NASA 는 달에 가지 않았다 ? moon hoax 달 착륙에 대한 진실

결과부터 이야기하자면 NASA 는 달에 갔다, 고 나는 믿는다. 이는 나의 전적인 물리조교에 대한 믿음으로 인한 것이다. 

Hi,

  Making equipment that can survive in outter space is actually fairly easy – making it possible for humans to survive is also very easy. In fact, making a camera that can deal with the pressure differences in taking it from sea-level to deep under the sea is a bigger challenge than making a camera that can take pictures on the moon.

 

  In general, getting to the moon is well within our tech. The moon hoax is just that – a hoax – a moon hoax hoax. We did go to the moon, NASA did land on it. Perhaps the best proof is looking through a powerful telescope to look at the surface of the moon where you can see evidence of our past presences there.

 

                Cheers,

                                Gordon.

yun young ‏@andsoilove

내 사랑 물리 조교는 역시 내 사랑 물리 조교, 이메일 답장이 신속하고 정확하고 친절하고 정교하고 신뢰가 가고 고맙지 #love

내가 이리 단순하지. 나의 사랑은 신뢰를 키우고 그렇게 나는 물리 조교의 말을 믿지, 의심 없이 제로 none. 더불어 그의 인종은 미국인이 아니다. 인종에 대해서는 여기까지.

아무튼 논쟁 자체는 흥미롭다. 이는 자연과학이 아닌 사회적인 이슈이다. 당시 space war 를 고려하여 충분히 제시 될 수 있는 설이고 충분히 믿을 법한 설이다. 재미있다.

자료: http://bbs2.ruliweb.daum.net/gaia/do/ruliweb/default/read?articleId=13433142&bbsId=G005&itemId=145

‘달 착륙 음모설 : 우리는 달에 착륙했는가?’  Did we land on the moon?  - Fox TV, 2001년 2월 15일  아폴로 11호가 250,000 마일의 무중력 공간을 항해하여 인류가 한 번도 가본 적이 없는 곳(달)에 갔었다는 이야기는 너무나 잘 알려진 이야기이며 인류 역사상 가장 위대한 순간이었다. 그러나 아폴로 로켓들을 설계했던 회사에 근무했던 빌 케이싱은 다음과 같이 언급하고 있다.  “60년대에는 우리는 절대로 달에 갈수 없을 것이라고 생각하게 하였던 많은 문제점들이 있었습니다.”  [빌 케이싱, Bill Kaysing (Moon hoax investigator)]  빌 케이싱은 여러가지 모순된 점을 열거한다. 우주공간이 맑음에도 불구하고 달의 검은 하늘에서 별들이 안 보인다는 점, 공기가 없는 달에서 미국 성조기가 펄럭이고 있다는 점, 강력한 로켓이 불을 뿜었을 달착륙선 아래에, 돌풍에 의해 생긴 구덩이가 없는 것... 이러한 증거들로 인하여 빌 케이싱은 인류가 달에 가본 적이 없다고 믿게 되지만, 나사는 이러한 의견을 일축하고 있다.    “언제든지 이상한 이론들을 믿는 사람들은 존재하게 되어 있고, 저희가 달 착륙 계획을 어떻게 조작할 수 있었다고 하는 그 이론은 정말 말도 안되지요.”  [브라이언 웰쉬(Brian Welch, 나사 대변인)]  과연 나사가 전 세계를 속였을까? 전직 우주인인 브라이언 오레리(Brian O'Leary, NASA astronaut)는 다음과 같이 말하고 있다.  “아폴로 계획에서, 그들이 정말로 달 위를 걸었는가에 대해서 저는 장담을 드릴수가 없군요... 나사는 감추어 버릴수 있는 능력이 있었지요. 편법으로라도 달에 처음으로 갔다는 이름을 남기기 위해서였겠지요.”  과연 정부가 사기극을 고려했어야 할만큼 달에 처음으로 가는 것이 중요했을까? 그 해답을 얻으려면 40여년 전, 미국과 구소련이 세계의 지배를 위해서 서로 경쟁하던 냉전의 시기로 돌아가야 한다.  “사람들은 우주경쟁에서 이기는 나라가 냉전에서 이긴다고 믿었는데, 그것을 먼저 달에 가는 것이라 생각했었지요. 그 당시는 국가적인 혼란기였다고 할 수 있지요.”  [하워드 맥컬디(Howard McCurd, Ph. D., Space Historian, American University)]  1957년 10월 4일, 구소련은 최초의 위성인 스푸트닉을 궤도에 쏘아 올리면서 미국을 경악하게 만들었다. 당시 뉴욕타임즈는 미국인들에게 스푸투닉에는 그 고도에서 도시로 떨어뜨릴 수 있는 핵폭탄이 장착되어 있지 않다고 설명하는 기사를 썼어야 했다. 많은 사람들이 소련의 최후 목적이 달에 미사일 기지를 건설하는 것으로 두려워했다. 한편 그 동안에도, 미국의 우주계획은 지구에서 뜨는 것조차도 어려워하고 있었다.  “달에 갔다가 안전하게 지구로 귀환할 수 있는 확률은 약 0.0017%였었습니다. 한 마디로, 현실적으로 불가능하였지요. 제 생각에는 60년대에 그들이 이렇게 생각했던 것 같아요, ‘할수가 없으면, 조작하라.’ ... 우주인들은 세턴 5호와 함께 이륙은 했습니다. 그리고, 눈에 안띄기 위해서, 그냥 지구주위를 8일 동안 선회하였던 것이었지요. 그리고, 그 중간에, 우주인들이 달에 있다는 가짜 영상들을 보여 주었습니다. 8일째 되는 날, 그들은 사령탑을 우주선에서 띄어내서 지구로 돌아오지요, TV에서 보여진 것과 같이요."  [빌 케이싱]    이 이론은 정부가 화성 계획을 조작하여서 전 세계를 기만하려 했다는 내용의 1978년 영화 [카프리콘 원, Capricorn One, 1978] 원의 모태가 된다. 아폴로호의 영상은 [카프리콘 원]의 장면들과 현저하게 비슷하다.    “저는 나사의 능력이었다면 인류최대의 사기극을 감행할 수 있었다는 것을 분명히 믿습니다. 달에 아무도 안보내고, 텔레비전 세트장에서 재창조를 하는 것이지요. 그 당시에도 그런 일은 할 수가 있었습니다. 그 정도 기술은 있었거든요.”  [폴 레저러스, Paul Lazarus (Producer, Capricorn one)]  빌 케이싱은 나사의 400억불 예산으로는, 달에는 못가더라도, 사기극을 조작할만한 충분한 물자가 되었다고 말한다.  “제가 나사와 정부가 달 착륙을 조작했다고 믿는 이유는, 무엇보다도 그것은 기술적으로 불가능했었기 때문이지요. 따라서 그들은 사람들을 믿게 하기 위한 대안을 생각해내야 했었던 것입니다.”  [빌 케이싱]  빌 케이싱에 따르면 달 착륙 장면은 사실상 네바다 주의 비밀 군사기지인, 일명 ‘51번 지역’으로 불리는 곳 내부의 사막에서 촬영되었다고 한다. 러시아 스파이 위성이 촬영한 사진들에 의하면 ‘51번 지역’ 안에는 영화 음향 효과실을 닮은 격납고들 외에도, 달의 표면과 같이 메마르면서도, 우연하게도 분화구들로 덮인 땅도 보인다고 한다. 그렇다면, 몇 십 억의 사람들이 네바다 주의 사막을 달이라고 생각하게 만드는 것이 정말로 가능했었을까? 이것에 대하여 빌 케이싱은 충분히 가능하고, 아마도 그것이 51번 지역이 그토록 삼엄하게 경계되는 이유일 것이라고 주장한다.  우리들은 1969년 7월 20일에, 달착륙선이 미국우주인들을 달에 내려주었다고 알고 있다. 하지만 그것은 단순히 철사에 의해 움직여진 영화 소품은 아니었을까? 빌 케이싱에 따르면 그렇기 때문에 나사의 공식적인 달 착륙 영상에는 엔진소음이 없었다고 한다. 달착륙선이 달의 표면을 비행하면서 촬영한 장면을 살펴보면, 우주인의 목소리는 들리지만 엔진 소리는 아예 들리지가 않는 것을 발견할 수 있다고 한다.  “로켓 엔진의 소음은 약 140 - 150데시발입니다. 한마디로, 굉장히 크지요. 엔진소리 사이에서 우주인들의 목소리를 들을 수 있는 것이 가능할까요?”  [빌 케이싱]  달에 가기 불과 몇달 전에, 일링톤 공군기지에서 달착륙선의 시험비행이 있었다. 나사의 카메라가 시험비행을 촬영하였는데, 닐 암스트롱은 다루기 힘든 달착륙선을 조종하려고 고생하다가 추락하였고, 마지막 순간에 암스트롱은 탈출하였다고 한다. 통제된 지구의 환경에서도 달착륙선이 그렇게 불안정하고 조종하기 힘들었는데, 어떻게 전혀 다른 환경의 달에서 훨씬 안정된 착륙을 하였을까?  달착륙선 시험비행... 운전미숙으로 추락하고... 암스트롱은 탈출한다... “달착륙선은 중앙에 설치된 엔진이 하나있었고, 작은 반동추진엔진 둘이 위에 있었지요. 그것들이 내려갈 때에 고도를 조정하게 되었지요. 비밀을 하나 말씀드리지요. 조종실 안에서 조금만 잘못 움직여도, 비행 패턴이 바뀌어집니다. 그러면 기울어지게 되고, 그리고 나서는 돌기 시작할 것입니다.”  [랄프 리네(Ralph Rene, Author / Scientist)]  “달 착륙이 가짜라고 믿는 사람들의 논점은, 상당히 정교한데, 그들은... 그러한 이론을 지지하려면 그래야겠지요. 아무튼, 아무도 논박할 수 없는 증거가 하나 있는데, 그것은 달에는 아직도 발자국들이 남아있다는 것이지요.”  [브라이언 웰쉬, 나사대변인]    하지만 달사기극을 주장하는 사람들은, 그 발자국들 조차도 의심스럽다고 주장한다.  “강력한 로켓의 엔진이 달의 표면에 다가온다면, 그것은 모든 먼지를 날려버리는데, 그 후에 달착륙선 주위로 수많은 발자국들이 보인다는 것은, 불가능하다고 생각합니다... 