# Fake NASA moon landing?

• NASA
I know this particular cons-theory has been done to death already, but does anyone on this forum have the means to examine the rate of fall of dust from the lunar rovers wheels as seen on NASA film footage?
If the whole thing was filmed on earth the one thing no one can fake is gravitational acceleration.
The rate of fall of the lunar dust on the film footage must coincide with being physically on the moon, and I think if you are expert enough with video you could possibly either debunk this one or debunk NASA.

Is anyone out there?

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chroot
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
The gravitational acceleration due to any mass M, at distance r, is

$a = \frac{{GM}} {{r^2 }}$

Pick up a freshman physics book.

- Warren

cheroot,
what on earth are you on about? or smoking?
Look, when those films are shown to us, in order for them to be showed in 'real-time' the astronaut who was filmed jumping up and down must fall back to the surface of the moon at moon g, not earth g (9.8m/s-2). This also applies to the dust off the rovers wheel trails. All the footage must have continuity of this basic fact. If we examine that continuity we can either prove or disprove whether they went or not.
Simply put, if you set the rate of fall of the dust from the wheels in the films according to lunar g, a fake film will run in slow motion but the real Mcoy will not.
Its not a very complex concept to understand.

russ_watters
Mentor
Fine dust on earth doesn't fall, it billows-up in a cloud. The very fact that you can see the dust arcing - regardless of an attempt to measure the arc - tells you you are looking at a vacuum.

chroot
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
I understand the concept, Ian. You asked if anyone had the means to examine ballistic trajectories in moon-landing footage, so I provided the relevant expression of the Moon's acceleration due to gravity. It's about 1.63 m/s^2.

Go for it.

- Warren

loseyourname
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
Well, I think his point is that you can fake a vacuum - or at least get very close to it. You can't fake the moon's gravitational pull. As far as I know, there is also no way to film in slow motion, only playback. So if the film is shown at full speed, and the men and dust are falling at the rate they should according to the acceleration due to gravity on the moon, the film is authentic, end of story.

loseyourname
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
chroot said:
I understand the concept, Ian. You asked if anyone had the means to examine ballistic trajectories in moon-landing footage, so I provided the relevant expression of the Moon's acceleration due to gravity. It's about 1.63 m/s^2.

Go for it.

- Warren
It's even easier than what you posted. At least in my freshman physics book, they have the quantity for the moon's gravitational acceleration. No need to even calculate.

Pengwuino
Gold Member
loseyourname said:
Well, I think his point is that you can fake a vacuum - or at least get very close to it. You can't fake the moon's gravitational pull. As far as I know, there is also no way to film in slow motion, only playback. So if the film is shown at full speed, and the men and dust are falling at the rate they should according to the acceleration due to gravity on the moon, the film is authentic, end of story.
Well you just film at 60 or 120 frames per second or something like that and when you are "releasing" the film to the public, you set it at 30fps so that the action will be going at 1/2 or 1/4 speed. That's how they do it in slow-motion scenes in movies.

Of course, i remember shots where, if this were happening, the astronauts would have had to have been doing some other things 2x or 4x as fast as normal people could to keep up the cherade.

chroot
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
For record, things fall about 1/6 as fast on the moon as they do on Earth.

- Warren

russ_watters
Mentor
loseyourname said:
Well, I think his point is that you can fake a vacuum - or at least get very close to it.
Can you really? on something as big as a sound stage? Or bigger? We have lots of video of the rovers and they traveled kilometers from their landers.

I have a lot of trouble with the slowing-the-video thing too, because of Penguino's point.

George Jones
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
Because the Apollo missions actually landed on the Moon, we know with certainty when the Hittites invaded Babylon.

Regards,
George

Phobos
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
russ_watters said:
Can you really? on something as big as a sound stage? Or bigger? We have lots of video of the rovers and they traveled kilometers from their landers.

I have a lot of trouble with the slowing-the-video thing too, because of Penguino's point.
As russ is already no doubt aware, astronomer Phil Plait touched upon this (emphasis mine)...
Bad [claim]: When the movies of the astronauts walking and driving the lunar rover are doubled in speed, they look just like they were filmed on Earth and slowed down. This is clearly how the movies were faked.

