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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.)"
Then again, since when our network executives concerned about what is good or bad TV, let alone good or bad science?
The fact that we such an abundance of blue-cheese dressing to go with our wings is enough proof for me.
This is the best option for the money. The alternative would be to send them all up there in the cargo bay of a shuttle and then crack the bay doors for a second or two and see if they'll finally believe you.
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
Johnson, flag this message for section 721 investigation. Potential Conway incident - auth code 786C-1943.
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).
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
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.
Maybe they could just send Buzz Aldrin out. With a bat. Or his manly fists of iron. That should "silence" the doubters!
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
Yeah, or they can give the the naysayers (h04X0rz?) a telescope and they can watch the Chinese building a colony there.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
God is omnipotent yet it would be impossible for him to create a rock he could not lift. Therefore, God does not exist. Right? Right? Is that a paradox?:-)
Since I moonlight in my spare time as God, let me answer this one for you. It's child's play.
I simply would create a rock exactly the size of the universe. I wouldn't be able to lift the rock, because by definition there would be no room for the rock to move.
Happy to clear that up for you.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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!
Sadly that's not the case. You just can't convince somebody who truly wants to believe that it's all a conspiracy. They'll point out that this supposedly independent private company had to get government approval to do so, and that's proof that NASA got to themm and forced them to take part in the deception. It took me all of about 2 seconds to come up with that explanation. These are people who wouldn't believe that it was possible to go to the moon if you blasted them into space and landed them there. They'd still come up with some elaborate explanation about how it was all faked.
There are none so blind as those who will not see. Sadly this applies as much to physical proof as anything.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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.
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.
...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.
St. Petersburg Times" has more info on the incident, if you must.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Buzz Aldrin Punches Moon-landing Conspiracy Theorist
btw...The video is pretty funny!
Money spent educating people is never a waste.
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.
This is just another attempt to hoodwink the public. I'd publish my point-by-point rebuttal but no one would understand the scientific terms that I'd need to use.
The government can already read our minds. Last year we saw that scientists have been able to have machines controlled by nothing other than thought by scanning brain waves. It's obvious that this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Moving machines with thought is only the part that the government allows these scientists to reveal to the public. Just as civilians aren't privy to top-secret military aircraft designs until years after they become completely outdated, so is the thought-reading apparatus hidden while it still is useful.
You think I'm mad? Even private corporations are not allowed to release technology without government approval. Remember the Hoverboards in Back to the Future? They're real. But they still have military applications so cannot be released to the public. We know that it can work because the Japanese have maglev trains that work on identical priciples.
You still think I'm mad? Turn your Television to a 'staticky' station. Watch the chaotic series of dots and blips. Do this for about six hours until your brain becomes attuned to the frequency. Soon you'll be able to decipher the 8,192 bit encoded datastream that the government is using to communicate with the L'kelialia from Pluto. You'll hear their voices. You'll see their devilish grins peering back at you.
People ask, why would the government want to fake the moon landing? It's easy. Staking a claim. In 2053 the Global Congress will debate the issue of ownership of mineral rights on Luna. The government is only making sure that it has the most prior claim. The actual technology for a moon shot won't be available for another 16 years (I think, this is 2002, right?) but time travel has been well understood since Einstein. It's very complicated and scientific (I'd have to use terms like Schwartzchild radius and eigenvalues to really explain it) but suffice it to say that it's true. I read it on Slashdot earlier this year.
Anyway, I hope my detailed, logical, and coherent analysis and convinces you that this upcoming paper is total fabrication.
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).
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.
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?
According to anonymous sources, Christoforo Columbo, an Italian adventurer employed by the Spanish court, never landed in America. He forged his ships' logs, and hired actors to play the parts of his "Indian" captives.
A spokesman for King Ferdinand of Spain declined to comment.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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*
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
They tried this one. Chairface Chippendale once tried to write his name on the moon, but he only got the first 3 letters before running out of room.
And then The Tick kicked his ass...
And then the Man Eating Cow showed up... but that was after the Ninjas....
Or something...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
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.
Reminds me of one of my favorite sigs ever:
MORTAR COMBAT!
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
This should clear up any misconceptions you might have regarding the Americans landing on the moon
please read and comment.
There certainly have been moon landings, but not before 1982, when NASA finally invented the technologies to get past the radiation belt. The world was fooled over a decade before into believing that Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. All the images and whatnot from the various Apollo missions were fakes. I have bulletproof evidence to support this claim: Two different people, who do not know each other, have separately told me that they doubt the moon landings took place.
Basically, we really did land on the moon.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
...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
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.
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
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy