Forty-five years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the infamous 'Moon Landing Hoax' is still trying to catch on

Monday, July 21, 2014, 1:35 PM - Forty-five years ago in the early morning hours of July 21, 1969 (UTC), Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon. This was an incredible accomplishment that required the collective efforts of hundreds of thousands of people, billions of dollars in development funds and nearly a decade of successes and failures to achieve. The event was watched, live on television, by an estimated 600 million people around the world, is still hailed as one of the crowning achievements of the space race and is still revered as one of the best examples of what we can accomplish by working together. Yet, with all of that, there is still a small, but vocal part of the population that challenges the idea that people have ever set foot on the moon.

There is abundant evidence available to prove, conclusively, that the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission and the five missions after that all successfully landed on the Moon and then returned safely - photographs, videos, expert testimony and the testimony of the men who made the journeys, and the rocks and dust brought back from the missions. However, it is this very evidence that this vocal minority have used in their attempt to prove that it was all part of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by NASA to make us think that the missions were successful. 

The Photographs

The astronauts on these missions took numerous pictures, documenting every aspect of their time on the lunar surface. While these efforts produced some truly iconic images for us to marvel over, certain details of the images have made some people suspicious. Two of the most common 'anomalies' they present are the crosshairs present in every lunar photo, which appear to be 'behind' certain objects in some photos, and the fact that there aren't any stars visible in the sky beyond the lunar horizon.

The crosshairs (or fiducials) in the images are there due to a glass plate (called a Reseau plate) that was installed just in front of the film of their cameras. The way these fiducials show up on the film is by deflecting the light passing through them by a very small amount, so that they do not focus on the surface of the film. This makes the part of the photograph covered by the fiducial show up as darker than the surrounding areas on the film, no matter how bright the light shining through them is. However, exposing the film is only one part of the process of creating a photograph. When the film was processed back on Earth, the photographic emulsions of the time weren't sensitive enough to pick up the difference between very bright areas on the film and the ever-so-slightly less bright region the fiducial produced on the film. This is seen over and over again, how the fiducials or portions of them go missing when the light from a bright object intersects with them, but are clearly visible otherwise. Updated scans of the original photographic negatives are able to pick up the fiducials much easier, though.

Credit: NASA

The issue with the 'missing' stars is simply a matter of the sensitivity of the film. With the bright lunar landscape, the astronauts in their bright white spacesuits, with their (mostly) bright white equipment, there was no way to take pictures of all of that and still pick up the faint stars beyond the horizon. Even if they set the camera for a longer exposure time to pick up the stars, the the light from everything on the surface would have completely washed out the image.

Another aspect of the images has to do with the shadows, especially how the astronauts were able to remain visible while in the shadow of the lander and while being backlit by the Sun (in the case of Buzz Aldrin's famous photograph). The argument is that there must have been more than one light source, which is true, but it wasn't due to spotlights on a movie set. The lunar surface itself was the second light source, due to the fact that the rough, angular particles of dust on the moon's surface tend to reflect light back in the direction from where the light came. So, with the sun behind Buzz Aldrin as Neil Armstrong snapped the picture, the lunar surface between the two astronauts was reflecting the sunlight back towards the sun. This lit up the front of Aldrin's suit even while he was casting a long shadow in front of him. For shots of the astronauts in the shadow of the lander, it was the same situation. Even though the direct line to the sun was blocked by the lander, the lunar surface all around was reflecting enough light back to light them up.

There are other issues that have been brought up as well, all with reasonable explanations, but it would take considerable time to go over them all here. However, the website Moon Base Clavius goes through an exhaustive list (click here).

The Space Environment

Scientists are quite familiar with the space environment, and while we certainly have more information about it these days, they were still very knowledgeable about what dangers the astronauts would have faced back then. Of specific concern was the exposure to radiation, both as the spacecraft passed through the Van Allen belts (the doughnut-shaped regions of charged particles from the sun that are trapped in place by Earth's magnetic field) and from cosmic radiation from space and the sun. Although spending time in the Van Allen Belts is not advisable, as you would accumulate a lethal dose of radiation over time, it would take months for that to happen. For the Apollo missions, the command module was specifically built to protect against the majority of this radiation, but their flight path was specifically chosen to fly them through the less intense regions of the edges of the belts. Even if they flew through the core of the belts, where the strongest radiation is, they only spent about an hour flying through. This was far too short a time to accumulate a harmful dose. 

