Laughing is good, for everyone, not just 13 year olds who were born 30 years after Apollo ended and who cannot possibly know anything about that of which they speak .

No offense intended, Ey3..., however, you should probably be told that the Moon was in fact pretty much like we thought it was going to be when we landed there first in 1969. There were of course some surprizes, as would be expected when first exploring a different world, but it seems that for those who will eventually return to the Moon that they will find it exactly as we did back in the day.

Although Apollo conducted what could be considered as a very basic reconnaisance of the lunar surface environment, we learned a whole lot, and those who return will uncover many other things that the first explorers could never have found, given the rather constrained nature of their forays.

But the Moon's basic nature is well known, and those future lunar explorers will be arriving in an environment which will in fact be pretty much exactly as we now know it to be...

But you can still laugh if you so desire. I can remember doing the same thing back in the day as we explored the lunar surface. It was a rather happy time.

Regards.

I do agree with Hazzard on this point - MID is an encyclopedia on Apollo, not to mention my favorite adversary as he is always very fair and objective in his replies to me. His example should be followed by all of us.

Many Thanks, Turb...you humble me with your kind comments!

...I blush.

You know that I feel this issue is open to discussion. I realize that for many, the Apollo program is something buried in the mists of the past, and I appreciate than people can see the possibility--being that the actual events are so remote and have never been repeated--that the whole thing may have been a gigantic hoax.

I think that merits some talk. But I do insist on discussion. Trying to "tear a new one" into people, on whichever side of the discussion you may be, is inappropriate and rather defeats the purpose of "discussion", which is basically an exchange, and which should, ideally be a learning experience for both parties.

I do have some problems with anyone who wishes to make snide comments, or say nothing while trying to sound cute. Not any large problems mind you...but I'll take a polite jab at 13 year olds who, from time to time, appear and make comments that are based upon nothing of substance at all, and I will take a jab at people who are simply rude .

However, you of course, Turb, are not among those folks!

Many thanks again,

and by the way...have you been able to uncover any further information as to why the VLA folks seem to have abandoned their imaging project?


Regards.

You're welcome, MID. And thanks for bringing up the VLT project. As a result of your query, I have emailed them some follow up questions for more details on why the project was abandoned. I will post back with any reply that may come.

Cheers.

About the VLT, its the same as with the retroreflectors evidence, any pictures of the lander remains are likely to be dismissed by hoax enthusiasts as artefacts from an unmanned mission.
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/mlrs/mlrs.html

If a HB cant wrap their head around the the Apollo missions given the myriad of evidence presented,I dont think that a few high resolution pictures of the LRV is going to open their eyes.



I wonder about the hardware that are still up there on the moon surface,what do you think the land site would look like to day.

Doubtful that the tires on the LRV would be intact,colors/fabric on the flag etc,etc ?

I find it somewhat amusing that once again folks are trying to sell our forerunners short. The reason that the Lunar missions ended was twofold - the US had nothing left to outdo the russians, and the cost was getting too great. You can only collect so many moon rocks. These aren't opinions, which I have read a lot of on this thread. These are facts.

As far as the time lapse for new Lunar missions, times are different. The space shuttle can't land on the moon, so scientists have to start from the ground up on a new vehicle design. Will it launch from the earth? Will it be assembled in space? How will it land on the moon in a way that is safe and efficient? How can we integrate new technology into this machine? Think of how long it took to develop the space shuttle, one of, if not the most, complex machine ever created.

Look at how long the shuttle missions were delayed after all the problems with the foam striking the underside. Times have changed, and NASA/the US isn't willing to put as much at risk as they did in the 1960's. People don't seem to realise the gravity [no pun intended] of the space race, and what it meant to get a leg up on the russians. Today's theme is quite different - international cooperation, and doing things the right way.

Of course it's your right to believe that the landings never took place. It's just sad that you can't logically process the facts, instead choosing to grasp at straws, trying to find a flaw. Believe it or not, NASA and the astronauts of the Apollo missions achieved great things, not just for the US, but for the world.

Definitely agreed, the technology which it would have taken for NASA to 'fake' the moon landings wasn't around in the 60s anyway. The main reason for no further trips to the moon is idiots like Bush not giving enough money to science.
Man definitely did land on the moon. If you go to the NASA website there are arguments for all of the so-called conspiracies somewhere in the archives from when all this rubbish first came up.

Phil Plait does more than a good job aswell.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

I've mused about that too on occassion.
The deteriorating factors would be the cosmic rays-radiation flux, and of course the intense light/heat v. intense cold flux every couple weeks. I should suppose that about 400 cycles of temperature variance in the range of about 500 degrees F would have an effect on some materials.