달착륙선의 아래에 엔진 바람에 의한 구덩이도 없다는 것이 제가 찾은 달사기극에 대한 증거 중, 가장 결정적인 것의 하나입니다.”  [빌 케이싱]    사실상 6번의 달 착륙 자료에서, 엔진바람의 흔적은 보이지 않는다. 하지만, 달착륙선 전문가인 폴 젤드(Paul Fjeld, NASA LEM specialist)는 그 흔적이 없는 이유를 설명할 수가 있다고 한다.  “하강하는 엔진에서 나오는 힘은 약 1,500 - 2,000 파운드정도인데, 이 정도 힘으로는 먼지를 밀어내는 정도만 되지, 타거나 그런 것은 없습니다.”  [폴 젤드, 나사 달착륙선 전문가]  “그렇다면, 만약 그들이 정말로 달에 내렸으면, 그 먼지들은 달착륙선의 다리에 내려 앉았을 터인데, 달착륙선의 다리들에서는 아무런 먼지의 흔적도 안보입니다. 제가 혼자서 이것을 발견했을 때에 말했었지요, ‘내가 지금 달에 내린 달착륙선을 보고 있을 가능성은 없다’ 라고요... 암스트롱이 ‘한 사람의 작은 발걸음이지만... 인류의 크나큰 도약입니다’ 라는 말을 했을 때에, 그가 만든 발자국은 51번 지역에서 아주 쉽게 만들 수 있었던 발자국이었지요.”  [빌 케이싱]  빌 케이싱에 따르면, 달 표면으로부터 달착륙선이 출발할 때, 엔진 끝에서 배기 가스가 보이지 않는다고 한다. 달 착륙선의 윗부분이 배기 가스도 없이 갑자기 올라가는 것이 마치 케이블로 끌려 올라가는 것 같다고 주장한다.  “달 착륙이 다 가짜였고 사기극이었다고 주장하려면, 모든 증거들, 다시 말해서 달 착륙의 진실을 입증할 수 있는 모든 물리적, 과학적인 실험들에 대해서도 다 가짜였다고 말해야 하지요.”  [브라이언 웰쉬, 나사대변인]  이것에 대해 빌 케이싱은 다음과 같이 반박하고 있다.  “제가 아폴로계획이 가짜라고 확신하게 된 것은 단순히 하나의 어떤 정보에 의해서가 아니고, 전체적인 것을 보고 내린 결론이었지요. 그것은 전부 다 조작이었습니다.”  만약 달 착륙이 정말로 영화 세트장에서 촬영된 것이었다면 그 증거는 어디에 있을까? 이것에 대해서 수상경력까지 있는 영화제작자겸 사진사인 데이비드 펄시는 바로 나사의 달 사진과 비디오에 그 증거가 있다고 주장한다.  “저희들의 조사에 의하면, 아폴로 계획에서의 이미지들은 진실되지도, 정확하지도 않습니다. 저희들이 보기에는, 아폴로 사진들은 조작되었습니다. 많은 이미지들이 모순성과 이상함으로 가득합니다.”  [데이비드 S. 펄시, David S. Percy (Royal photographic society, 로얄 사진학회)]  사기극을 주장하는 사람들은 나사가 일부러 당시의 이미지들을 보기 힘들게 만들었다고 한다.    “나사는 텔레비전이라는 독특한 매체를 통해서 사기극을 조작했지요. 그들이 완벽하게 통제할 수 있었던, 흑백의, 조잡한 화면은 모든 사람들에게 그것은 달이라고 믿게 하였지요. 우리들은 의심할 수도 없었습니다. 그들은 영상들과 소리들에 대해서 모든 영향력을 가지고 있었지요. 제 말은, 말하기 안타깝지만, 그것은 사람들이 생각하는 것보다도 쉬웠었다는 것이지요.”  [바트 시브럴, Bart Sibrel, (Investigative Journalist, 조사 언론인)]  화면이 깨끗하지 않음에도 불구하고 달 사기극 조사원들은 그 이미지들이 조작되었음을 보여준다는 증거를 찾아냈다. 우주인의 움직임이 지구의 6분의 1인 달의 중력에서 움직이는 것처럼 보이지만, 데이비드 S. 펄시에 따르면 그 필름의 속도를 두 배로 빠르게 하면 우주인들은 지구에서 달리는 것처럼 보인다고 한다.  그리고 달에 공기나 바람이 없는데, 미국 국기가 펄럭이는 것도 그 증거 중의 하나라고 주장한다. 영상을 보면 절대로 우주인들의 움직임 때문에 펄럭이는 것이 아니라 바람에 의한 것임을 알 수 있다.  또한 다루기 힘든 우주복의 디자인 때문에 우주인들은 그들의 가슴에 장착된 카메라들을 다루기가 극히 힘들었을 것이다. 만약 그 카메라들이 다루기 힘든 것이었다면 어떻게 그리도 깨끗하고 정밀하게 조준된 사진들이 수천 장이나 찍혔을까?    달 사기극 조사원들은 달 사진에서 가장 큰 결점은 조명이었다고 말한다. 달에서 유일한 빛은 태양이었지만 아폴로 14호에서 찍은 사진에서는 그림자들이 다른 방향으로 드리워지는 것이 보이는데, 그것은 여러 개의 빛의 있었다는 것을 보여주고 있다. 또한 달 착륙선에 의해 만들어진 그림자 안으로 내리고 있는 우주인은 온 몸이 잘 보이고 있다. 어째서 그는 어둠에 묻히지 않았을까? 어떤 사진은 태양이 달착륙선의 뒤에 있는데도 달착륙선의 앞부분이 선명하게 보이고 있다. 이것은 그곳에 하나 이상의 빛이 있었다는 것이고, 한마디로 달이 아니었다는 것을 알 수 있다고 한다.  조명은 태양 하나였는데... 그림자는 여러 방향으로 나 있는 이유는? 태양의 반대쪽인데 환하게 보이는 것은 조명 때문일까? 이러한 주장에 대해서 나사는 무시하고 있다. (나사의 주장이 그다지 설득력이 없어 보이는 이유는?)  “아폴로 우주인들이 찍은 사진들이 조작이라는 주장은 아주 많습니다. 그리고 그런 주장들은 너무 많아서, 다 해명을 해주는 것은 쓸데없는 일입니다.”  [브라이언 웰쉬, 나사대변인]  다른 시간, 다른 장소에서 찍은 이미지가 똑같은 배경을 가지고 있는 사진도 있다. 또한 사진기의 초점이 표시되는 십자 표시도 의문점을 드러내고 있다. 십자선들은 모든 달 사진기에 영구적으로 새겨져 있었다. 한마디로 모든 이미지들의 위에 나타나야 한다는 소리이다. 그러나 어떤 사진에서는 십자선이 가려져 있는 경우도 있다. 이것에 대해서 의혹을 제기하는 측은 기술적인 손질과 변조로 이미지를 처리했다고 주장한다.  십자선 위에 있는 이미지는???   이러한 의혹적인 사진들과 비디오들 앞에서 나사는 달 사기극을 논박하고 있다.  “굉장히 복잡하기도 하고 굉장히 바보같기도 하지요. 관찰을 잘못한, 물리적으로 틀리고, 과학적으로 틀리고, 역사적으로도 틀린 논쟁들이 있지요. 이러한 논쟁안에는 복잡하게 짜인 함정들 뿐이지요.”  [브라이언 웰쉬, 나사대변인]  “모든 사진들과 영상들을 보고난 후에, 완전히 확신하게 되었지요. 저의 생명을 걸고서라도, 인류는 달에 가지 않았다는 것을요. 저는 그것을 압니다.”  [바트 시브럴, 조사언론인]  만약 달사기극 조사원들의 주장이 옳다면, 나사는 어떻게 내부에서 막는 사람도 없이 그러한 사기극을 행할 수가 있었을까?  버질 거스 그리슴은 최초의 7명의 우주인들 중의 하나였다. 그러나 그는 우주계획에 대해 꺼리김없이 비평하였고, “누군가가 죽게될 것이다” 라는 말을 하였다고 한다. 그는 1967년 1월 27일, 최초의 달착륙 2년전, 모의 실험 중에 사고로 죽음을 당한다. 그리슴의 가족들은 그것이 누군가 고의로 일으킨 일이었다고 생각한다. 거스 그리슴과 아폴로 1호의 우주인들이 비극적인 사고의 피해자들이었을까? 아니면 그들이 너무 많이 알고 있었기 때문에 고의적으로 제거된 것은 아닐까? 그 화재의 원인은 아직도 밝혀지지 않았고, 그 사령탑은 군사기지에 폐쇄되어 있다.  토마스 로날드 베론은 아폴로 1호의 건축기간에 안전검사관이었다. 