Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[SuperMurrio]

Utterly and completely wrong. The aerodynamic wake of a moving vehicle is not the only thing that can cause dust to be lifted when a vehicle passes. The wheels play a role as well. Some wheels are especially good at lifting dirt and dust because of the way they're designed. In the video Jay provided of the desert racer, one can see the effects of the paddle-like surfaces on the tires, which are literally called 'sand paddles' and are designed to dig into the sand for traction. You can see a wave-like effect caused by each individual paddle as it throws up sand.

Here's a slow motion video showing the same effect:

The Apollo LRV wheels consisted of steel wire mesh with flat titanium chevrons. They dug into the regolith and threw it aloft as they rotated. Here you can even see the maps used to replace the broken fender during Apollo 17 that I mentioned earlier.
View attachment 71435



The real difference between air and no air is that in air, fine particles become suspended - they form clouds of dust that billow and roll with the air in which they're suspended. With no air, the dust that's thrown up - even the finest microscopic particles fall back to the ground as fast as a bowling ball would. There is no fluid medium for dust to become suspended in so it doesn't form clouds that roil around as the vehicle passes. This is exactly what we see in the Apollo 16 mm DAC motion pictures.

You're trying to assert that the lack of air means that we shouldn't see any dust being thrown up by the LRV, but that's just wrong. If you put a wire whisk on the end of a rod and stuck it into the lunar regolith and flipped the end of it up out of the dust, do you think that no dust would be thrown aloft because there's no air?

There was some superb photography earlier this year from the Artemis II mission which covertly landed on the moon... no wait, this thread is getting to me... I mean photos from the Dakar Rally.

 

[SuperMurrio]

As I said that was taken by my old smart phone, obviously crappy compared to my old SLR's and Leica lenses. It was a few years back but I still have all the old negatives and slides - too many thousands to have the time to dig them out. Strangely, many old professional studio photos taken in the early 1900's have remained in better condition than some more modern ones.

omnia instrumenta et nulla idea, as they say.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Here, by the way, is the sticker that was atop the Hasselblad film magazines used on the lunar surface, showing a handy reference for f-stop and shutter speed for various lighting conditions.

View attachment 71442

"The darkslide has more power than you can imagine. Join me, and together we can rule the moon as father and son!"

 

[JayUtah]

Our intuitive behaviour fails us outside our usual environment so the question is for lots of people interpreted as "Why when it is nighttime can't you see the stars?"

This is a good tl;dr of what I wrote at length above. The original claim was made without any knowledge of photography and with a clear reference to the "night sky." Similarly some posters in this thread have mistakenly referred to the "night sky" as their standard for Apollo lunar surface photography. Intuition is hard to shake, so subsequent "physicists" and "photographers" just repeated the wrong-headed intuition accompanied by their pseudo-expert imprimatur.

 

[JayUtah]

"The darkslide has more power than you can imagine. Join me, and together we can rule the moon as father and son!"

Dark sides slides are evil. More on that later.

The normal way you operate a magazine-loaded camera is that you attach the magazine and then you pull out the darkslide and keep it somewhere safe. At the end of the roll you slide the darkslide back in place and remove the magazine. Some hoax claimants point out that this would be cumbersome in space gloves. Plus, where would you put the darkslide so as not to lose it?

On the Apollo-modified Hasselblad, the reseau plate occupies the space that would normally accommodate the darkslide when the magazine is first attached. Therefore you have to remove the darkslide before you attach the magazine. You just throw the darkslide away. (The Sierra Club would be aghast.) There's a wire loop on the darkslide that helps you pull it out while wearing gloves.

Doesn't that expose the film? Yes, but generally only the frame currently in the gate. The normal A12 magazine for 120 format (the consumer equivalent to Apollo film) runs the film top to bottom between spools on a removable film carrier. The frame in the gate sits in front of a very flat pressure plate that presses the film up against the edges of the gate. This, combined with spool tension, keeps the film remarkably flat. The darkslide ordinarily slides into grooves in front of the gate. If you remove the magazine without the darkslide, you'll wreck the frame in the gate. And some light will leak around the sprocket drives and rollers so you'll probably spoil the frame before and after the one in the gate. Toward that end, there's an interlock that prevents the magazine release from operating unless there's a darkslide there.