For cosmic radiation, this was a concern then, and it still is now. The astronauts weren't in any danger from it, though. Data gathered by the Curiosity rover, while it was still tucked away in its spaceship on the trip to Mars, showed that space travellers would be able to spend an entire year beyond Earth's protective magnetic field before they would need to worry about the radiation dose they were accumulating. At that point, the dose would exceed the life-time limit that NASA set down for women and it would be approaching the limit for men, but it would still be well below what's considered a lethal or dangerous level of exposure. The two weeks that the astronauts spent on their journey to the moon and back wouldn't have come close.

NEXT PAGE: The Moon Itself, the Grand Conspiracy, and Why Haven't We Gone Back?

The Lunar Environment

Certain questions have raised about things seen in video and images that seem strange, but make sense when they're considered in the context of the moon's environment.

The flag erected by the astronauts is one, specifically because the videos taken of them planting it show the flag waving, as if there was a breeze.

This doesn't make sense, of course, because there's not enough atmosphere on the moon to cause a breeze. However it wasn't because of air that the flag was waving, but specifically because of the lack of air. The astronauts had difficulty planting the flag, because the ground there was a very thin layer of dust, with hard rock below. They had to twist the flag pole hard to get it to go into the ground, and when they stopped twisting it, the flag fabric continue to wave back and forth due to the momentum of the twisting. Because there was no air to slow it down, it continue to do so until friction with the flag pole eventually brought it to a halt. At that point, it remained perfectly still, even as the astronauts moved around it.

When certain images and video were taken, it seemed as though the background stayed exactly the same, while the foreground changed dramatically. However, due to the environment of the moon, with its bright, fairly uniform surface (at least where the astronauts landed), no atmosphere, and lack of familiar terrain features for perspective, it's very difficult to gauge distance there. Hills, mountains and even rocks that seemed only a short distance away were, in fact, a lot farther. This video shot by the Apollo 16 astronauts gives an excellent example, by showing just how long it takes for the astronauts to walk over to a rock that seems to be only a few metres away.

The Conspiracy

The monumental scale of the conspiracy proposed for the moon landing hoax is the part that truly upends the entire idea. It would involve all the other governments at the time that were capable of monitoring the flight of the rocket, which would have, at least, counted the U.S.S.R., whom the United States was trying to beat to the moon. If the government of the U.S.S.R. knew it was fake, at a point at the height of the Cold War, when exposing the fakery would have embarrassed their bitter rivals, why would they hold on to that information? A conspiracy would have involved hundreds of thousands of people, scattered across multiple companies contracted to produce parts. Not one has come forward in the years since, bringing credible evidence that the landings were faked, regardless of financial difficulty or any other issues that may have befallen them. Furthermore, since they were all doing their jobs to produce parts for the mission, that would hold up to the specifications needed to safely take three men to the moon and return them to Earth, NASA would have ended up with a functional Saturn V rocket, a real command module, lander and orbiter, rovers and spacesuits, and all the equipment used on the lunar surface, and they would have spent billions getting it all. With the billions more needed to maintain a conspiracy for decades, it would have been far easier to just load three astronauts into that command module and launch them to the moon... which, of course, is what they did.

Why haven't we gone back?

This question comes up quite often, even with those who agree that the missions took place and there's no conspiracy to defraud the public. The sad fact is that once the missions were completed, there was no more reason to spend billions to go back. Public interest in the missions was wavering even at the time of Apollo 13 (although the accident revived that for a short time), while the costs weren't getting any cheaper. There was no justification for spending billions more to go back when they had what they needed (the one-up over the U.S.S.R. and the scientific data collected). It was cheaper to send robotic missions afterward. This is really unfortunate, as it would truly be amazing to have a permanent settlement on the moon now (even with the potential health problems of dealing with a low-g environment for long periods of time). However, along with plans for the asteroid capture mission, NASA seems to be reconsidering its position on the moon recently. This might give us a new mission in the works for the years to come, especially since there are valuable resources available on the moon (Helium 3?).

There are, obviously, many, many more arguments made about how the landings were faked, and even trying to write-off the above explanations (along with the explanations of everything else proposed). Some excellent sites to check out are listed below:

Moon Base Clavius
Goddard's Journal: Are Apollo Moon Photos Fake?
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy
Robert A. Braeunig's Rocket & Space Technology site 

NASA's Apollo Lunar Journal website (pictures, videos, reports, and a wealth of information about the missions)