화재 후에, 베론은 국회에서 아폴로 계획은 정말 엉망이고 미합중국은 절대로 달에 갈 수 없다고 증언했다. 계획 자체가 중도 포기될지도 모른다는 생각도 있었다. 그러나 베론은 그 증언이 있은 후 정확히 일주일 후에 교통사고로 죽는다. 베론의 보고서는 사라졌고, 오늘날까지도 발견되지 않았다. 이후 아폴로 계획은 계속되었고, 때 아닌 죽음들도 이어졌다.  빌 케이싱은 거짓을 숨기고 감추기 위해서는 그것에 대해서 말을 할 수 있는 사람들을 제거해야만 했다고 주장한다. 그러나 나사는 아폴로 계획에 동참한 25만명의 사람들(간접적으로 참여한 50만명까지 합치면 75만명)을 언급하면서 그렇게 많은 사람들을 상대로 비밀을 유지할 수는 없을 것이라고 주장한다. 그러나 바트 시브릴은 소수의 살람들을 제외하고는 전체적인 모습을 볼 수 있는 사람들이 없었다고 말한다.  의문스러운 죽음들, 사진들이 조작된 흔적, 공기 없는 진공공간에서 펄럭이는 깃발들만이 달착륙을 의심하게 하는 원인은 아니다. 우주인들은 우주여행에서 절대로 살아남을 수 없었다는 주장도 있다.  “우리가 달에 갈수 없었던 이유는 그 소수의 사람들이 알았던 현상 때문인데, 그것은 벤 알렌 방사선 밸트였지요.”  [바트 시브럴, 조사언론인]  지구 지구 500마일 위에는, 강력한 방사선층이 지구를 수천마일의 두께로 둘러싸고 있다. 이곳을 통과하는 사람은 누구든지 방사선 때문에 극심하게 아프게 되든지 혹은 짧은 시간 안에 아예 죽을 수도 있다고 한다. 아폴로 계획을 제외하고는 단 한 번도 유인 우주선으로 이 죽음의 방사선을 통과하려 시도해 본적이 없었다.    “제미니, 멀큐리, 스카이랩 등 역사상 모든 유인우주선 계획들 중에서 이 방사선층을 통과해 가본 것은 오직 달계획뿐이었습니다.”  [바트 시브럴, 조사언론인]  물리학자인 랄프 리네에 따르면, 우주인들을 보호하기 위해서는 사령탑에 6피트 두께의 납이 필요했었다고 한다. 그러나 그들이 가지고 있었던 것은 종이 두께의 알류미늄 외부벽이었고, 그들의 우주복도 유리섬유, 알류미늄 섬유, 그리고 실리콘 섬유로 만들어져 있었다.  “지구에서 X 레이를 찍을 때에도 납으로 보호를 하는데, 우주인들이 얇은 알류미늄막으로 보호되고 있었다는 것은 참으로 재미있습니다.”  [빌 케이싱, 달 사기극 조사원]  만약, 벤 알렌 벨트가 우주인들을 죽이지 않았더라고, 더욱더 무서운 우주공간의 방사선이 그들을 죽였을 것이라는 설도 있다. 태양의 강렬한 자기폭풍은 격렬한 방사선을 우주공간에 보내기 때문이다. 랄프 리네에 따르면, 아폴로 16호 계획은, 현재까지의 기록된 태양의 가장 강력했던 폭풍과 동시에 행해졌다고 한다. 방사선의 영향력이 두발의 손실, 암, 혹은 죽음에 까지 미치게 할 정도로 무서웠지만, 아폴로 16호의 승무원들에게는 아무런 영향을 끼치지 않았다.  “나사에게는 또 다른 문제도 있었는데, 그 중 하나가 달의 표면은 인간들에게는 너무 험하다는 것이었지요. 어두운 곳, 그러니까는 우주선의 그림자 같은 곳에서는, 온도가 영하 250도까지 내려갑니다. 태양 아래에서는, 온도가 영상 250까지도 올라가고요.”  [랄프 리네, 작가 / 과학자]    랄프 리네에 따르면, 우주인들이 착용하였던 우주복들은 강렬한 열과 방사선으로부터 충분한 보호를 해줄 수가 없었다고 한다. 하지만 나사는 이 주장이 틀렸다고 한다.  “달 표면의 방사선이 우주인들에게 해를 끼칠 수 있었다는 이론은, 저희들이 그 장비들을 어떤 식으로 설계했는가에 대한 무지와 미숙한 과학적 지식 때문이지요. 그들이 입고 있던 우주복들은 믿을 수 없을 만큼 강하고, 아주 많은 것들에 견딜 수가 있었습니다.”  [브라이언 웰쉬, 나사대변인]  “만약 그 우주복들에 나사가 말하는 만큼의 성능이 있다면, 저는 그들이 한, 두 명의 사람들에게 우주복을 입혀서, 3마일짜리 섬에서(방사능에 노출된) 뜨거운 구덩이 안에서 쓰레기를 치우게 하는 것을 한번 보고 싶습니다. 하지만 그들은 할 수가 없고, 하지도 않을 것이에요.”  [랄프 리네, 작가 / 과학자]    아폴로 우주인들이 달까지의 여행으로부터 단 한 번도 심하게 아파본적이 없다는 사실은 변함이 없다. 그들이 처음부터 지구의 안전한 대기층을 떠나본 적이 없었기 때문은 아니었을까? 치명적인 방사선에 대한 공포가 러시아 인들이 달 계획을 포기하게 만들었던 요인의 하나였다고 한다.  “그것이 러시아가 사람을 달에 보내려 하지 않았던 가장 중요한 이유였습니다.”  [빌 케이싱, 달 사기극 조사원]  “물론 저희들은 미지의 우주공간에 가는 것에 대해 걱정을 했었습니다. 당연히 두려워 했었지요. 저희들은 방사선이 사람에게 어떤 영향을 끼칠지에 대해 아무것도 알수가 없었습니다. 저희들은 그 방사선이 우주선 자체에도 영향을 미칠 가능성에 대해서도 추측해 보았었지요.”  [보리스 발렌티노브치 볼리노브(Boris Valentinovich Volinov, 러시아 우주비행사)]    과연 미국 정부가 이러한 믿을 수 없는 사기극을 행하였을까? 논쟁은 여전히 오늘날까지 계속되고 있다.  “저의 개인적인 견해이지만, 저는 오랜 기간의 연구 끝에, 나사는 인간을 달에 내려본 적이 없다는 결론을 확신하게 되었습니다.”  [랄프 리네, 작가 / 과학자]  “우리가 달에 가지 않았다고 말을 하는 사람들은 완전한 바보라고 생각합니다.”  [줄리언 스키어, 전직 나사 대변인]  “누구든지 저를 미치광이, 바보 혹은 정신이 돌았다고 하시고 싶으시면 저는 환영합니다. 하지만, 그들이 모든 곳에 널려 있는 증거들을, 조사해보는 것도 물론 환영합니다.”  [빌 케이싱, 달 사기극 조사원]  “결론은... 미합중국은 1960년대와 1970년대에 달에 갔었다는 것입니다. 그것이 끝입니다.”  [브라이언 웰쉬, 나사대변인]  이 논쟁이 끝날 수 있는 길이 있을까? 전문가들이 동의하는 유일한 해답은 250,000마일 거리에 있다. 만약 나사가 정말로 달에 가보았었다면, 6번의 성공적인 아폴로 계획들의 잔재들이 달에 남겨졌을 것이다. 달착륙선의 하단 부분들, 버려진 월면차들, 그리고 매 착륙 지점들마다 미국 국기들이 여전히 남아있을 것이다.  “저는 나사와 모든 그들의 후원자들이 가장 강력한 망원경으로 달에 달착륙선이 있는지를 관찰해 보기를 바랍니다. 만약 달착륙선이 있다면, 저는 달 사기극에 대해서 한 마디도 더 하지 않을 것입니다. 하지만 없다면, 저는 저의 주장을 굽히지 않을 것입니다.”  [빌 케이싱, 달 사기극 조사원]  아쉽게도 달을 그토록 자세하게 관찰할 수 있는 망원경은 없다. 아폴로 계획들의 잔재들은 달에서 말없는 증언을 하고 있을까? 아니면 사기극이었을까?  2년 안에, 일본은 달의 근접사진을 찍을 인공위성을 보낸다고 한다. 거기에서 무엇을 발견할까? 그때까지, 질문은 남아있다. “인류는 달에 가보았는가?”  (당시 이 프로가 방영된 후 10년이 다 되어간다. 그래도 여전히 논쟁은 계속된다. 도대체 일본은 뭐하고 있었나?)  인류는 달에 가지않았다? 주장의 반박글:http://bbs2.ruliweb.daum.net/gaia/do/ruliweb/default/etc/327/read?articleId=14654223&bbsId=G005&itemId=145&pageIndex=1

