Moonlanding a hoax?

Do all of you believe that NASA really landed their craft on the Moon in 1969?
I tend to agree with the non believers, but I'm willing to change my opinion if proper proof is presented.

I think, if it were a hoax, they wouldn't have fooled the Soviets, who were monitoring the entire rocket's journey. And I think it would have been out of character for the Soviets to be silent when they had an opportunity to embarrass the United States.

Do you think all moon landings were a hoax or just the one in 1969?

Absolutely, with 100% confidence, they did so, yes. The historical record is so complete, there is no credible reason to believe otherwise.

Link to video.

By now it would not surprise me if many such events are faked.

The general public (myself included) rarely has a lot of info about space or our tech levels in relation to such landings. So there is mostly just "faith" used either way, which is why doubt now is more prominent.

The phrase about the one small step sounds rather fishy too. Would anyone really say that if he was the first to walk on the moon? Even in fiction you don't have the characters say so grandiose things.

Yes, it happened. The evidence against it is flimsy and mostly the result of people thiking they know something about science when they don't. The evidence for it is strong. The lack of any objection by the Soviets who certainly had a huge vested interest in proving the whole thing false is damning.

It happened.

(and in answer to Kyriakos's line above: I believe the small line step, was, in fact, scripted. What, you think NASA would send a man to the moon and NOT think about what to say once he gets there?)

^Considering the patent/rights craze in the US, one would expect in that case the writer of the phrase to have become known by now

Unless I remember my legalities wrong, there would be no patents/rights on it. The work of government agencies is, I believe, considered public domain by definition.

EDIT: that said it appear I was wrong, and it was not, in fact, scripted in advance.

Mind you, he would hardly be the first man to come up with a great quote on the spur of the moment, so that hardly proves anything.

the script might have changed after the little thing that the lander might have crashed and left Armstrong and Aldrin dead on the moon . "America the great" line was then maybe too much for Armstrong .

Oda Nobunaga said:

Unless I remember my legalities wrong, there would be no patents/rights on it. The work of government agencies is, I believe, considered public domain by definition.

EDIT: that said it appear I was wrong, and it was not, in fact, scripted in advance.

Mind you, he would hardly be the first man to come up with a great quote on the spur of the moment, so that hardly proves anything.

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Doesn't prove it, but it makes it sound all the more fictitious

If i had placed a character on an environment no one else had been at, and it was even another planet/satelite, i doubt he would be busy with making this sort of statement. Cause that would look fake even in a fictional story setting

I don't think you're having much of a grasp of human nature here, Kyriakos.

We're good at coming up with approprpiate one-liners. Not always, but very often.

^Right. Reminds me of the meme "and then a miracle happens"

I have to doubt that in such a voyage, for which endless loads of dollars were spent, and would be shown on tv/media forever, they just thought that the astronaut could say what he felt like. So i ask how come no one stepped in to take credit for the phrase he had to use. Cause iirc that astronaut never claimed he had prepared it, it was all a spur-of-the-moment, cause he apparently is too dumb to know the phrase would be known since that point and repeated as attributed to that 'landing'.

A quick google search suggests that he planned it a couple of hours ahead of time.

And I cannot believe that someone (astronauts being intelligent people who would probably understand the import of what's going on) would not think incredibly carefully about exactly what they were going to say when they landed. Are you nuts? He knew that clip would be watched by literally hundreds of millions of people live, and that they would probably replay it thousands of times afterward. If it were me, I'd probably be thinking about little else in my spare time.

Also, I find it a little sad that humans try so hard to poke holes in what is quite possibly the greatest achievement our species has ever made.

North King said:

A quick google search suggests that he planned it a couple of hours ahead of time.

And I cannot believe that someone (astronauts being intelligent people who would probably understand the import of what's going on) would not think incredibly carefully about exactly what they were going to say when they landed. Are you nuts? He knew that clip would be watched by literally hundreds of millions of people live, and that they would probably replay it thousands of times afterward. If it were me, I'd probably be thinking about little else in my spare time.

Also, I find it a little sad that humans try so hard to poke holes in what is quite possibly the greatest achievement our species has ever made.

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Uh, that he knew it would be repeated again and again was exactly my point. Accusing one he missed something, and missing something yourself, is not the best omen either, btw

And to spell it out more: the point is that he was supposedly sent there after years of research, planning, and mountains of cash spent. I think that it would be a bit too LOTR-like to be of the view he was urged or even allowed to have a special little phrase he would like to share when on the moon.

