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Post by reTrEaD on Jul 19, 2019 21:18:35 GMT -5
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind. In my opinion, Apollo (all missions but particularly Apollo 11 and 13) were the greatest peacetime adventures mankind embarked upon during the 20th century. Of course, there are somewhere between 5~20% of the current population who believe Apollo was a hoax and NASA faked the the lunar landings.  |
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Post by pyrroz on Jul 20, 2019 2:53:18 GMT -5
There are countless times that the official narration is barely relevant to the actual events, or even worse, it presents the exact opposite to the reality. So those could very well be a hoax. The alarming number here is 5-20% . That's very low.
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Post by reTrEaD on Jul 20, 2019 11:41:23 GMT -5
The alarming number here is 5-20% . That's very low. I would say alarmingly high. YMMV. |
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Post by Jaga on Jul 20, 2019 15:18:59 GMT -5
Depends on the country. While it's about ≈5% in the US, it's about 20% in the UK and 57% guess where.  Propaganda stuff. |
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Post by reTrEaD on Jul 20, 2019 15:30:15 GMT -5
Uhhh ... Greece?  |
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Post by Jaga on Jul 20, 2019 17:19:15 GMT -5
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Post by reTrEaD on Jul 20, 2019 19:03:10 GMT -5
Yeah, Jaga, I figured that was who. My Greece comment was for the benefit of pyrroz.  |
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Post by newey on Jul 21, 2019 8:20:01 GMT -5
Like all conspiracy theories, the "faked moon landing" theory reflects only intellectual laziness. At least this one is pretty harmless, unlike some others which have sparked believers to violence.
If you point out to these people that modern technology allows us to verify the landing sites independently, the conspiracy-minded will just claim a deeper conspiracy that involves unmanned missions planting things on the lunar surface. The fact that scientists to this day continue to use mirrors placed on the lunar surface to reflect lasers and thereby measure the rate of the recession of the moon's orbit from earth? "Just more of the conspiracy", they'll say.
There is an old saying, often attributed to Ben Franklin but current due to its adoption by the Hell's Angles, that "Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead". Any law enforcement investigator will tell you that successful conspiracies are rarer than hen's teeth for this very reason- and that the more people that would have to be involved for the conspiracy to be true, the less likely the scenario is.
I say "intellectual laziness" because conspiracy theorists always seem to disregard what they learned about probability in math class, and they never seem to want to apply the wisdom of William of Ockham. And, once any piece of their supposed "evidence" is debunked (e.g., "How come the photos from the Moon don't show any stars?"), the response is usually to attack the debunker as being "in on it", rather than discuss the substance of the issue.
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Post by Jaga on Jul 21, 2019 12:02:09 GMT -5
The interesting thing that in Soviet period in USSR there was no such thing as Moon landing conspiracy theory. People felt the same emotions as it was during the first human being in outer space.
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Post by thetragichero on Jul 21, 2019 13:38:05 GMT -5
maybe I'm being a bit obtuse here...
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Post by reTrEaD on Jul 21, 2019 13:58:46 GMT -5
There is an old saying, often attributed to Ben Franklin but current due to its adoption by the Hell's Angles, that "Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead". Any law enforcement investigator will tell you that successful conspiracies are rarer than hen's teeth for this very reason- and that the more people that would have to be involved for the conspiracy to be true, the less likely the scenario is. That's gold. |
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Post by pyrroz on Jul 24, 2019 9:15:24 GMT -5
this should be included in every decent western keyboard : |
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Post by pyrroz on Jul 24, 2019 9:32:39 GMT -5
The term "conspiracy theorist" is an artificial derogatory tag given "on demand" by those who support the opposite of a view that does not align 100% with the mainstream perception, in order either to disregard this view or even worse collectively the person(s) who present this view or even the "group" that those persons are supposedly members of.