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NASA 의 반론 2001 

자료 http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast23feb_2/

According to the show NASA was a blundering movie producer thirty years ago. For example, Conspiracy Theory pundits pointed out a seeming discrepancy in Apollo imagery: Pictures of astronauts transmitted from the Moon don't include stars in the dark lunar sky -- an obvious production error! What happened? Did NASA film-makers forget to turn on the constellations?

Most photographers already know the answer: It's difficult to capture something very bright and something else very dim on the same piece of film -- typical emulsions don't have enough "dynamic range." Astronauts striding across the bright lunar soil in their sunlit spacesuits were literally dazzling. Setting a camera with the proper exposure for a glaring spacesuit would naturally render background stars too faint to see.

Here's another one: Pictures of Apollo astronauts erecting a US flag on the Moon show the flag bending and rippling. How can that be? After all, there's no breeze on the Moon....

Not every waving flag needs a breeze -- at least not in space. When astronauts were planting the flagpole they rotated it back and forth to better penetrate the lunar soil (anyone who's set a blunt tent-post will know how this works). So of course the flag waved! Unfurling a piece of rolled-up cloth with stored angular momentum will naturally result in waves and ripples -- no breeze required!

Left: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin deploy a U.S. flag on the Moon in 1969. [more]

The Fox documentary went on with plenty more specious points. You can find detailed rebuttals to each of them atBadAstronomy.com and the Moon Hoax web page. (These are independent sites, not sponsored by NASA.)

The best rebuttal to allegations of a "Moon Hoax," however, is common sense. Evidence that the Apollo program really happened is compelling: A dozen astronauts (laden with cameras) walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. Nine of them are still alive and can testify to their experience. They didn't return from the Moon empty-handed, either. Just as Columbus carried a few hundred natives back to Spain as evidence of his trip to the New World, Apollo astronauts brought 841 pounds of Moon rock home to Earth.

"Moon rocks are absolutely unique," says Dr. David McKay, Chief Scientist for Planetary Science and Exploration at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC). McKay is a member of the group that oversees the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at JSC where most of the Moon rocks are stored. "They differ from Earth rocks in many respects," he added.

"For example," explains Dr. Marc Norman, a lunar geologist at the University of Tasmania, "lunar samples have almost no water trapped in their crystal structure, and common substances such as clay minerals that are ubiquitous on Earth are totally absent in Moon rocks."

"We've found particles of fresh glass in Moon rocks that were produced by explosive volcanic activity and by meteorite impacts over 3 billion years ago," added Norman. "The presence of water on Earth rapidly breaks down such volcanic glass in only a few million years. These rocks must have come from the Moon!"

Right: A glass spherule (about 0.6 mm in diameter) produced by a meteorite impact into lunar soil. Features on the surface are glass splashes, welded mineral fragments, and microcraters produced by space weathering processes at the surface of the moon. SEM image by D. S. McKay (NASA Photo S71-48109).

Fortunately not all of the evidence needs a degree in chemistry or geology to appreciate. An average person holding a Moon rock in his or her hand can plainly see that the specimen came from another world.

"Apollo moon rocks are peppered with tiny craters from meteoroid impacts," explains McKay. This could only happen to rocks from a planet with little or no atmosphere... like the Moon.

Meteoroids are nearly-microscopic specks of comet dust that fly through space at speeds often exceeding 50,000 mph -- ten times faster than a speeding bullet. They pack a considerable punch, but they're also extremely fragile. Meteoroids that strike Earth's atmosphere disintegrate in the rarefied air above our stratosphere. (Every now and then on a dark night you can see one -- they're called meteors.) But the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it. The tiny space bullets can plow directly into Moon rocks, forming miniature and unmistakable craters. 

"There are plenty of museums, including the Smithsonian and others, where members of the public can touch and examine rocks from the Moon," says McKay. "You can see the little meteoroid craters for yourself."

