Borneoguy: Moon landing hoax

Ahhhh ... this infamous topic again ... have been debated among my friends for quite some times ... was NASA's landing on Moon on Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969 real? rumours had it that the USA made an entire "moon" set supposedly somewhere around the Nevada desert and film it .... How could the flag flutter when there's no wind on the moon?

Motives

Several motives have been suggested for the U.S. government to fake the moon landings - some of the recurrent elements are:

Distraction - The U.S. government benefited from a popular distraction to take attention away from the Vietnam war. Lunar activities did abruptly stop, with planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the US ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War.

Cold War Prestige - The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race with the USSR. Going to the Moon, if it was possible, would have been risky and expensive. It would have been much easier to fake the landing, thereby ensuring success.

Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars pretending to go to the moon. This could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity. In variations of this theory, the space industry is characterized as a political economy, much like the military industrial complex, creating fertile ground for its own survival.

Risk - The available technology at the time was such that there was a good chance that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted.

9 SPACE ODDITIES:

1. Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the Moon. In front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air flow over the ball. The Moon has no atmosphere and no air.

2. A camera panned upwards to catch Apollo 16's Lunar Landerlifting off the Moon. Who did the filming?

3. One NASA picture from Apollo 11 is looking up at Neil Armstrong about to take his giant step for mankind. The photographer must have been lying on the planet surface. If Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, then who took the shot?

4. The pressure inside a space suit was greater than inside a football. The astronauts should have been puffed out like the Michelin Man, but were seen freely bending their joints.

5. The Moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn't America make a signal on the moon that could be seen from earth? The PR would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with magnesium flares.

6. Text from pictures in the article said that only two men walked on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor has no camera. Who took the shot?

7. The flags shadow goes behind the rock so doesn't match the dark line in the foreground, which looks like a line cord. So the shadow to the lower right of the spaceman must be the flag. Where is his shadow? And why is the flag fluttering if there is no air or wind on the moon?

8. How can the flag be brightly lit when its side is to the light? And where, in all of these shots, are the stars?

9. The Lander weighed 17 tons yet the astronauts feet seem to have made a bigger dent in the dust. The powerful booster rocket at the base of the Lunar Lander was fired to slow descent to the moons service. Yet it has left no traces of blasting on the dust underneath. It should have created a small crater, yet the booster looks like it's never been fired.

A more subtle version of the theory is that although the Apollo missions were not faked, some of the photographs were doctored. According to this theory the U.S. government feared the humiliation that would occur if the mission failed and fake photographs were prepared on Earth "just in case." By this account, although the mission was a success, some of these fake photographs were so impressive that it was decided to release them anyway for propaganda purposes.

The first published presentation of the claims was Bill Kaysing's We Never Went to the Moon in 1974, although perhaps the best known is NASA Mooned America by Ralph Rene.