Did We Land On The Moon

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 $ 28billion (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.

Name

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Neil Armstrong

Age on Mission First Step

38y 11m 15d

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Buzz Aldrin 39y 6m 0d

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Pete Conrad

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Apollo 11

July 20, 1969

Apollo 12

November 19-20, 1969

39y 5m 17d

Alan Bean 37y 8m 4d

ExtraVehicularActivity dates

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Alan Shepard

47y 2m 18d Apollo 14

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Edgar Mitchell

40y 4m 19d

7

David Scott

41y 1m 25d

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James Irwin

41y 4m 14d

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John W. Young

41y 6m 28d

10 Charles Duke 11 12

Eugene Cernan Harrison Schmitt

February 56, 1971

July 31– Apollo 15 August 2, 1971

Apollo 16

April 21-23, 1972

Apollo 17

December 11-14, 1972

36y 6m 18d

38y 9m 7d

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: • •

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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. 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." 1.

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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?