Did We Really Go To The Moon?
Some people claim that NASA's Apollo Moon landings were fake - they are wrong!
The most common reasons people doubt or reject Apollo are rebutted here as briefly as possible (to keep things easy):
There's no proper evidence - In the first place, every step of NASA's effort to get to the Moon was meticulously documented from within and without. This thoroughness left behind many thousands of documents, photographs, and audio/video recordings, and millions of typed and handwritten words. Artefacts - the tangible hardware - from the lunar missions are currently on display in numerous museums around the world. And then there is the Moon itself. The lunar astronauts returned with more than 382 kilograms of Moon rocks which have been shared and studied by scientists in many countries for decades. None of these experts has expressed doubts about the rocks' origin.
The US government has lied about other things - Of course, it has, and it will do so again but the fact that the US government is capable of lying doesn't prove that it lied about Apollo. Watergate and Trumpgate are not evidence of Moongate!
Who filmed Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon? - The Lunar Module did. While still on the steps, Armstrong deployed the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly from the side of the Lunar Module. This housed, amongst other things, the TV camera and meant that over 600 million people on Earth could watch the live feed.
The absence of stars in photographs - All manned landings happened during the lunar daytime. Thus, the stars were outshone by the Sun and by sunlight reflected off the Moon's surface. Also, cameras were set for the proper exposure to photograph well-lit astronauts (wearing white suits) and the highly reflective Lunar Module, not the faint light of distant stars in dark space. If the cameras had been set instead to capture the light of stars, the astronauts would have been overexposed.
There is no blast crater under the Lunar Module - In order to land, the Lunar Module's descent engine was throttled back and shut down prior to contact with the surface of the Moon. If the vehicle's engine had been engaged at anything near its ten-thousand-pound thrust capability, it could not have landed.
The flag moved - The US flag that was displayed on a rod extending horizontally from a flagpole did not move because of wind (on Earth). It moved because of the astronaut's manipulation of the flagpole during his effort to drive it into the lunar soil.
Everyone involved lied! - Hundreds of thousands of NASA personnel and contractors might have lied and then kept lying about it for all these FIFTY years! This is as doubtful as things can get, particularly in these current days of leaks, self-publicity and social media. Over the years, several Apollo engineers, mission control personnel, and astronauts may well have lied about their precise involvement in the Apollo programme and, in some cases, their personal memories may be at fault but there are far too many people telling the same story. Faking a Moon landing would be easy, compared with the challenge of getting thousands of conspirators to maintain the lie for all these years!
The US lied because it was determined to win a public relations war with the (then) USSR - Clearly, the Soviet Union would have won such a war if they had exposed such a vast American fraud, but the Soviets were also technologically sophisticated in space. Their Luna 2 spacecraft had reached the surface of the Moon in 1959 - a full ten years before Apollo 11 made the first manned Moon landing. The Soviets knew the landings were real and they even acknowledged them.
NASA could have faked the landings - Maybe NASA could have produced convincing video programmes on a terrestrial sound stage that were good enough to fool non-experts. But why do it so many times? There were nine missions to the Moon, six of which landed. The Apollo 16 and 17 crews each spent three days there. Why? If this was all a daring publicity stunt, why increase the risk of discovery with multiple missions? Why make it necessary for so many astronauts and ground personnel to lie and maintain the cover up? If this were a hoax, isn't it more likely that NASA would have faked one landing, had a big parade, and then promptly closed down the operation?
There's no remaining evidence of the landings - In fact, since the late 2000s, high-definition photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the Apollo landing sites have captured the lander modules and the tracks left by the astronauts. In 2012, images were released showing five of the six Apollo missions' American flags erected on the Moon still standing; the exception is that of Apollo 11, which has lain on the lunar surface since being accidentally blown over by the take-off rocket's exhaust.
CONCLUSION: Like all conspiracy theories that are short on evidence, the Moon-hoax claims rely heavily on the absence of good thinking. Crossing 240,000 miles of cold, hostile space was a technological achievement ahead of its time - an amazing moment of intelligence and courage.
So next time you hear someone say that the six Apollo landings of the 1960s and 1970s did not happen, please remember what you have just read!