These guys think up a lot more elaborately crazy ◊◊◊◊ than a lone laptop display being faked.
That was why it took so long for
Mythbusters to do that episode. Phil Plait, at first on his own and later with me, approached the producers early on with proposals to do an episode debunking the hoax claims. As is well known now, Adam Savage is a huge Apollo nerd and he was on board even before Phil reached out. This was something Adam really wanted to do. But since the show must have an entertainment component in order to compete in its market, it took all that time to come up with something that would be visually appealing. You can have all the science in the world behind you, but in the end the producers don't want the audience to say, "Ugh, this is boring, let's watch
Dancing With the Stars instead." During preproduction I quipped that most people just tuned in to see how Tory was going to hurt himself that week. (That did not land well; the show was actually no-joking fanatical about safety.)
The problem in general with debunking is that it's very easy and very entertaining to throw out some lurid tale full of falsehoods and misconceptions that's long on entertainment impact. "Did you know they faked the Moon landings!" (MUSIC: Dun dun
dunnnnnh!) More often than not the most correct answer is a dry half-hour physics lecture. This is why I never participate in "sound bite" live debates. That format always favors people who can hurl the most hogwash in 30 seconds.
Most of actual science is watching displays on laptops. It's truth, but not very entertaining. So no, that was a bad note to end on. I have occasionally discussed with Adam how it might have been done better. And there may an addendum in Adam's evolved media presence. But honestly he's more focused on the reality of Apollo than in wasting any more time debunking cranks.
There is also the fact that the Soviets deployed two retroreflectors via crewless rovers.
Indeed. From the science perspective, the Soviet retroreflectors are far less efficient that Apollo's. This is because precise alignment on the lunar surface is key to their effectiveness. Apollo's were hand-placed and hand-aimed, and as a result return much more of the input signal. The Soviet versions are also much smaller, so that they can fit within the payload capacity of a small, uncrewed lander.
But how do you show this? "Oh, look, that histogram on the laptop is
much taller than that other histogram on the laptop." As a scientist I'm thrilled to have clean data. As a media consumer, I'm already reaching for the remote. And of course if you're predisposed to dispute every morsel of evidence, you can certainly say that there must be some guy in the next room fiddling with a dial to get the display to come out that way.
This touches upon a central dilemma in the debate. Hoax claimants say, "Well, if NASA really wanted to prove they went to the Moon they should have done X. Since they didn't do X, that means they were deliberately avoiding their burden of proof." NASA put the LRRRs on the Moon not to prove to doubting critics that they had been there, but to do science. Ditto all the photography, geology, and astronomy. Claims that presume NASA believed they had to build an airtight evidentiary case that would stand up to even absurd and misguided levels of doubt either requires NASA to be uncommonly prescient or devolves into circular reasoning.
Besides, in law it's common for a prosecutor to try to argue that a defendant's alibi is suspiciously airtight. Similarly if NASA had gone to comically airtight efforts to produce evidence at the time, that can be argued as a sign of premeditation and fabrication. The evidence is what it is, warts and all. The Soviets remained convinced, and they independently verified some of NASA's claims in ways only they could.
ETA: as a side note, I am perpetually stunned that we can actually aim and hit that tiny little reflector from earth. I mean, consider the orbital mechanics and the precision needed to hit a moving target from a moving planet and the exquisite mechanical precision of aiming the thing to hit a target so incredibly small. Even being able to find it from here!
It's helpful to realize that the beam spreads out so that the patch of light that lands on the lunar surface is a number of kilometers wide. So it's not like you have to hit a square-meter target with a beam only a centimeter or so wide from 380,000 km away. Of course that cuts both ways since the intensity of the beam is spread out and thus the number of photons landing on the reflector is greatly diminished. What you get back is often only a few photons. You have to pick them out of the background by range-gating and careful wavelength filtration.
And yes, the Moon is receding from Earth at the rate of about a centimeter per year.
