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Fox Moon Special Response
An anonymous reeader writes "The other day the Fox Network showed an ill-researched program about how the moon landings were hoaxed. Nasa has responded on their front page, here. Since the community here appreciates science, here is a page originally linked to on the NASA site about refuting the illogical arguments of non-believers: badastronomy.com."
To fake a moon landing and cover it up for 30+ years, or
To actually land on the moon.
Any thoughts?
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Seriously, folks--don't you think that if there was any proof that we didn't land on the moon that the Soviets would have brought it up a long time ago?
The Apollo missions are among the greatest triumphs that mankind has ever achieved.
Please don't let the conspiracy wackos persuade you otherwise.
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"Has sensational journalism gone too far? Find out at eleven!"
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
It was terrible, they made a huge effort to put holes in the pictures shot on the moon and saying there were two light sources (therefore one had to be artificial). All the pictures they showed, though, could be easily explained by the fact that on the moon the Earth is a decent source of light if the Sun is shining on it (which it was in the pictures). They said that NASA didn't send ANY artificial light sources up there; I don't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure they would have had to send SOME up there. They also played on the fact that some of the pictures had similar backgrounds, but totally different foregrounds. This was just ignorant in my opinion because when they superimposed pictures with different foregrounds (ie the LEM at it's landing site, and then one without it) the back ground was still the "same" mountain structure, but shifted or a resized. Can't that be explained be being a different distance away? Yes.
I also never really saw any interviews with ex-NASA employees or anyone with any real connection to the space program (now or at the time), but just with photographers and conspiracy theorists (not many scientists). I didn't see the entire program, though, so I could be wrong. I just couldn't stand to watch it because it was so awful.
IANAL, but I play one on
Argument #2: if the moon landings had been faked, the Soviets would have known, just like they knew most of the USA's major secrets at the time (and vice versa of course). You think they would have kept quiet about it? Of course not! The best they did was to land a rover on the moon (which is still nothing to sneeze at) - if the human landing had been a fake they would have loved to let the world know about it.
I caught a few minutes of this program when it was on and my first thought was "Oh look, a sequel to "Alien Autopsy: Truth or Hoax?". Because that's basically all it was. You can get an "expert" on just about anything to go on camera all bearded and expert-looking and say whatever you want. Too bad the general public doesn't quite get that concept yet... :^(
Freedom: "I won't!"
What got me was some of the advertisers. Gateway? Sprint PCS? Would any of these companies even exist without the space program? What hypocrisy!
Seriously, does anyone have a list of advertisers during the show? I only saw the last 20 minutes or so, but I remember Gateway, Sprint, and Dodge. Perhaps we should write the advertisers and let them know their support for this dreck sucks. Fox dislikes criticism like masochists dislike whipping. They'll probably send a thank you note to NASA and badastronomy.com for the free publicity...
I'd rather trust a man who doesn't shout what he's found. -- Genesis
It's pretty bad when the most believible show on your network is the Simpsons.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
We may laugh this off, but this kind of nonsense has a corrosive effect. Even if I tell you that I'm going to tell you a lie, a false statement I make to you has been shown to influence your thinking and judgement later. Multiply that effect by several hundred million and who knows what happens? How much funding is NASA going to lose because of the false impressions this kind of show creates? The only thing I can see doing about this sort of thing is to express your outrage. If you subscribe to cable, unsubscribe and let them know why. When it comes to the dangers of media, this is the kind of stuff politicians should worry about.
I'm slowly learning to just live stuff like this. The badastronomy.org link has beeen on Slashdot before, so I have checked it out. When I saw a commercial for the Fox special, I went on a 2-minute explanation to my girlfriend about how most of the evidence that we DIDN'T go to the moon is, in fact, better applied to the argument that we DID. Her eyes literally glazed over. I was in protracted-rant mode; clearly hellbent on showing the world how ignorant it really is, incited by things I read on Slashdot.
:)
I'm sick of making peoples' eyes glaze over. This stuff is definitely News for Nerds. It's definitely Stuff that Matters. But honestly, the world is very fickle about what it chooses to believe. There will always be people who say the landings were faked, as long as it's one person's word against another's.
People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off. Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore. The downside to this process is that nobody really gets the satisfaction of saying "I convinced the world they were wrong." The upside is, the ignorance is eventually conquered.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't let this, nor the misuse of the word "hacker," or anything else make you feel like we need a grass-roots movement to end the stupidity. The ignorance will just go away on its own, to be replaced by more sophisticated ignorance
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That's good, since judging by your message, you don't have a very good grasp of the issues you're discussing.
You're completely ignoring the idea that we can actually evaluate different assumptions or beliefs based on evidence, logic, and tests, which leaves you lumping together belief in gods with our understanding of mathematics.
You're also seriously confusing facts, interpretation of evidence, hypotheses, theories, and beliefs. Unless you're going to take things to the point of saying "this could all be a dream", all sorts of essentially "irrefutable" facts do exist. When it comes to logical, mathematical and scientific knowledge, we also have the ability in many cases to categorically determine whether a hypothesis is or isn't valid. In other areas, we aren't able to be so definitive, but we can be sure of the accuracy of a successful theory to a degree equal to our ability to test it.
