Roommate says (We never walked on the moon)

There's plenty of pictures, audio and nasa members who'll provide enough evidence. Some people just don't believe it. But, my grandfather was one of the men listening as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, that's my evidence.

Fred there are several web sites and there was a Fox special years ago that try and debunk the walking on the moon thingy.

There is no concrete proof that we did or didnt.

Fred my cousin Sean B who is on gather...his Dad worked at Nasa for years as did our uncle.

Conspiracy theories are dime a dozen. Who cares what he believes.

Rebecca it is interesting to note that the photos you mention are the biggest "evidence" the debunkers use to show how we didnt land on the moon.

My friend Marcella was born on that day. Her mom calls her moon baby because she was laying in her hospital bed giving birth to her and watching it on tv. So I am sure there is footage.
Is he a fundamentalist mormon? Because they don't believe the moon thing.

Sorry Fred, there's nothing you can say. I am with him on this one. Even when I watched us 'land' and take that 'one giant leap for mankind', I was in grade school. I questioned a teacher about it then. Of course my parents and family probably thought I was nuts. Not until a few years ago did I realize there were other people thinking basically the same thing I thought questioning the same things I was questioning. Unless, I'm the next one on the moon and land next to the 'planted flag', I will never believe we made it to the moon. I'm sure he won't either.

BTW, I can't believe I just admitted that on Gather. LOL

If someone thinks they didn't walk on the moon, well, you won't be able to convince them of it. They will have to come to the realization when they grow up on their own! : )

We walked on the moon. Tell him that. If he refuses to believe, that's his loss!

.... Just Ask him if he know "Micheal Jackson" :)

This interests me, because according to something our president said a couple of years ago, we need to invest in NASA to come up with the technology to walk on the moon again. Huh? Don't we already have that technology? If we walked on the moon 40ish years ago, why don't we have the technology to do so today? Actually, why aren't we up there now?

It messes with my logic sensors. They tingle every time this comes up.

How much jet fuel does it take to launch off the moon? Less than earth, but still a lot, right? How do you set up the proper trajectory without a launch pad? Why wasn't there a delay in their talks to Houston? There's a delay when Matt Lauer in NYC talks to Houston today with all the advances we've seen in communications.

Seriously, tingling logic sensors on this one.

Maybe it happened. Maybe our govt. pulled the wool over your eyes. I know that's hard to believe, our govt. would never fudge something important.

Of course I wasn't born at that time, so that would obviously play a roll in my logic sensors tingling.

Why would you want to convince him that people were on the moon? He enjoys thinking that they did not. Why deny him that innocent pleasure. This way he can think that he's superior to all those poor suckers who think man was on the moon.

You know better but it isn't worth the trouble to convince him.

Maybe he should try to convince you that we didn't.

If they refuse to believe the evidence already available, it's highly unlikely that anything you say will convince them.

Get a group together and tell him to look at the moon through a telescope and that you can see the flag and all of you agree.If he can't see it he must need his eyes checked.

Save your breath Fred........................lose-lose there at this point! LOL

Your kidding, right?

My younger brother is one that does not believe that man has walked on the moon, and any number of other things.

He just thinks that government is completely untrustworthy, especiall over the most important things.

I went to high school with Neil Armstrong's son. He not only acted as if his dad walk on the moon, but like he created it too. His older son was my swimming teacher one summer. He was an ass. Never saw Neil in town, though I can show anyone interested where his little cow farm is.

well at least these theories are good for a laugh, like who killed JFK, and the such I mean good Lord .................
logic will answer all DUH

Fred, You can't convince someone of something if they don't want to believe. He probably doesn't believe in faeries or Santa Claus, either. Too bad.
..
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If the young man is interested enough to learn about how it was done, he could walk through it and you might be able to help him. Solve the "big picture" problems first: the weight of the entire package at takeoff (285,000 lb), the earth orbit and eventual escape velocity required, the thrust required (the Saturn V 1st stage produced 7,500,000 lb) and the amount (weight, volume) of fuel for a successful launch. Then go to the videotape and see if the Saturn V rocket fit the specs.

Jamie C. asked a few cool questions...
How much jet fuel does it take to launch off the moon? Less than earth, but still a lot, right?
A lot less because not only does the moon exert only 1/6 the gravity, but also the LEM (Lunar Module) was a relatively tiny vehicle with paper-thin foil walls, weighing only 10,024 lb on takeoff. So the LEM needed less than one percent of the thrust required for the takeoff from earth.

