Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[Mojo]

Gather 'round while I sing you of Werhner von Braun,
A man whose allegiance is ruled by ecpedience
Call him a nazi he won't even frown
Nazi, schmazi says Wernher von Braun
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
Once a rocket goes up who knows where it comes down?
That's not my departement, says Werhner von Braun!

That kind of German expert?
(Thank you for your service, Tom Lehrer, akways there when we need you!)

 

[JayUtah]

Tell me you know nothing about the Soviet space program without telling me you know nothing about the Soviet space program.

It's fair to say that Brezhnev was not as excited about going to the Moon as Khrushchev had been. But it's utter bollocks to imagine that the USSR would not know or care that it was faked. Khrushchev had been all about breaking records and grabbing headlines. Thus he pushed his space scientists to take a lot of risks and shortcuts. This approach was not really conducive to what it would take to get to the Moon. Brezhnev was less excited about the Moon, but he kept the program going as long as it could be done safely. They didn't abandon their crewed lunar landing program until the mid-1970s. Brezhnev was more interested in sustainable space stations than in one-off "stunts."

However, the FBI was well aware of the Soviet infiltrations of the Apollo program. The KGB was actively trying to spy on American space engineering. That's how they got the plans for the space shuttle, which they then adapted into their own Buran. While certain elements of the Saturn launch vehicle family were considered highly classified (and some of it still is), the spacecraft and mission profiles were not especially secret. In fact, many of the design activities were being openly discussed in the literature. The Soviets even recovered one of the boilerplate Apollo spacecraft and studied it extensively before returning it to NASA.

By Apollo 8 it was very clear to the Soviets that they were too far behind in their own crewed lunar landing program to be a credible competitor. However that doesn't mean they had quit the Moon Race. As Apollo 11 was being prepared for launch, the Soviets launched a last-ditch attempt at a sample return mission, hoping to get a lunar surface sample back to Earth before Apollo's. It failed. But the notion that if the Soviets had even caught a whiff of hoax they wouldn't have cared or called the U.S. on it is utter bollocks. They were still very much trying to one-up the Americans and grab headlines, and would undoubtedly have blown the whistle on a hoax.

In fact, many of the hoax claimants don't even try to claim that the Soviets were fooled. They claim the Soviets knew all along but had been bribed to keep it quiet by various enticements such as cheap shipments of grain in the 1970s.

 

[catsmate]

The CSM in LEO would have been a naked-eye object. But during the more distant parts of the trajectory, amateur equipment generally didn't have the resolving power to see the Apollo spacecraft even as a point of light. Some large-scale professional optical telescopes were able to see Apollo spacecraft (again, mostly as points of light). For example, the debris cloud and outgassing around Apollo 13 were seen from ground-based telescopes.

Radio tracking was primarily how it was done, largely passively. The CSM was constantly emitting radio signals for telemetry purposes, as was the LM while it was operational. These signals could be precisely located as a direction from Earth, and the Doppler shift of the main carrier gave you a velocity toward or away from the observer. Roger Bate's excellent book on astrodynamics gives a method for resolving angle-speed data points into a trajectory. There were certainly the ground stations that belonged to the MSFN, from various countries. But other ground radio telescope stations independently tracked the ships via their emitted radio waves.

The holy grail of independent tracking was the work of Larry Baysinger. He independently received the voice signals using equipment he built himself. Transmission frequencies for space missions are routinely published internationally to prevent conflicts. So he was able to tune his equipment appropriately. He wrote down and published how he did all of it; it's a master class in antenna design. Now keep in mind he wasn't receiving signals from the LM. He was receiving the VHF suit radio signals.

The suit comm system was a weird sort of daisy chain that could support any number of astronauts simultaneously on the surface. It used one suit radio as the relay for the other suit transmissions, all of it ending up on a single frequency received by the LM. Then the LM folded that into the unified S-band signal in a separate voice subcarrier. It would have taken quite a lot of intricate ground equipment to decode the unified S-band signal. But the voice transmissions between the suits and to the LM were just straight-up amplitude-modulated VHF signals at around 300 MHz. Any ham radio guy can pick that up and listen to it. The trick is to get an antenna sensitive enough to pick up suit signals from 380,000 km away. This is what Baysinger did, and showed everyone how he did it.

NASA did not know ahead of time that he was going to do this, nor even that it could be done. Sure, everyone is picking up complex S-band signals from the region of the Moon. If you wanted to fake that, you could send a decoy spaceship to transmit. But why go so far as to fake extremely weak VHF suit signals coming from the lunar surface that no one was expected to be able to pick up from Earth?

I just found that wiki has a unified list of third party evidence.

Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[catsmate]

I'd say 41. Television networks didn't "archive everything" in the 1950s.

Yep that was mine, I must have been a little off.
FFS magtape was expensive and shows were routinely wiped into the '70s.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

It's fair to say that Brezhnev was not as excited about going to the Moon as Khrushchev had been. But it's utter bollocks to imagine that the USSR would not know or care that it was faked. Khrushchev had been all about breaking records and grabbing headlines. Thus he pushed his space scientists to take a lot of risks and shortcuts. This approach was not really conducive to what it would take to get to the Moon. Brezhnev was less excited about the Moon, but he kept the program going as long as it could be done safely. They didn't abandon their crewed lunar landing program until the mid-1970s. Brezhnev was more interested in sustainable space stations than in one-off "stunts."

However, the FBI was well aware of the Soviet infiltrations of the Apollo program. The KGB was actively trying to spy on American space engineering. That's how they got the plans for the space shuttle, which they then adapted into their own Buran. While certain elements of the Saturn launch vehicle family were considered highly classified (and some of it still is), the spacecraft and mission profiles were not especially secret. In fact, many of the design activities were being openly discussed in the literature. The Soviets even recovered one of the boilerplate Apollo spacecraft and studied it extensively before returning it to NASA.

By Apollo 8 it was very clear to the Soviets that they were too far behind in their own crewed lunar landing program to be a credible competitor. However that doesn't mean they had quit the Moon Race. As Apollo 11 was being prepared for launch, the Soviets launched a last-ditch attempt at a sample return mission, hoping to get a lunar surface sample back to Earth before Apollo's. It failed. But the notion that if the Soviets had even caught a whiff of hoax they wouldn't have cared or called the U.S. on it is utter bollocks. They were still very much trying to one-up the Americans and grab headlines, and would undoubtedly have blown the whistle on a hoax.

In fact, many of the hoax claimants don't even try to claim that the Soviets were fooled. They claim the Soviets knew all along but had been bribed to keep it quiet by various enticements such as cheap shipments of grain in the 1970s.

Good stuff, thanks!

In addition, there are a number of common hoax claims that the Soviets could verify or ridicule based on their own space program.

They knew the radiation and thermal environment from here to the moon as well as NASA did, so they would know whether "tHe VaN AlLeN BeLts WoUld KiLl the AstrOnauTs UnLesS tHeY hAd SiX iNcheS of LeAd".

And besides their many impromptu impactor missions and solar flybys, they'd had at least two successful soft landings with probes that had taken photographs of the surface. So they knew:
1) What it took to land on the moon,
2) What the surface of the moon was like,
3) What the surface of the moon *looked* like,
4) What *photographs* of the surface of the moon look like,
and 5) Whether it was even possible to use photographic film on the moon.
All things pertinent to some common hoax claims.

 

[JayUtah]

The Artemis mission has resurrected some of the old hoax claims. It's inevitable some of it would come here. But Marcus Allen died months ago. That's no longer timely. The fact that he made a living publishing fringe claims doesn't mean we have to jump start all the claims de novo to commemorate his passing. Someone dying doesn't suddenly reset all the things that person was persistently wrong about for 30 years.

It's one thing not to want to learn a whole lot of rocket science. A lot of the Apollo details are quite complicated and require a lot of expertise to understand properly. Apollo was the accomplishment of the world's brightest minds at the time. It will naturally express that high expertise. But it's another thing entirely to demand that one's own laziness, mediocrity, and ignorance be celebrated as a meaningful challenge. "I can't figure out how it was done, therefore it must have been impossible," is not a very strong position.

But hoax claimants go further: "I can't figure out how it was done, and I know there are people who could teach me, but I'm simply going to persist in my ignorance and demand that I must somehow still be worth paying attention to." That's arrogantly presumptuous.

And—absurdly—even further: "I can't figure out how it was done, and I could answer my own question by simply looking around at how photography and shadow actually work—simple subjects within anyone's capacity to learn and observe—but I'm going to persist in what anyone can see is abjectly wrong and pretend that I must somehow still be worth paying attention to." This is what people like Marcus Allen did. It goes beyond merely being curious or questioning and becomes just straight-up lying. These people knowingly prefer the easily-shown lie.

