Man on the Moon...?
- Thread starter coachdags
- Start date
just watched this myth buster video, very good, if you like this topic, give it a watch.
We have, in 1972, with Apollo 17.
I would say that neither the money nor the motivation has been present since then, however.
Obviously not. First of all, our last trip to the moon was 1972. But that's nitpicking. There just hasn't been a desire to do so. It took an incredible amount of political will to make it to the moon. Since then, NASA has dealt with rovers to MARS, spacecraft that traveled through and left the solar system, the ISS, the shuttle missions, etc. Combine that with the fact that NASA is vastly underfunded, heading back the moon was low priority.
There's no real reason to, I guess, is the big reason. That, and NASA sold their souls for the giant mistake that was the Space Shuttle.
I wouldn't say that NASA is vastly underfunded. They are a huge government bureaucracy with no cohesive vision and no cohesive mission living with some horrible decisions made in the last 3 decades and unwilling to change, or even be honest with themselves and the taxpayers.
The shuttle has been, by it's original goals, a total, complete, unmitigated disaster.
The ISS has been a pointless boondoggle that should have been mercifully killed before it ever started. It's just an excuse to spend money on something that should have been done better, cheaper and faster years and years ago.
They don't do anything particularly useful for the average citizen these days with the vast, vast majority of their budget, other than spend our money. The handful of success stories have been relatively low-budget, low-profile (at the time) ventures, aside from the flawed Hubble situation, and even a good number of those have been failures.
NASA stopped being truly remarkable at the end of Apollo, IMO. They haven't had a focus that the rest of the country has really gotten behind since then, and it shows.
If you are so sure we went to the moon in 1969, can you explain why no country has been there since? Surely there is something to learn from landing on the moon. Did we share these valuable secrets with other countries such as North Korea and the Soviet Union?
Did the Soviet Union, whose space program was markedly ahead of ours, just decide to give up their ambitions of going to the moon?
There is certainly all kinds of reasons we would have had for faking a moon landing, and this country during the Cold War, especially the CIA, was no stranger to using propaganda and lying to the American Public. I think that the fact that no country has been there since doesn't necessarily mean outright declaration of a moon faking, but definitely deserves an explanation.
Did the Soviet Union, whose space program was markedly ahead of ours, just decide to give up their ambitions of going to the moon?
There is certainly all kinds of reasons we would have had for faking a moon landing, and this country during the Cold War, especially the CIA, was no stranger to using propaganda and lying to the American Public. I think that the fact that no country has been there since doesn't necessarily mean outright declaration of a moon faking, but definitely deserves an explanation.
Sometimes I wonder where conspiracy people would think it might be filmed at? There would be too many people seeing a lander being rolled into a sand filled studio somewhere. Someone, a janitor, would eventually talk.
But then again maybe that studio became the same studio for Full House :skeptical:
But then again maybe that studio became the same studio for Full House :skeptical:
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
As before, the answer to the first part is very simple. Money.
If you look at the costs of Mercury through Apollo 11 (1958-1969), the space program cost the USA around 34.8 billion dollars (1960's money). Adjust that 40 years forward with inflation and you're talking about around 221 billion dollars.
How many countries have that kind of coin to spend? The US did, the Soviets thought they did (turns out they didn't - helped lead to some of the major economic problems that caused the fall of the Soviet Union). Japan? Nope. The EU? Nope. Central/South America/Africa? No way. China? Not until recently, and they're working on it. India? See China.
The other part of the equation is that since the Saturn V was (tragically) axed in 1971, the world hasn't had a heavy-lift vehicle sufficient to get a large payload to the Moon.
-The Saturn V could put 100,000 lb. to the Moon, 262,000 lb. to Low Earth Orbit (over half of that obviously being the propellant to get to the Moon). -The Space Shuttle can put around 53,000 lb. to Low Earth Orbit, most of that being the Shuttle itself.
-The biggest contractor rockets - Delta IV Heavy (ULA/Boeing): around 56,000 lbs. to LEO. Atlas V Heavy (ULA/Lockheed): 65,000 lbs. to LEO. -Internationally, Ariane 5 (ESA): 46,000 lbs.
As for how the US beat the Soviets... turns out the Soviet space program got very political, at one point with about 30 rocket designs competing for the same money, as opposed to the US, who picked one idea and pumped money into it. The Soviets actually were still ahead up until 1967 (Apollo 8). Another big problem was that the Soviet chief engineer, Sergey Korolyov, died (possibly of cancer) in 1965. Two years later, politics forced the USSR to launch Soyuz 1 when it still had design faults, resulting in the death of a cosmonaut (They wanted a man on the Moon in '67, in time for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution). The resulting year-and-a-half delay gave the US enough time to sprint to the finish line.
*edit* There's actually a great op-ed in the NY Times today about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/opinion/18iht-edbignami.html
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Wow, more ammo for the fake landing crew:
Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits - Yahoo! News UK
NASA deleted the original video tape.
Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits - Yahoo! News UK
NASA deleted the original video tape.
I was seven when they landed and i was irritated every time they cut into the television programs with updates. I didn't see what the big deal was since they went to stars on Star Trek. Beam me up Scotty.
By the way, a neighbor of mine was in Mission Control and says it wasn't faked.But then again, he wasn't on the moon or was he?
By the way, a neighbor of mine was in Mission Control and says it wasn't faked.But then again, he wasn't on the moon or was he?
Awe, I love this topic. It's one of my favorites. I'm sorry, but I've seen and read every theory against us actually doing it being debunked. My favorite claim is how you can't see any stars in the sky. That's the one that convinced a girl I used to work with that we didn't go. She could never understand when I asked her, "How many stars do you see during the day here on earth, at high noon?" Just because the sky was black, doesn't mean that, with the sun showing, it was so bright on the surface of the moon, you wouldn't be able to see any star but our sun. Of course, this is the same girl who doesn't believe we landed on the moon, but regularly visits psychics and palm readers to guider her in her life. She even visited and belives an Indian woman actually read her dogs mind and was able to tell her everything her dog needed and was longing for. Heck, if nothing else, the fact that this woman believes we didn't go to the moon is all I need to make me believe we did. There is really no doubt about it. If anyone who believes we didn't, actually did some research on their theories and supposed truth, they'd believe we went also.
A great site to look into that debunks a lot of the myths about going, can be found here:
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: Bad TV
It's a great site that explains a lot of those "little" mysteries.
A great site to look into that debunks a lot of the myths about going, can be found here:
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: Bad TV
It's a great site that explains a lot of those "little" mysteries.
Even with everything we have today, I find this to be the most amazing thing humans have ever created. I'm still upset at being born in 1970, jsut a hair too young to have ever witnessed a Saturn V launch in person. There are a lot of things I would do with a time machine if one did exist. The first thing I would do though, would be to go back and see that launch in person. I'm into model rocketry, and have seen a lot of big stuff launched, but I still can't imagine what kind of earth shattering commotion that thing must have created when they lit those 5 F-1 engines. It's still the single most powerful liquid fueled rocket engine ever developed. That says a lot about '60s technology right there.
I cannot believe it was faked for 2 reasons
1) you cannot keep something like that under your hat for 40 years, I would expect that there'd be more significant proof of a fake. A fake requires a film crew, cameras, EVIDENCE....no way
2) There was no reason to "fake" a moon landing. The political thing was that we could basically put an ICBM anywhere on the planet. The rocket went into space, everyone saw that. Russians knew we could blast them to the stoneage without the moon landing.
1) you cannot keep something like that under your hat for 40 years, I would expect that there'd be more significant proof of a fake. A fake requires a film crew, cameras, EVIDENCE....no way
2) There was no reason to "fake" a moon landing. The political thing was that we could basically put an ICBM anywhere on the planet. The rocket went into space, everyone saw that. Russians knew we could blast them to the stoneage without the moon landing.
I'm fairly certain we did it, but far from 100% positive. The main thing that troubles me is if we could land a man on the moon 40 years ago why haven't we advanced much farther as the computer and technology have advanced. It seems like we've gone backwards from that point in our space program. I would think we would be traveling to the moon routinely by now and perhaps beyond considering how far technology has advanced in the last 40 years. Our current shuttle seems like a giant step backwards from a moonlanding.
