Faking the moon landings

[molesworth]

As it happens, I agree that 400,000 people wouldn't have had knowledge when making the Apollo missions that they were helping a fake, since those figures include people like "the people who made mission patches."  Mission patches for a fake mission would be exactly the same as mission patches for a real one!

Fair point.  A large percentage of the people working on it could have done their jobs very well without knowing they were contributing to a fake mission.

They would still, as has also been mentioned, have built a spacecraft and launch system capable of taking people to the Moon 

On the other hand, I think about 100,000 people would have had the knowledge to be sure the missions they were working on were fake.  That's a lot of people to keep quiet.  I also agree that the alleged hundred people doesn't even include the people required to even approximate the Apollo footage, especially with 1969 technology.  Much less however many people it takes to fake all the other physical evidence, like rocks and soil samples and physical effects of space travel on astronauts.

There is a huge amount of evidence that can't be explained away, and even if it was "only" 100,000 people (which I'd say was a conservative estimate) that's an awful lot of people to keep paying for their silence, and yet not one person in 50 years has ever even hinted at revealing the secret...

[mako88sb]

There is a huge amount of evidence that can't be explained away, and even if it was "only" 100,000 people (which I'd say was a conservative estimate) that's an awful lot of people to keep paying for their silence, and yet not one person in 50 years has ever even hinted at revealing the secret...

Plus there's how many hundreds of thousands of people from numerous countries around the world who for the past 45+ years would have been educated and worked in all the relevant fields of science and engineering involved with Apollo who would be able to look at all the scientific evidence and know whether or not it stands up to scrutiny. I find it pretty amazing that hb's really don't comprehend what would be involved to pull off a hoax of this magnitude never mind being able to keep it going for so long.

[AtomicDog]

Anyone, anywhere on earth who works in, on, or studies space exploration would be knowledgable enough to expose Apollo as a hoax. That's a lot of MONEY! to be paid out yearly, and every one of them would need a Death Squadder following them around  24/7 to keep them quiet.

[Allan F]

That's a lot of deathsquadders, when you take 8-hour shifts and weekends and holidays into account. You'd need around 8 deathsquadders for each scientist, to ensure total coverage.

[Abaddon]

That's a lot of deathsquadders, when you take 8-hour shifts and weekends and holidays into account. You'd need around 8 deathsquadders for each scientist, to ensure total coverage.

Yet somehow all these death squads evade the CTists. Odd that.

[jfb]

There is a huge amount of evidence that can't be explained away, and even if it was "only" 100,000 people (which I'd say was a conservative estimate) that's an awful lot of people to keep paying for their silence, and yet not one person in 50 years has ever even hinted at revealing the secret...

Plus there's how many hundreds of thousands of people from numerous countries around the world who for the past 45+ years would have been educated and worked in all the relevant fields of science and engineering involved with Apollo who would be able to look at all the scientific evidence and know whether or not it stands up to scrutiny. I find it pretty amazing that hb's really don't comprehend what would be involved to pull off a hoax of this magnitude never mind being able to keep it going for so long.

Lunar samples are being analyzed to this day.  I wonder how incoming researchers are informed that everything they’re studying is fake, and how they get their cut of the hush money pie.

[cambo]

Ok, first go with that quote button thingy, so if I’ve messed up, I promise I will keep going till I get it right, rather than giving up and faking it.

They got gravity wrong? Really? Do you actually understand the reason for the proposal of dark matter and its relationship to the cosmological model?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Here’s a sentence from the first paragraph. “Gravitational effects that cannot be explained unless more matter is present than can be seen”

https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy

And here’s an extract from the second link. “Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein's theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. Theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is” Do me a favour and go argue with who ever made those statements.

what is stopping them from revealing the Moon Hoax for MONEY!?
And what stops the President from making himself a hero in the eyes of the nation by revealing the hoax?

How do you reveal a secret to another party that already knows? Strange! You would not see your president as a hero, you little fibber, you’d label him a liar and then go and find a rope. Anyway, he would have to run it by those other countries first, to get their approval, but as he probably doesn’t know anyway, your comment is moot.

You'd need more than that just for the supposed filming

If I shoot a film with two people in it, that makes three people in total. Yes, I am oversimplifying it, but you are deliberately overcomplicating it. I’ll stick with my original figure. And as for the hundreds of thousands working on the project, a lot of those will be hoax believers themselves. One in four people asked in the street, that have an opinion will tell you they don’t believe, so do the maths.

robotic probes that launched unseen to set up the experiments, and returned kilogrammes of rock samples

 No need, everything they needed could be found on earth. Hang on, what experiments?

