In their minds, Apollogists happily summarize their foundation with many dishonest claims, such as:
1. 400,000 people couldn't have all lied. (this hoax required the work of a few hundred - military men who firmly understand the nature of Top Secret and Treason).
2. Nations around the world validated it as it was happening. (a few, claims, with no lasting evidence, and no witnesses specified except a few names)
3. Amateurs around the world validated it as it was happening. (we have one)
4. Russia had no reason to congratulate us if we lied.
5. 50,000 samples have been given out to 500 labs in over 15 nations (not true).
Yeah, let's go through these points.
1. 400,000 people couldn't have all lied. (this hoax required the work of a few hundred - military men who firmly understand the nature of Top Secret and Treason).
You seriously misunderstand the extent to which the engineers in the different contracting and sub-contracting companies needed to talk to each other. For example, the people designing the space suits needed to talk to the people designing the Command Module and the people designing the Lunar Module, because at different points in the mission the suits would be supplied by oxygen from the two spacecraft, so they needed to be sure all three connections were compatible. And that's just one of many such interactions.
You suggest the LM was real but couldn't be made to land on the Moon. According to that hypothesis there must have been teams of engineers who couldn't make the component they were working on function as intended. Yet somehow they were able to interact with related teams of engineers as described in the preceding paragraph without arousing any suspicions. That sounds implausible, so I eagerly await your evidence for the existence of such non-functional components.
2. Nations around the world validated it as it was happening. (a few, claims, with no lasting evidence, and no witnesses specified except a few names)
Looks like you didn't look too hard.
Can I point you to the
www.honeysucklecreek.net website, dedicated to the tracking station just outside Canberra which was one of the three stations used to communicate with the Apollo missions. The (Australian) staff who worked there remain happy to talk about their work, took a heap of photos during missions (including of the highest quality TV image anyone saw in Apollo 11), and one of the staff even spoke directly to the crew of Apollo 16 at one point.
They have explained how they know they were receiving a signal from the Moon, and how it couldn't have come from anywhere else. One of the staff explained to me how he tried to work out how NASA could have perpetrated a hoax without the Honeysuckle Creek staff knowing, and was unable to (though I assume you'll say he didn't try too hard).
3. Amateurs around the world validated it as it was happening. (we have one)
You can add Swede Sven Grahn to that list (
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/). He was part of a team of amateurs who picked up signals from Apollo 17. Some signals were from the spacecraft in lunar orbit, while other signals were definitely from the surface. I'll leave it up to you to either search his website, or work out for yourself how it would be possible to tell the difference.
And obviously, in addition to the amateurs tracking the missions, were the professionals in the USSR who also tracked the missions.
4. Russia had no reason to congratulate us if we lied.
No comment about this? Remember, the Space Race was another front in the Cold War, one which both the USA and USSR were highly motivated to win. The whole purpose of the Space Race was to convince countries around the world that their science and technology was better than the other guys' science and technology. Therefore, being caught lying about an achievement in the Space Race would destroy their credibility in the Space Race in the eyes of the world.
Therefore, both the USA and USSR were limited in their ability to fib. The USSR managed it by not announcing missions until they'd been successfully launched, by releasing as little information as they could get away with, and letting eager Western journalists over-interpret things. So, for example, while the Soviets misled the West about the nature of the Voskhod 1 spacecraft, they couldn't hide the fact of the mission because people on Earth could and did track the mission.
By contrast the USA didn't hide anything except medical information about the astronauts. Journalists had easy access to NASA and to the astronauts.
We also know the Soviets were receiving information about Apollo from contacts within NASA and its contractors.
And because the Soviets operated spacecraft in every part of space and the Moon where the Apollo missions went, we know the Soviets knew the details of those environments. Therefore, the ability of the USA to lie about those environments was non-existent.
Put all of that together, and it's clear the Soviets had (a) an accurate understanding of what Apollo involved and (b) clear knowledge that Apollo was real.
5. 50,000 samples have been given out to 500 labs in over 15 nations (not true).
Not true? Just like that you know it's not true. Sorry, but you're going to have to do a little better than that.
Have you been to the Lunar and Planetary Institute website (
www.lpi.usra.edu) and checked out their Lunar Sample Atlas? Pick a rock at random (say, Apollo 12 sample 12035), and download the summary document which includes photos, a list of the rock's minerals, it's chemical composition, a summary of geochemical studies, and a list of 20 scientific papers about just that one rock. Now repeat that for literally thousands of individually numbered rock samples.
As scientists have explained to me, they know the Apollo rocks must be from the Moon, can't be fake, can't be from the Earth, can't be lunar meteorites, and can't have been collected by unmanned sample retriever missions.
Feel free to explain how these scientists don't know what they're talking about, or accept that people collected those rocks from the surface of the Moon.
