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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.)"
from a recent news article...
:)
The controversy recently emerged from cyberspace in the person of Bart Sibrel, who has made a film questioning the Apollo Moon missions and who confronted astronaut Buzz Aldrin at a Beverly Hills hotel on Sept. 9 and demanded that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he had in fact walked on the moon.
The 72-year-old Aldrin, the second man ever to touch the lunar surface, punched the 37-year-old Sibrel in the face. Sibrel asked that assault charges be filed, but Los Angeles County prosecutors declined. A videotape of the incident showed Sibrel following Aldrin on the street with a Bible and calling him a "thief, liar and coward," one prosecutor said.
How's that for refutation?
-fester (Good for Buzz.. I'm sure he and the others who risked their ass at the top of that Saturn V are sick of this crap)
-'fester
Didn't we leave mirrors up there for laser experiments? Are they detectable to the average Joe?
Ok I am going to admit it: I had serious doubts that NASA went to the moon after seeing the Fox special. I didnt know enough (and still dont)about lunar physics or photography to be able to make a judgement call on a lot of the claims. The one claim that struck a chord with me was the crosshairs missing from the pictures. That one I could understand. Unfortuneately the NASA spokeman was not cast in a good light at all. He was evasive on a lot of the issues and came across as someone who was trying to hide something. Now whether this was the producers' fault or whether this guy was just weasley in real life, I dont know. But I thought they raised valid concerns and I couldnt find anything that refuted the claims put forward in the special.
That was until I saw this article:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html
They could save themselves 15k and just link to that. He refutes all the claims of the doubters with very rational explanations.
See the internet is good for something after all!
It is a sad statement for science in this country that NASA has to spend money debunking the absurd. I watched the Fox special and I kept shaking my head in bewilderment by the conspiracy theorist's "evidence". A modicum of science education ought to have been enough to have the nation laughing at these poodle buggering ninnys. Instead everyone shakes their head and says "sounds 'bout right to me..." Blech.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I don't believe these nutcases. However, I recently realized that one of my arguments against them is not as strong as I thought.
Here's the argument: Tens of thousands of people were involved in the Apollo program. There were thousands of them who would unavoidably know if the moon landings were faked. Several thousand people can't keep a secret for over 30 years.
What is wrong with this argument? Bletchley Park. For about 30 years, several thousand people kept the secret that the allies hand broken most of the axis codes during World War II.
(It is still a valid argument, however - there are differences between Bletchley Park and a hypothetically faked Apollo 11.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I acknowledge as fact that the moon landings occurred, but I'm not at all surprised that some people don't. After all, what have we done since then? Apollo, while inspiring, exemplified "pyramid building" in its most extreme form.
We spent billions of dollars pursuing this grand enterprise and for what? To NEVER return? Where are the research stations? The power plants? The mines? Where's the grand plan for the future?
The saddest thing of all is that if NASA had the money and motivation to return to the moon, I doubt we'd be able to do it before 2015, since most of the engineers that worked on the Apollo missions have long since retired or died. I'm pretty young myself (24), and I don't mind saying that without the requisite experience base, all the technology we throw at the problem is utterly USELESS.
Sorry for the rant, guys and gals. I went to school, studied, and became an engineer because of Apollo. The fact that NASA's become little more than a budget problem is about the saddest thing I've ever heard.
-boredman
Well, it won't necessarily be moot. We're dealing with people who don't believe the pictures that were already taken by NASA, so why would they believe these more modern pictures?
I thought the apollo missions were broadcast live world wide (it was a 'US vs. USSR' sword rattling deal). I'm not sure what more can be done for these naysayers.
What I don't understand is, communication sattelites are OK, but not moon landings? Though, again, when you're dealing with people just looking for an excuse to not believe, I'm sure that even taking them up in the shuttle itself would not be enough ("then, they drugged me -- I'm sure in the food or in the air I was breathing -- while showing moving pictures of stars and stuff. Other than that, I could just have been on Space Mountain in Disneyland" or something similar).
Why can't they point Hubble at the Apollo 11 landing site and take a picture of it?
Come to think of it, why have we never seen an aerial photo of the Apollo 11 landing site taken from Earth or Earth orbit? It can't be too difficult, can it?
With its 2.4 meter diameter mirror, the smallest object that the Hubble can resolve at the Moon's distance of around 400,000 kilometers is about 80 meters across. More info including cool pics here.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
I don't think you'd want to point Hubble at the Moon to "prove" to some bozo that there's space junk there. I'm no Hubble expert, but I do know a few things:
* The Hubble doesn't just sit there unused. Every minute -- every second -- of its time is reserved months in advance for research purposes.
* Even if the project were deemed worthy, it would probably cost more than $15k to make the project happen.
