Did we go to the moon?

[ericinboston]

Ok, I'm sure we've all heard the news coverage about the 40th anniversary of Apollo and the first man on the moon. But over the past 5-10 years it has struck me that maybe we never went and it's all a sham.

Although I do not read the Moon conspiracy theory websites or books, I do have my doubts....and here are my personal opinions that you can verify if you wish.

1)We landed on the moon in 1969...and during this landing the astronauts were able to hop out of the spacecraft, run around the moon, plant a flag in the ground, take photos AND video footage, beam it live back to the earth, and hop back in the ship and go home. As you may have heard recently, somehow, somewhere, NASA lost the ORIGINAL VIDEO FOOTAGE of this famous launch. The original footage was a much higher quality video than what was beamed back to earth on tvs. So let me get this straight: this event is probably the single most important event in mankind, yet NASA lost/erased the tapes sometime in the 1980s...10+ years AFTER the mission. Years. Not days. That's like saying Columbus took photos and his government lost them. Or that you went back in time and took a photo of Jesus and you lost it. Every single item of this mission should have been treaty as a national treasure yet somehow, ooops, it was destroyed. But wait, we have the real crappy copies if you want. Nobody ever wondered back when COLOR television was mainstream or the VCR was born or CD ROM was born or computer technology was jumping by leaps and bounds every 12 months to ask "hey, can we look at that original video footage? we have the tvs/monitors to enjoy it now". And NASA NEVER looked at the originals? Or did they? And if they did, did they make any scientific discoveries?

2)By allowing the original content to be destroyed, it directly feeds why folks think it never happened (among other reasons). If the original footage was "allowed" to be misplaced/destroyed, why? Did it capture little aliens in the background? Maybe an ancient artifact sculpture in the background? Maybe if seen in all it's glory (unlike the ugly black and white grainy fuzzy vids we all see from the mission) it would highlight a conspiracy such as a movie set (that we never went to the moon).

3)During later missions to the moon, the astronauts brought all sorts of toys along like those 4x4 rovers and shovels and stuff. Hmmm....here we are 40 years later and the best we can create is a rover that creeps along Mars at 1 mile a day unlike the Moon Rovers that appear to go about 20MPH. Seriously. Now I know we had to send the rovers to Mars to be un-manned but how the heck did we create a moon buggie? First, every ounce of weight is a huge detriment to liftoff (unless of course we have free rocket fuel). Every scientist/astronaut in the world tells you about how they can't bring anyting to space other than a book and an iPod because of weight restricitions...not to mention SPACE restrictions!

4)If we can build all those cool moon buggies in the 70's why can't we quickly whip up a few telescopes to stick on the moon? Afterall, 40 years have passed and the technologies we have created are amazing....nobody can figure out how to plop that (or something else) on the moon?

5)Why haven't we gone back to navigate the ENTIRE moon? Viewing it from a telescope is one thing...walking on it with hard core shovels and ground penetrating radar (and whatever else) is another. Seriously, why haven't we gone back? The answer is NOT "the moon is boring and we have nothing to learn so we spend gazillions on Mars instead".


I was born in 1970 and grew up hugely interested in space and science...and always believed in our Moon mission...but the past few years with everything new I see on tv about the solar system, other missions, other country's missions, etc. it just seems so ridiculous that we went there in 1969 and several times later with moon buggies and stuff that we can't even do today.


Thoughts? I have purposely avoided all the other topics such as wacky moon photos and star-less pictures and odd footprints. I'm more talking about what we HAVE and HAVE NOT done since the famous mission...and when you compare the missions, even after a mere 30 years of time, something seems amiss. Oh, and now we've somehow lost the original video footage (that surprisingly was only requested in the early 2000's for the first time).

[ThisIsNot]

Eh, I think we went to the moon. Maybe we didn't go in 1969 but we definitely went at later dates. Conspiracy theorists will look into a bunch of different events throughout history whether it be the moon landing, assassination of JFK, assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Holocaust, etc.

I can see why some people don't think that we went to the moon. Losing the original moon landing footage fuels a bunch of debate, Nasa's lack of interest in the moon adds to this, and there are a bunch of other things.

On a side note, I do have an answer for your third point. The moon is a 5 minute drive compared to how far away Mars is. Aluminum may not be very strong but it is light and its strength increases while in low gravity environments (due lower the "strength" of forces acting on it). Astronauts could easily haul a aluminum buggy to the moon as those vehicles weighed only a couple hundred pounds. However, Mars is so far away that we can really only send small satellite sized objects. It also takes a longer time for signals to get to Mars. That is why those Mars rovers move so slowly. They will move a short distance, send the picture back to Earth (which takes a while), Nasa analyzes it, they instruct the rover to do something (which takes a while to get there), and the process is repeated. There are also dust storms on Mars that limit when Nasa can communicate with their rovers.

Originally Posted by ericinboston

Ok, I'm sure we've all heard the news coverage about the 40th anniversary of Apollo and the first man on the moon. But over the past 5-10 years it has struck me that maybe we never went and it's all a sham.

A sham? You got that right. No highway signs are posted on the moon. No trash along the moon highways. No fast food places - on the lighted side at least - that I can see. No WalMarts. No drugs. You can't have American culture on the moon without drugs.

If we had really gone to the moon, politicians would have taxed us for national parks to preserve it. Politicians would have taxed us for native reservations on the moon and moved the natives there. Politicians would have taxed us for unneeded projects like bridges to nowhere on the moon. Politicians would have moved even more of our jobs to the moon. Those are the biggest reasons I see to say we never went to the moon.

The NASA engineers had to stay three miles back from the rocket. They couldn't even see the rocket with those dark glasses they had to wear. In those days, television was like the internet today. You could put up anything and call it whatever you wanted without any proof whatever. You notice that no one took a current newspaper up there and took a picture with the newspaper in the foreground and the earth in the background. Noooo. Not that you couldn't photoshop the picture anyway.

It was a sham slam.

[JesterEric]

I work for the Feds, and every so often we actually get this question, among others even more disturbing.

I tell them all the same thing: Maxim 1--When it comes to the government, never ascribe to conspiracy what can be credited to incompetence.

How could NASA erase the original footage? Because they probably needed the tape, and that kind of stuff is expensive, y'know.

Check the near disaster that was Apollo 13. You mean we built air filters for the landing module that are different from the air filters for the rocket? Yep.

There's a corollary to Maxim 1, though: Never underestimate the extremes of human achievement...in both directions Never say that "nobody" could do something that stupid...you know you'll be wrong.

On the more inspirational side, though, never doubt that "someone" can't do it. Think of Einstein, who first wondered what you'd see at the edge of a lightning bolt. Think of Stephen Hawking, trapped in a body that doesn't "work right," but has a mind that stretches out beyond the known universe into dimensions only he can see.

Of course, I could just be working for the Men in Black...come closer to the screen and take a look at this shiny new pen I got....

It seems strange that we had a successful moon launch when the previous 20 launches blew up on the pad or went out of control.