why was the usa the only one to go to the moon?

[Bob B.]

It was infinitely more valuable to appear to have gone to the moon than it was to have risked going.

I disagree.  Nothing is achieved by faking it.

[alexsanchez]

You tapdance good, son.

So why didn't Nixon blow the whistle on Johnson, a bitter political rival, and humiliate him and his administration?

Maybe Nixon didn't want to end up like JFK (not that I'm insinuating anything... just saying).  And Nixon had the rest of the Apollo missions to milk.  Why ruin a good thing.

(bolded for emphases)
Then why say it? What a blatantly dishonest statement!
"I am not saying this, except I am."
Couldn't spread the bull shit thicker with a leaking honey wagon.
Nixon hated Apollo, as he well knew that it was mostly the work of his bitter political rivals. The fruit may have undergone its final ripening while under his purview, but the actual planting and tending was by others.
 If he wanted to milk it, why did he almost axe Apollo 16 and 17? Why were Apollo 18, 19 and 20 cancelled?

Not saying and not insinuating are two different things.  Apollo was a legacy of JFK.  Nixon was the president at the time of the moon landing (referring to my previous post.)  Nixon was the one handed the Apollo 11 death speech.  I don't know why Nixon almost axed 16 and 17.  You'd have to ask him.
President Nixon spoke to Aldrin and Armstrong during their first walk on the surface of the moon, praising the astronauts and observing the unique importance of the mission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_in_popular_culture

[DataCable]

What if the astronauts had been stranded on the moon and were forced to sit there until their oxygen ran out? [...] Americans would have said cancel the space program because we can't live through that again.

What if a single spark during a ground test caused the pressurized pure-O₂ environment of an Apollo capsule to burst into flames, killing all three crewmembers?  That surely would have caused such public uproar that the entire program would be scrapped... wait, no, that didn't happen.  Well, how about a spacecraft in-transit to the moon has an explosion aboard, severely crippling it, causing the crew to barely get back to earth alive.  Nobody would dare let another mission... oh, wait... yes, yes they did... four more times.

Now, supposing it was a hoax:  In front of millions of live witnesses, a Saturn V booster, supposedly with 3 live crewmembers atop it, explodes seconds after launch and the LES clearly failed, "killing" the crew.  How do you propose the conspirators would have planned to deal with that scenario?  What were they to do with the inconveniently still-breathing would-be astronauts?  How does one guarantee a "fake" success when there are still unfakeable elements (e.g. a rocket launch) which cannot be guaranteed to succeed?  If that atrocious film Capricorn 1 is good for anything, it demonstrates just how ludicrous the hoax logic is.

[alexsanchez]

What if the astronauts had been stranded on the moon and were forced to sit there until their oxygen ran out? [...] Americans would have said cancel the space program because we can't live through that again.

What if a single spark during a ground test caused the pressurized pure-O₂ environment of an Apollo capsule to burst into flames, killing all three crewmembers?  That surely would have caused such public uproar that the entire program would be scrapped... wait, no, that didn't happen.  Well, how about a spacecraft in-transit to the moon has an explosion aboard, severely crippling it, causing the crew to barely get back to earth alive.  Nobody would dare let another mission... oh, wait... yes, yes they did... four more times.

Now, supposing it was a hoax:  In front of millions of live witnesses, a Saturn V booster, supposedly with 3 live crewmembers atop it, explodes seconds after launch and the LES clearly failed, "killing" the crew.  How do you propose the conspirators would have planned to deal with that scenario?  What were they to do with the inconveniently still-breathing would-be astronauts?  How does one guarantee a "fake" success when there are still unfakeable elements (e.g. a rocket launch) which cannot be guaranteed to succeed?  If that atrocious film Capricorn 1 is good for anything, it demonstrates just how ludicrous the hoax logic is.

I'm sure NASA had their fingers crossed either way.  If it blew up, I'm sure they had a contingency plan.  If the astronauts were prepared to die, I'm sure they were prepared to go into hiding.

[JayUtah]

As I've said several times, from a technical standpoint, it's the navigation problem of lifting off from the moon.  You can go back through my earlier posts about IMU alignment to moon-centered coordinates, and the inability to do so.

You mean that steaming pile of ignorance you keep repeating over and over as if you knew what you were talking about?

