NASA Wasting Time and Money on Moon Landing Doubters

Rob Miles writes "Yahoo! News has this article about how NASA is paying aeronautics engineer James Oberg $15,000 to write a monograph gathering up materials answering the skeptics of the 1969 Apollo Moon Landing, point by point. It's a shame that even $1 has to be spent to debunk these conspiracy theorists with too much time on their hands. And it's unfortunate that the nutters will see this as validation of their ridiculous claims ('if our charges weren't true, NASA wouldn't bother answering them' they'll snivel.)"

Comments

Re:THis wil be moot soon

[Lawbeefaroni]

Yeah, or they can give the the naysayers (h04X0rz?) a telescope and they can watch the Chinese building a colony there.

Re:Why don't they just...

[Floody]

You don't understand how telescopes work.

Hubble is limited by its diffraction resolution, which is a little less than 0.05 arcseconds; this works out to about 90 meters at the distance of the moon. Groundbased telescopes are even worse.

This means that while magnification may be extensive, one cannot resolve details smaller than 90 meters. Clearly, the LM descent stage and other debris would be significantly smaller.

IIRC, the LM descent stage area is about 10 meters across. To image that with any visual accuity, you would need resolution at the order of two or three meters.

This has already been done...

[Griim]

...and rather well, I thought, by the guy who runs BadAstronomy.Com.

Here is a direct link to the article where he does so, where he tears apart the horrible Fox TV special that was on in 2001.

Buzz has his very own response ;-)

[rainer_d]

Look here to see that even at 72, he can defend himself.

St. Petersburg Times" has more info on the incident, if you must.

Re:NASA

[jokerghost]

Actually, there are defacto "NASA Was Here" signs on the moon. The astronauts left several special reflectors (I forget the name) that reflect light straight back at the target, regardless of the angle from which the beam (in the form of a laser) originates. These have been used for years to calculate the distance the moon has been receeding from the Earth year to year. Also, there are beacons that ham radio operators have been using for years to bounce signals off of.... Why is it these conspiracy theorists always ignore this tiny point?

-jokerghost

Re:This wil be moot soon

[AdTropis]

from what I understand, hubble is unable to gaze upon objects so close to earth. it was designed to peer deep into space.

imaging satellites are probably too close to earth to get a good photo as well. and it really doesn't make sense to build a satellite just to take pictures of the moon. of course, even if NASA (or whomever) did that, there'd still be people saying it was all a hoax... *sigh*

Re:FOX Network

[the-matt-mobile]

There was also a recent article in Discovery magazine mentioning this bad-science-blundering. They provided the link to bad astronomy and mentioned some of the other urban-legends-of-science like being able to balance an egg during the equinox. One of the points they presented was how scientists do some experiments with bouncing laser beams off a mirror on the moon which the Apollo astronauts placed there. How's that for not landing on the moon?! Check it out some details here

Re:A moon landing believer who also doubts

[gol64738]

This should clear up any misconceptions you might have regarding the Americans landing on the moon

please read and comment.

Re:So any skepticism is bad?

[FreeUser]

Should we just accept everything the news media feeds us? So naive...

No, but twenty seconds of rational thought will debunk any of the conspiracy notions being bandied about by the imbecelic media whores of Fox News.

• The Russians were watching very closely, and would have cried foul had anything been "faked"
  
• Amateur radio enthusiasts tracked the saturn v's trajectory as well, and monitored the radio signal being sent back to earth
  
• The astronauts left mirrors behind, off of which we still bounce lasers today to measure the (increasing) distance to the moon.
  
• The "facts" as given by the moronic and scientifically illiterate media whores of Fox are trivially debunked
  
• For any conspiracy or coverup to have worked would have required a worldwide media conspiracy, on the part of several neutral nations as well as several nations who were, at the time, military foes (China, Russia, Eastern Europe)
  

Sorry, but when conspiracies start to reach "Nowhere Man" levels, they simply don't exist. (If you don't understand the television reference be glad, be very glad. Arguably the worst show to ever air on American TV).

Skepticism is only called for when strong evidence hasn't been presented by those making incredible claims. If NASA hadn't sent back radio signals, video, pictures, brought back lunar material, left "we were here" mirrors lying around, and had their telemetry and every vector tracked by literally thousands of different people, then some skepticism would perhaps be in order. However, they did all that and more ... making their claims backed by a plethora of evidence only someone with an agenda ("I'll make my career detracting from mankind's greatest triumph of the Media Whore Network [Fox]") could possibly ignore. As such, it is the likes of Fox that are making incredible claims, without a shred of credible evidence to back it up. In short, sir, your skepticism is woefully misdirected, and, yes, poeple who are skeptical of the lunar landings in light of a mountain of evidence should be laughed at and mocked the same way someone who is "skeptical" about the spherical shape of the earth would be when they trott their "flat as a plate" theory out.