An example might be Newton vs. Einstein: Einstein's special relativity replaced Newton's theories of motion, and general relativity replaced Newton's theory of gravitation, but in both cases, even though Einstein's theories have enormous conceptual consequences, the quantitative effect was relatively small and only affects extreme situations. While Newton's theories held force, they could be demonstrated to hold true under any circumstance which could be devised to test them. Once testing became more sophisticated, i.e. the evidence available to us changed, it became clear that the theory, while accurate to a point, didn't account for all cases, and more refined theories had to be developed.
The history of science has been characterized by this process: as we gather more evidence about the world around us, so we are able to develop better theories about how that world works. Galileo came to his understanding about the solar system based on his use of a telescope, a tool not previously available. In the early history of science, there were many cases in which large assumptions were made due to the limitations on the evidence available at the time. Theories about the Earth or the Sun being at the center of the universe were such theories: they were based not so much on evidence as on belief. As such, it's not completely accurate to characterize these beliefs as "science".
The point of all this is that when it comes to "hard" scientific knowledge, it is possible to assess the facts and theories we rely on as to the degree of "truth" they contain. Rather than talk in black and white terms, it is better to talk about degrees of certainty. On many subjects, we come close enough to 100% certainty to be able to talk about "irrefutable" facts. On other subjects, such as quantum physics, we're acutely aware of the shortcomings in existing theories, and are actively looking for ways to improve or replace those theories.
This process has been in progress for a few thousand years now - the process of gathering evidence, interpreting it, and developing theories to account for it. On many fronts, we're asymptotically approaching an "irrefutable" position, and the only reason postmodernists don't recognize that is because they haven't spent the time to understand it. It's certainly true that if one believes a theory is false, and refuses to consider the evidence that it is true, it will remain false, for you, even as you fall to your death over a cliff in an arc described by Newton's laws.
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that even the physical laws of our universe only apply locally. And as I understand it, quantum physics tells us that nothing is impossible, just very very very unlikely.
It's silly to talk about such things when you clearly don't understand them. In what way do "the physical laws of our universe only apply locally"? What relativity says is simply that measurements necessarily apply to a reference frame. It's actually one of the most intuitive theories in existence today, and can be derived from first principles on a piece of paper, using simple thought experiments. It certainly doesn't create any uncertainty about the laws of physics throughout the universe. As for quantum mechanics, your understanding doesn't match that of the scientific community. It's true that any individual particle, while undergoing some change or interaction, has the potential to do all sorts of strange things, with some of the stranger ones constrained only by being statistically very unlikely. However, the mathematics of the quantum wave function, which is one of the most well-tested formulae in existence, shows that every interaction which a particle undergoes with its environment reduces the possibilities available to it, so that impossible things remain impossible, and you don't come home to find your sofa hanging three feet above the floor.
Having said all that, it certainly isn't possible or wise to ignore the social construction issues and linguistic/conceptual constraints which we all, as non-omnipotent beings, face. But that doesn't mean that all beliefs are created equal. I agree with you that skepticism is important, but never more so than when evaluating the application of postmodernist relativism to hard science.
The softer sciences, of course, are another story entirely, but that's largely because of the issue I've already mentioned: solid evidence is harder to come by, which necessitates much assumption. But we know this, and if we're being honest, we can assign a lesser degree of certainty to our theories about anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.
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The FOX TV network has cancelled plans for a "Vietnam: Was it a Hoax?" shockumentary, as well as a "Cuban Missile Crisis: JFK's Popularity Stunt" miniseries...
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These are quite a good (and funny) read.
http://www.primeline-america.com/moon-ldg/
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/aylett/eth69.html
http://batesmotel.8m.com/
http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html
Some people are crazy too, like this guy, who says the MOON is a fake.
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Tonight on Fox: Deadliest Executions Part XVII
Later: Is Clinton more evil then Hannibal Lecter?
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Teflon was not invented for heat shields. (It would perform poorly as one.) It was invented for the Manhattan Project, where it was used to create grease-free seals in the miles of pumps and piping in the Y-12 gaseous diffusion U235 separation plant.
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Dust does not "kick up" in a vacuum. It follows the same trajectory as a rock. Dust blown away from the lander during its descent would not land on the lander.
2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon.
The astronauts used standard Hasselblad 2-1/4 inch film cameras and TV cameras. These cameras do not put "crosshairs" on the film. Those would have been added later. I haven't seen the show or the pix you are referring to, but I do know that some pix I have seen on the Web have clearly been tampered with -- not by NASA but by someone else out to make "unbelievable" moon photos.
3. The lack of a blast crater. (This one was partial explained, an expert said that the lander didn't need much actual blast force to land... however i would have thought in the lower gravity of space, it would have made an indentation because of how the entire surface seemed to be just a dust or sand.)
The moon's surface isn't entirely dust and sand, it is also rock. Again, there is no atmosphere; only particles big enough to be directly moved by the blast force will be moved at all, and they will follow a parabolic trajectory away from the lander. They will hit the ground long before the hatch is opened as there is no atmosphere to suspend them.
