Did we really land on the Moon?

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You know people used to navigate thousands of miles in complete isolation for months at a time without radios or even electricity, and they were able to arrive at precise destinations using nothing but one of these:

I bet in 1969-70 most people thought we would have a colony on Mars by now. I'm not disagreeing it's a somewhat preposterous notion and more a thing of science fiction than reality.

I believe most scientists and whoever argree that the moon landings were purely political against Russia. The whole thing was a "space race". I can see it being faked if necessary to achieve that goal, since that's what the whole thing was about in the first place. If faked, I don't think everyone involved with the mission was in on it. They would have all thought they were tracking and watching footage from deep space and the moon, even if it was really taking place around Area 51 at night.


Another thing that keeps being brought up is finances when there were six moon landings from 1969 to 72. Yet just one more in the last 25 years is supposed to be beyond financial ability. I bet all those space shuttle missions cost a lot more than a single moon mission would have.

Last edited by EzraS on 02 Aug 2017, 2:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

And they continued doing so rather than it all coming to a screeching halt for half a century or more.

well i am sure you believe we did land on the moon so i will no go on with that.
all the knowledge for calculations of thrust and payload and angular momentum and the apogees and accelerations away from orbit were very well known back then.
smart science has been around for a long time.

as far as the computational capacity on board the lunar missions, it was sufficient to deal with what it had to process.
people say that mobile phones have so much more capacity, and that is true, but they need it to download complex pictures and videos and other stuff in a short amount of time, together with ads and cookies and the whole swag of baggage.

i used to program a tandy trs-80 computer in 1980 (when i was a small kid) and it was capable of very many calculations rapidly due to the fact that it was operating in a first generation language.

so the saturn V by Von Braun was a direct challenge in a way for the russians in a well chosen way (exploration and discovery) to show the might of the launch capacity for intercontinental ICBM's. (it got to 24,000 mph to escape orbit in a multi stage way). shuttles went about 17,000 mph i think.


sorry. plenty of craft have escaped orbit since then.
juno's going around jupiter, and there is cassini around saturn, new horizons around pluto.

voyager which is the farthest man made object away from earth.

then you've got the curiosity and discovery missions which sent vehicles to mars.........

i mean the list goes on.



the van allen belt is not that far extended away from earth.
it is our magnetic forcefield blown a bit backward by solar particles.

The ancients had astrolabes, and later sextants, for navigation. That is true. But those instruments are only good at telling you how far north or south you are (latitude), and are useless for longitude (east-west). The result being that they were anything but precise, and often whole fleets got shipwrecked on schoals because of the lack of precision.

East west navigation depends on knowing what time of day it is, and reliable at-sea clocks weren't invented until the late 1700's.

And actually there were maritime equivalents of the modern space program that did start, and then later did abruptly stop.

The Vikings discovered America in 1000 AD, and then the discovery was forgotten for half of a millennium. Its wasn't until John Cabot that another European set foot on North America again in the late 1490's.

Imperial China sent out huge fleets of ships to explore the world during the 14th Centurey. They sent out a series of voyages over several decades ending around 1410. First they reached southeast Asia, then another fleet reached India, and they finally established bases on the East Coast of Africa. It was China's equivalent of Europe's later age of discovery. But then the imperial Ming government just went "meh" one day, and canceled the whole thing, and the maritime space program came to a "screeching halt", and China ceased to be a maritime power.

Meanwhile, a few decades later in the 1400's on the opposite side of Eurasia Prince Henry the Navigator, ruler of Portugal realized that Portugal faced the Atlantic, and that the Atlantic could be his little kingdom's avenue to power. So he poured money into his equivalent of NASA- an academy for navigators and sea captains. His NASA type program enabled Portugual to explore the coast of Africa, and eventually to find a way to Asia via the Indian Ocean going east around the bottom tip of Africa. And Prince Henry's investment paid off by making Portugal a rich trade controlling empire. This provoked the envy of neighboring Spain making Spain's queen ripe for being persuaded to pay for Columbus's voyage to find a western short cut to east Asia (which was a failure because Columbus stumbled upon two dumb continents that blocked his way to the far east, bummer), thus sparking "a space race" between the two superpowers of that age (Spain and Portugal). That in turn sparked Europe's post Middle Ages age of discovery.

The rivalry between Spain and Portugal started off much like the US-USSR space race, but soon the exploration became self sustaining because the colonizing and exploring reaped economic rewards (spices, gold, ivory, slaves), and it was no longer just national vainglory.

The modern cold war era space race did not result in the US getting spices, gold, slaves, ivory, or even petroleum, from the Moon. So once the vain glory of national pride had been expended that lack of payoff (no booty) was the real reason that the whole thing screeched to a halt.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 02 Aug 2017, 3:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

well here is very old technology. (fictional but at least imagined at the time)
https://vimeo.com/8423361

somebody i met was selling 100 acre plots on the moon, and i was prepared to pay if the land i bought was properly fenced.
he told me there were no problems, but when i told him i had a powerful telescope trained on the plot i intended to buy, he was unable to come up with any fence building laborers to build the fence, so the deal was off.

i will not buy property that is not fully and securely fenced.

I meant a craft with people in it, instead of just a probe.

In general, all things considered,I doubt that people thought a hoax like this would have worked.

For one, the news media would have had something to say about all that. They wouldn't have taken all this lying down.

Many in the news media hated Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. They were looking for ways to discredit both of them. If there was any indication of a hoax like this back then--trust me--it would have been reported.

We had decent technology in many ways back in the 1960s--with the exception of computer technology. The moon landings were mostly a feat of engineering and knowledge of astronomy. We didn't need today's computers to navigate a space craft.

But how would the media know? Launch a rocket and then make it look like all transmissions were coming from it and then the moon. How could anyone tell the difference?

The media would know----because they had access to NASA. And to its high officials.

More extensive than you can imagine.

And then you have experts who know a real transmission from a fake transmission.

Moreover, there was no hullabaloo in those days about a "fake" Moon landing.

Moreover....there's no inkling of any sort of hoax from the astronauts, or from family, friends, associates of astronauts. If there was a hoax, it's quite possible that an associate of the astronauts, or the astronauts themselves, might want to write an expose and make lots and lots of money.

I just don't see any possibility of a hoax.

Who did the land survey?lol

As I recall, during a couple Republican Presidential primaries back, Newt Gingrich was pretty much leading the pack until he started babbling about establishing a colony on the moon that could eventually become the 51st state.

Um... the Russians go into space on a regular basis. They do it all the time. It's routine for them. What on (or off) Earth are you babbling on about?

How far away from Earth into outer space have they travled in manned spacecraft?

I mean manned missions into deep space out past the Van Allen belts etc.

Not manned missions that orbit the earth or unmanned deep space probes.