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DID WE LAND ON

THE MOON?
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Did We Land on The Moon?

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving


the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon
and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project...will
be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more
important...and none will be so difficult or expensive to
accomplish...."
President John F.Kennedy,1961

"That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind."
U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong, on the Moon, 1969

The Apollo expedition to the Moon tells the historic story of


human exploration of the Moon by the United States. The defining
moment of this journey occured when Astronaut Neil Armstrong,
after descending the frail-looking ladder of the Lunar Module
Eagle, took the first human steps on the Moon on July 20, 1969.
Five more flights carried astronauts to the Moon, the last in 1972.
No human has been there since.
This marvel of exploration took shape in the special
circumstances of the 1950s and 1960s. The United States and the
Soviet Union competed for primacy in a global struggle pitting a
democratic society against totalitarian communism. This struggle,
called the Cold War, motivated the first explorations of space by
both countries.
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The space age began on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet


Union orbited Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite.
On 3 November 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik II. Included in
the payload was a dog named Laika, the first living being sent into
space. Initial American attempts to meet the Soviet challenge
ended in failure, inciting widespread public agitation that the
United States was falling behind in this new, crucial arena Cold
War competition.
From this beginning, both countries raced into space. But the
goal of this competition remained unclear. Not until 1961, when
President John F. Kennedy called for a lunar journey by the end of
the decade, did landing humans on the Moon become the focus of
the space race.
In the wake of Sputnik in 1957, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower responded to the Soviet challenge and to public
concern and excitement by reorganizing the American space effort.
One step was to create a new government agency to conduct
civilian space exploration. In 1958 congress established the new
agency-the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA). The armed services retained control of separate military
space programs.
Prior to the creation of NASA, ongoing studies in aeronautics
and space science were conducted under the auspices of the
Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency, the
Naval Research Laboratory, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency,
and the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. NASA
acquired many scientific and technical programs from these
agencies after its formation.
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THE SPACE RACE AND HUMAN EXPLORATION

As President John F. Kennedy assumed office in January


1961, the space race with the Soviet Union would soon move
beyond a competition to place satellites and animals in orbit: plans
for human exploration were well underway.
Again the Soviets led the way, exciting people around the
world when a cosmonaut became the first human explorer in space.
On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth once
in his Vostok spacecraft and returned safely. Gagarin's flight took
place a month before American astronaut Alan Shepard's suborbital
flight, and 10 months before astronaut John Glenn became the first
American to orbit the Earth. Gagarin's flight suggested, once more,
that the U.S.S.R. was well ahead in the Space Race.

CHARTING A PATH FOR THE AMERICAN SPACE


PROGRAM

Immediately after Gagarin's flight, President Kennedy


wanted to know what the United States could do in space to take
the lead from the Soviets. Vice President Lyndon Johnson polled
leaders in NASA, industry, and the military. He reported that "with
a strong effort" the United States "could conceivably" beat the
Soviets in sending a man around the Moon or landing a man on the
Moon. As neither nation yet had a rocket powerful enough for such
a mission, the race to the Moon was a contest that the United States
would not be starting at a disadvantage.
The rationale for human exploration of the moon primarily
came from a memorandum for Johnson prepared in early May
1961 by NASA Administrator James E. Webb and Secretary of
Defense Robert F. McNamara

PRESIDENT KENNEDY AND THE MOON DECISION


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President Kennedy spent several weeks assessing America's


options for competing with the Soviets in space. On May 25, 1961,
he announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon before a joint
session of Congress. At that point, the total time spent in space by
an American was barely 15 minutes.
"...if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the
world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in
space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to
all of us, as did Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on
the minds of men everywhere... Now it is time to take longer
strides-time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space
achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future
on Earth. ...we have never made the national decisions or
marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We
have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule...
Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is
not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because
whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share...

