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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.)"
I rmeber reading a while back(a couple of month's) that a private comapny has gotten goverment approval to go to the moon. SO when this happens they can take pictures and disprove the naysayyer once and for all.
procrastination is a way of life aka i'll think up a sig later
Then again, since when our network executives concerned about what is good or bad TV, let alone good or bad science?
This booklet is for educators, to help them address concerns brought up by students who might have stumbled on a True Disbeliever's website or seen that atrocious Fox program!
That's not a waste of time nor money.
Stefan Jones
This issue should fall far below the attention-radar of NASA. The act of giving it even a moment's notice fans the flames of the conspiracy theorists (and will be adduced by them as yet further proof that the agency has something to hide).
It was a sad day when Fox stooped to entertaining the theory on its special (the company should have lost priviledges to the monicker "journalism" that instant).
It is too bad one of the astronauts did not trudge a gigantic NASA WAS HERE into the moon dust so that the image could be seen from a large telescope. That should silence the idiots.
On another note it always amazes me that a significant segment of a human population will believe the unbelievable and doubt the obvious.
... has to have a bottom.
I would think that given that the moon landings happened during the height of the cold war, the Soviets would have been watching them very closely and would've been all over them like a bad stink if they could've even come close to demonstrating that the moon landings were faked. By the same token, if you were NASA, would you put your and your country's "face" on the line by staging such a stunt and risking discovery?
You're using her as bait, Master!
Unfortunately, with the current administration, we're a lot more likely to see our tax dollars going to religious schools that teach the reverse
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Money spent educating people is never a waste.
Why doesn't NASA simply point the Hubble at one of the landing spots and settle this for good? I think that'd cost a tad less than $15,000...
What's the best argument people can think of as proof that we actually went there in '69?
The Australian satellite dish T.V. broadacst fiasco comes to mind..
I hate Grammar Nazi's
This is EXACTLY RIGHT. Anyone who believes that the moon landings were fake to "win" the space race clearly believes that the Soviets, in spite of launching the first artificial satellite and first man into space, were too stupid to notice that:
No conspiracy theory concerning the lunar landing stands up to even five minutes of skeptical thought.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Creationists (including the "intelligent design" crowd) belong in exactly the same camp as the "moon landing was a hoax" people, Holocaust-deniers, flat-Earthers, etc.
Umm, I wouldn't put the holocaust-deniers in that list. Creationists and flat-earthers are merely idiots, but the holocaust-deniers are a pack of nazis who are trying to get another chance at genocide. Treat the nuts with derision, but if you get a crack at a holocaust-denier, kick his ass, but good.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Have you seen the computer that run the Space Shuttle? It's a pretty dinky piece of work. Most of us would laugh a computer like thout off of our desks and throw it in the trash. It is pathetically weak. But it's all that's needed to do the job and it's extremely resistant to radiation and external EM interference.
The Apollo computers were powerful enough to do the job. Going to the moon is not like driving down the highway. The number of dicisions needed are miniscule in comparison. And remember that this was only a guidance computer. It didn't actually DO anything but tell the crew of the Apollo where the hell they SHOULD be. You don't need a whole hell of a lot of power to do that. Hell, a man with a sextant and a stopwatch could do it.
Do you doubt the building of the Golden Gate bridge or the Empire State building because they had NO computers at the times those building were supposedly built? How about the Great Wall of China?
I don't doubt that we went to the moon. And I don't doubt that Apollo 11 was the real deal. For one thing I watched it on TV as it happened. For another, the politacl fallout from the Soviets finding out it was a fake would have ruined the USA in the politial arena. It was too damned important to fake. Succeed or fail, we had no choice but to play it honest.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Too bad the evidence for evolution as we know it isn't enough to bring it out of the 'theory' stage. Never mind the fact that a growing majority of schools teach the concept as fact.
Grumble. Nothing in science ever gets beyond the 'theory' stage. We still have the Germ Theory of disease and the General Theory of relativity don't we?
Theories are science's attempt to explain facts.
Fact: Things are attracted to other things.
Theory: Mass distorts spacetime and objects follow the shortest path in curved space.
Fact: Species change over time.
Theory: Traits are inherited from parents with occasional mutations. Environmental pressures cause certain traits to be more successful than others.
one of the reasons I prefer creationism (and the beliefs one can have with faith in God) is that evolution doesn't offer me much comfort in the face of depression, loss, hurt, uncertainty, death, etc.
What does evolution have to do with any of that? The truth of evolution doesn't preclude the existence of God.
See what five minutes and an elementary knowledge of photography and astronomy can do?
There have already been tens of thousands of dollars spent on adjudicating the argument between religious dogma and scientific theory.
The Scopes "Monkey Trial" happened in the early 1920s, with John Scopes fighting to teach evolution in the state of Tennessee. Scopes's lawyer, Darrow, lost.
Refusing to admit crucial evidence, the presiding judge, John T. Raulston, gloried in frustrating the defense and upholding Christian orthodoxy.
These are the kind of people you're up against. Evidence and proof mean nothing. Reality? What's that? You can spend all the money you want, but you'll never convince superstitious zealots that what they believe is wrong.
blog
Should we just accept everything the news media feeds us? So naive...
Whether or not the landings were faked, the point is that when news of the landing spread in 1969, most of the world blindly accepted what they were seeing on telly without a moments hesitation.
At least these articles that cast doubt over the plausibility of the moon landings (never mind the nutters who say "It definitely was a hoax) encourage people to think for themselves before believing everything they read.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...fact about that entire saga is not a technical but a psychological one.
Remember, it was a "race into space" with the Russians leading some time along the way. They had the first device in orbit (Sputnik) and they certainly can be credited for having a high-tech state of the art space control center back then.
If something was faked along the way to the moon landing (i.e. no rocket leaving earth, the radio waves of transmission not really originating from the moon, etc.) do you think they would have kept their traps shut about this hoax? If someone had the tech and the expertise to really establish if something moved from earth to moon and transmitted a load of radio waves from there, it was them. They have not spoken up, and that in an era where almost every mistake from either side was used as ammunition to discredit the other. They didn't. Proof enough. QED.
+++ath0