The flags were made of nylon, as was the webbing of the LRV seats and the velcro seatbelts.
I should think one would observe some deterioration in those materials, and as you speculate...the colors of the flags might well be washed out rather profoundly. I'm not sure how nylon itself would behave over the course of so much time in that environment. The temperature wouldn't approach nylon's melting point, but I wouldn't be surprized if some of the fabric had deteriorated to the point of falling apart somewhat.

You might also see the effects of micrometeorite bombardment in some areas. Perhaps a degradation in the insulating materials on the LM descent stage and LRV where so protected. The passive thermal insulation on the LRV batteries may have deteriorated as well, perhaps resulting in battery rupture.

But I don't think the LRV tires would be very much affected. They were metal, consisting of an aluminum hub and a tire body constructed of zinc coated steel strands with titanium "treads".

I think from a distance, you'd likely see pretty much what was left there decades ago, save perhaps the absence of much color on the flags...and maybe some other colored materials that would've washed out. You'd likely see other effects only close up.

Charlie Duke left a photograph of his family on the surface in a plastic bag on Apollo 16. I'd bet one wouldn't know what that thing was laying on the surface today. It would probably be completely deteriorated and warped.

Regards.

You speak of some complex items here. I appreciate your position, and essentially agree with you. I'd like to expand on a couple of your points.

There were several factors, all of which interwound to cause Apollo's demise, and which influenced the fact that we didn't continue with space exploration. It's difficult to put it all into a simple nut shell and say "that's the reason".

The primary thrust of Apollo at its genesis was to create something that would position the United States in a position of superiority to the Soviets. This cannot be denied. Of course, Apollo became much more than that, especially in the hearts of those involved with it.
As of Apollo 8, we were decidedly ahead of the Soviets, as we had in fact gone to the Moon. As of Apollo 11's launch, we had won, as the Soviet lunar capabilty had been destroyed. All we had to do was to do it. We did, of course, and continued the program as designed for a time, gradually scrapping missions because of Nixon's cuts of what would've been the final 3 Apollo lunar landing missions. This process was spurred on by the ever present American ability to became jaded and blase about the extraordinary in rapid fashion.

Money was needed for the still escalating war in Viet Nam, which was a primary reason for the cuts that pre-empted Apollo's planned conclusion. It also pre-empted most of the advanced Apollo Applications program, any hope of continuing manned space exploration for decades to come, and even compromised the Space Shuttle design process, which resulted in the vehicle we finally flew in 1981, and which has killed 14 people since.

The cost of Apollo was only getting too great because other things were costing far too much.

The time lapse which has occurred is not so much due to the time required to develop new technologies. We had the technologies in place to develop new spacecraft and new missions in the 1970s. We simply couldn't do it because we essentially weren't allowed to. The government didn't want that, and the people didn't care either.

Of course, today, we now have a new plan to return to the moon, but as you say, that requires money, and time to develop many new spacecraft, since there's been a 30-some year gap between the Apollo program and the new project.

Incidentally, this new plan does involve earth launching and assembly on the ground. The landing mode is well understood, and it seems somewhat remarkable that very similar approaches are to be used to the original EOR plan that was scrapped in the 1960s in favor of the more efficient LOR mode that we used so successfully. I question this approach, and marvel at the fact that the Shuttle seems to play no role in this lunar landing plan (...I say this because the very point of the Shuttle at its inception was to act as a support vehicle for just such a project as this).
___________________________________________________________________________

I think that your idea regarding safety and what the US / NASA is willing to put up with is a little off, with all due respect.

I think the US is perhaps not willing to put up with the lack of safety that has been profoundly demonstrated by the Shuttle. I do not think it's a matter of not being willing to put up with the risks they did in the 1960s. We put up with "managed risks" in the 1960s. Research pilots did the flying of these spacecraft, and contrary to the popular image of the test pilot, these people were not willing to put up with any undue risk. They didn't just strap in, cast their fate to the winds, and ride off, blindly risking their personal safety and their lives for the thrill of it.

While it's absolutely true that any project which pushes the envelope contains risk, engineers and test pilots strive for safety before anything else. They are aware that things can certainly go wrong in such a program, and that things sometimes do go south in a hurry, but the emphasis is on understanding and envisioning the possibilities of such things, creating procedures and work around for these possibilities, and maintaining a high degree of redundancy so that the risks are what we call "managed".

We could live with managed risk. In Apollo, I guarantee you that flight crew safety was #1 in priority. The flight crews were intimately involved in every decision pertaining to flight, and the commander of a mission had final word on a GO/NO GO situation.