In July 1969, just eight years after President Kennedy's call


to reach the moon, Apollo 11 stood ready to begin the first human
exploration of another world. The Mercury, Gemini and early
Apollo flights provided crucial experience in space but Apollo 11
and its astronauts-Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael
Collins-faced new and risky challenges in exploring the Moon and
returning home to Earth.
On July 16 a Saturn V rocket, carrying the astronauts, the
Command Module Columbia, a Service Module, and the Lunar
Module Eagle, lifted off. On July 19, Apollo 11 reached lunar orbit
and on the 20th Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface in
the Lunar Module, with Collins remaining in the orbiting
spacecraft. Later that day Armstrong emerged from Eagle,
descended its ladder, and touched the Moon, offering his famous
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commemoration of the moment: "one small step for (a) man, one
giant leap for mankind."
The cost of the entire Apollo program: USD $25.4 billion
-1969 Dollars ($135-billion in 2005 Dollars). See NASA Budget.
(Includes Mercury, Gemini, Ranger, Surveyor, Lunar Orbitar,
Apollo programs.) Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rocket cost alone,
was about $ 83-billion 2005 Dollars (Apollo spacecraft cost $ 28-
billion (CS/M $ 17-billion; LM $ 11-billion), Saturn I, IB, V costs
about $ 46-billion 2005 dollars).
People who have walked on the Moon

As of 2007, twelve people have walked on the Moon. No one has


walked on the Moon since 1972.

Extra-
Age on Vehicular-
Name Mission
First Step Activity
dates

Neil 38y 11m


1 Armstrong 15d
July 20,
Apollo 11
1969
2 Buzz Aldrin 39y 6m 0d

39y 5m
3 Pete Conrad
17d
November
Apollo 12
19-20, 1969
4 Alan Bean 37y 8m 4d
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47y 2m
5 Alan Shepard
18d
February 5-
Apollo 14
6, 1971
Edgar 40y 4m
6 Mitchell 19d

41y 1m
7 David Scott
25d
July 31–
Apollo 15 August 2,
1971
41y 4m
8 James Irwin
14d

John W. 41y 6m
9 Young 28d
April 21-23,
Apollo 16
1972
36y 6m
10 Charles Duke 18d

Eugene
11 Cernan
38y 9m 7d
December
Apollo 17
11-14, 1972
Harrison
12 Schmitt
37y 5m 8d

Charlie Duke was the youngest, at age 36 (+6mo). Alan


Shepard was the oldest, at age 47 (+2mo).

James A. Lovell, Young, and Cernan are the only three


astronauts to fly more than one lunar mission (two each). Of these
three, only Lovell did not walk on the lunar surface. Lovell and
Fred Haise were prevented from walking on the Moon by the
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malfunction on Apollo 13 that resulted in the mission being


aborted.

Joe Engle had also trained to explore the Moon with Gene
Cernan as the backup crew for Apollo 14, but Engle was later
replaced by geologist Jack Schmitt when the primary crew for
Apollo 17 was selected. Schmitt had been crewed with Dick
Gordon in anticipation for Apollo 18. But when Apollo 18 was
cancelled, Schmitt bumped Engle, leaving Gordon as the last
Apollo astronaut who had trained extensively for lunar exploration
without ever getting a chance to fly a lunar landing.

But it seems that the moon landing was a hoax since some
professional photographers and investigators claim that all was
faked.

Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations are claims that some


or all elements of the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA
and possibly members of other involved organizations. Some
groups and individuals have advanced alternate historical
narratives which tend, to varying degrees, to include the following
common elements:

• The Apollo Astronauts did not land on the Moon;


• NASA and possibly others intentionally deceived the public
into believing the landing(s) did occur by manufacturing,
destroying, or tampering with evidence, including photos,
telemetry tapes, transmissions, and rock samples;
• NASA and possibly others continue to actively participate in
the conspiracy to this day.
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Several motives are given by hoax proponents for the U.S.


government to fake the Moon landings.

