Conspiracy Theory

Did We Really Go to the Moon?

Capricorn 1

• Bad: The program talks about the movie ``Capricorn 1'', an entertaining if ultimately silly movie about how NASA must fake a manned Mars expedition. The program says ``The Apollo footage [from the surface of the Moon] is strikingly similar to the scenes in ``Capricorn 1''.

• Good: Is it just an amazing coincidence that the actual Moon images look like the movie, or is it evidence of conspiracy? Neither! The movie was filmed in 1978, many years after the last man walked on the Moon. The movie was made to look like the real thing!

Lack of Stars

• Bad: The first bit of actual evidence brought up is the lack of stars in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon. Without air, the sky is black, so where are the stars?

• Good: The stars are there! They're just too faint to be seen.

• I'll say this here now, and return to it many times: the Moon is not the Earth. Conditions there are weird, and our common sense is likely to fail us.

Lack of Stars (cont.)

• So why aren't they in the Apollo pictures? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film.

No Blast Crater

• Bad: In the pictures taken of the lunar lander by the astronauts, the TV show continues, there is no blast crater. A rocket capable of landing on the Moon should have burned out a huge crater on the surface, yet there is nothing there.

• Good: When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour? Sure, the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had a throttle. They throttled down to about 3000 pounds of thrust.

No Blast Crater (cont.)

• the engine nozzle was about 54 inches across, which means it had an area of 2300 square inches. That in turn means that the thrust generated a pressure of only about 1.5 pounds per square inch! That's not a lot of pressure.

No Blast Crater (cont.)

• Moreover, in a vacuum, the exhaust from a rocket spreads out very rapidly. On Earth, the air in our atmosphere constrains the thrust of a rocket into a narrow column, which is why you get long flames and columns of smoke from the back of a rocket. In a vacuum, no air means the exhaust spreads out even more, lowering the pressure. That's why there's no blast crater!

Dust and Footprints • Bad: The next argument presented on the show

deals with the lunar dust. As the lander descended, we clearly see dust getting blown away by the rocket. The exhaust should have blown all the dust away, yet we can clearly see the astronauts' footprints in the dust mere meters from the lander.

• Good: Once again, the weird alien environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine taking a bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids: ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a deep breath, and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof! Flour goes everywhere. Why?

Dust and Footprints (cont.)

• On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust, or dust hit by other bits of flying dust.

Objects in Shadows

• Bad: The next evidence also involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow can be seen, sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque on the side of the lander that can be read easily. If the Sun is the only source of light on the Moon, the HBs say, and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows should be utterly black.

• Good: The answer is: The Moon itself. Surprise! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came.

Objects in Shadows (cont.)

• This effect is called heiligenschein (the German word for halo). This also explains another HB claim, that many times the astronauts appear to be standing in a spotlight.

• http://www.iangoddard.net/moon01.htm