If it was me, I'd be looking for something like $250,000 a year for life, and at least $100,000 a year for each child for life, otherwise the lawyers open the envelope!

These people were under intense pressure to meet Kennedy’s goal, and when they realised they couldn’t do it, which was probably pretty early on in the programme, they knew they had no choice but to fake it, and money may not have been there main motivation, as they were duty bound to deliver at all costs. All they needed was a skilled film maker with knowledge of the latest film making techniques. This film maker may have seen this as the biggest challenge of his career, to make a movie that would fool the world. But unfortunately, because of this, he would never get the fame, he would truly deserve for his masterpiece. He may then have come up with the idea of placing clues within his later movie productions that the more intelligent people among us would be able to decipher. That’s one possible scenario anyway.

build a movie set and a huge vacuum chamber

Am I missing something? What would a vacuum chamber be in aid of?

We have evidence that a rocket was launched

I think you’re wrong, I reckon there is actual proof of that and I’m almost sure they could get stuff into orbit, not people though.

Drought? It is the period of the bag that proves it is in a reduced gravity field something that would be very hard to duplicate on Earth. Plus the lack of atmospheric drag is the reason the motion is not damped, which is indicative of it being in a vacuum.

Drought? I had to laugh at myself on that one, bloody dementia! Anyway, this is another example of people interpreting something the way they want to see it. Put the draught source behind the bag, pointing down toward the bottom of the bag. The motion of the bag would not be damped, as you put it, and simply alter the strength of the air flow and its angle to change the period of the motion. This is something you can try without going to the moon.

It would be much, much cheaper to just send the CIA hit squads to take out all the high profile Hoax Believers

You mean the people who post on YouTube? And the people who have dared to post their thoughts on sites such as this, only to be frightened off by the verbal abuse they receive? If it wasn’t for the deliberate ridicule, designed to fend off these people, there would be a hell of a lot of people needing slaughtered.

And if they built the Apollo hardware to go to the moon then what the hell was to stop them going to the moon?

 They built the Apollo hardware to fool people into thinking they were going to the moon, and what stopped them going was because it didn’t work. You think the components were all manufactured in the same place, or even assembled in the same place? Do you think the people doing the final assembly would have to know whether the finished article would work or not? It would just be a case of getting a few thousand people to assemble a very complex Airfix model with millions of parts, rather than a few dozen, following instructions from the designers, who knew it wouldn’t work.

Having to redefine gravity to better explain the apparent missing mass in galaxies doesn't stop it from working on this scale

If it’s wrong, then surely it has to be scrapped and rebuilt from the bottom up? If one part is wrong, surely we can’t just remove it and replace it with a different set of equations and expect it to fit? I’ve just realised, I’m actually asking a question here, rather than telling you you’re wrong. I must be getting soft in my old age.

Don't you understand - all of science is wrong!!  Apparently the Illuminati / lizard people / aliens have controlled all of human knowledge for millennia, convincing us with their wily equations that the Earth is a sphere, that gravity pulls things down, and that the Moon isn't made of cheese.

This ancient conspiracy was put in place to control the populace, and keep us from finding out the truth, since that would be a bad thing, because... erm... ah...  No, it's to keep us in our place and away from their precious MONEY!  Or something

Now you’re just being silly, unless you’ve managed to get your head around the concept of sarcasm. Surely not!

I can use Newton's equations of motion to tell me how long a hammer will take to fall if I drop it, what path a ball will take if I throw it, how the Moon moves it its orbit

It’s a big leap from dropping a hammer, to the moon orbiting the earth and another big leap from there to the rest of the universe, so I ask, what is the difference between our own solar system to the rest of the stars and planets? If there was a difference, we would have to categorise every single solar system inside every single galaxy with its own set of rules.

Anyone, anywhere on earth who works in, on, or studies space exploration would be knowledgable enough to expose Apollo as a hoax

I suspect like me, they would if they could prove it, but unlike me, they have a living and reputation to think about, so until someone gets there hands on that proof, they stay quiet. Out of the millions of scientists in the world, how many of them have spoken publicly in support of Apollo not being a hoax? I’ll give you a clue, you won’t need to take your socks off.