Right: Nick-named "Big Muley," this 11.7 kg Moon rock was the largest returned to Earth by Apollo astronauts. One side of Big Muley was peppered with meteoroid "zap pits."Below right: A close-up view of 1 mm diameter zap pits shows tiny craters lined with black glass surrounded by a white halo of shocked rock. [more]

Just as meteoroids constantly bombard the Moon so do cosmic rays, and they leave their fingerprints on Moon rocks, too. "There are isotopes in Moon rocks, isotopes we don't normally find on Earth, that were created by nuclear reactions with the highest-energy cosmic rays," says McKay. Earth is spared from such radiation by our protective atmosphere and magnetosphere.

Even if scientists wanted to make something like a Moon rock by, say, bombarding an Earth rock with high energy atomic nuclei, they couldn't. Earth's most powerful particle accelerators can't energize particles to match the most potent cosmic rays, which are themselves accelerated in supernova blastwaves and in the violent cores of galaxies.

Indeed, says McKay, faking a Moon rock well enough to hoodwink an international army of scientists might be more difficult than the Manhattan Project. "It would be easier to just go to the Moon and get one," he quipped.

And therein lies an original idea: Did NASA go to the Moon to collect props for a staged Moon landing? It's an interesting twist on the conspiracy theory that TV producers might consider for their next episode of the Moon Hoax.

"I have here in my office a 10-foot high stack of scientific books full of papers about the Apollo Moon rocks," added McKay. "Researchers in thousands of labs have examined Apollo Moon samples -- not a single paper challenges their origin! And these aren't all NASA employees, either. We've loaned samples to scientists in dozens of countries [who have no reason to cooperate in any hoax]."

Even Dr. Robert Park, Director of the Washington office of the American Physical Society and a noted critic of NASA's human space flight program, agrees with the space agency on this issue. "The body of physical evidence that humans did walk on the Moon is simply overwhelming."

자료 wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories 

Motives

[edit]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. The three main theories are below.

The Space Race

The US government deemed it vital that it win the Space Race against the Soviet Union. 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.^[17]

A main reason for the race to the Moon was the Cold War. Philip Plait states in Bad Astronomy that the Soviets—with their own competing Moon program and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data—would have cried foul if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing,^[18] especially since their own program had failed. Proving a hoax would have been a huge propaganda win for the Soviets. Bart Sibrel responded, "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep spacecraft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were suddenly canceled."^[19]

However, the Soviets had been sending unmanned spacecraft to the Moon since 1959,^[20] and "during 1962, deep space tracking facilities were introduced at IP-15 in Ussuriisk and IP-16 inEvpatoria, while Saturn communication stations were added to IP-3, 4 and 14",^[21] the latter having a 100 million km range.^[22] The Soviet Union tracked the Apollo missions at the Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment".^[23] Vasily Mishin, 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$30 billion to go to the Moon, and Bill Kaysing claims that this could have been used to "pay off" many people.^[24] 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".^[17] Others have claimed that, with all the known and unknown hazards,^[25] NASA would not have risked the public humiliation of astronauts crashing to their deaths on the lunar surface, broadcast on live TV.^[26]

Vietnam War

It is claimed that the landings helped the US government because they were a popular distraction from the Vietnam War; and so manned landings suddenly ended about the same time that the US ended its role in the Vietnam War.^[27]

[edit]Claimed motives of the conspiracists

This section requires expansion. (April 2011)

Some have argued that one of the main motives of conspiracists is making money from pseudoscience. In November 2002, actor Tom Hanks, who starred in the movie Apollo 13 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 astronaut Jim Lovell (Apollo 8 and Apollo 13) because he said that he went to the Moon.^[28]

[edit]Conspiracists and their main proposals

• Bill Kaysing (1922–2005) – an ex-employee of Rocketdyne,^[29] the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V 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,^[30][31] 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%.^[32] NASA and others have debunked the claims made in the book.
• Bart Sibrel – a filmmaker, produced and directed four films for his company AFTH,^[33] including a film in 2001 called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon,^[34] 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,^[35] which disproves the documentary's main argument that the Apollo crew faked their distance from the Earth command module, 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 after Sibrel confronted Aldrin with his theories^[36] 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.^[37]
• William L. Brian – a nuclear engineer who self-published a book in 1982 called Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, 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. 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.^[38]
• Ralph Rene – an inventor and 'self taught' engineering buff. Writer of NASA Mooned America (second edition OCLC 36317224).
• 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 – 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, the big problem is getting people there". He suggests that NASA sent robot missions because radiation levels in space would be deadly.^[39] Another variant on this is the idea that NASA and its contractors did not recover quickly enough from the Apollo 1 fire, and so all the early Apollo missions were faked, with Apollo 14 or 15 being the first real mission.^[40]
• 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 (Fox News Channel) to argue that no one has landed on the Moon.
• Clyde Lewis – radio talk show host.^[41]
• 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 centimetres (9.4 to 14 in) to the right of the camera.^[42] This matches with the sunlit part of Armstrong's spacesuit.^[43]
• Yuri Mukhin – 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 and some Soviet scientists helped NASA fake the landings.^[44]
• Alexander Popov – Russian doctor of physical-mathematical sciences 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 was in fact a camouflaged Saturn 1B^[45] and denies all Moon landing evidence.^[46]
• 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 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 superalloy used in the F-1 engine.^[47][48][49]
• Philippe Lheureux – 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.^[50]
• Joe Rogan – 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.

[edit]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 belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejectionsand cosmic rays made such a trip impossible.^[30]

Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, gave detailed answers to the conspiracists' claims on the laboratory's website.^[51] 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.^[52]

[edit]Number of people involved

According to James Longuski (Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue University), the conspiracy theories are impossible because of their size and complexity. More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences, plus 6 others who flew with them as Command Module Pilots as direct witnesses, and another 9 astronauts who orbited the moon (which proves, at least, that the Saturn-V was capable of reaching the moon. A feat which some hoax theorists claim wasn't possible.) 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.^[53][54] 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 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), Jillette said the government could not have silenced everyone if the landings were faked.