4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?
Not really. The LEM didn't need a lot of thrust to lift off (1/6 gravity), and there was no atmosphere to carry the blast sound back to the lander. The lander's engine noise might have been comparable to the hiss of gas escaping under pressure from a container -- a high frequency not readily picked up by low-frequency mikes and not readily transmitted through the frame of the lander.
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> I'm waiting for Murdoch to green light the Fox special "The Great Holocaust Hoax" and "The Great Spherical Earth Hoax."
LOL
Years ago when I was in Junior High, I had a Science Teacher who posed a very simple, yet very challenging question:
Prove that the Sun is the center of the Universe, & not the Earth.
(For the sake of the exercise, he ignored the question whether the Sun is in revolution around another point, or that point is in revolution around still another point.)
The point of this exercise was not to convince us that Gallileo & Copernicus was wrong, but to consider facts & draw our own logical conclusions. Most people would have to say that the Earth rotates around the Sun because that's what they were taught in school. And some of these people eventually realize that that not everything they learned in school was correct, & so start questioning other things they were taught.
Such as Evolution. Or the Holocaust. Or whether the Earth is round.
And when someone questions these things, instead of an informed argument, the questioner is greeted with derision & unsympathetic laughter. Very similar to the youthful nerd who asks a difficult question of her/his teacher that shows she/he knows more than the instructor. Or that she/he bothered to do the homework.
Or begins twisting another person away from logical thinking into the land of superstition & faulty thinking. Read the books of L. Ron Hubbard with a critical eye, & you will be amazed what bizarre creations one can create based on urban legend, lazy research & a fevered imagination.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Three of your four questions were answered in the link given in the article.
Another good source was Michael Shermer's "E-Skeptic" email for February 17, 2001. I won't copy and paste it in because I don't know if that's allowed; unfortunately I also can't find it online at the Skeptic magazine website. Oh well...
As Skeptic's writeup commented,
"Unfortunately, this NASA guy had obviously never read any of the conspiracy claims, or the answers to them, for this is the biggest no-brainer debunking in skeptical history that anyone who actually knew something about the Apollo space program could have handled."
This is a common trick used by sensationalistic crap TV. They have an "expert" who has not had time to think about debunking the specific issues, and then frame the presentation as if his failure to immediately respond means that all scientists everywhere are similarly dumbfounded. This is not science, it's National Enquirer type entertainment.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
First, the lunar dust is denser than what we think of as dust; it's apparently more like dense sand.
Second, your intuition about how much dust would be "kicked up" is based on your experience in an atmosphere. If you spread out dust and blow straight down into it, the pressure of your breath into the atmosphere will spread around the dust a lot more than your breath alone. You'll see dust curling up and around, and being pushed out, and drifting down slowly, due to the atmosphere.
With a rocket in a vacuum, only those dust particles directly pushed by the rocket exhaust move. An area directly underneath the rocket would be swept clean, but just a few feet away there may be no effect -- or there may be thicker dust because what was under the rocket had to go somewhere.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
It's bleed-over. When the thin black lines appear in front of something light-colored, the exposed film appears to erase the thin black lines. You see this all the time, and it's something photographers have to be aware of.
Besides, what is the claim here? That NASA didn't actually use crosshair cameras in their $30 billion "simulated" moon landing? Is the theory that NASA instead went out of their way to meticulously paint black crosshairs on the background of the photo? Absurd.
The badastronomy.com link given in the story writeup answers this.
See number 1 above. The crater was there, but more localized than your experience in an atmosphere would expect.
Also, the main point here is the rocket motor which the non-moonie suggests had "30,000 pounds" of thrust. Guess what? It had a throttle. Would the astronauts endanger their lives and mission by roaring down at the surface at maximum velocity so that they had to have the throttle wide-open to land? Of course not.
They did the 30,000-pound burns high above the surface, and by the time they were a few feet above the surface, it was operating at a fraction of its capacity.
I didn't see the show and I don't know what was said about this; this is the only point that isn't addressed at badastronomy.com or in the Skeptic writeup.
I guess the issue is that the LEM lander was doing rocket burns during descent and we should have heard the noise on the tape. I would point out, first, they were not doing continuous burns, I don't know what fraction of the descent time the rocket was actually on. Second, I do not believe the comm link was open the whole time. Third, I would not be at all surprised if the rocket motor caused more vibration than noise inside the LEM. Again, our experience in an atmosphere can be counter-intuitive, and rockets are constructed so that most of the energy, sound and otherwise, goes out the nozzle.
Fourth, given the deceitful way that these charlatans try to convince the gullible, I would not be at all surprised if they distorted the evidence regarding rocket noise.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.
Isn't the real answer that the flag was made with springs so it would stand out straight on the pole? That's why it's not hanging limply.
The moon is pretty damn far away. Go look at it sometime. About the size of a dime held at arm's length, it is really about the same size as the entire continental United States.
We can in fact detect reflections form the very carefully machined retroreflectors left behind by the astronauts, but even the best telescopes ever built would not be capable of resolving the LEM as a distinct object, much less resolving the other junk left up there by NASA.
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