Family Problems

[AmeerikaUlePilvede]

My dad is a firm believer that space travel does not exist or we didn't go to the moon. He says that with the radiation the sun expels, you'll need at least seven feet of lead to keep yourself from being exposed from the violent radiation. Please, I need to have some kind of info that proves we went to the moon OTHER THAN THE VIDEO. Some scientific explanation about how its all possible or something.
It seems everything I say he always has a comeback for it. However, most of it is just smoke, but I can never call him on it.

 

[SpeedFreek]

I would suggest the excellent moon-hoax debunking website:

http://www.clavius.org

specifically:

http://www.clavius.org/envradintro.html

http://www.clavius.org/envrad.html

http://www.clavius.org/envsun.html

 

[Saiph]

Well, he's likely talking about the van allen radiation belts. And while the radiation level is high, the astronauts went through quickly...and it wasn't that bad. Many astronauts have developed cancer though.


One 'non-video' confirmation would be the long term, ongoing measurement of the moons position via laser. An observatory fires off a laser at some very special mirror panels left on the moon. By measuring the return signal, they can determine the recessional velocity of the moon (yep, it's heading away at ~2cm/year!).

Without those mirrors, or if the laser misses...you get no return beam. So this is pretty clear evidence that we've gone.

That, and the soviets haven't thrown a stink about it being faked either. You think they'd have called our bluff if it had been a hoax.

 

[Shpaget]

Without those mirrors, or if the laser misses...you get no return beam. So this is pretty clear evidence that we've gone.

Actually that means only that the mirror was sent, not that a person placed it there.

That, and the soviets haven't thrown a stink about it being faked either. You think they'd have called our bluff if it had been a hoax.

There is an alternative explanation for this as well.

Not that I'm moon hoax guy. Just pointing out that it's hard to give conclusive evidence one way or the other.

 

[Fallingstar1971]

Without actually going yourself, there is no proof that you could give that could not have been "faked"

But lets approach this logically.

What was going on in the late 60s, early 70s? (wars, Nixon, cold war,whatever)

Now, what point would there be in faking it? Just to say that "We were first?"? According to the Russians, with minor modifications, Soyuz could shoot for the moon.

What would it take to fake it? Does anyone remember the SciFi of the late sixties? Compared to today, these would be horrible. How would someone faking it do a better job than hollywoods best special effects people?

Every single piece of Evidence you give WILL be explained away. BUT, if you listen closely, you will here that no matter what you say it can be argued. For example:

The pictures returned from Apollo were just too perfect in order to have been real. With a camera with no viewfinder, how did they accomplish this?

Well, turns out you were not seeing all the film, only the shots Nasa put out for publicity. In order to compete with the "hollywood" scifi, they would have put forward their best. Now you can see ALL of the images, and by gods you can see that we were lucky to get the shots we did. There is a lot of bad exposured and wasted film on these reels.

Now if you told that to a conspiracy theorist , he would most likely say something like "OK so now we have more film, but most of this is garbage, obviously put out by Nasa, altered so that we cant tell what they are. What are they hiding?"

At that point you should stop. He is changing his mind to fit his hypothesis. First, since the film was perfect, it must be fake. Second, since I cant tell whats on the film and have NO PHOTGRAPHIC KNOWLEGE WHAT-SO-EVER, they must have been doctored, and hense faked.

The Van Allen belts were a problem, and as you have already stated, delt with. (with a price)

Pictures have been released showing the FOOTPRINTS of the astronauts making a trail across the lunar surface. But these could have been faked.

The National Archives has a transcript from Nixon that was never used in case of disaster. Why would he need this if it was all on a movie set?

The Russians were in the Cold War with us. I have not seen ANY evidence of the Russians being blackmailed by the US to keep there secret, nor the rest of the world for that matter. The Russians were not the only ones to examine these rocks.

The point is that I could type for hours. I could look up the trajectories of the Apollos, I could look up the formulas required to calculate fuel consumption, orbital dynamics, whatever. I could put this all into a report and he will just throw it back at you and say it was faked. All of it.

He, nor will most others, ever be convinced unless you load them up into a rocket, shoot it at the moon, and tell them to explain all the equipment, footprints, ect left ON the moon.

I will close with this..................

You cant win. Give up, and walk away knowing that you know the truth. Dont argue with someone who can ground you LOL

Thousands of years from now, when humanity is forgotten, there will be two examples of our ingenuity in mint condition. You could conceivably walk right up to them and they should still be functional.

I speak of the Lunar rovers of course. They will continue to remain, long after our time is done.

However, if you want to get a rise out of him......Google "faked or fact" moon landings

YOU PAY ATTENTION, its not real. Not once is the questioner and the answerer on screen at the same time. This video was faked by patching a bunch of clips together with the questions inserted between. It was a good job and the author keeps you distracted just enough so that you may fall for it. (Even Wiki has something to say about it)

HOWEVER, Ill put money down saying he falls for it, hook, line and sinker.

