I don’t know haw many ways conspiracy theorists can continue to try to show that the Apollo Moon landings were hoaxed, nor what facts people need to hear to convince them. I guess some people will just never face what is in front of them, but then that is what the conspiracy theorists say as well.
Published on Apr 14, 2013
Award winning filmmaker Bart Sibrel presents his highly acclaimed (and much hated) controversial documentary showcasing newly discovered behind-the-scenes out-takes from the first mission to the moon, proving that the crew never left earth orbit.
Never before in all of recorded aviation has a flying machine worked on its first attempt, much less the most complicated one ever imagined, landing on another heavenly body on its maiden voyage, and returning roundtrip with a crew that lived to tell, all with 1960’s technology. (More computing power is found today in a $10 watch.)
According to William Kaysing, a NASA contractor for Apollo, a classified interdepartmental memo rated the odds of a successful and survivable manned lunar landing on its first attempt at one in ten thousand. That is why the returning men of the mission looked so dejected rather than triumphant at their press conference, as they were blackmailed into lying about the alleged greatest accomplishment of mankind, to the detriment of their own souls.
Sibrel has been interviewed, and his documentary about the moon landings have been featured on, The Tonight Show, The Daily Show, Geraldo at Large, The Abrams Report,
Coast to Coast, NBC, CNN, FOX, Time Magazine, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Washington Post and USA Today.
Let’s look at the video. It opens ( for some reason) with a short history of the Titanic and the statement.
It was boasted to be “The ship that god himself could not sink.”
Well if you are going to offer a documentary trying to prove your case, you had better do the research. If you are going to get things wrong in your introduction you are not making a very good case for the rest of the show. As for the quote, the closest any advertising by White Star Lines for the Titanic is this statement:
As far as it is possible to do, these two wonderful vessels are designed to be unsinkable.
“Two” referring to the Titanic and here sister ship Gigantic. As for the “God himself…” statement, it is urban legend attributed to a deck hand speaking to a passenger, from no official or informed source if the statement was made at all.
And while it is true the Titanic “never completed its first voyage” people tend to forget her sister ship, the Gigantic completed many voyages, until she was sunk during WWI by either a mine or a torpedo. And, yes, while it is true she did sink, it is hardly a fair criticism that she did so as result of the intentional application of explosives designed for the purpose.
The documentary goes on to criticize NASA:
The same Space Program couldn’t put into orbit a telescope with a lens that focused.
Again not exactly true. The problem with the Hubble’s lens was not that it did not focus, but that an error was made in the shape of the lens. They fail to mention that the problem was repaired, while somehow drawing a parallel between launching a one-off mission like the Hubble to the series of 2 unmanned, 12 manned Gemini missions that preceded 4 manned Apollo missions, two of which orbited the moon and returned to Earth, all 18 of which were designed to test various equipment and mission aspects of the Apollo 11 mission which finally landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon.
The documentary then launches into old territory of conspiracy theory starting with the “Lethal Radiation” of the Van Allen Belts.
That question is addressed Here:
The time the astronauts would be exposed is fairly easy to calculate from basic orbital mechanics, though probably not something most students below college level could easily verify. You have perhaps heard that to escape from Earth requires a speed of about 7 miles per second, which is about 11.2 km per sec. At that speed, it would require less than an hour to pass outside the main part of the belts at around 38,000 km altitude. However it is a little more complicated than that, because as soon as the rocket motor stops burning, the spacecraft immediately begins to slow down due to the attraction of gravity. At 38,000 km altitude it would actually be moving only about 4.6 km per sec, not 11.2. If we just take the geometric average of these two, 7.2 km per sec, we will not be too far off, and get about 1.5 hours for the time to pass beyond 38,000 km.
Unfortunately calculating the average radiation dose received by an astronaut in the belts is quite intricate in practice, though not too hard in principle. One must add up the effects of all kinds of particles, of all energies. For each kind of particle (electrons and protons in this situation) you have to take account of the shielding due to the Apollo spacecraft and the astronaut space suits. Here are some approximate values for the ranges of protons and electrons in aluminum:
Range in Aluminum [cm] Energy
[MeV]electrons protons 1 0.15 ~ nil 3 0.56 ~ nil 10 1.85 0.06 30 no flux 0.37 100 no flux 3.7 For electrons, the AE8 electron data shows negligible flux (< 1 electron per square cm per sec) over E=7 MeV at any altitude. The AP8 proton compilations indicates peak fluxes outside the spacecraft up to about 20,000 protons per square cm per sec above 100 MeV in a region around 1.7 Earth radii, but because the region is narrow, passage takes only about 5 min. Nevertheless, these appear to be the principal hazard.