You don't understand ascent and rendezvous.  You keep trying to tell us that it's a one-shot deal that requires great precision at the outset.  In fact no kind of rendezvous is or was ever attempted the way you say.  Multiple phase ascent and rendezvous was explained to you several times.

You don't understand inertial guidance.  You think the IMU on a spacecraft works the way a gyrocompass on an airplane works.  It doesn't.

You don't understand IMU alignment.  You think it's to establish location when in fact it's to establish orientation in 3D space.  Toward that end you think that IMU alignment requires a fixed survey point on a planetary surface.  It does not.  You can only conceive of silly straw-man methods.  You ignore the actual method employed.

Let's be absolutely clear:  it's painfully obvious that you don't understand even the rudimentary basics of this type of navigation or orbital mechanics.  And several people have explained to you exactly what's wrong with your expectations and exactly what was actually done to accomplish the parts of the mission you say were impossible.  You simply keep repeating the same egregious ignorance over and over again.

My main objection is from both a political and statistical standpoint...

No.  You spilled the beans earlier.  You gave your reason as purely political -- you religiously assert that governments always lie, and that your faith on this point is reliable enough to ignore all evidence.

the only way to insure a guaranteed 100% success was to fake it.

Asked and answered repeatedly.

What if the astronauts had been stranded on the moon and were forced to sit there until their oxygen ran out?

Oddly enough, NASA and the administration had a plan for this.  It wasn't discovered until many years later.  Why would they need to plan for that, and keep the plan confidential, if there was no chance of that happening?

Imagine how sick this country would have felt listening to their final transmissions down to their last gasp for air.

Straw man.  Why do you think that would have been broadcast?

Imagine the astronauts saying goodbye to their families from the moon, broadcast on live TV.

Straw man.  Why do you think it would have been broadcast?

If you're interested, the actual plan for what would have happened is now unclassified.  Go read it.

Image the embarrassment to NASA.

Well if you propose silly morbid scenarios, then yes.  Are you really so arrogant as to think that the way you envision it would have been the way it would have played out.

Americans would have said cancel the space program because we can't live through that again.

You mean like they did after Apollo 1 and Apollo 13?

The entire world would have been listening to the astronauts as they waited to die.

No, that was not the plan.

Given those political odds, what to you think Nixon, a career politician enamored with his own image, would have chosen to do?

Well he didn't plan to do it the stupid way you lay out.  But there was a plan.

We got nothing out of going to the moon except national prestige, and political and military advantage, and supposedly a bunch of moon rocks.

Wow, you really have absolutely no clue how the aerospace industry works, do you?

Obvious troll is obvious.

[JayUtah]

I'm sure NASA had their fingers crossed either way.  If it blew up, I'm sure they had a contingency plan.  If the astronauts were prepared to die, I'm sure they were prepared to go into hiding.

Do you have any actual evidence for any such contingency plans?  Or are these things you just believe and take on faith?

[raven]

Not saying and not insinuating are two different things.  Apollo was a legacy of JFK.  Nixon was the president at the time of the moon landing (referring to my previous post.)  Nixon was the one handed the Apollo 11 death speech.  I don't know why Nixon almost axed 16 and 17.  You'd have to ask him.
President Nixon spoke to Aldrin and Armstrong during their first walk on the surface of the moon, praising the astronauts and observing the unique importance of the mission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_in_popular_culture

Then just what did you mean by when you said, "Nixon didn't want to end up like JFK"?
I am asking you about the near cancellation of Apollo 16 and 17  because you are the one claiming he was trying to milk Apollo for political gain. That claim is contradicted by the fact he almost cancelled two missions and that the three last missions were cancelled.
Also, you think he is going to publicly say on the air how much he hated the whole thing?
The man was a lifetime politician. Public smiles/private frowns are his stock in trade!

[ka9q]

if you say you have a patent, and cannot give us evidence to that effect, we must only conclude that you are lying. Just as you say governments ALWAYS lie.

Every time some conspiracist claims certain credentials we always take the bait and demand proof of their validity. The resulting rathole diverts the argument away from their original claims, just as they intended.

Folks, it doesn't matter if alexsanchez had invented sliced bread; his Apollo claims are still crap, and they should be treated as such.