Call me unkind, but I don't think those people deserve a parade. Weaponized ignorance and deliberate misinformation are not things I think an enlightened society should indulge.

 

[JayUtah]

They knew the radiation and thermal environment from here to the moon as well as NASA did, so they would know whether "tHe VaN AlLeN BeLts WoUld KiLl the AstrOnauTs UnLesS tHeY hAd SiX iNcheS of LeAd".

This is why their study of the Apollo boilerplate capsule was so important to the argument for authenticity. They would have been able to tell whether such a vehicle could provide a safe haven from radiation during the mission: not just the Van Allen belts, but the ambient radiation outside the magnetosphere (that the belts protect Earth from), and any of various kinds of solar events that might have happened.

Incidentally, I was able to confirm with Prof. Van Allen before his passing that he sees no reason why the Apollo missions can't have succeeded as advertised.

Many of the hoax claims are not rocket science. They're things you can observe yourself just by looking around you, or with your own photographic equipment that we all carry now. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to debunk those particular claims. But it's salient that rocket scientists also aren't fooled.

There's a web site out there that publishes (among other things) articles purporting to be from Russian academics challenging the Apollo missions. It's so funny, because none of these authors seem to have verifiable credentials (if, in fact, any identity at all). And when you get into the meat of the claims, they're obviously written with no correct understanding of the underlying sciences. So since the OP video was made, there is a new strategy involving dressing up Björkmann-esque claims and attributing them to unheard-of, untraceable Russian "scientists."

 

[Vixen]

Tell me you know nothing about the Soviet space program without telling me you know nothing about the Soviet space program.

Well, the Soviet Chief Designer who put Sputnik up there, Korolev, sent up eight or nine Luna modules in the early to mid-60's trialling soft landings on the moon. Almost all of them crashed. So it was very brave to send up three guys in a module that had crashed to earth just 14 months earlier of the prototype model tested by Armstrong himself at NASA.

 

[JayUtah]

Well, the Soviet Chief Designer who put Sputnik up there, Korolev, sent up eight or nine Luna modules in the early to mid-60's trialling soft landings on the moon. Almost all of them crashed.

...which is entirely a non-sequitur to...

So it was very brave to send up three guys in a module that had crashed to earth just 14 months earlier of the prototype model tested by Armstrong himself at NASA.

No.

The LLRVs and LLTVs were not "lunar module prototypes." They were trainers. That is, they were meant to use various ad hoc contrivances to simulate in Earth gravity what it would be like to fly the lunar module, not to test the design of the lunar module itself. As ad hoc trainers, they were not made to last, or to be especially safe against all mishaps. That's why they had ejection seats. Further, each of those vehicles flew successfully more than a hundred times with different pilots. You hear about the one crash involving Neil Armstrong because it was a singular event among a large number of successful, unremarkable flights.

For testing the actual lunar module, a number of test articles (LTAs) were built for ground testing such things as thermal response and airtightness. But more importantly, LM-1 and LM-2 were built specifically as flight test prototypes. LM-1's mission was so successful that LM-2's mission was deemed unnecessary and LM-2 now occupies a place of honor at the NASM. The actual lunar modules were extensively flight-tested on Apollo 9 and Apollo 10.

The Soviet landers were trying to use automatic, uncrewed technology. That's a harder problem in many respects. NASA solved many of the problems of lunar landing by putting a pair of highly skilled pilots on the craft.

 

[JesseCuster]

Not to detract from the the achievements of Armstrong & Aldrin and the third guy who stayed inside the capsule, and of course,
it is undeniably factual it all happened.

I predict this point of view will not last very long.

 

[LondonJohn]

Well, the Soviet Chief Designer who put Sputnik up there, Korolev, sent up eight or nine Luna modules in the early to mid-60's trialling soft landings on the moon. Almost all of them crashed. So it was very brave to send up three guys in a module that had crashed to earth just 14 months earlier of the prototype model tested by Armstrong himself at NASA.

It's amazing what googling "Soviet space program" and "US space program" will throw up, isn't it.

And BTW, the lunar module trainer(s) - cue the famous footage of Armstrong's ejection just prior to ground collision - were entirely different from what ended up being the lunar module itself (not least because the real LM operated in 1/6 Earth gravity). So, as so very often, you don't know what you're talking about.

ETA NInja'd by Jay.....

 

[LondonJohn]

I predict this point of view will not last very long.

