Russian Official Calls For "International Investigation" of the Apollo Program

MarkWhittington writes: According to a Tuesday article in the Moscow Times, a spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee named Vladimir Markin suggested that an international investigation be mounted into some of the "various murky details surrounding the U.S. moon landings between 1969 and 1972." Markin would particularly like to know where some of the missing moon rocks went to and why the original footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing was erased. Markin hastened to add that he is, of course, not suggesting that NASA faked the moon landings and just filmed the events in a studio.

Comments

Buzz Aldrin, paging Buzz Aldrin

[istartedi]

Will Buzz Aldrin please pick up the white courtesy phone? We have need of your your services.

Re:Of course not.

[Jane Q. Public]

Of course he's not suggesting that.

Here's what's completely ridiculous about the whole "fake Moon landing" thing:

In 1969, "special effects" that were convincing enough to have faked the whole thing would probably have cost more than 2 whole trips to the moon.

Besides... the site has been photographed from orbit repeatedly since.

Re:It's just grumbling about US investigations

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is sort of amazing that the US managed to get involved in FIFA. You'd think that a secretive organization based in Switzerland, of all places, could handle a little slush money without passing through US jurisdiction.

Seems like sloppy work, to me.

The proof?

[hcs_$reboot]

The proof.

Re:The tapes were re-used

[imidan]

It is suspected that the tape was re-used due to NASA's tight budget and they couldn't afford more tape.

Not just budget concerns. There was also a big problem in the 80s when commercial whaling was outlawed. The tape that NASA had used to record a lot of data involved whale oil in its production somehow. When whaling went out, whale oil went away, and companies that made data tape scrambled to replace it with something. They came up with synthetic alternatives, but because they didn't have much time to test, they discovered after it was already in use that the new stuff basically turned into glue after sitting on a shelf too long, which ruined tapes. So the old whale oil tapes became valuable for re-use, since you could depend on them not gluing together and losing all of your data. So that's another reason why NASA taped over a lot of irreplaceable data.

At a conference last year, I spoke with a NASA guy who was working on recovering a lot of old lunar data. He told me about the whale oil angle. He also said their best find at that point had been a whole palette/palettes of the whale oil tapes that had been sent from one NASA group to another to be copied over, but had been misplaced in a warehouse during transit, and just sat there ever since.

Re:No it is just grandstanding

[rtb61]

From the Russian point of view the only reason the US government investigated it and sough prosecution was because Russian is the next country to get the World Cup. The side show venting about the moon is because he didn't think about the corruption involved in the US getting the Olympics. So the Russians government does not care about the various US moon missions (at least in the past everything is changing now as the push is on to get back there, obviously this is secret that has just subconsciously leaked out), just empty bitching and a possible security blunder.

Look at all the stupid shit American politicians say, seriously stupid shit that doesn't even hint of benign as the FIFA investigation. Every time any Russian says anything it is Putin's fault or the whole Russian governments fault. Yet the endless stream of bullshit spouting out from the whackddoodles that infest the US congress and senate is considered as not being from the US government at all this by the US government.

Re:Of course not.

[AmiMoJo]

In this case other countries with no reason to lie for the US have observed the landing sites too. Both China and Russia have photographed them from orbit.

Even back at the time the landings were taking place other countries were able to verify them by simply listening in on radio communications from the moon. They would have realized pretty quickly if the signals were not coming from the moon, so at the very least NASA would have had to somehow get some unmanned transmitters up there.