Was the moon landing just a hoax?

[Teenager]

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ap11ann/FirstLunarLanding/i9.jpg


I have a question that concerns this picture.

Notice how the flag appears to be "waving" and "blowing" in the wind. How is this possible on the moon? There is no wind on the moon, is there?

Maybe I missed something. Weird.

[UnkHiram]

No, the moon landing was not a hoax.

[aaron11]

They did something to the flag to make it look that way, they realized before hand that if they didn't, it would simply be sitting there drooping...

I remember the story, but i cannot remember exactly what they did to the flag to make it look that way...I think they used a rod or something across the top..

Their are some items that were left on the moons surface for taking measurments and stuff, and you can see them with a telescope, the only hoax is the idea that the USA staged the landing...

http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/moon.htm

[Logic]

The flag isn't waving, it's wrinkled. The moon landing was not a hoax, c'mon people.

[ThomasMore]

In a word, NO. The moon landing was not a hoax.

And there wasn't just one moon landing, there were 6: Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. 13 was the failed mission.

I can't see the picture you refer to, but I have heard this one before. The flag wasn't flapping in the wind. But it is also not rigid, it is cloth. Gravity on the moon is about 1/6 that of earth, and the act of planting the flag causes it to rustle some.

Healthy skepticism in all things is good. I think you have that.

But at the same time, there are many people who go through life as cynics, not skeptically examining everything, but denying everything. Some of them will waste a lot of ink and a lot of their own and other people's time to invent far-fetched theories.

When you investigate things skeptically, apply Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. If you want to dig deeply, that is good. But hold all explanations (even the "alternative" ones) to the same high standards.

As Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:21,

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

[Melz]

Web info:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/images/hoax/buzz_med.jpg (http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/apollo/apollo11/html/as11_40_5903.html)February 23, 2001 -- Last week my phone rang. It was my mother ... and she was upset.
"Tony!" she exclaimed, "I just came from the coffee shop and there's an [adjective omitted] man down there who says NASA never landed on the Moon. Everyone was talking about it ... I just didn't know what to say!"

That last bit was hard to swallow, I thought. Mom's never at a loss for words.

But even more incredible was the controversy that swirled through her small-town diner and places like it across the country. After a long absence, the "Moon Hoax" was back.

Above: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the Moon in 1969. [more information (http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/apollo/apollo11/html/as11_40_5903.html)]

All the buzz about the Moon began on February 15th when Fox television aired a program called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? Guests on the show argued that NASA technology in the 1960's wasn't up to the task of a real Moon landing. Instead, anxious to win the Space Race any way it could, NASA acted out the Apollo program in movie studios. Neil Armstrong's historic first steps on another world, the rollicking Moon Buggy rides, even Al Shepard's arcing golf shot over Fra Mauro-- it was all a fake!



<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=5 width=115 align=right border=1><TBODY><TR><TD bgColor=#ffffff><CENTER>http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/images/brightflare/newshat.gif

Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery (http://science.nasa.gov/news/subscribe.htm)</CENTER>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Fortunately the Soviets didn't think of the gag first. They could have filmed their own fake Moon landings and really embarrassed the free world.

Shows like Conspiracy Theory ought to be as tongue-in-cheek as they sound. Unfortunately, there was an earnest feel to the Fox broadcast, enough to make you wonder if the program's makers might have fallen under their own spell.

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....

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/images/hoax/flagwaving_med.jpg (http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/apollo/apollo11/html/s69_40308.html)Not every waving flag needs a breeze -- at least

link (http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23feb_2.htm)

[Teenager]

Hmmm, that's kinda interesting. Mind-boggling, but interesting, especially the part about the waving flag.

[BEST45CAL]

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ap11ann/FirstLunarLanding/i9.jpg


I have a question that concerns this picture.

Notice how the flag appears to be "waving" and "blowing" in the wind. How is this possible on the moon? There is no wind on the moon, is there?

Maybe I missed something. Weird.

Yeah, you missed the rod holding up the top part of the flag. With little or no gravity, the flag would not stay in that position without any extra support. It's not waving.

I thought this hoax was dead and gone.:rolleyes:

[Geoffrey20005]

Ditto 45Cal...

If I can remember where it came from, and find it again, a group of 11th graders from some school in California won a science fair, and as their prize they got to pilot Hubble for a few hours. They pointed Hubble at the moon and took some pictures, and even found a crater that hadn't been named before, so they named it after their school. Then they pointed hubble at the moon landing pads, and took pictures of the flags and other items left by the moon-walkers. The pictures were posted, and it was actually pretty neat to see them... whte landscape with the red white & blue.

Yes, we did land on the moon.

-Geo

[BarryC]

I have on my hard drive a short video clip of (what is supposed to be) an outtake from the hoax filming of the July 20, 1969 moon landing. Some studio lighting falls down. This video clip originated at http://moontruth.org/ or http://www.moontruth.org/ . It was supposed to prove that the moon landing was a hoax.
I just tried that website and it is down now.
I remember watching the whole thing on TV. I had just gotten out of Kindergarten.
The part about seeing the stuff that was left up there with the Hubble Telescope- that's cool. I never knew that.
Barry

[Naturalized-Texan]

I worked a heluva lot of hours - overtime and getting up in the middle of the night so that I could use the computers - designing, building, and testing the software that brought the Apollo astronauts back safely from the Moon and from the explosion on Apollo 13.

The Moon landings were REAL.

[JNSmith]

Aluminum pole. Aluminum arm.

http://solarflag.com/nasa.htm

[DeclinetoState]

I would have just used starch in the flag, but you know me. :D

[DoctorDoom]

The loonies never let a good hoax die.

http://www.primeline-america.com/moon-ldg/

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/1999/aug/m08-009.shtml

Re the notion that kids were allowed to direct the Hubble, and used it to see flags, etcetera, that smacks of urban legend. From the Hubble website:

A closeup view of Copernicus' terraced walls. Hubble can resolve features as small as 280 feet across.Moon (http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1999/14/image/c)

280 feet at 238,000 miles is about 0.092 arc-second. According to this page (http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/balloon/telescope.html), the Hubble's maximum possible resolution is 0.06 arc second. Thus imaging items down to to 280 feet is pushing the limit of the scope's resolving power.

That being so, it is impossible for the scope to see the landing modules, let alone the flags.

[Teenager]

So Doc, are you saying the kids never saw the evidences on the moon?

[The_RANDy_Corporation]

Teenager, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and suspect that you (like I frequently do) are just stirring the pot. If you really are so stupid as to harbor doubts about whether the many moon landings were somehow staged, turn off your computer, and go outside. Play some football; shoot some hoop; get a girlfriend, and never, never come back to the internet again . . . for your own sake.

[Teenager]

Teenager, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and suspect that you (like I frequently do) are just stirring the pot. If you really are so stupid as to harbor doubts about whether the many moon landings were somehow staged, turn off your computer, and go outside. Play some football; shoot some hoop; get a girlfriend, and never, never come back to the internet again . . . for your own sake.

LOL!!! Randy, I have no doubt about the moon landing. I'm just really do not understand the physics of space. Also, there are many falsified reports that happen in space, and I wish to sort them out. But some of the jargon they use is just to hard for me to figure out(like Doc's webiste, for example).