna 20

Luna 20 was the second of three successful Soviet lunar sample return missions. It was flown as part of the Luna program, also called Lunik 20, as a robotic competitor to the six successful Apollo lunar sample return missions....

and Luna 24

Luna 24

-External links:*...

robots gathered only 326 grams combined (that is, less than one-thousandth as much). Indeed, current plans for a Martian sample return would only gather about 500 grams of soil, and a recently proposed South Pole-Aitken basin

South Pole-Aitken basin

The South Pole-Aitken basin is an impact crater on Earth's Moon. Roughly in diameter and deep, it is one of the largest known impact craters in the Solar System. It is the largest, oldest and deepest basin recognized on the Moon. This moon basin was named for two features on opposing sides; the...

robot mission would only gather about 1 kilogram of Moon rock. If NASA had used similar robot technology, then between 300 and 2000 robot missions would have been needed to collect the current amount of Moon rocks that is held by NASA.

Concerning the composition of the Moon rocks, Kaysing asked: "Why was there no mention of gold, silver, diamonds, or other precious metals on the Moon? It was never discussed by the press or astronauts." Geologists realize that gold and silver deposits on Earth are the result of the action of hydrothermal fluids concentrating the precious metals into veins of ore. Since in 1969 water was believed to be absent on the Moon, no geologist would bother discussing the possibility of finding these on the Moon in any large amount.

President Nixon gave 135 sovereign states, all 50 US states and the US territories each an Apollo 11 Moon rock and Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock. Many of these Moon rocks have been stolen, destroyed, or are missing. The loss of so many Moon rocks has been used by conspiracists to bolster their claim that man never went to the Moon. NASA counters that accusation by stating that the vast majority of Moon rocks and soil gathered on the Moon are securely held at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. NASA also points out that independent scientists have studied the Moon rocks since they were brought to Earth.

Missions tracked by independent parties

Aside from NASA, a number of groups and individuals observed the Apollo missions as they happened. On later missions, NASA released information to the public explaining where and when the spacecraft could be sighted. Their flightpaths were tracked using radar and they were sighted and photographed using telescopes. Also, radio transmissions between the astronauts on the surface and in orbit were independently recorded.

Retroreflectors

The presence of retroreflectors (mirrors used as targets for Earth-based tracking lasers) from the Lunar laser ranging experiment

Lunar laser ranging experiment

The ongoing Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment measures the distance between the Earth and the Moon using laser ranging. Lasers on Earth are aimed at retroreflectors planted on the moon during the Apollo program, and the time for the reflected light to return is determined...

is evidence that there were landings.

External links

Clavius.org is devoted to analyzing the conspiracists' claims and attempting to debunk them.
Apollo Lunar Surface Journal Photos, audio, video and complete communication transcriptions of the six successful landings and Apollo 13, John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, December 18, 1969, p. 30.
Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and Mirrors John Schwartz for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

July 13, 2009
Buzz Aldrin Punches Moon Landing Conspiracy Theorist In The Face - video report by The Huffington Post
ABC News Refuting the Most Popular Apollo Moon Landing Hoax Theories
Darryl Cunningham Moon Hoax Comic

Television specials

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