1. Cold-War prestige — The U.S. government considered it


vital that the U.S. win the space race against the Soviet
Union. Going to the Moon was risky and expensive (John F.
Kennedy famously said that the U.S. chose to go because it
was difficult.) Despite close monitoring by the Soviet Union,
Bill Kaysing believes that it would have been easier for the
U.S. to fake it, and consequently guarantee success, than for
the U.S. actually to go.
2. Money — NASA raised approximately $30 billion to go to
the Moon. Bill Kaysing thinks that this amount could have
been used to pay off a large number of people, providing
significant motivation for complicity.
3. Risk — This argument assumes that the problems early in the
space program were insurmountable, even by a technology
team fully motivated and funded to fix the problems. Kaysing
claimed that the chance of a successful landing on the moon
was calculated to be 0.017%.
4. Distraction — According to hoax proponents the U.S.
government benefited from a popular distraction from the
Vietnam war. Lunar activities suddenly stopped, with
planned missions canceled, around the same time that the
U.S. ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War.[9] (However,
the Apollo program was cancelled several years before the
Vietnam War ended.)
5. Saving face — To seemingly fulfil president Kennedy's 1961
promise "to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of
landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the
Earth."
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The Soviets, with their own competing moon program and an


intense economic and political and military rivalry with the USA,
could be expected to have cried foul if the USA tried to fake a
Moon landing. Theorist Ralph Rene responds that shortly after the
alleged Moon landings, the USA silently started shipping hundreds
of thousands of tons of grain as humanitarian aid to the allegedly
starving USSR. He views this as evidence of a cover-up, the grain
being the price of silence. (The Soviet Union in fact had its own
Moon program).

Proponents of the Apollo hoax suggest that the Soviet Union,


and latterly Russia, and the United States were allied in the
exploration of space, during the Cold war and after. The United
States and the former Soviet Union today routinely engage in
cooperative space ventures, as do many other nations that are
popularly believed to be enemies. However, this suggestion is
challenged by the impression of intense international competition
that was under way during the Cold War and is not supported by
the accounts of participants on either side of the Iron Curtain.
Many argue that the fact that the Soviet Union and other
Communist bloc countries, eager to discredit the United States,
have not produced any contrary evidence to be the single most
significant argument against such a hoax. Soviet involvement
might also implausibly multiply the scale of the conspiracy, to
include hundreds of thousands of conspirators of uncertain loyalty.

Who is Kaysing?

William Charles Kaysing (July 31, 1922 – April 21, 2005)


was a writer best known for claiming that the six Apollo moon
landings between July 1969 and December 1972 were hoaxes. He
is regarded as the instigator of the moon hoax movement. He
served on a destroyer with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in World
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War II, and received his Bachelor of Arts in English from the
University of Southern California in 1949. Before he broke out of
the rat race, he was first employed by the Rocketdyne Corporation,
and then became head of the Technical Publications Unit at the
Propulsion Field Laboratory in Simi Hills, California. There he
worked closely with top scientists and engineers on the research
and development phases of the Atlas, Apollo, and other space
rockets. At that time, his integrity was highly enough regarded by
his superiors for him to receive clearance for SECRET, USAF, and
the "Q" Atomic Energy Commission. During that entire period,
however, he was overworked, burdened with unending debt,
unhappy, and eventually critically ill. In 1963, he broke out. To
earn what little money he then discovered he needed, he became a
freelance writer. He has published over twenty books since then -
with publishers of the caliber of Prentice Hall and the San
Francisco Chronicle Press - and he has appeared on more than 100
radio, television, and newspaper interviews.

Accusations

Hoax proponents argue that Wernher von Braun's trip to


Antarctica in 1967 (two years prior to the Apollo missions) was in
order to study and/or collect lunar meteorites to be used as fake
Moon rocks. Because von Braun was a former SS officer, hoax
proponents have suggested that he could have been susceptible to
pressure to agree to the conspiracy in order to protect himself from
recriminations over the past. Whilst NASA does not provide much
information about why the MSFC Director and three others were in
Antarctica at that time, it has said that the purpose was "to look
into environmental and logistic factors that might relate to the
planning of future space missions, and hardware". An article on
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Sankar Chatterjee at Texas Tech University states that von Braun


sent a letter to F. Alton Wade, Chatterjee's predecessor, and that
"Von Braun was searching for a secretive locale to help train the
United States’ earliest astronauts. Wade pointed von Braun to
Antarctica." Even today, NASA continues to send teams to work in
parts of Antarctica that are very dry and mimic the conditions on
other planets such as Mars and the Moon.

