Moon...Conspiracy REFUTED - warning very long post
I know that someone else posted this link, but with so many idiots out there prepared to believe anything, it can do no harm to post it again.
And I'll even copy a few of the facts, I'm sure the author of the site won't mind.
====== Bad: The first bit of actual evidence brought up is the lack of stars in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon. Without air, the sky is black, so where are the stars?
Good: The stars are there! They're just too faint to be seen.
This is usually the first thing HBs talk about when discussing the Hoax. That amazes me, as it's the silliest assertion they make. However, it appeals to our common sense: when the sky is black here on Earth, we see stars. Therefore we should see them from the Moon as well.
I'll say this here now, and return to it many times: the Moon is not the Earth. Conditions there are weird, and our common sense is likely to fail us.
The Moon's surface is airless. On Earth, our thick atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading it out over the whole sky. That's why the sky is bright during the day. Without sunlight, the air is dark at night, allowing us to see stars.
On the Moon, the lack of air means that the sky is dark. Even when the Sun is high off the horizon during full day, the sky near it will be black. If you were standing on the Moon, you would indeed see stars, even during the day.
So why aren't they in the Apollo pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow space traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day.
So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars!
It's that simple. Remember, this the usually the first and strongest argument the HBs use, and it was that easy to show wrong. Their arguments get worse from here. ===== Bad: In the pictures taken of the lunar lander by the astronauts, the TV show continues, there is no blast crater. A rocket capable of landing on the Moon should have burned out a huge crater on the surface, yet there is nothing there.
Good: When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour? Of course not. They slow down first, easing off the accelerator. The astronauts did the same thing. Sure, the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had a throttle. They fired the rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough to land on the Moon, but they didn't need to thrust that hard as they approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about 3000 pounds of thrust.
Now here comes a little bit of math: the engine nozzle was about 54 inches across (from the Encyclopaedia Astronautica), which means it had an area of 2300 square inches. That in turn means that the thrust generated a pressure of only about 1.5 pounds per square inch! That's not a lot of pressure. Moreover, in a vacuum, the exhaust from a rocket spreads out very rapidly. On Earth, the air in our atmosphere constrains the thrust of a rocket into a narrow column, which is why you get long flames and columns of smoke from the back of a rocket. In a vacuum, no air means the exhaust spreads out even more, lowering the pressure. That's why there's no blast crater! Three thousand pounds of thrust sounds like a lot, but it was so spread out it was actually rather gentle.
[Note added December 6, 2001: Originally in this section I said that the engines also cut off early, before the moment of touchdown, to prevent dust from getting blown around and disturbing the astronauts' view of the surface. This was an incorrect assertion; it was known that dust would blow around before the missions were launched, and steps were taken to make sure the astronauts knew their height above the surface. Anyway, the incorrect section has been removed.] ====== Bad: The next argument presented on the show deals with the lunar dust. As the lander descended, we clearly see dust getting blown away by the rocket. The exhaust should have blown all the dust away, yet we can clearly see the astronauts' footprints in the dust mere meters from the lander. Obviously, when NASA faked this they messed it up.
Good: Once again, the weird alien environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine taking a bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids: ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a deep breath, and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof! Flour goes everywhere. Why? Because the momentum of your breath goes into the flour, which makes it move. But note that the flour goes up, and sideways, and aloft into the air. If you blow hard enough, you might see little curlicues of air lifting the flour farther than your breath alone could have, and doing so to dust well outside of where your breath actually blew.
That's the heart of this problem. We are used to air helping us blow things around. The air itself is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust, or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was. Ironically, the dust around the landing site was probably a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown out would have piled up there.
I can't resist: another Hoax Believer argument bites the dust. ===== Bad: The program has two segments dealing with what they call ``identical backgrounds''. In one, they show the lunar lander with a mountain in the background. They then show another picture of the same mountain, but no lander in the foreground at all. The astronauts could not have taken either picture before landing, of course, and after it lifts off the lander leaves the bottom section behind. Therefore, there would have been something in the second image no matter what, and the foreground could not be empty. Obviously, the mountain background is a fake set, and was reused by NASA for another shot.
Good: Actually, the pictures are real, of course. As always, repeat after me: the Moon is not the Earth. On the Earth, distant objects are obscured a bit by haze in the air, and we use that to mentally gauge distances. However, with no air, an object can be very far away on the Moon and still be crisp and sharp to the eye. You can't tell if a boulder is a meter across and 100 meters away, or 100 meters across and 10 kilometers away!
That's what's going on here. The lander is close to the astronaut in the first picture, perhaps a 20 or 30 meters away. The mountain is kilometers away. For the second picture, the astronaut merely moved a few hundred meters to the side. The lander was then out of the picture, but the mountain hardly moved at all! If you look at the scene carefully, you'll see that all the rocks and craters in the foreground changes between the two pictures, just as you'd expect if the astronaut had moved to the side a ways between the two shots. It's not fraud, it's parallax! ==== Bad: The program claims that when the top half of the lander took off from the Moon to bring the astronauts back into orbit, there was no flame from the rocket. Obviously, every rocket has a visible flame, so the takeoff was faked.
Good: There is actually a simple reason why you cannot see the flame from the lander when it took off. The fuels they used produced no visible flame! The lander used a mix of hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide (an oxidizer). These two chemicals ignite upon contact and produce a product that is transparent. That's why you cannot see the flame. We expect to see a flame because of the usual drama of liftoff from the Earth; the flame and smoke we see from the Shuttle, for example, is because the solid rocket boosters do actually produce them, while the lunar lander did not. Here is a brief webpage describing this. Note too that fuels like this are still used today, and indeed rockets in space produce little or no visible flame. ==== Bad: When the astronauts are assembling the American flag, the flag waves. Kaysing says this must have been from an errant breeze on the set. A flag wouldn't wave in a vacuum.
Good: Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.
New stuff added March 1, 2001: Many HBs show a picture of an astronaut standing to one side of the flag, which still has a ripple in it (for example, see this famous image). The astronaut is not touching the flag, so how can it wave?
The answer is, it isn't waving. It looks like that because of the way the flag was deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal rod which telescopes out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they couldn't get the rod to extend completely, so the flag didn't get stretched fully. It has a ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed. In later flights, the astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose because they liked the way it looked. In other words, the flag looks like it is waving because the astronauts wanted it to look that way. Ironically, they did their job too well. It appears to have fooled a lot of people into thinking it waved.