"I am utterly objective and I'm not going to form a view until I have all the relevant information"

 

[LondonJohn]

The Soviet landers were trying to use automatic, uncrewed technology. That's a harder problem in many respects. NASA solved many of the problems of lunar landing by putting a pair of highly skilled pilots on the craft.

And it's highly possible that had it not been for Armstrong's skill, nerve and intuition in dealing with the 1202 errors and his manual guidance of the LM onto more level terrain (as the minimum ascent fuel level inched ever closer), Apollo 11 might have been a disaster.

 

[Axxman300]

It's one thing not to want to learn a whole lot of rocket science. A lot of the Apollo details are quite complicated and require a lot of expertise to understand properly. Apollo was the accomplishment of the world's brightest minds at the time. It will naturally express that high expertise. But it's another thing entirely to demand that one's own laziness, mediocrity, and ignorance be celebrated as a meaningful challenge. "I can't figure out how it was done, therefore it must have been impossible," is not a very strong position.

Long forgotten in the conversation is how public schools used the excitement of the space program to push science on willing young minds in the 1960s and 1970s. I was born in 1964, all my piers wanted to be astronauts, not cowboys until we hit junior high school. Captain Kangaroo and Mr Rogers did many shows explaining aspects of space flight, rendezvous in orbit, and landing on the moon along with what they expected the astronauts to experience when they landed. For the first four Apollo missions the news was wall-to-wall NASA experts explaining each step of the mission in a way that anyone could understand. You couldn't escape space flight education even if you wanted to. The newspapers were full of NASA diagrams, and all the top news magazines were filled with all things lunar landing.

So by 1971, the average seven year-old grasped the basics of the Saturn V, the LM, gravity on the moon, and so on. This sideshow of lunar landing hoaxing can only exist in a world where people have been under-educated. Sure, in 1977 there were people who thought it was all fake, but they were usually the town drunks. Yes, rocket science is complex, but it's also basic: 17,500mph to get into orbit, 25,000mph for escape velocity. The Saturn V solved that problem with multiple stages. Lunar gravity is 1/6 earth's gravity, so a smaller rocket engine will get you off the surface. The engineering was spectacular, even by today's standards, but straight-forward.

I guess I'm a child of the 60s and the space program, I respect science, and listen to those smarter than I am.

 

[JayUtah]

And it's highly possible that had it not been for Armstrong's skill, nerve and intuition in dealing with the 1202 errors and his manual guidance of the LM onto more level terrain (as the minimum ascent fuel level inched ever closer), Apollo 11 might have been a disaster.

Quite likely.

It's fun to note the difference in presumption between Americans and Soviets. Some Americans said the Apollo spacecraft had to be remote-controlled because crewed space travel was beyond the technology. Some Soviets, in contrast, said that Soviet automation technology was deficient, therefore the remote-controlled Lunokhod rovers secretly had little KGB midgets inside them to drive them.

It's important to remember that the point of Apollo was, "to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth." The primary goal was a crewed landing. If it's mandatory to have a human aboard, then it's smart to make that human an integral and important part of the overall system instead of just "Spam in a can."

It's also important to understand the Apollo 11 mission objective: To perform a manned lunar landing and return. The bar was kept absurdly low so that the U.S. could claim Kennedy's goal. Even if Armstrong and Aldrin had immediately lifted off without even getting out, the mission would have been deemed a success according to its objectives. That was held in abeyance in favor of the more exciting possible mission activities such as photography and sample collection.

And others noted technically that the way we number years means that 1970 would be part of "this decade," so if Apollo 11 failed they still had another year and a half to try and still meet Kennedy's goal.

Finally, someone quite recently found in Pres. Nixon's papers the speech written for him that he was to have read if the crew had been unable to take off from the lunar surface. It had the expected platitudes, language like, "They came in peace and now they will have to rest in peace." It was accompanied by a sheet describing the protocol for radioing the last goodbyes, etc.

Capricorn One notwithstanding, the point is that you don't set up those contingencies for something you're faking. If you're faking it, you know how it will come out. You don't need Plan B options like downgrading the mission objectives, claiming more time, and contingencies for national funerals. If the more you dig into the history, the more you uncover stuff that a real mission would be thinking about (even if not made public), and the less you find things like, "Here's what to do if we get caught," the more your history is real.