Good [debunking]: This was the first new bit I have seen from the HBs, and it's funny. To me even when sped up, the images didn't look like they were filmed in Earth's gravity. The astronauts were sidling down a slope, and they looked weird to me, not at all like they would on Earth. I will admit that if wires were used, the astronauts' gait could be simulated.

However, not the rover! If you watch the clip, you will see dust thrown up by the wheels of the rover. The dust goes up in a perfect parabolic arc and falls back down to the surface. Again, the Moon isn't the Earth! If this were filmed on the Earth, which has air, the dust would have billowed up around the wheel and floated over the surface. This clearly does not happen in the video clips; the dust goes up and right back down. It's actually a beautiful demonstration of ballistic flight in a vacuum. Had NASA faked this shot, they would have had to have a whole set (which would have been very large) with all the air removed. We don't have this technology today!

This is another case of selective vision on the part of the HBs.

George Jones
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
George Jones said:
Because the Apollo missions actually landed on the Moon, we know with certainty when the Hittites invaded Babylon.
I was referring to the reflectors left on the moon by the atronauts. Astonomers use them to meausure the round-trip time for light that goes from the Earth to the Moon to the Earth. This has allowed astronomers to meaure very accurately changes in the size of the Moon's orbit over the last 35 years.

If these reflectors were not actually left by the astronauts, the conspiracy would have to be huge, involving astronomers, professors, postdocs, grad students, technicians, etc. over the last 35 years.

These accurate measurements have allowed the position of the Moon to be retrodicted and compared to eclipse data recorded at the time of ancient Babylon, thus giving accurate information about when the Hittites invaded.

I read this in a 2001 (plus or minus a year) Sky and Telescope. If anyone's interested, I could probably find the out which exact issue the article's in.

Regards,
George

loseyourname said:
You can't fake the moon's gravitational pull
Well, bringing to mind the NASA antigravity chamber(s) and the fake gravity at MIR, this could actually be possible.

This is not a valid theory because it isn't based on facts that it can explain better than the true story.

You also have to understand that the first moon landing was broadcast live, so how are you gonna tape something at high speed at the same time that it's playing at normal speed?

Lets not forget the huge problem with all those saturn V rockets that we launched into space with all those witnesses. Were they all brainwashed or something? What about all the news channels which covered these stories through the development of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs? Remeber all that footage with Walter Cronkite? Were the saturn rockets really just tiny model rockets which the government also taped at high speed and then slowed down in order to make them look more massive?

What about all the radio chatter in between the space capsules and the ground? All those transmissions were recieved by third party obervers too. radio transmission in planes is pretty much line of sight, and I'd imagine it works that way for spacecraft too because spacecraft were evolved from planes, including thier instrumentation, so why did such a broad area of people recieve transmissions from the spacecraft if the spacecraft wasn't in space? Did the government rig huge antenna arrays around the globe to fake all these transmissions?

And also taking into account all the points brought up by the good people of pf in this thread, how can anyone believe that the moon landings were fake? The only way someone would believe that is if they just can't understand our reality (that it truely is possible to leave the planet and visit other ones), or they have a hefty proficiency of denial. Granted I'm a huge conspiracy nut; I don't arrive at my conclusions without common sense, reason, the scientific method, objective judgment, etc.

Thats funny Mattara... anti-gravity chambers...

Jonny_trigonometry said:
Thats funny Mattara... anti-gravity chambers...
That might not be the official title for it, but how do you think they train astronouts at NASA?

Also, remember the laser measurements that can be done to measure the distance from earth to the moon. There are mirrors up there placed by an apollo crew. Try to counter that one :)

Mattara said:
That might not be the official title for it, but how do you think they train astronouts at NASA?