[JayUtah]

http://watergate.info/1969/07/20/an-undelivered-nixon-speech.html

That's the speech Nixon would have delivered if Apollo 11 had been unable to lift off from the Moon.  Michael Collins writes in Carrying the Fire about the parts of the flight plan that would have required him to fly home alone.  Along with Nixon's speech, there were procedures to be carried out at Mission Control, which included allowing loved ones private communication time with the crew, then terminating the connection to the let crew work out their final preparations according to their own conscience.

Your silly "must have been faked" scenario avoids all that documented dignity in favor of your hypothetical macabre televised gasping death throes.

[Chew]

As I've said several times, from a technical standpoint, it's the navigation problem of lifting off from the moon.  You can go back through my earlier posts about IMU alignment to moon-centered coordinates, and the inability to do so.

It has already been explained to you: gravity and a celestial mark.

[raven]

Reading that speech almost leaves me in tears.

[Noldi400]

The parts in 2001: ASO that looks like they are in zero gravity (they're close enough.)  The scenes shot on the moon were intentionally made to look bad.  Kubrick would have been told to do an intentionally bad job showing them walking on the moon in 1968, a time when he would have been working for NASA.  The moon scenes are the only scenes in the movie that look fake.  The lack of continuity is obvious and sticks out like a sore thumb.  Kubrick knew walking on the moon wouldn't have looked like that.

No, not really - one glaring example that comes to mind is a scene on the "moon shuttle" where a tray floats up off someone's lap,supposedly in zero-G, visibly swinging from side to side in apparent violation of Newton's First Law of Motion.

Or are Newton's Laws also suspect because they're taught in publicly funded schools?

[ka9q]

Also the LM did not work flawlessly. If it did, the Eagle wouldn't have had those program alarms during its descent.

That's just one well-known LM glitch. Here are two more. Both have to do with the S-band steerable antenna so I'm familiar with them.

Eagle had S-band comm dropouts early in the descent phase serious enough to require Mike Collins to relay via VHF. There were two contributing causes: Armstrong had the windows facing down to perform landmark checks (which is how he knew they would land long), and in that orientation the S-band steerable antenna had to point through one of the just-added RCS plume deflectors. The problem was worked around in real time with a yaw maneuver, and when Eagle later yawed so the windows faced up the problem went away.

The S-band steerable antenna on Apollo 16 totally failed because a retaining pin did not release when commanded to do so. The entire mission was flown on the omni antennas and with the separate antennas on the LRV.

These are classic examples of the kinds of problems that happen all the time in complex, real-world systems, and they'll ring true to any experienced engineer. (As opposed, say, to someone pretending to be an experienced engineer.) Something gets changed, usually for a perfectly good reason but often at the last minute, and it doesn't occur to anybody that this will affect some other subsystem. But it's always obvious in hindsight...

This is why we spend interminable hours in meetings. And it's why we test, test and test again -- and then we do some testing. Apollo 5 tested the basic operation of the LM in its design environment: vacuum and freefall. Apollo 7 did the same thing for the CSM, with a crew. Apollo 8 tested the entire system for getting to lunar orbit and back. Apollo 9 tested the LM in space with a crew, and rendezvous procedures with the CSM. Apollo 10 tested flying the LM separately in lunar orbit and getting it back to the CSM.

So by the time Apollo 11 landed, everything had already been done at least once except for the powered descent and actual landing, and so it's no surprise at all that that's where most of the problems appeared. The hardware, software, people and procedures were hardly "untested" as some ignorant conspiracists would have us believe.

[alexsanchez]

The parts in 2001: ASO that looks like they are in zero gravity (they're close enough.)  The scenes shot on the moon were intentionally made to look bad.  Kubrick would have been told to do an intentionally bad job showing them walking on the moon in 1968, a time when he would have been working for NASA.  The moon scenes are the only scenes in the movie that look fake.  The lack of continuity is obvious and sticks out like a sore thumb.  Kubrick knew walking on the moon wouldn't have looked like that.

No, not really - one glaring example that comes to mind is a scene on the "moon shuttle" where a tray floats up off someone's lap,supposedly in zero-G, visibly swinging from side to side in apparent violation of Newton's First Law of Motion.

Or are Newton's Laws also suspect because they're taught in publicly funded schools?

Maybe we really went to the moon.

[JayUtah]

Maybe we really went to the moon.

That's certainly how all the available evidence is interpreted unanimously by the appropriately educated and experienced people.