These numbers seem generally consistent with the ~2 rem doses I recall. If every gram of a person’s body absorbed 600,000 protons with energy 100 MeV, completely stopping them, the dose would be about 50 mSv. Assuming a typical thickness of 10 cm for a human and no shielding by the spacecraft gives a dose of something like 50 mSv in 300 sec due to protons in the most intense part of the belt.
At one point the documentary offers a montage of images juxtaposing the development of the space program with various scenes of extreme poverty and cultural tragedy around the world. While I do not disagree that possibly money is better spent on Humanity than on exploration of the Moon, this is simply an emotional appeal that really offers no evidence about the Moon landings being faked. All it does offer is more corporate/government/illuminati type conspiracy rhetoric.
They then offer a comparison between keeping the Manhattan Project secret and keeping faked moon landings secret. What they fail to recognize in this comparison is that the Manhattan Project needed only be kept secret for a few years until the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, at which point I think the secret is out. What they also fail to recognize is that while the Manhattan Project was intended to be kept secret, it did not work out that way. The Russians, while nominally allies, were informed of the work on the atomic bombs almost as soon as work began. You can read that story Here. This documentary, demonstrating once more its quality of research and accuracy of presentation makes the clear statement that “The secret did not get out.”
Next they make the claim that mission rehearsals done here on Earth could have been been re-broadcast via satellite to seem like they were coming from the Moon. And that there is no way the Russians could have been tracking the Apollo missions that went there to somehow show that they did not. Unfortunately for those ideas to work, simple and indisputable facts prove them wrong. The Apollo missions were transmitting constant telemetry back to Mission Control. A signal easily tracked, and by triangulation easily determines the position of the command module. This same triangulation eliminates the possibility of using an Earth orbiting satellite to transmit the “faked” footage. Since they make the case that Cold War motives were behind the fakery of the Moon Landings, and since it can be shown that Russia kept pretty well informed of our activities, and since Russia had every bit as much ability to track an orbital craft as the US, then it seems if they want to prove their hoax theory, the place to go is demonstrate that the Soviet Union knew the Moon Landings were a hoax. Yet that case is never made.
Next they raise the same old questions of photographs, while claiming “anomalies of light and shadow, they demonstrate a complete lack of awareness either, which I will not bother to rehash here, but offer you This Article that covers the topic instead.
Finally they get to the supposed keystone of their case for the trickery and like all conspiracy theories, if you even halfway listen to what is actually said, and shown in the video, their analysis is based on broad assumptions with no foundation.
While laying claim to having done research which proves a Moon landing hoax, this documentary repeatedly gets simple facts wrong. If you apply their own stated logic (based solely on their interpretations assumptions and ignorance of facts), “If they genuinely went to the moon why would they be faking any part. By faking being halfway to the moon, it becomes apparent that they did so because they could not even go half way.” then I submit that if they cannot get their facts half correct, then they fail to do so because they cannot get any of their facts correct an, so their story is a fraud.
I will recall you this statement from the description that accompanies the video:
Never before in all of recorded aviation has a flying machine worked on its first attempt…
And say to the producers of the “documentary” that they themselves admit that there were many flights to orbit, as well as failures in the early attempts. Apollo 11 was not the first flight. Your own case contradicts the argument you try to make. Like most conspiracy theories, this one relies wholly upon the ignorance of the audience to make its case, manipulating or outright fabricating information where none supports its version of the true story.
If all else fails, mirrors are not a naturally occurring phenomenon, especially not specifically designed mirrors which always reflect back 180 degrees, called retro-reflectors, to the source of light. We have placed those on the surface of the moon and researchers in many countries regularly use them to take measurements on the distance between the Moon and the Earth.
Since it is the documentarians who make the case here, possibly their time would be better spent recording and making public the poverty, abuse and injustice many governments enforce upon their people rather than fabricating a poorly made case for government hoaxes as the cause for those social problems. Provided they could do it honestly, with facts, it might just wake some people up to change that needs to happen.
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