Apollo used an aftermarket longroll magazine made to spec for use in space by a company in Hollywood that specialized in custom camera backs. In this magazine, there is no separate film carrier. The entire back of the magazine opens up. The film runs left to right in this magazine, and is double-sprocketed because the film is so very thin and flimsy. More importantly, the pressure plate doesn't press the film up against gate edges but against the silvered glass reseau plate. This is so the reseau fiducials (crosshairs) would be contact-exposed. The plate was silvered to draw away the electrostatic buildup that would inevitably result from dragging polyester across glass in a vacuum. For the real photo geeks: yes you can sometimes see catadioptric effects and halation from this arrangement.

But if you're following along, you realize that this means there's no gap between the film plane in the magazine and the back of the reseau plate. That's why you can't have the darkslide in place with the magazine attached.

To load a new magazine, the astronaut removed the darkslide and tossed it away. This would immediately expose the frame in the gate. And as I mentioned above, you would typically get light leaks onto the frame to either side of the rollers. After mounting the magazine, the astronaut would click off three throwaway frames. This is enough to bring film from deep onto the supply spool forward. Similarly at the end of the roll, the astronaut clicks off three more throwaway frames. That winds the last good frame safely onto the takeup spool deep inside the magazine away from light leaks.

This is familiar to anyone who has ever used 135 roll or Kodak 126 cartridge film. After you load the cartridge or get the 35 mm roll film onto the sprockets and threaded onto the takeup spool, you close the back and wind several frames in order to pull unexposed film out into the gate. 120 roll film has a paper leader and backing that lets you load the magazine in subdued light. But after you put the film carrier in the magazine you still have to wind past the leader and get good film into the gate.

All this is worth belaboring because in the photography word this detail was one of the ingeniously simple solutions, alongside such things as zone focusing. All these "professional photographer" hoax claimants should have been aware of the historical oddity of dispensing with darkslildes. At any rate, an author researching Apollo would have easily been able to find the answer to the question, "How did the astronauts deal with the magazine darkslides?" The first thing that comes up is the audacious yet genius procedure of simply ignoring the darkslide and winding some throwaway frames the way photographers are already used to doing.

But no—instead of displaying even the slightest actual expertise or genuine curiosity, these claimants just lie and say it was a cumbersome thing that the astronauts couldn't have done, so the missions must be fake. "This is what we have to do in the studio," is such a straw man. The notion that you can't take photos under challenging physical circumstances would have come as a great surprise to any photojournalist, especially those covering the Vietnam War.

Now I managed to botch reinserting the darkslide out in the desert. So yes, darkslides are evil Sith lord scoundrels. Since the interlock was disabled, I managed to wreck a couple of the frames I shot when I removed the non-Apollo A12 magazine. I didn't plan to recreate that part of the Apollo photography experience, but here we are. Luckily the producers accepted my, "I totally meant to do that," at face value and we treated it as serendipitous. If there's interest, I'll scan some frames from that roll and post them.

 

[bknight]

Yes, but those disappearing fiducials "prove" that they were not taken on the Lunar Surface.

 

[theprestige]

This video here is very interesting. It has the three Apollo 11 astronauts at a press conference, not ever seeming to be able to confirm anything. Just vague references to 'commitment'.

Why is any of this a problem for you?

You believe the Apollo program was real. You believe those astronauts, and the others, all landed on the moon in exactly the way described by the historical record. So therefore you must believe that the astronauts' behavior is in fact the normal sort of behavior for people who have had that sort of experience. Also therefore you must believe that the photos, video footage, and other artifacts in the record are all in fact exactly the kind of artifacts one should get from the project as described.

 

[JesseCuster]

When do we get to hear about how the Van Allen belts meant that the whole thing was actually impossible and astronauts and electronics would have been fried?

 

[Andy_Ross]

Searing radiation hell!

 

[EHocking]

"The darkslide has more power than you can imagine. Join me, and together we can rule the moon as father and son!"

I believe that we two can make Brittan great, you as the Prince Regent and I as King Penguin.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Yes, but those disappearing fiducials "prove" that they were not taken on the Lunar Surface.

My favorite part of that CT is that for some reason they had to composite in the white stripes on the U.S. flag.

Kubrick: Damn! The flag provided by the prop department doesn't have stripes! It's all red! There's no time to make a fake flag!

Trumbull: Don't worry. We'll fix it in post.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

Vixen, my recommendation is to watch the entire interview, not some cherry picked bits offered by a guy looking to promote his YouTube channel with some low hanging fruit.

Wait, I thought Vixen was deeply skeptical of claims from mere YouTubers?

 

[JayUtah]

My favorite part of that CT is that for some reason they had to composite in the white stripes on the U.S. flag.

