The Moon Landing conspiracy has been around since the 1970’s but has taken off recently and even had a several movies and television shows released about this very topic. I tried to find the original source of this but could not locate one since it was in the 1970’s. most of the reason that I found for the faking of the moon landing was so we could win the space race against the then Soviet Union who was winning. This just makes you think but the facts do align with this conspiracy.
Most of the people that believe this conspiracy do have some valid points but at closer look they do not hold up to any scrutiny. These include such things as the flag did not waive, no stars visible in the pictures, and the footprints do not match the picture. These are all easily dismissed as the individuals are not on earth which changes things dramatically. For example, the flag does not waive because there is no wind due to a limited atmosphere on the moon. Furthermore, there is no stars visible due to it being daylight and to get stars to show up it would take a completely different type of photo. Lastly the footprints do not match because the astronauts wore a lunar overshoe to get added traction on the dusty moon and did not use their plain spacesuit shoes.
There are so many ways that this can be disputed that Phil Plait did an entire article in Scientific American. He even linked a webpage that he created to dispute every claim that a show that appeared on Fox made about the fake moon landing. One of the surprising things that he put in his webpage was the fact that he said that Gallup did a poll in 1999 and it said that only 6% believe that the moon landing was faked. I did try to pull the poll, but it was not available even the link. The show that he was talking about said 20%, which is pretty bad.
I did also find an Ask an Earth and Space Scientist article on ASU’s website which I thought was pretty convenient since I am taking this class at ASU and my daughter is talking to me about attending ASU for their space program. They go into detail about every one of the arguments and dispute them. Here are their answers:
- The first claim is that the flag on the moon appears to be waving. Given that there is no wind on the moon, it is argued that the flag must then have been on Earth and not on the Moon. However, the way the flag was positioned was due to how it was set up. The flag had a vertical pole, which held it upright in a similar way to flagpoles that we see here on Earth. But this pole had a second portion that went horizontally (making a 90 degree angle at the top of the pole), which was meant to hold the flag out. This portion malfunctioned and did not come out all the way. Because the material of the flag was not pulled tight, it had creases in it that made it appear to be waving.
- A second claim is that pictures from the moon do not have any stars. With no air on the moon, the sky is black and so stars should have been visible. The air in the atmosphere is made up of lots of little particles, and light will bounce off of these particles. This can make it difficult to see the stars. We experience this on Earth, where stars are more difficult to see in cities that have a lot of this light pollution. With no air on the moon, we don’t have any light pollution, and so it should be easy to see the stars.
The answer to this claim is that you can see stars on the surface of the moon. But you are unable to see them in the photos due to the settings on the camera. The sun generates a bright light on the surface of the moon, and so the camera had to be set to capture images in this very bright setting. The exposure time was set to be fast, and the aperture was set to be more closed, sort of like when you squint your eyes to see better outside on a sunny day. These settings on the camera actually cause the stars to not be recorded.
If you happen to find a very dark spot on Earth, you could test this for yourself. If you use the same camera settings, you would find that when you took a picture of the landscape, the stars would be visible to the eye, but not present on the captured image.
- A third claim is that there are shadows in the captured images that are not simply black in color. If the only source of light on the moon was the sun, the shadows would be black. This is because there would be no light scattering into those areas of shadow to light them up. However, even though there is no air to scatter light, there are other sources of light on the moon. There may be a hint of light from the Earth. But the other (and main) source of light is the moon itself. Dust on the moon can actually reflect light. As the light from the sun reflected off the astronaut suits and the lunar module, it interacted with the dust on the moon to cause the shadows to appear a color other than pure black.
In conclusion, I do not know why people believe this when you can look at the moon and see the landing site. Some people have complete distrust in the federal government, and it shows. Overall though I think it wanes and waxes on how this topic is viewed, and I don’t believe that it is an opinion held by most.
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