With the Shuttle, a paradigm shift developed wherein "success" was placed in a priortity over safety. What was done with the shuttle was to create and ignore risk, risk that didn't need to exist at all, in a program that should've been relatively low risk relative to the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, which consisted of a series of missions...each of which pushed into new unknown areas of experience. The shuttle pressed no envelope of unknown flight when it completed it's test series (STS-1 through STS-4).

NOTE: Please do not interpret this to mean that I think that Shuttle flights should be utterly safe and risk free. After all, there is risk in jumping on an airplane and flying off to grandma's for the holidays. Granted, it's pretty low (alot lower than jumping in your car and driving there!). To expect that nothing will ever happen, even in what should be relatively routine Earth orbital space operations would be naive. However, we should never have seen what we saw with the disasters of Challenger and Columbia. Those things were the results of risks that were created by the paradigm, and which were ignored.


But "success", which was never really defined for the Shuttle (being that it really had no mission or mandate), became the illusory emphasis, and the obvious was ignored by this paradigm shift of NASA management.

To wit, the known SRM field joint problems that were present during the mid 1980s were essentially pushed aside. Data clearly indicated that the O-rings eroded as a function of lowering launch temperatures. No data existed for anything under 50 degrees F, but extrapolating the existing data clearly showed that complete primary and secondary O-ring erosion could possibly (and perhaps would probably) occur if one launched below a certain temperature...at least by the extrapolation. Conclusive data? No. Enough to cancel? It depends on which NASA you were with.

In 1986, apparently not. In 1969, absolutely. A scrub would've resulted and the problem would've been studied in depth with alot of testing and data gathering. The launch would've been scrubbed until the temperatures for launch were within the known data range.

So, what we had were these two opposed paradigms:

1) 1969.

Is there anything that says we might have a problem here...anything we see that might spell a problem? Answer: Yes, this particular condition we haven't seen before. We don't have any data telling us how we'll behave in this realm. We might be fine, but all our data says that if we go into this realm, we might also have a serious problem.

Result: OK, we scrub until we understand this better.


2) 1986

Same question.

Result: Well, since we have no proof were going to have a problem, we'll go.


In other words, the one says, "Prove to me we're safe to the best of our understanding, and we go."

The other says, "Prove to me were not safe, or else we go."


It's a subtle, but profound difference in thinking. And that is what people are not willing to put up with anymore.

It's not the risk...it's the lack of managing it that people are unwilling to endure any more.

Regards.

Thanks, Turb!


I'll look forward to hearing about it.


Regards.

Personally I believe that they went to the moon. I feel that considering the length of time the missions have been going the accidents while tragic were likely to occur shooting someone into space it is a dangerous process. As for the question why haven't we been I would ask why should we go back. Should our country really spend a small fortune and put peoples lives at risk to go to place that if even they do go and bring back more evidence the people that believe the moon landing is fake still won't be convinced.

I don't think that convincing the moon hoax believers is very high up on NASAs "to do list".

MID, very well said!

I think your two questions are are unrelated.

You ask why we should go back.

You also ask if we should spend a small fortune and put peoples lives at risk..."even if we do go and bring back more evidence the people that believe the moon landing is faked still won't be convinced."

The second question is unrelated to the first, because it supposes that we would do all these things to simply bring back more "evidence"...to convince the people who don't believe we went in the first place.

As to that implication, I should agree with Hazzard. There is absolutely no possibility, nor even a notion of executing a manned space exploration project such as a return to the moon to convince anyone that we've already been there. That, quite frankly, is an unthinkable prospect. And, as you say, any further "evidence" of the successful Apollo programs reality is likely to fall on deaf ears and blind eyes anyway.

The cost of returning to the moon, or any other manned program is often brought up at the top of people's lists regarding the why of returning.

I think that is probably the most hollow reason there is for not going. The cost of a manned space exploration program is not difficult, despite all the skewed theories and discussions to the contrary. Quite simply, Americans spend more money than the entire Apollo program cost every single year on cosmetics. Add beer and cigarettes to the mix and the entire idea that we can't afford to go to the moon is essentially ludicrous.

The entire Apollo Program cost Americans approximately $120 a piece. That, spread over approximately 11 years. Figure it out. About 3 cents per day per person. Forget about the cost. In America, we can afford it.

Why would we go?

For the same reasons we went before, save that now, we know the benefits in many areas of such a program (beyond national prestige and technological superiority over the Soviets, that is).
Today, we look at our modern life and its technological advantages, its comforts and its relative comforts, and we look back to our forefathers and often wonder how it was that they were able to live without the things we take for granted.
Our microwaves and cell phones and PCs and high-zoot televisions and digital music and all of that (and much more than that) are all results of the technological explosion brought about by ...you guessed it, the Manned Space Program that resulted in Apollo.