That is my all-time favorite too. But it's such a stupid claim on its face. Why not just put the reseau plate on the final process camera?

When I got the first film-grain scans of Roll 40 I noticed that the fiducials were not at all blown out. So I did a bunch of experiments. What makes them go away? Duping made them fainter, but didn't eliminate them altogether. Resizing the digital copy didn't make any difference. (That one surprised me.) By far what killed them most effectively is the JPEG DCT compression. They simply don't survive the JPEG lossy compression if they're in a DCT macroblock that's otherwise all white.

For this we have to go back to where the digital copies came from. LPI had their crappy scans, although I notice now they have scans at higher resolution if you click through. That wasn't always the case. Initially there was no comprehensive effort to digitize the Apollo 70 mm photography. But there was still a demand for web content. So people both in and out of NASA started scanning whatever prints or dupes they had in their possession. It was a haphazard, uncoordinated effort. Some NASA centers had scans of some photos; others had scans of others. People posted their privately-obtained prints that they had scanned. They all got traded left and right, copied, resized, recompressed, and generally done historical violence to. In fact my own web site still has some of the crappy initial scans, and not just because I wanted to illustrate what could happen when you work from crappy scans. Some of them are just the best copies I could find at the time.

Unfortunately this just fed the conspiracy paranoia. All the conspiracy authors realized they could just download photos they wanted without having to pay NASA's photo contractors for them. So they all got hold of the crappy, "no idea where this came from" copies and proceeded to attribute all the sins they found in them to some artifact of fakery. The disappearing crosshairs claim was easy to make then, since they were all looking at low-quality, hand-me-down JPEGs. Those claims are much harder to make credibly now simply because we have such beautiful, high-quality scans of the camera originals in which the fiducials are all there where they're supposed to be.

 

[JesseCuster]

Wait, I thought Vixen was deeply skeptical of claims from mere YouTubers?

What Vixen doesn’t seem to realise is that anyone can make YouTube videos or documentaries and it’s just the opinion of the creator or writer. Sure, you might get a token opposing opinion for “balance”. But it’s just someone’s opinion.

If only she realised that before linking to a YouTube video in support of some laughable claim…

 

[JayUtah]

Broadly speaking, the monetization of YouTube creates a situation in which a channel's success depends competing for viewership. Channel operators are forever asking us to promote them by liking and subscribing, activities they are certain will make the selection algorithm prefer their channels over others. Even more broadly speaking, this is just true of publishing in general. Attention is a limited commodity. Competition for it can be fierce.

Not everyone who needs to attract attention will resort to nefarious means to get it. Sensationalism is low-hanging fruit, to be sure. But channels like Juan Browne's Blancolirio prove that you can achieve success in the YouTube environment by well-researched, relatively non-controversial factual content. A high subscriber count is certainly an indication of how popular a channel's content is, but isn't a good indicator of the practical reliability of that content. It's probably just as wrong to presume either reliability or unreliability solely on the basis of a channel's monetized presence on YouTube. You have to look closer. Here's how I evaluated the evidentiary value of the video purporting to criticize the Apollo 11 press conference.

Because Apollo is a topic I've studied well enough to be considered an expert on, I know that the Apollo 11 press conference and astronaut public statements in general are fertile ground for claims to be able to infer the subject's mental state and subsequently the likelihood of deception and finally the evaluator's preferred reason for that alleged deception. Because this particular pattern of argument arises only from certain contexts from which we also get ridiculously poor research and bad reasoning, there is reason to suspect bias simply from the choice of argument.

Looking at the channel as a whole, I can see that there are a few through-lines to the subject matter. One is true crime. The other is UFO suppressionism. Although both rely on armchair analysis of purported wrongdoing, the claims of suppressed UFO information is what interests us here. This is clearly a subject the channel operator finds not only interesting but provocative. Given the objectively questionable nature of suppressionist arguments, it can be said that the channel is reaching for the sensational. This frames the analysis of the press conference. The channel operator is predisposed to interpret ambiguous data in favor of his desired conclusion.

Looking at the foundation of the claims, I find a claimant who simultaneously claims professional expert status, but then does not want to connect his conclusions to his professional reputation. This is always a major flag. I understand the need to insulate one's day job from one's side hustle for legal reasons. I understand we are living in a hyper-litigious society. But ultimately a claim to expertise is either operative or it isn't. Reaching for expert credibility without agreeing to put that expert credibility at risk is a red flag.

