50th anniversary of the moon landing

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I still can't believe how to this day, I keep running into otherwise sensible people who claim the moon landings were faked.

So I ask them - given that any country with a radio telescope could have detected signals being sent from the moon, why did the USSR and all it's allies go along with hoax, instead of saying "It's a hoax - there are no signals coming from the moon - the USA and it's friends like Australia are all lying to you"?
Cheers,
Renato
 
I had just been transferred to Wagga. A few of us went to the Commercial Club for the afternoon :cool:;)
 
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I still can't believe how to this day, I keep running into otherwise sensible people who claim the moon landings were faked.

Read a recent book by David Robson entitled The Intelligence Trap for how ‘otherwise sensible’ people can be precisely not that.
 
What was I doing on that date? I was way ahead of my time. Instead of caring about a major historical event, I was self-absorbed that day, taking a "selfie":

me.jpg

I actually recall it quite well. Everyone on the "outside" was talking about the moon landing, whilst I was trying to understand why I was developing gills :)
 
I was in final year of school and listened to it on the radio (South Africa didn’t have TV). I then remember having an intense discussion by telephone about it with a sort of boy friend.
 
Read a recent book by David Robson entitled The Intelligence Trap for how ‘otherwise sensible’ people can be precisely not that.
I haven't read the book, sounds interesting. But I'm unsure why it should be the case when nowadays, knowledge is just a few keystrokes away.

When people tell me about Chariots of the Gods, Faked Moon Landings, Loose Change (9/11 attack), Crystal Skulls, Aliens building the Pyramids, Easter Island, Peruvian buildings, Flying Saucer at Westall, Victoria etc etc from a book they read, a video they saw on YouTube, or some crazy show on History Channel or Channels 7, 9, or 10, I just tell them to go home, get a search engine up, type in the name of the weird theory and add the word "debunked".

Then check the articles that show up. There will inevitably be at least one that tears the claims to shreds line by line. And numerous results come up for "fake moon landing debunked".

A couple of years ago, a student teacher was earnestly telling me about how over some town in Texas, some 3000 people witnessed a UFO over the town. To which I replied,
"And not one of them thought to bring out a phone and take a picture or video of it?
Funny, when anything else happens nowadays, there always seems to be one or more people recording it on a phone.
If I saw news reports showing that three or four hundred of those people had photographed the UFO, from three or four hundred obviously different angles - I might be persuaded that UFOs exist.
What do you think
?"

To which he replied -"Yes...... it's a load of cough".
And that's about the only time I've ever convinced someone over such an issue.
Cheers,
Renato
 
I actually recall it quite well. Everyone on the "outside" was talking about the moon landing, whilst I was trying to understand why I was developing gills :)

+1 ........ was definitely alive at the point, albeit not breathing

Not sure if you made it into the 60s's but I did, although only in the last months of the decade. Being of the year the 747 first flew, the first human being travelling to the moon, and even (as a gay man) Stonewall riots, there's plenty of "50th anniversary" reminders of my coming milestone. A great year though. :p
 
It occurred to me as I was reading some of these posts that my grandchildren (11 / 12) may not even realise man has walked on the moon. ..... I must ask them.
 
All these posts on conspiracy and fakes has given me a sudden urge to download and watch the movie Capricorn One :)
 
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And, it seems, we're returning.
I'll believe it when I see it. Sadly, every US administration over the past couple of decades has come up with a new goal, that totally changes NASA's direction. The end result has been the expenditure of vast amounts of money, for absolutely zero achievement.

The SLS basically duplicates what was done by the Saturn 5...and that first flew in 1967. SLS largely seems to be an employment program...even a political boondoggle. They're building the booster, so they need to find something to do with it. Cancelling that, and using commercial boosters might get them enough money to actually do something...but that doesn't spread the largesse to the correct states.

When they originally went to the moon, there were a number of mission modes that were considered. Direct ascent, was somewhat silly, but it had the positive (if you were a rocket builder) of needing a huge booster. The planned vehicle was appreciably bigger than Saturn. An alternative, which could use much smaller boosters was 'earth orbit rendezvous'. In that mode, you'd use a couple of launches, and assemble your final vehicle in earth orbit. The final mode, which they used, was 'lunar orbit rendezvous'. Space X could probably handle a combination earth orbit/lunar orbit rendezvous mission with their current Falcon Heavy, using two or three launches. Three launches would cost about $400 million, vs well over a billion for a single SLS.

SLS itself, whilst looking like the grandson of Saturn, is a vehicle that has morphed out of a couple of earlier programmes. Its main engines come from the Space Shuttle, so they are well proven. On the shuttle they went to great pains to re-use these engines. If they'd been prepared to throw them away, it would have allowed for a much lighter, smaller, and probably safer, shuttle design. The SLS will use four of them, and they will not be recovered. You have to wonder how many exist, and if they can actually make any more, or whether the production facility closed decades ago. SLS was originally conceived as part of the Ares system. That system consisted of two vehicles. One was meant to lift heavy loads, but was not going to be man rated...and that's the one that has become SLS. The smaller Ares I launcher would have lifted the astronauts. That vehicle was actually test flown way back in 2009.
 
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You can listen to the landing in real time at this link.
 
for Renato.. there are more things et al..
I opine that science has built some very shaky hat stands in the pursuit of the unknown.
Equally the published cranks and dreamers tend to be writing pure scifi
The philosophically contemplative who have an open mind about a whole lotta stuff are just out there in the middle distance.. wondering…...
 
I've been following along the moon landing in real time on Twitter for the last week. The Apollo 50 channel has been tweeting the comms transcript as it happened, minute by minute. Fascinating to read. Currently, they're on their way back to Earth. The amount of jokes by the astronauts though, I suppose you need a lot of humour in that scenario.

In related news, I'm now browsing for a telescope.
 
And sadly, we see that Chris Kraft has died. The man who created the role of 'flight director', and one of the people who made it all happen.
 
Unfortunately,as it did in 1969,the moon landing has overshadowed another 50th anniversary.


In the 2019 "Apollo 11" documentary film, there is a TV news item about this matter.
 
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