Hasselblad were the manufacturer of the camera that took all


of the photos on the Apollo missions. Jan Lundberg was the
Manager Of Space Projects at Hasselblad from 1966 to 1975 and
responsible for the production and building of the Hasselblad 500
EL/70 cameras that were used on the Apollo Missions. He says
'Originally NASA made all the alterations themselves, then they
presented what they had done to us and asked if we could do the
same, to which we replied yes we can, and we can do it better. We
proceeded to make the alterations that were accepted by NASA.'
Protective plates were added to the case and film magazine.

An important factor to take into consideration is the great


variations in temperature that the film would have had to endure
whilst on the lunar surface. The temperature during the Apollo
missions were recorded as being between -180F in the shade to an
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incredible +200F in full Sunshine. How could the film emulsion


have withstood such temperature differences? The astronauts can
be seen to move between the shadows of the rocks and then into
full sunlight in some shots. Surely the film would have perished
under such conditions? If the film used during the Apollo missions
had such qualities as to withstand such differences in temperature,
why are Kodak not publicly selling them in today's market?

Lets move onto the famous picture


of Buzz Aldrin that shows the
LEM, Neil Armstrong and landing
site in the reflection of his visor.
One of the strange things with this
picture is that the reticule that is
supposed to be in the middle of the
picture actually shows up at the
bottom of Aldrin's right leg? How
can this be when the camera is
attached to the cameraman's
chest??? A fact that is easily
verifiable by the reflection of the
cameraman in the visor.
Many people have speculated that
the pictures have been retouched to
bring up the detail of the astronauts.
But this cannot be applied to the
Apollo 11 photographs because a
duplicate copy of the original
Armstrong film has been analyzed
and shows that the pictures are all
on one continuous roll of film that
contains over 100 images. Even Jan
Lundberg from Hasselblad, the
makers of the camera, says that the
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pictures seem as though Armstrong


is standing in a spotlight. The only
way the reticule could appear in the
bottom of the leg is if the picture
had been copied and reframed!!!
The horizon is about 89 degrees
from the true vertical. Dr Groves
has worked out that after analysing
the shadows cast by both the
astronaut in the picture and the
supposed cameraman in the visor,
that Armstrong who is taking the
picture is standing on ground that
is a mere few inches higher than
where Aldrin is stood, If this is the
case, then it means that whoever
took the shot was in fact at least 2
feet higher than Aldrin and
therefore means that Armstrong,
although visible with the camera in
the visor, is not the actual person
who took the shot

Why No Dust?
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The lunar lander used two engines stacked on top of one


another. The LEM's descent engine used hyperbolic propellants,
that means two different fuels that light at the same time. The
exhaust jet coming out of the LEM on descent or ascent should
have created an enormous cloud of reddish coloured gas, instead
we see the bursting apart of the milar covering as it leaves the
Moons surface? The fuel used are exactly the same as used on the
Shuttle today, and we can clearly see the exhaust smoke coming
from them, so why not the LEM?

Surely there should have been some type of crater under the
Apollo landing modules, especially the Apollo 12, as it slowly
moved across the moon's surface before landing.

The 5000 degree Fahrenheit heat from the 10,000 lb thrust of


the engine should have produced at least some volcanic rock. If
you compare the molten volcanic rock at Mount Etna, that was
boiled at only1000 Celsius. I have heard some sceptics claim that
the engines force would have been dispersed mainly sideways, but
if this is so, what actually held up the 2,300lbs of lunar lander
when it was on its descent to the Lunar surface? Why was there
not any dust in the landing pads either? There is certainly lots of
dust scattered when the LEM is leaving the Moon and if the engine
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simply blew all the dust away from around the LEM as it landed,
how did Armstrong manage to create that famous footprint?

Do you seriously believe that Neil Armstrong could land the


Lunar Module by trying to judge the terrain below from a very
restrictive view of the Moons surface from the small triangular
window positioned on the side of the craft?
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'Buzz' different in various images


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LRVs lowered into position?

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