[edit]Photograph and film oddities

Main article: Examination of Apollo Moon photographs

Conspiracists focus heavily on 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 (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.^[55]

Enlargement of a poor-quality 1998 scan – both the crosshair and part of the red stripe have "bleeded out"   Enlargement of a higher quality 2004 scan – crosshair and red stripe visible   David Scott salutes the American flag during the Apollo 15 mission. The arms of the crosshair are washed out on the white stripes of the flag (Photo ID: AS15-88-11863)   Close-up of the flag, showing washed-out crosshairs

2. Crosshairs are sometimes misplaced or rotated.

• This is a result of popular photos being cropped and/or rotated for aesthetic impact.^[55]

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.^[56][57]
• The Apollo astronauts used high resolution Hasselblad 500 EL/M Data cameras with Carl Zeiss optics and a 70-mm film magazine.^[58]

4. There are no stars in any of the photos; the Apollo 11 astronauts also claimed in a post-mission press conference to not remember seeing any stars.

• The astronauts were talking about naked-eye sightings of stars during the lunar daytime. They regularly sighted stars through the spacecraft navigation optics while aligning their inertial reference platforms.

• 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.^[59][60] 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.^[61][62]

• 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 and some background stars were taken from lunar orbit by Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Al Worden.^[63]

• Pictures of the planet Venus (which is much brighter than any of the stars) were taken from the Moon's surface by astronaut Alan Shepard during the Apollo 14 mission.

Short exposure photograph of the International Space Station taken from Space Shuttle Atlantis in February 2008 – one of many photographs taken in space where no stars are visible   Earth and Mir in June 1995 – an example of how sunlight can outshine the stars, making them invisible   Long-exposure photo taken from the Moon's surface by Apollo 16 astronauts using a specialultraviolet camera. It shows the Earth with the correct background of stars   Long exposure photograph from the ISS of Space Shuttle reentry which some stars are visible In this image the Earth is lit by moonlight, not sunlight

5. The angle and color of shadows are inconsistent. This suggests that artificial lights were used.

• Shadows on the Moon are complicated by reflected light, uneven ground, wide-angle lens distortion, and lunar dust. There are several light sources: the Sun, sunlight reflected from the Earth, sunlight reflected from the Moon's surface, and sunlight reflected from the astronauts and the Lunar Module. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many different directions, including into shadows. Shadows falling into craters and hills may appear longer, shorter and distorted.^[64] Furthermore, shadows display the properties of vanishing point 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 to obscure distant objects, thus they appear clearer and closer.^[65] 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.^[66]

7. The number of photographs taken is implausibly high. Up to one photo per 50 seconds.^[67]

• 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.^[68][69]

Original AS16-107-17445 photograph   Original AS16-107-17446 photograph   Close-up of later generation prints of 17446

9. A resident of Perth, Australia, with the pseudonym "Una Ronald", said she saw a soft drink 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.^[70]

10. The book Moon Shot contains an obvious composite photograph of Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon with another astronaut.

• It was used instead of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors 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).
• If the astronaut is standing in sunlight while photographing into shade, light reflected off his white spacesuit produces a similar effect to a spotlight.^[71]
• 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:

Original photo of Buzz Aldrin during Apollo 11   The more famous edited version. The contrast has been tweaked (yielding the "spotlight effect") and a black band has been pasted at the top

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.

[edit]Environment

1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation (see radiation poisoning and health threat from cosmic rays). Some conspiracists have suggested that Starfish Prime (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, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too dangerous for the Apollo missions.^[72] Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem (10 mSv), which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years.^[73] 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.^[74]

• 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 cataracts that have been shown to be caused by radiation exposure to cosmic rays during their trip.^[75] At least 39 former astronauts have developed cataracts; 36 of those were involved in high-radiation missions such as the Apollo missions.^[76]

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.^[77] Furthermore, film carried by unmanned lunar probes such as the Lunar Orbiter and Luna 3(which used on-board film development processes) was not fogged.

3. The Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted.

• There is no atmosphere to efficiently bind lunar surface heat to devices (such as cameras) that are not in direct contact with it. In a vacuum, only radiation remains as a heat transfer mechanism. The physics of radiative heat transfer are thoroughly understood, and the proper use of passive optical coatings and paints was enough to control the temperature of the film within the cameras; 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.^[78] The film was not in direct sunlight, so it wasn't overheated.^[79] Note: TheMoon's day is about 29½ Earth days long, meaning that one Moon day (dawn to dusk) lasts nearly fifteen days.

4. The Apollo 16 crew should not have survived a big solar flare 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.^[80][81]

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 so that it did not hang down. The flag only seemed to flutter when the astronauts were moving it into position. Without air drag, these movements caused the free corner of the flag to swing like a pendulum for some time. The flag was rippled because it had been folded during storage—the ripples could be mistaken for movement in a still photograph. Videotapes show that when the astronauts let go of the flagpole it vibrates briefly but then remains motionless.^[82][83]
• This theory was shown to be untrue on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

Cropped photo of Buzz Aldrin saluting the flag (note the fingers of Aldrin's right hand can be seen behind his helmet)   Cropped photo taken a few seconds later, Buzz Aldrin's hand is down, head turned toward the camera, the flag is unchanged   Animation of the two photos, showing that though Armstrong's camera moved between exposures, the flag is not waving

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".^[66]
• 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.^[84]

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

David Scott drops a hammer and feather on the Moon

[edit]Mechanical issues

Under the Apollo 11 Lunar Module

1. The Moon landers made no blast craters or any sign of dust scatter.^[85]

• 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 (1.5 PSI).^[86] Beyond the engine nozzle, the plume spreads and the pressure drops very quickly. (In comparison the Saturn V F-1 first stage engines produced 3.2 MPa (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 is very compact below its surface dust layer, further making it impossible for the descent engine to blast out a "crater".^[87] 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.^{[88],pp. 97-98[89]}

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 (fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide (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.^[90] The same fuel was used by the core of the American Titan 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.

• 

  Apollo 17 LM leaving the Moon; rocket exhaust visible only briefly.

 
• 

  Apollo 8 launch through the first stage separation

 
• 

  Exhaust flame may not be visible outside the atmosphere, as in this photo. Rocket engines are the dark structures at the bottom center.

• 

  The launch of a Titan II, burning hypergolic Aerozine-50/N₂O₄, 430,000 pounds-force (1.9 MN) of thrust. Note the near-transparency of the exhaust, even in air (water is being sprayed up from below).