We often hear arguements regarding the "spaceships or schools" type of reasoning. Yet, it is an established fact that Apollo was responsible for, among many other things, the United State's preeminent educational system during the 1960s and 1970s. The Soviet accomplishment of Sputnik placed an unprecedented emphasis on schools and universities in this country in a manner that was unprecedented. In 1970, the United States was number 1 in the world in education, and in scientific and technological acchievement. That was because of the space program.

The reason that this situation is not the norm in America today is because we've had no inspirational projects in three decades to stimulate the emphasis. A true manned space exploration program could well provide that emphasis again, and its subsequent benefits.

Scientific research, physics, astronomy, molecular biology, medicine, materials research....all of that was enhanced by the early space program, and much more can be, and should be done.

To describe the wide ranging possibilities of a manned presence in space, and on the Moon, particularly, would take much more room, and much more time than I have at this point.

Quite frankly, the appropriate question is not "Why should we go back?"

It is, "Why didn't we continue in the first place?"

Regards.

Thank you very much, hechtal!

Regards.

To seem intelligent. Conspiracy theories are often much more elaborate than what's commonly believed about something. And they usually require the listener to expand his understanding to accept the possibility of a conspiracy. Those who casually examine photographs of the lunar landings are impressed when they are led to discover discrepancies. This inflates the ego and gives one the impression that he is smarter than the dozens who look at the same photographs and see nothing special.-Jay windley.

I think there's quite a bit of truth to this.
I'm not so sure that they require "the listener to expand his understanding to accept the possibility of a conspiracy", however.
I think they rather require the listener to have little or no tacit understanding of the subject matter in which the conspiracy theory is being advanced.

I think, for instance, that in the case of the lunar photographs, one will be impressed by someone saying that the shadows are all wrong because they have no realization that in looking at the lunar photographs one is actually seeing perfectly natural phenomena that can be observed on almost any two dimensional representation (i.e. photograph) that they've seen countless times on Earth...of Earth scenes.

People generally don't question such claims as those, they tend to accept that there's something wrong, and go along with the notion, rather than say, "Well, let's see. How about I look at some photos taken on Earth and see if I can notice something different in similar circumstances pertaining to shadow angles, etc."

They know little or nothing about the fact that shadows do in fact appear to be at different angles in a panorama, or even certain single frames based upon items in the field that cast shadows, or based upon the curvature of the surface the shadows are cast upon, and thus, perfectly normal (natural) representations are regarded as unusual.

A complexity in the conspiracy theory business is that there are in fact certain conpiracies that occur, and undoubtedly will occur.

For instance, it is rather well established that the JFK assassination is a mess of jumbled, conflicting information. The conspiracy is relatively obvious. Most people realize this based on the serious research that has been done over the years. There is a huge difference between looking at the Zapruder film and attempting to justify the Warren Commission's version of the asassination to it, and looking at a perfectly normal lunar photograph in which there is absolutely nothing wrong, save that which people with limited understanding of what they're looking at are attempting to create in it.

However, the point is that with actual conspiracies we've seen and know about, a rather pronounced tendency to make one out of virtually everything has arisen. And that is the genesis of the moon hoax largely. But the Kennedy situation is obvious. The lunar landings cannot be substantiated as anything but factual events.


Regards.

A rather pertinent note regarding the oft-mentioned cost factor of the Apollo program, or any manned space exploration project.
Such arguements fall on utterly deaf ears with me. A simple reason is that there's more than enough money to do this thing, and any thing else that Americans wish to do.

As I'd mentioned, it would cost pennies a day in todays dollars from each Amercian to fund Apollo over the course of 10-11 years. This past Friday was what is dubbed "Black Friday" (quite apropos, actually), which of course is the beginning of the Christmas holiday shopping season.

On that day in America, as unbelievable as it may seem, 50% of this nation's population was in shopping malls and department stores. Half of the population of this country! Guess how much they spent on discretionary spending....

28 BILLION DOLLARS.

In one day...Americans, following some impulse, some tradition, spent more than the entire Apollo Program cost...on Christmas...


Now, of course, the 24 billion expense on Apollo was spread out over 11 years in dollars valued at 1960s levels. Todays return to the moon project will run about 100 billion to accomplish the next landing. This spread out over a projected 13 years. The cost is actually less than that of Apollo, and the fact is that 4 "Black Friday shopping sprees...4 single shopping days like last Friday could more than pay for it.

So I suppose what I'm saying is, forget the cost factor. It's not a factor at all.

Regards.

For assassin101:


Here's a place where you can place your questions regarding the Apollo program.

And to answer your question, no, it's not true. It actually happened.