Play the video, smile, and walk away

Star

 

[kg]

Exploring the Moon: The Apollo Expeditions by David M Harland
I'm not sure that this book will change you're fathers mind about landing on the moon but it is an excellent read if you are interested in the subject. Some of my very first memories are of the Apollo missions. At the time there was alot of hype about astronauts blasting off, drinking Tang, planting flags, hitting golf balls and such. As to why they were going the press basically said "to collect some rocks". This book talks about how the geologists made a hypothesis about what the moon was made of and how they went about trying to prove it. It also goes into detail about several of the missions and the white knuckle dash to deploy experements and to collect as much evedence as possible. It really puts the Apollo missions into context.

 

[Saiph]

Sure, mirrors were sent....but without actually placing them by hand I doubt we'd be able to make sure they're alligned properly, and located accurately enough for this experiment.

The margin for error for landing most missions on other planets is many square miles...and look at all the problems our modern robitic probes have landing, deploying, and such...

If we had sent an automated probe to deploy those mirrors, we'd have talked about the achievement in automation and design.

 

[CalliArcale]

Another good book is Moonport. It's freely available on the Web, but is also available in paperback. It doesn't really provide any evidence of landing on the Moon -- but it does give a fascinating look at the massive human effort that went behind Apollo. Most moon hoax claims revolve around the actual landings (and then, mostly around a limited set of photographs, which the moon hoax believers misinterpret). One of the big things they overlook is the massive scale of the project. If you read "Moonport", you get a new appreciation for the true scale of the project. It would be impossible to buy the silence of everyone involved.

Truly, there isn't really a case for the missions having been faked. The evidence isn't just strong; it's overwhelming. They found data that nobody expected at the time, but which was later confirmed by other probes, even ones from other nations. They brought back tons of moon rocks, which cannot possibly be terrestrial, nor have entered as meteorites. Robotic missions have never brought back more than a tiny amount of material; if you can bring that much material, you might as well send humans along. Bottom line: if we had the capability to fake it this well, then we had the capacity to actually do it -- and actually doing it would be easier.

The simplest photographic evidence is in the videos of the lunar rover, though. Watch how the dust soars up into "rooster tails" behind the wheels. It does not billow, as dust would on Earth. It arcs on perfect ballistic trajectories. And it does so much more slowly than it would on Earth. If you do the math, it's clearly being pulled by 1/6 G. That alone proves that the only place you could possibly film a fake Apollo landing would be . . . well, the Moon. In which case, why bother faking it? ;-)

Note: some no-moonies claim that the slow rate of fall was due to the tape being slowed down. But that doesn't make sense, because nothing else in the shot is slowed down. The "Mythbusters" did a particularly extensive takedown of that myth, doing their best to try and replicate the Apollo footage by a variety of methods proposed by no-moonies. The only method that worked was to have Adam walking inside an aircraft flying parabolas to produce 1/6 G. And that's only sustainable for a brief time, so it cannot account for the Apollo footage, which has much longer uncut segments (and anyway was definitely NOT filmed inside the cramped quarters of an aircraft).

 

[MeteorWayne]

Sorry to dispute what you said, Calli, but that's so far off I had to.

The total moon rocks returned from the moon by Apollo (and Luna) is about 382 kg, or 842 pounds. Thus the term "tons" is not correct.

Wayne

 

[Saiph]

I'm pretty sure she meant in the figurative, not literal/quantitative sense.

But it's nice to know the actual number. Do you happen to know what any other missions have brought back?

 

[MeteorWayne]

Off the top of my head, the Luna Missions (Russia) brought back 0.66 kg.

 

[CalliArcale]

I'm pretty sure she meant in the figurative, not literal/quantitative sense.

But it's nice to know the actual number. Do you happen to know what any other missions have brought back?

Correct, I was using the term figuratively. I could've said "butt-load" instead, but that would've been much more rude. However, less prone to misunderstanding. I will be more careful in future.

Here is the customs form that the Apollo 11 crew had to sign on their entry back into the United States following their mission. While not including technical information such as weight (as that would be in the attached manifest, which I have not been able to find online so far), it is kind of interesting. Adds a bit of human interest to the story. If nothing else, it's kinda cool to see a customs declaration form listing the point of departure as "MOON".

For another look at the human side of the evidence, I strongly recommend The Alan Bean Gallery. Alan Bean is a painter, but he's more famous for his *other* job. He used to be an astronaut, and flew to the Moon aboard Apollo 12. (He also had a stint aboard Skylab.) The experience moved him so greatly that he felt the only way he could possibly share it with people was through his art. The website is a gallery of his work currently on display at the National Air & Space Museum. There are a few interesting tidbits about his work. Nearly all are moonscapes, and he makes sure that a little bit of the Moon gets into each one. I don't mean that metaphorically at all -- he has some stuff that he brought with him to the Moon, and he makes sure that some of it gets into each painting, usually a bit of cloth filthy with moondust. Actual bits of the actual Moon. As you might guess, the originals are quite valuable, and he's made a good living for himself since retiring from NASA.