 
• 

  Atlas uses non-hypergolic kerosene (RP-1) fuel which gives a bright and very visible exhaust, 340,000 lb_f(1.5 MN) of thrust

 
• 

  Bright flame from first stage of the Saturn V, burning RP-1

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.^[87]

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 when Jim Lovell (played by 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 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 generatorscould use radiative cooling fins to allow indefinite operation because they operated at much higher temperatures.

Surveyor 3 with Apollo 12 lander in background.

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 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.

Jim Lovell training for Apollo 13

7. All six lunar landings happened during the first Presidential administration of Richard Nixon 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.^{[citation needed]}

• The development of the Saturn V rocket, the Apollo CSM and LM and the flights up to Apollo 8 (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 program.^{[citation needed]}

[edit]Transmissions

1. There should have been more than a two-second delay in communications between Earth and the Moon, at a distance of 400,000 km (250,000 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.^[91]

The relative sizes of, and distance between, Earth and Moon, to scale, with a beam of light traveling between them at the speed of light.

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 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.^[92]

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 andHoneysuckle Creek radio telescopes. These were converted to NTSC television at Paddington, in Sydney. This meant that Australian viewers saw the Moonwalk several seconds before the rest of the world.^[93] 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 (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.^[94]

[edit]Missing data

Wikinews has related news: Apollo Moon landings tapes reported missing

Blueprints and design and development drawings of the machines involved are missing.^[95][96] Apollo 11 data tapes containing telemetryand the high quality video (before scan conversion) of the first Moonwalk are also missing. See the documentary film Did We Go? (2005).

[edit]Tapes

Main article: Apollo 11 missing tapes

Photo of the high-quality SSTV image before the scan conversion

Photo of the degraded image after the SSTV scan conversion

Dr. David Williams (NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center) and Apollo 11 flight director Eugene F. Kranz both acknowledged that the Apollo 11 telemetry data tapes are missing. Conspiracists see this as evidence that they never existed.^[97] 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 (SSTV) camera (see Apollo TV camera). To broadcast the pictures to regular television, a scan conversion had to be done. The radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia was able to receive the telemetry from the Moon at the time of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk.^[98] Parkes had a larger antenna than NASA's antenna in Australia at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, so it received a better picture. It also received a better picture than NASA's antenna at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. 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.^[99] 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 camera and these are also available. Later Apollo missions did not use SSTV. At least some of the telemetry tapes from the ALSEP scientific experiments left on the Moon (which ran until 1977) still exist, according to Dr Williams. Copies of those tapes have been found.^[100]

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.^[101] Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967,^[102] even before the Moon landings.

Apollo 16 Lunar Module

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 in Perth, Australia. One of the old tapes has been sent to NASA for analysis. The slow-scan television images were not on the tape.^[103]

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.^[104] 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.^[105] 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.^[106]

[edit]Blueprints

Apollo 15 Lunar Rover

The website Xenophilia.com documents a hoax claim that blueprints for the Apollo Lunar Module, Lunar rover, and associated equipment are missing.^[107]There are some diagrams of the Lunar Module and Lunar Rover on the NASA website and on Xenophilia.com.^[107] Grumman appears to have destroyed most of their documentation,^[108][109] but copies of the blueprints for the Saturn V exist on microfilm.^[110]

An unused Lunar Module is on show at the Cradle of Aviation Museum.^[111][112] 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 and LM-9 at Kennedy Space Center.^[113]

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.^[114] The "Moon buggies" were built by Boeing.^[115] The 221-page operation manual for the Lunar Rover contains some detailed drawings,^[116] although not the blueprints.

An original Saturn V rocket is on display at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.^[117] The rocket components are also on public display, as is much of the original equipment used on the Apollo missions.

[edit]Technology

See also: Space race and List of space exploration milestones, 1957-1969

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);^{[Note 1]} the first living creature in orbit (a dog named Laika, November 1957,Sputnik 2); the first man in space and in orbit (Yuri Gagarin, April 1961, Vostok 1); the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova, June 1963, Vostok 6); and the first spacewalk (EVA) (Alexei Leonov in March 1965, Voskhod 2).

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 successfulspace rendezvous), 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).^[118] In fact, by the time of the launch of the first manned Earth-orbiting Apollo flight (Apollo 7), 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.^[119]The Soviet LK Lander Moon lander was tested in unmanned low-Earth-orbit flights three times in 1970 and 1971.

[edit]Deaths of NASA personnel

In a television program about the hoax allegations, Fox Entertainment Group 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 (killed ejecting from T-38 which had suffered a bird strike, October 1964)
• Elliot See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 crash in bad weather, February 1966)
• Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom, Edward Higgins "Ed" White, and Roger B. Chaffee (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
• Edward "Ed" Givens (car accident, June 1967)
• Clifton "C. C." Williams (killed ejecting from T-38, October 1967)
• Michael J. "Mike" Adams (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. (F-104 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^{[clarification needed]} 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.^[120][121]
• 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.^[7] His obituary claims he died of a heart attack at the relatively young age of 42.^[122] 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 and Buzz Aldrin. Also, nine of the twelve Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon without landing between 1968 and 1972 still survive, including Michael Collins. There is no evidence to support Gelvani's claim that Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin 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 (ground training accident, March 1961)
• Grigori Nelyubov (suicide, February 1966)
• Vladimir Komarov (Soyuz 1 accident, April 1967)
• Yuri Gagarin (MiG-15 crash, March 1968)
• Pavel Belyayev (complications following surgery, January 1970)
• Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev (Soyuz 11 accident, June 1971).

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

[edit]Stanley Kubrick involvement

Main article: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)#Mock hoaxes and Conspiracy Theory

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 which is partly set on the Moon and featured advanced special effects.^[41] It has been claimed that when 2001 was in post-production 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 and Harry Lange, 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 (1975). The lens was originally a still-photo lens and needed changes to be used for motion filming. There is a mockumentary based on this idea, Dark Side of the Moon, 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.^[123]

[edit]Academic work

In 2002, NASA granted US$15,000 to James Oberg 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.^[7] Oberg stated that he meant to finish the book.^[124][125] In November 2002 Peter Jennings 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.^[7]

In 2004, Martin Hendry and Ken Skeldon of the University of Glasgow were awarded a grant by the UK based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council to investigate Moon landing conspiracy theories.^[126] In November 2004, they gave a lecture at the Glasgow Science Centre where the top ten claims by conspiracists were individually addressed and refuted.^[127]

[edit]MythBusters special

Main article: Mythbusters "NASA Moon Landing" episode

An episode of MythBusters in August 2008 was dedicated to 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.