Damned if you do {take photgraphs}, damned if you don't!
I'm convinced this is why David Percy's book is so long (500+ pages) and filled with tedious irrelevancy (UFOs and Egyptian numerology) and why his video is nearly four hours long and filled with tedious recitation. The longer you spend with them, the more you see that they switch expectations like this. But they keep throwing irrelevant things at you and belaboring the wrong points to make you forget how much they're just making it up.
Rocket scientists can't educate certain people because there's nothing for them to push against in a vacuum.
I've never failed to teach any facet of the Apollo missions (or space travel or science in general) to anyone of any background who actually wanted the answers. No, not everyone gets to the point of being able to solve heat transfer through differential equations. But the basic principles are easy enough to express by analogy. Yes, you do need to have or learn some science. But it can be done.
People cling to conspiracy theories because they
want to. There is no other reason. It's not because the hoax theories themselves make better sense (usually quite the opposite) or are in any way predicated on a better understanding of the relevant facts.
When I was a kid I'd write NASA at least twice a year asking for Apollo and Skylab pictures...
Of course NASA was good at public relations back then. And back then it was one the great places to work if you were really good at being a scientist or an engineer.
It's one thing to send swag to school kids. But people have gotten their hands on actual NASA equipment being sold as scrap, and have recognized it, salvaged it using NASA's documents from the National Archives, and agree it works. They've posted the software on Github, where it has been downloaded and run on emulators that diligent fans built solely from decades old hardware specifications. I remember a guy named Sullivan once built a complete Solid Works model of all the manned spacecraft using nothing but what had been published throughout the years.
I even met Alan Shepard. I was too nervous to ask about space, but we talked about golf for a little bit.
I met Shepard too. He visited my school when he was in town to give a lecture at the university. So they rounded up the nerdiest kids to sit in a classroom and ask questions. Al told us about this great thing NASA was going to have one day: a giant spaceship that would take off like a rocket and land like an airplane, take off again like a rocket and land like an airplane, over and over again. Decades later, when I had my head in a giant fuel line trying to help NASA figure out why there were cracks forming in the flowliner to the RS-25 low-pressure turbopump, I just smiled quietly to myself.
Point being that NASA is just too big to keep this kind of a secret.
Paradoxically, this is what some authors try to say is wrong with the photos or whatever. They say they've been deliberately tampered with to tip off diligent researchers like these brave conspiracy theorists as to what was really going on. They knew that the conspiracy theorists would eventually figure it out, even though these hypothetical whistle-blowers would have been killed if NASA had caught on to what they were doing. Some of them say they even wrote to NASA with all their challenges and tip-offs, and NASA had the audacity not even to bother answering them. The nerve!
It goes on and on like that. It's cultural and historical vandalism. When some people lack the skills to build beautiful things themselves, they get revenge by spray-painting their self-important vulgarity all over other people's achievements.
And meanwhile, NASA has a probe about to swing around Mars to use its gravity to reach an asteroid out between Mars and Jupiter named Psyche, an all metal, or all nickel core of a planet...
And the people who built and operated Apollo had already been distinguished in their fields before they got there. It's not as if Apollo rose out of nowhere and faded into nothing. Tom Kelly's team, who build the lunar module, later went on to design the Grumman F-14, one of the most successful jet fighters of all time. They really are top guns in their field.
I'm convinced that the reason some people—not all, but some—believe in obviously unlearned hoax theories like this is that they failed in some aspiration for their own life, maybe even through no fault of their own. Regardless, they're stuck there. They couldn't be brilliant scientists or world renowned artists because, for whatever reason, it ended up beyond their grasp. But instead of filling the measure of their actual talents and present circumstances and having joy therein, they silently bemoan their station and resent those others whose opportunities, skill, and perseverance allowed them to accomplish something to a degree they themselves couldn't. They figure those apparently successful people weren't actually any smarter, more diligent, or more talented than they, so whatever they achieved
must have been obtained by cheating. And they make it their life's goal to "discover" (i.e., manufacture) the evidence of that cheating to soothe their fragile egos and convince themselves that they won in the end.
That particular brand of hoax believer simply can't accept that other people
really have provably distinguished themselves in the mastery of challenging sciences and
actually solved the problems they set out to solve. Because if they accepted that, they would have to acknowledge that their own comparative shortcomings are their own fault, not someone else's. They may really not be as smart as the people who built and flew spaceships to the Moon. Consequently they decide to spray-paint their resentfulness and delusions of superiority all over those accomplishments: "No, no, pay attention to
meeee!"
that pattern seems vaguely familiar to a number of posts in just this thread