* The Hubble is designed to look at very, very, very faint objects. Close yourself in a dark room, look at the light bulbs, then flip the switch to turn them on. Ouch! Now, imagine if your pupils couldn't contract... and your retina was worth several hundred million bucks. Double ouch!
* If you believe in the Hubble telescope's images, there's a very, very strong chance that you believe that man has landed on the Moon already. Conversely, if you don't believe in the moon landing, why would you believe in the Hubble?
And as for aerial images... it was big news when spy satellites could spot an object as large as a car from orbit. Compare these numbers:
* Distance to Space Shuttle (Low Earth Orbit): 400 km
* Distance to Geosynchronous (med-high) Orbit: 27,000 km
* Distance to Moon: 384,000 km!
If the CIA/KGB can barely make out an object the size of a car from Earth orbit, how likely is it to see an even smaller object from 10 times as far?
*whew* A great intellectual exercise... too bad the target of NASA's informative pamphlet don't work that muscle.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Yes, it can be. As an approximation you can figure the resolution of a telescope at a given distance as:
size of mirror/wavelength of light = distance to object/size of object
Given that the distance to the moon is about 500 million meters, the lunar lander is about 10 meters across, and visible light has a wavelength of about 5e-7 meters, that means that you need a mirror about 25 meters across to see it. That's about 10 times the size of the Hubble mirror, and 2.5 times the size of the Keck mirror. Of course you can't see it with a ground based telescope anyway because they'll have problems with atmospheric distortion. And that's just the resolution you'd need to be able to spot it as a speck. You'd need to multiply the size of the mirror by the number of pixels you want in your picture, so a 10x10 pixel picture (still not exactly detailed) would need an optical telescope about the size of the Arecibo radio telescope.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Aaah, but why haven't they? I think the answer is pretty clear... :)
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
creationism is not testable. by its very definition creationism cannot be tested or verified.
creationism is not applicable. you cannot apply creationism to solve any problem.
creationism does not make any verifiable predictions.
therefore, creationism is not a theory.
the theorem (theory) of pythagoras is a theory. the theory of evolution is a theory.
creationism is NOT a theory. to claim it is otherwise is either ignorant or fraudulent.
Look people... there is a parabolic mirror array that observatories use to measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon... if this isn't proof that we went to the moon, I don't know what is (and yes it would be beyond the capabilites of current technology to deliver such a mirror to the surface of the moon with robotics). Joe
Plus it would burn out the optics on Hubble. It is not designed to look at the moon. The instruments are fine enough and there is enough reflected sunlight from the moon to cause major damage.
The party's over
Anyway, I myself don't know if the program I saw a few months back was this Fox production everyone is talking about, but personally I thought that as conspiracy theories went, theirs was relatively well argued. I certainly didn't go and say "Well, I think they're right", but they raised some intriguing points. An earlier poster gave a link to some site that in turn gave fairly convincing counter- arguments to them. As it is, I frankly don't care one way or another who's right, it's not my country claiming to have gone there not only several times but also first, and I'm not in any hurry to go myself. Things learnt from the landings affect our modern life? Well, either they do or they don't, and not knowing either way doesn't seem to have changed my TV set.
Now I agree that at least many/most conspiracy theorists are total fruitcakes, and maybe all these guys who claim that it didn't happen (I don't remember if any of them refused to believe that man landed on the moon, or if they just questioned it) are nutters too- I don't know any of them at all, and don't remember much about how they seemed on the program- but for gods sakes, Slashdot seems to be coming over all witch-hunty over this. Kill them! Kill them all! I know that (most of?) you guys are joking, but seriously, you should hear yourselves here.
I'd like to know, Is it that they're conspiracy theorists, and being unreasonable and absolutely not accepting that what they believe could possibly be wrong (again, I don't remember how they were), which would be a pretty good reason to disdain them, or is it that some of you don't want to be told that what you believe could possibly be wrong, especially when it involves your country and/or spheres of interest?
Like I say, I'm not especially bothered who's right. In fact, can we have some Microsoft-bashing or something instead now? I'm not happy with this being on the unpopular side of the argument business...
I Should point out I do agree with what you say about the nature of science, and of conspiracy theorists. But if people say "I'm not going to debate that point" (because the other person is a conspiracy theorist) it makes the conspiracy theorists look like they have a point. If the conspiracy theorists are unreasonable deep-down, then the way to win the argument is to clearly demonstrate that to people.
[Waits in flame proof bunker for moderators to designate me a troll, or a gullible person who sometimes listens to conspiracy theorists]
Be careful! New moon tonight.
I think this can be best summed up by this saying: "Never argue with an idiot. They'll just drag you down to their own level, and beat you with experience."