 

[Vixen]

Long forgotten in the conversation is how public schools used the excitement of the space program to push science on willing young minds in the 1960s and 1970s. I was born in 1964, all my piers wanted to be astronauts, not cowboys until we hit junior high school. Captain Kangaroo and Mr Rogers did many shows explaining aspects of space flight, rendezvous in orbit, and landing on the moon along with what they expected the astronauts to experience when they landed. For the first four Apollo missions the news was wall-to-wall NASA experts explaining each step of the mission in a way that anyone could understand. You couldn't escape space flight education even if you wanted to. The newspapers were full of NASA diagrams, and all the top news magazines were filled with all things lunar landing.

So by 1971, the average seven year-old grasped the basics of the Saturn V, the LM, gravity on the moon, and so on. This sideshow of lunar landing hoaxing can only exist in a world where people have been under-educated. Sure, in 1977 there were people who thought it was all fake, but they were usually the town drunks. Yes, rocket science is complex, but it's also basic: 17,500mph to get into orbit, 25,000mph for escape velocity. The Saturn V solved that problem with multiple stages. Lunar gravity is 1/6 earth's gravity, so a smaller rocket engine will get you off the surface. The engineering was spectacular, even by today's standards, but straight-forward.

I guess I'm a child of the 60s and the space program, I respect science, and listen to those smarter than I am.

I don't think you could call Marcus Allen 'under-educated'; he is merely taking a scientific stance towards it - devil's advocate, if you like. He is taking the null hypothesis "didn't happen", then seeking evidence that he was wrong. It's as good a way as any to get to the truth, especially in the geopolitical environment of the Cold War 'Space Race', with Kennedy promising the USA would be first to put a man on the moon 'by the end of the decade'. So yes, the aim was 'by hook or by crook' to beat the Soviets, so it is perfectly reasonable to suspect they cut corners to do it by 1969. And it hasn't been done again since 1972.

 

[JayUtah]

I don't think you could call Marcus Allen 'under-educated';

I don't necessarily think he was under-educated. I think he was deliberately misinforming people. That said, he was clearly under informed. I'll explain more in a later post.

he is merely taking a scientific stance towards it - devil's advocate, if you like.

No, there is nothing scientific about his stance. He's simply wrong, and for reasons that are almost trivially easy to discover. He had the ability to discover them. And as a self-proclaimed informer, he had the duty to discover them. He simply chose otherwise. That's the opposite of science.

He is taking the null hypothesis "didn't happen", then seeking evidence that he was wrong.

No, that's not how history works. The person claiming a historical event is a fake has the burden of proof to show evidence of the fakery. Not just the failure of evidence to measure up to some post hoc, ad hoc expectation. Not just some inference based on not understanding the evidence. We're not talking about something far in the past, beyond the recollection of living memory. We're talking about something that happened within living people's lifetimes. They saw it. They participated in it. The null hypothesis is not that it "didn't happen." That's patently absurd. If something in history appears to have happened, the notion that it happened the way it appeared to is the null hypothesis. To claim it appears to have happened one way but really happened another way incurs that special burden of proof.

It's as good a way as any to get to the truth...

No. It's only a way to create meaningless doubt—in Allen's case, so he could sell magazines to gullible people.

And if you want affirmative proof that the missions were real, there is more of it than you could ever hope to look at in a lifetime. All that evidence is what the hoax claimants are frantically (and comically) trying to explain away by one ignorant alternative or another.

so it is perfectly reasonable to suspect they cut corners to do it by 1969.

They did cut corners, which is why we had the Apollo 1 fire. But if you want to claim that they were so desperate to appear to have succeeded that they just faked it, you need a whole lot more than, "Well, I don't think those shadows look right."

And it hasn't been done again since 1972.

What does that have to do with it being faked? People first went to the Challenger Deep in 1960, and then not again until 2012. Does that mean the Trieste's voyage was faked?

 

[EHocking]

I was in boot camp. We "watched" the landing on a TV with rabbit ears in our company lounge.

I was just a kid when I watched it. I guess I was too young to realise I had to wear rabbit ears to understand what I was seeing.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I was just a kid when I watched it. I guess I was too young to realise I had to wear rabbit ears to understand what I was seeing.

The TV in our lounge (shared with another company on the other side of the barracks) had rabbit ears. Chicago was just on the limit of reception. We had the same grainy pictures but overlaid with a layer of electronic snow. I didn't know what the landing looked like for years after.

 

[EHocking]

I predict this point of view will not last very long.

Remember. Not a CTer, just discussing “current events”…