How do you set up the proper trajectory without a launch pad?
You do it with thrusters, little rockets mounted on the side of the vehicle that are able to change the yaw, pitch, and roll of the vehicle.

Why wasn't there a delay in their talks to Houston? There's a delay when Matt Lauer in NYC talks to Houston today with all the advances we've seen in communications.
There was a delay. For Matt Lauer, it's a 46,000-mile round trip to a communication satellite in stationary earth orbit at an altitude of 23,000 miles. Plus some additional delay through all the cable and circuitry on the ground. If he's talking to someone, double that distance while he waits for the answer to return. That's only about a half-second "in the air"--but a further pregnant pause is added as the signal is processed and eventually stuck into Matt's ear. Earth-to-moon is about 6 times as far as a single "bounce," so the lunar round trip "in the air" is only about 3 seconds, plus processing delays on the ground.

Ya know, somebody messed with the photos, and I have seen that as clear as can be. One can actually see the exact same hills on the horizon, in pictures taken from entirely different locations on the moon. Also, if one divides the total number of photos taken by the astronauts, by the time they were "outside", it would require one be taken every nine seconds, and that just didn't happen.

Now, I figure people went to the moon, but Nasa did some goofy stuff with the photos, for whatever reasons, and that has not been addressed by them. Until they explain why that happened, I can't really blame those who dismiss the whole thing as a sham, and can't say with absolute certainty it wasn't. That is very unfortunate, cause it was clearly a great accomplishment, I think.

Thanks for the answers, Dave. I appreciate you taking the time to respond so intelligently. I was doing a little web research after my comment and found that they can't find the original film reels from the first moon walk. Okay, I know govt.offices can be slightly (cough, cough, cough) incompetent, but really, don't you think you'd be a tad more careful with something THAT important? Also there are no blueprints anywhere for the rover vehicles. Not even at Boeing, who supposedly made them. On the converse, there was lots of interesting info on debunking the myths, and a lot of it makes my logic sensors calm slightly. Honestly, I still don't know what to think. It's possible they faked the whole thing. And there's plenty of evidence that we did walk on the moon.

So, I'm still on the fence with the 5% of Americans who just don't know what to believe. Both sides give compelling arguments.

John, here's a site that is time-stamped about 10 days after the Fox show in 2001. He puts up some rebuttals to some of the "fake photography" claims. Since I didn't see the original Fox program, I don't know how well he covered the material presented in the program.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/iangoddard/moon01.htm

Jamie C., what I suggest is the same thing that I put up earlier. Do the math and then look at what is out there and see whether a contraption like a combo Saturn V, LEM, and Apollo capsule could handle the task.

The guidance systems aren't really computationally difficult to implement (a good thing, since the PC hadn't been invented yet). But you have to carry enough fuel to get there and back, and everything has to be the right size and so forth. I think if you're careful you'll find that it checks out just fine. Healthy skepticism will be your friend throughout!

Dave,

I didn't even know there was a program. I looked at the photos.

There are a lot of people that believe this. I would just let it go.....just like I nodded and said interesting when my neighbor said that the world was going to end in 2012.

I recently created a photo album "Pictures of Apollo 11" have him look at that for a start. There are more photos out there too, from other missions. Lori's right, her uncle's (one my father and one uncle)both worked there, I did too. Those rockets are definatley going somewhere.

One other thing, space travel is possible either way, you wouldn't have sattelite T.V. , cell phones or the internet without it. Do you think they faked the Mars, Viking pictures too? Why? The space race with the Soviet Union was pretty much over. The U.S. Government gave our people a Bicenntenial present.

Yes there was a delay in communicating with the Apollo missions.

Fred, sit your roomate down and have him watch Apollo 13. Tell him it's not science fiction. I have seen up close Niel Armstrongs suit he wore on the Moon and Jim Lovells he never got to wear on the Moon. There is differences in how the "wear and tear"is. And I have seen Apollo capsules too. The burn marks from reentry are something else.

One of the best arguments is that some of the rocks brought back surprised the scientists who had not expected what they found.