I wonder how incoming researchers are informed that everything they’re studying is fake

The rocks, for instance, possess the same qualities as what is perceived to be a moon rock.

 



 

[Jason Thompson]

If it’s wrong, then surely it has to be scrapped and rebuilt from the bottom up? If one part is wrong, surely we can’t just remove it and replace it with a different set of equations and expect it to fit?

No. As with Einstein's equations, we replaced Newton's and made sure the Einsteinian ones worked just as well for everything Newton's worked for (which is pretty well everything in the solar system unless it's really close to the Sun), and explained the bits where Newton's theories fell down (like the precession of Mercury's orbit). Then it was tested with other observations (like the bending of light near the Sun during an eclipse) to make sure it worked. It did. But in terms of everything on Earth and in most of the solar system (including sending probes to the planets), Newton's equations work well enough, and are a lot simpler, so they are still taught and still used. If we have to have a new theory of gravity to explain the missing mass, that theory still has to fit the observed behaviour of everything else as well. It doesn't invalidate everything that went before it because the objects in the solar system aren't behaving any differently, so equations derived from literally centuries of observation don't get thrown in the bin.

It’s a big leap from dropping a hammer, to the moon orbiting the earth

Literally the entire premise of Newton's theory of universal gravitation is that it is not a big leap, and centuries of observation and experiment since then has confirmed this.

so I ask, what is the difference between our own solar system to the rest of the stars and planets?

Almost certainly nothing. Dark matter, or the possible need to redefine gravity to eliminate it, has nothing to do with stuff on a planetary system scale and everything to do with the galactic and universal scale.

If there was a difference, we would have to categorise every single solar system inside every single galaxy with its own set of rules.

Again, entirely wrong. Because we know how things work on a planetary and stellar scale, but things get uncertain when dealing with galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

All of which still comes back to the basic point: redefining gravity to eliminate the dark matter or missing mass problem makes no odds on the scale of a solar system, because we have centuries of experience observing on that scale and demonstrating the equations used are adequate, and any new theory will have to fit that observation just as well as Einstein's or Newton's did.

[Luke Pemberton]

Theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is” Do me a favour and go argue with who ever made those statements.

No, you don't get to shift your claim that gravity is wrong so all other missions can go in the hoax bin because you don't understand gravity and its equations.

When Einstein published a set of field equations that described gravity, he realised that solutions to his equations gave a model for the universe that expanded and he was uncomfortable with this idea as the view at the time was that universe was static. He introduced a cosmological constant so that his equations produced solutions that give a static universe. Shortly after Einstein produced his equations, Hubble showed that the universe was indeed expanding, which led Einstein to remark that the cosmological constant was his 'greatest mistake.'

Scientists use Einstein's field equations to develop cosmological models. The problem faced by theorists is that Einstein's equations to not provide solutions to the nature of the Universe, they provide a set of possible solutions. Scientists have to produce a metric that describes trajectories on a manifold. They then need to ensure that manifold and actions on that manifold, which are constrained by boundary conditions,  satisfy the general solutions to the field equations.

The cosmological model of an expanding universe, and manifolds to describe that universe are well known, well understood; and fit the observable universe. However, there is discrepancy between theory, the inflationary period of the universe and the current expansion of the universe that cannot be accounted by the observable matter. Discrepancies between theory and observable are not unique to the theory of gravity, after all, what is physics but a set of mathematical constructs that provide conceptual models to explain the observable.

Scientists believe the percentage of normal matter in the universe cannot account for its expansion and propose that dark matter may exist to overcome this discrepancy. There is also a proposal that as the universe expands, dark energy is created. This is linked to the interpretation of the cosmological constant and the vacuum potential. Dark matter has been proposed to explain why observations do not fit with the model, not that the theory is incorrect.

In fact, Einstein's general relativity successfully accounts for the precession of Mercury's perihelion, enables us to understand the corrections need to make to clock in GPS satellites, explains the bending of light by stars, explains the stability of rapidly rotating neutron stars and gravitational lensing.

Einstein's theories reduce to Newton's theories in weak local gravitational fields, so there is nothing wrong with the description of gravity under those conditions. If you notice, in Einstein's field equations and Newton's equations, there is letter a G. This is the gravitational constant. The gravitational constant is exactly that, a constant that defines the strength of the field according to the mass that produces the field. Any new theory has to incorporate this constant into its framework, and also reduce to Newton's equations.