So in order to support the validity of a certain perception one has to do : - create massive amounts of .. media coverage (others could call this propaganda) about the validity of this perception
- automatically tag as "conspiracy theorist" anyone who wishes to oppose this perception
- repeat
So about the Ben Franklin saying above, I think the way it works is like this : - 3 newspapers can present a false as a truth if the richer one buys the other two
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 24, 2019 9:54:30 GMT -5
The alarming number here is 5-20% . That's very low. I would say alarmingly high. YMMV. Being a career-long employee in the aerospace sector, I have been interested to see just *what* the conspiracy theorists think is the evidence that it is/was a hoax. None of the 10 or more so-called 'proofs' are true or convincing. If it was a hoax (which I do not believe) it was done with technology that no one believes existed at that time. A great example is the lunar dust that gets kicked up and falls ballistically (not swirling around in the air) - which means it was in a vacuum. Try taking cement powder and tossing it and then see that it would never fall like that in air. There was a large vacuum chamber in existence at that time, but I do not think they could make it also look convincing as lunar footage shows. Then there is the path that the dust follows, which is indicative of less than 1 g of gravity (meaning it would have been a huge vacuum chamber that was *also* accelerating down toward the earth like they do in the KC-135 'vomit comet'. I cannot buy that theory either). Then the famous flag waving thing, which claims there was air in the 'sound stage'. So if they had this huge vacuum chamber, why would they not have used it when they planted the flag, too? This dust *could* be faked on the video footage if they could use CGI, but computers could not do CGI back then .... Of course then we have more recent Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images showing the landing site and the tracks of the astronauts. There is also the reflector placed on the lunar surface that can be detected. There are the radio signals from the Moon that Russia also received. The list goes on and on. What unfortunately also gets people going are the NASA images that were created as composites. "Faked images" - sure, meant to look prettier than reality but that does not mean that they never went there. I see travel advertisement images of Newfoundland showing a Newfoundland Dog standing on the shore looking at an iceberg and a humpback whale crashing into the ocean. I doubt that actual scene ever existed - it is a composite - but no one is claiming that there is no such thing as that dog, iceberg, or the whale or that no one was ever there to see them. |
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Post by reTrEaD on Jul 24, 2019 10:27:10 GMT -5
The term "conspiracy theorist" is an artificial derogatory tag given "on demand" by those who support the opposite of a view that does not align 100% with the mainstream perception, in order either to disregard this view or even worse collectively the person(s) who present this view or even the "group" that those persons are supposedly members of. Actually it's a highly accurate term in this case. The 'theory' part is accurate because the claim the lunar landing never occurred has not been proven. The 'conspiracy' part is accurate because for the landing on the moon to be faked, there would necessarily have been a conspiracy (a group of people conspiring to defraud). And a massive (in terms of number of individuals involved) conspiracy at that. |
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Post by reTrEaD on Jul 24, 2019 10:27:31 GMT -5
Being a career-long employee in the aerospace sector, This sounds like an interesting tangent. (not to sideline the rest of your post which was very much worth reading) What sort of work did you do? |
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 24, 2019 11:34:20 GMT -5
Throughout my career I have worked as an engineer/manager on space robotics (manned and unmanned missions), remote operations techniques using semi-autonomy and artificial intelligence, imaging/instrumentation, satellite actuators, full satellite design/build/test/launch and commissioning, and on-orbit operations. I have met many astronauts, including Buzz.
... and all of that while struggling to improve my abilities to build, play, and experiment with guitars and recording guitar music!
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Post by newey on Jul 26, 2019 18:49:09 GMT -5
True. But you'll never get me to believe that Newfoundland exists . . .  |
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Post by gumbo on Jul 27, 2019 4:08:26 GMT -5
...well..
when it all happened 50 years ago, I was working on a JPL-contracted (Deep Space) tracking station in the middle of the South Australian desert...we were after the long-range Mars stuff with an 85-foot dish and not part of the Lunar Mission tracking compliment in Oz...BUT, we DID get the Armstrong audio direct through our own 'bandwidth' direct from Houston ( a few seconds before other people this side of the Globe) and it WAS certainly convincing...
I distinctly remember standing there in silent awe at what was coming through the speaker in the crew room that day, and with all the previous and subsequent evidence presented to me, I had no reason to doubt that it was all perfectly authentic.
...but, all people are different, and have the right to believe what they choose.
...some of them even think that Gibson invented the Les Paul shape..
Have a good day believing whatever floats your boat, and enjoy making music...even if you're in Newfoundland !
g-f-b
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Post by b4nj0 on Jul 27, 2019 4:19:06 GMT -5
Several years ago I went along to an Autographica event at a Heathrow Airport hotel. I queued for an hour and paid £60 to grip and grin with Beano sporting his Nomex jacket. What a gent in the purest sense of the word. What a simply lovely man. Made my day /decade etc. Rest in peace Alan. With a signed photograph safely under my arm, and a couple of snaps on my "smart" 'phone, I was almost elated with the frisson. I had a little video clip too but I deleted it in a drunken moment. I paid a little more to attend his lecture /Q&A afterwards which was also brilliant. I had just left Bruce McCandless signing photos for folk and was headed for the lecture theatre when I encountered Beano on his way too. We chatted along the corridor until some minders propelled me away at the last moment in front of the stage door. Those of us that were around at the time of the moon missions (I was twelve and well aware of the enormity of it all) were left with a lifelong wonder at the achievement. Those were indeed heady times. Everyone needs an angle I guess, but I feel genuinely sorry for BIMLACs.
There on the other side of the hall from where Beano signed my photograph was Buzz scribbling away. He wanted several hundred for his scrawl and should you be unlucky enough to rock up with a photo' already benefitting from Neil and Michael's moniker, the price spiralled up to around £700. I gave him the swerve on principle.
On the day I embarked upon my seventh decade, SWMBO bought me a Speedmaster. It all makes sense to me, rather like joining up the dots. I have a friend that lives near New Oyunz and who worked as an engineer for the *real* NASA (his words). For me it's better than great to exchange ideas with him.
After Neil died, his wife was interviewed and one thing she said was "when you look up and see a full moon, give a little wink for Neil" (my memory- not a quote) and I always do that now.
Great thread. Sorry for wittering on a bit ...
e&oe...
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Propaganda stuff.