Ie i find it very unlikely it happened that way.

(goes without saying that the moon story, real or not, currently is rather not our problem. If one just looks at the collapse going on in what is more likely our own planet anyway...).

North King said:

A quick google search suggests that he planned it a couple of hours ahead of time.

And I cannot believe that someone (astronauts being intelligent people who would probably understand the import of what's going on) would not think incredibly carefully about exactly what they were going to say when they landed. Are you nuts? He knew that clip would be watched by literally hundreds of millions of people live, and that they would probably replay it thousands of times afterward. If it were me, I'd probably be thinking about little else in my spare time.

Also, I find it a little sad that humans try so hard to poke holes in what is quite possibly the greatest achievement our species has ever made.

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He could have rehearsed it better, too.

Kyriakos said:

Uh, that he knew it would be repeated again and again was exactly my point. Accusing one he missed something, and missing something yourself, is not the best omen either, btw

And to spell it out more: the point is that he was supposedly sent there after years of research, planning, and mountains of cash spent. I think that it would be a bit too LOTR-like to be of the view he was urged or even allowed to have a special little phrase he would like to share when on the moon.

Ie i find it very unlikely it happened that way.

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Perhaps your point was too opaque, or perhaps I am too dense.

That said, what are you talking about? So you think these people would have preferred their astronaut to just step onto the ground and go, "huh, it's pretty gray here. How 'bout that?" Or that he would have been so caught up in the moment that he said, "Hellooooooooooooo, Sea of Tranquility!"? So many things in history are accompanied by brilliant lines that dismissing an event that is absurdly well documented (dismissing the moon landing is pretty much on par with dismissing the Holocaust in terms of historical understanding) because "man, I just don't think anyone would say something that could go in a movie!" is ridiculous.

Other things you'd have to dismiss based on that criterion:

The test of the atom bomb ("I am become death, destroyer of worlds."),
World War One ("The lamps are going out all over Europe."),
Pretty much any person's death where there are clever last words involved,
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt ("From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us."),
Any political speech written in under two hours,
The invasion of the Soviet Union ("We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."),
and so on...

People who are aware they are in great moments can often come up with quotes on the fly. He had tons of time to prepare. Having radio silence, or having him go through routine mission checks, without stopping to note the fact that humans set foot on another world for the first time in history... I don't even...

(goes without saying that the moon story, real or not, currently is rather not our problem. If one just looks at the collapse going on in what is more likely our own planet anyway...).

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In the grand scheme of things, the Earth is nothing but a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. Speaking from the long view, there is nothing we have ever done that is more impressive than sending a guy past the confines of this blue marble. And that's not even going into the fact that this is pretty clearly one of the few achievements we can claim for science, rather than something crass like organized violence.

The moon landing wasn't fake, but the Mars landing will be.

North King said:

A quick google search suggests that he planned it a couple of hours ahead of time.

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Indeed, Armstrong had known for at least a month that he was commanding the crew that would make the first landing attempt, and Armstrong and Aldrin had been on the moon for hours before they actually began preparation for the EVA, so it's not like he had to come up with it on the spot.

Nor is it the first thing he said on the surface of the moon either. The first word spoken from the surface is probably "shutdown", which Armstrong spoke immediately after the LM settled on the moon. There was also lots of comm traffic between Armstrong, Aldrin and Houston when the EVA began, Armstrong's famous line was uttered when he first stepped off the spacecraft.

Kyriakos said:

And to spell it out more: the point is that he was supposedly sent there after years of research, planning, and mountains of cash spent. I think that it would be a bit too LOTR-like to be of the view he was urged or even allowed to have a special little phrase he would like to share when on the moon.

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The same thing is true of Apollo 8. The whole "Good Earth" reading from Genesis wasn't official, although it had been composed by some friends and associates (many of them politicians) of Frank Borman, and carried by him to the moon.

bhsup said:

The moon landing wasn't fake, but the Mars landing will be.

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Pfft, landing a LM on Mars makes no sense at all, and those spacesuits are decidedly subpar. If the moon landing was fake (it wasn't), at least they put effort into that one.

Space may be the final frontier but it's made in a Hollywood basement.

Cutlass said:

He could have rehearsed it better, too.

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For what it's worth, he did actually say "for a man." Unfortunately, his Ohio accent screwed everything up. It ended up sound like "One small step fra man" which anyone not used to the accent heard as "for man" or "fer man" in a more neutral American accent.