Oh learned ones, tell me... When Neil was stepping down that ladder, giving the famous speech we can all recite about one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.... Just WHO was taking the pictures??? - Or was he NOT the first man to set foot on the moon, the lowly photographer astronaut wasn't worthy??? And besides the generic hills in the background, where are the stars???? Or don't they have stars in the heavens of the moon??? I have a friend who worked at NASA that asked the photographer question back then when it "happened" and you know.... they couldn't answer (or wouldn't). So you'd think if they were capable of figuring all the trajectories and stuff to pull off the mission, they ought to be able to answer a simple question like, "Who took that picture?"

Don't - a remote-control videocam was mounted on the outside of the LEM and recorded the first step on the moon. If you look at some of the NASA web pages, you can view other videos taken from that cam, showing it panning to view activities of both astronauts while they worked outside the LEM. (There are obviously other photos taken after both astronauts had left the LEM.) Sorry you had to wait all these years for a simple answer.

Don't - regarding the stars and photography on the surface of the moon in general: the most important thing to keep in mind is that there is essentially no atmosphere on the moon. So photos taken on the moon don't look quite like those taken on Earth. First, because there's no atmosphere to filter the light, the intensity of sunlight during the day (and each moon-day lasts 29-1/4 Earth-days) is extreme, as are reflections from the surface. That helps to explain the shadow detail in shots where the sun is backlighting a foreground object, the crosshairs on the lenses being blown out by bright objects, and the difficulty in seeing relatively dimly-lit objects, such as stars, when there is anything else in the frame. f-stops, dude.

In addition, distant objects don't fade away into an atmospheric haze. In photos, distant ridges and mountains look like nearby hills. That helps explain why you can view a photo of a distant landscape with the LEM in the foreground, and a different photo of apparently the same landscape with no LEM in the foreground.

Dave those shots were not a tight angle from the LEM they were a wide angle pointed at the LEM - give me a break

If it was that simple, why did my friend that was working at NASA at the time, not get the simple answer "it was mounted on the LEM"

Hi, Don't... I don't know specifically what shots we are talking about, so I can't address lenses. The link I put up earlier has a couple of examples and a discussion of the "disappearing LEM," which is where I got the idea for the example I mentioned.

It would be an interesting study to take a look at a map of Tranquility Base and the surrounding topography to get a better idea of the sightlines and distances to the geographic features that show up in those photos. I haven't investigated that, but it wouldn't be difficult.

As far as the mounted camera or cameras in general, you ought be be able to find quite a bit of information about that by Googling it. I know I did. I don't know what the deal was with your friend.

An additional note on the "backdrop" of mountains seen in Apollo 11 photos: the shots that are taken to the northwest show a couple of towering ranges, the Apennine Front to the left and Mount Hadley Delta to the right. The Apollo 15 astronauts walked on Hadley Delta a couple of years later. If you go to Google Moon and look at the landing sites for the two missions, you'll see that Hadley Delta is about 500 miles northwest of Tranquility Base (Apollo 11). From the elevation data on Google Moon, it appears that the difference in elevation between Tranquility Base and Hadley Delta is roughly 10,000 to 15,000 feet. That explains why those features show up in any Apollo 11 photo taken in that direction.

http://www.google.com/moon/

Regarding the "first step on the moon" photography, here are some links that describe the equipment in some detail (and also contain other links to other interesting sites)

http://www.myspacemuseum.com/apollocams.htm

Quote from the site:

Westinghouse Apollo Lunar Television Camera - Used on the lunar surface on Apollo 11 only... Few people who lived during the time of Apollo will ever forget where they were when they watched Neil A. Armstrong make his "One small step" into the history books on July 20, 1969. The fuzzy, gray images beamed back from the lunar surface for 2 hours that night allowed all of us to share in the wonder of that historic event. The machine that was used to do this was named simply the Apollo Lunar Televsion Camera. Built by Westinghouse, it was a simple system which measured 11" x 6" x 3", weighed 7.25 pounds, and used 6.25 watts of power. It was capable of operating at 10 or 0.65 frames per second, depending on light level, and it had 4 interchangeable lenses. The camera was mounted inside the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) in Quad 4 of the Lunar Module (LM) Descent Stage. This gave the capability of broadcasting the first steps of the astronauts as they climbed down the ladder of the LM at the start of the first EVA [extra-vehicular activity]. The astronauts would then detach the camera from it's [sic] mount in the MESA, mount the camera on a tripod, and carry it away from the LM to show the progress of the EVA.[emphasis added]

More on the MESA (Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly) and photography:

http://www.myspacemuseum.com/mesa.htm
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11
/photography/index.shtml#cameras

This was a very interesting article and debate!

Very interesting articl