Looking at the nature of the claims themselves, they are immediately at odds with the science and ethics that pertain to the claim to expertise. The claimed expert is simply engaging in activity that would be inadmissible as evidence in court (the expert's purported day job), unethical in clinical and professional practice (his other purported day job), and therefore unreliable. But because the purported ability to finely examine behavior and determine the likelihood that the subject is lying is firmly rooted in popular mythology, the viewer is not likely to be immediately skeptical of the claims. Claims made under color of expertise but expressing only popular belief is a red flag. This is a major recurring sin in the Apollo conspiracy theory as well as many other conspiracy genres.

While we find reasons to suspect bias, we have to provide actual evidence of bias. The channel operator admits that other reasons besides deception may give rise to the behaviors he identifies as unexpected. But he simply sides with the deception hypothesis without giving an evidentiary reason why. There's your bias.

 

[bknight]

Speaking of YT and off topic, what is your appraisal of the claims that trips to mars will be deadly for the people onboard a space craft due to GCR exposure?

 

[theprestige]

Speaking of YT and off topic, what is your appraisal of the claims that trips to mars will be deadly for the people onboard a space craft due to GCR exposure?

The specifics of each claim probably matter a lot.

As far as I know, it's generally accepted that long exposure to GCR will significantly increase the risk of cancer and other problems. I don't know if the math actually works out to radiation sickness and death, on (say) a two-year mission.

But it's not really accurate to say that the trip will be deadly, anymore than it's accurate to say a trip across the Atlantic ocean will be deadly. It could be deadly, if proper steps aren't taken. In the case of long-duration space missions, that generally means more shielding, which means more weight and more cost, with accelerating increases in both (as is the way in rocketry).

 

[JayUtah]

Attenuating GCR to occupationally safe levels over, say, a 2-year mission remains a somewhat open engineering question. It's not a question of how to do it. Low molecular weight shielding is already in use on the ISS. The question is how to do it within the practical limitations that currently exist for the mission.

GCR exposure is not acute, it is chronic and cumulative. A 2-year-mission without any shielding would probably not risk a dose that would be deadly in the customary way: the so-called LD 50/30 standard. But it would expose the crew to long-term health effects consistent with a constant exposure to elevated radiation levels.

 

[Axxman300]

Speaking of Mars, the Psyche probe successfully swing-shot around the red planet and is on its way to its target. In a classic NASA, "Oh by the way" moment, they used their time around Mars to calibrate their nifty new cameras and sensor packages:

NASA’s Psyche Mission Images Mars’ Huygens Crater - NASA Science

Captured by the multispectral imager instrument on NASA’s Psyche mission, this is an enhanced-color view of the large double-ring crater Huygens (upper right; about 290 miles, or 470 kilometers, in diameter) and the surrounding heavily cratered southern highlands near 15 degrees south latitude.

science.nasa.gov

NASA’s Psyche Mission Spies Mars’ Wind-Blown Craters During Close Approach - NASA Science

This view of the Martian surface, captured by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft on May 15, 2026, shows streaks that have formed due to wind blowing over impact craters in the Syrtis Major region.

science.nasa.gov

So we get new cool pictures of Mars...But yeah, sending men to the moon is hard...

 

[Vixen]

When do we get to hear about how the Van Allen belts meant that the whole thing was actually impossible and astronauts and electronics would have been fried?

I am afraid it is a real phenomenon. The Apollo 11 spacecraft was of mere thin aluminium and the space suit fabric designed to supposedly prevent the astronauts from either boiling or freezing as well as protecting them from the very real Galactic Cosmic Radiation [GCR]. The debunkers will tell you the spacecraft passed through these high GCR Van Allen belts 'very rapidly' and NASA spokespersons - PR - will suggest that why, Van Allen himself, whom the doughnut-shaped belts of especially intense GCR is named after, was on the NASA team*. They will never confirm it but they'll 'suggest' the spacecraft went via the 'safe route' via one of the poles. This of course is mere 'iffing and butting' but not actually verified fact. Whilst orbiting planets is a relative doddle, landing and mucking about with cameras is pure nonsense and then taking off again, based on a closely followed script (there was no software) plus NASA claims to have lost 700 boxes of telemetry and the original film, I do wonder at the general public's gullibility. Given the sheer amount of fuel needed, why, it's a freaking miracle Apollo 11 journeyed 300,000 more miles than the recent Artemis II and NASA never thought shortage of fuel could ever be a problem there.

*This is the laughable standard of 'debunking'.