So no, you don't get to throw away centuries of understanding because you don't understand the subtle nature of the theories, their history and how they have been tested and validated.

[Bryanpoprobson]

rought? I had to laugh at myself on that one, bloody dementia! Anyway, this is another example of people interpreting something the way they want to see it. Put the draught source behind the bag, pointing down toward the bottom of the bag. The motion of the bag would not be damped, as you put it, and simply alter the strength of the air flow and its angle to change the period of the motion. This is something you can try without going to the moon.
 

It will not work like that the duration of the swing is dependent on the gravity field no amount of draught will make it swing quicker.

As for the dark matter argument, it is still nonsense to presume that refinements of theories negates all that has been theorised before. If a new theory of gravity is produced redefining our ideas of dark matter, it doesn’t mean that planes will suddenly fall out of the sky. The very idea of postulating, that this proves Apollo was faked, is just ridiculous.

[gillianren]

Cambo, pick out your favourite movie.  Watch the credits.  How many people are in them?  Which ones can you eliminate for a technically complicated shoot like faking the Moon footage?

[raven]

Cambo, let's see if this analogy works for you.
Let's say you're watching friends place a game moving little figures on a black and white board. You don't know the rules, but you're working them out as you watch from observation, like, ah, that row of pieces in the front, they move one space. Suddenly, you see one of them move two spaces on its first move. Does that invalidate what you knew before? Does the rule 'those pieces only move one space' have to be 'thrown out'.
No. Under most circumstances, a pawn can indeed only move one space. Just in some circumstances, they can move two, namely, their first move. Likewise, as we discover additional edge cases that require additional rules or even new explanations entirely while having the old rules work well enough as not to have any noticeable effect in the old circumstances. Newton's laws usually work well enough on the relatively small and slow scale of spaceships orbiting most moons and planets.
Only when we get to a very large scale, like galaxies, does dark matter start to, well, matter.

[nomuse]

rought? I had to laugh at myself on that one, bloody dementia! Anyway, this is another example of people interpreting something the way they want to see it. Put the draught source behind the bag, pointing down toward the bottom of the bag. The motion of the bag would not be damped, as you put it, and simply alter the strength of the air flow and its angle to change the period of the motion. This is something you can try without going to the moon.
 

It will not work like that the duration of the swing is dependent on the gravity field no amount of draught will make it swing quicker.

As for the dark matter argument, it is still nonsense to presume that refinements of theories negates all that has been theorised before. If a new theory of gravity is produced redefining our ideas of dark matter, it doesn’t mean that planes will suddenly fall out of the sky. The very idea of postulating, that this proves Apollo was faked, is just ridiculous.

To be fair, you could modulate by giving a timed series of hard pushes. Except then the swing wouldn't be natural. And you'd probably notice if you were firing off an air cannon at regular intervals into the dirt around the set.

[Bryanpoprobson]

To be fair, you could modulate by giving a timed series of hard pushes. Except then the swing wouldn't be natural. And you'd probably notice if you were firing off an air cannon at regular intervals into the dirt around the set.

True, but as you say that would have to be deliberate intent to make the swing period faster, which excludes a bag caught in a draft. It would be a simpler exercise not to allow any motion like this to be shown. Besides this is only one example of a pendulum the one highlighted by the ALSJ is probaby a better example.

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a14/a14pendulum.html

[AtomicDog]

what is stopping them from revealing the Moon Hoax for MONEY!?
And what stops the President from making himself a hero in the eyes of the nation by revealing the hoax?

How do you reveal a secret to another party that already knows?

There are dozens of publications that would pay handsomely for an Apollo-Era scientist or technician coming forward with airtight proof of a Moon Hoax.

Strange! You would not see your president as a hero, you little fibber, you’d label him a liar and then go and find a rope. Anyway, he would have to run it by those other countries first, to get their approval, but as he probably doesn’t know anyway, your comment is moot.

I see that you have problems remembering your own words:

By new generations, do you mean the sons, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the film crew and NASA’s top brass? Surely only the CIA would need to know, as they are probably running NASA, and I’m sure some of them will be trained in special effects. Let the original hoaxers go to their graves, which would just leave those crafty CIA agents. it wouldn’t surprise me if the president himself wasn’t aware.

You're the one who brought up the President knowing about the hoax, not me. Make up your mind.