Also, remember the laser measurements that can be done to measure the distance from earth to the moon. There are mirrors up there placed by an apollo crew. Try to counter that one :)

they train them in an airplane. They nick named it the "vomit comet". It's a modified boeing of some kind i think (707? not sure). You've noticed that if you drop a penny while going over a hump in a roller coaster that it tends to almost float right? Thats the same principle, you just fly an airplane in a much bigger "hump" and you have artificial zero gravity within the inertial frame of the plane for a period of time. If you throw a baseball up in the air, in it's inertial frame it is at zero g.

yes, as George mentioned, the mirrors are a big thing to consider. If he didn't mention them, I would've because they are very important. Along with all the other things mentioned in this thread, I hope there is enough to put this to rest. Just use your imagination, there are many more ways to show that this is not a valid conspiracy theory. arghhh!!:grumpy:

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chroot
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
There's both the vomit comet and the neutral-buoyancy lab, which is underwater.

- Warren

The people that believe we didn't land on the moon, are any of them planetary scientist?

Hundreds of people have images of the spacecraft closing in on the moon from Earth bound telescopes. We have pics of the darkside of the moon. Granted we have found rocks from Mars on Earth from exsplotions, did they think we found these samples from the moon(chemical makeup/radioactive dating) already on Earth? I still can't fathom this silly impugn.
Armstrong and Aldrin taking part in some type of fakery? After 30+ years of open evidence? The fact of the matter is, if Armstrong and Aldrin were to take off their helmets, their spit would boil in that vacuum.

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loseyourname
Staff Emeritus
Gold Member
Pengwuino said:
Well you just film at 60 or 120 frames per second or something like that and when you are "releasing" the film to the public, you set it at 30fps so that the action will be going at 1/2 or 1/4 speed. That's how they do it in slow-motion scenes in movies.

Of course, i remember shots where, if this were happening, the astronauts would have had to have been doing some other things 2x or 4x as fast as normal people could to keep up the cherade.
What I mean is you can detect that by examining the film. The only way to cover that up would be to never let anyone look at the film itself.

badastronmy article of the fox program said:
The program's conclusion was that the whole thing was faked in the Nevada desert (in Area 51, of course!). According to them, NASA did not have the technical capability of going to the Moon, but pressure due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union forced them to fake it.
:tongue2:
Out of all junk on Fox that(which 100% of Fox) that has to biggest,stupidest,untruthiness(I call 2006 word of the year!),Idoitic,crapottery(the term in used to describe fake secience and the term used to refer to durgs),consirpicay,junk.If Fox wanted it's veiwers to belive that area 51 was the place where the Apllo moon landings were flimend,them and there viewers would also asume that the Roswell new mexico UFO inccedent was real and that the ship was taken to Area 51 to be reversed engineerd.Well if it was aliens they masterd intersteller transportaion which would mean that going to the moon would be no big diffuclty for them!So the goverment could of reversed engineerd the technology and used it to go to the moon.:grumpy:Anyway if it was fake couldn't the soviet union figured it out and tell everone to make the U.S. look bad and tell everone that U.S. goverment is misleading everone including there on citzens.

Is it possble to sue fox for misleading it's "viewers"(meaning people who forgot to chage the channel after the simpsons)
Is it possible to get your cabel company to not provide you with bad channels?

Edit:I found a good article that explains some of things that badastronmy explained try to explain better
http://www.iangoddard.net/moon01.htm
The claim that these known and mapped Moon mountains that are viewed from myriad angles in Apollo photos [3] are really a fake backdrop that was accidently used in two staged studio sets on Earth is not a theory but an exercise in silliness. BadAstronomy.com explains the other example FOX presented of an alleged identical background "anomaly." [6]

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scott1 said:
:tongue2:

Edit:I found a good article that explains some of things that badastronmy explained try to explain better
http://www.iangoddard.net/moon01.htm

Hah...nice. I enjoyed reading that. My girlfriend is convinced that the moon landing was a fake, so I'm gonna show her this website later tonight.

Ian said:
cheroot,
what on earth are you on about? or smoking?
Look, when those films are shown to us, in order for them to be showed in 'real-time' the astronaut who was filmed jumping up and down must fall back to the surface of the moon at moon g, not earth g (9.8m/s-2). This also applies to the dust off the rovers wheel trails. All the footage must have continuity of this basic fact. If we examine that continuity we can either prove or disprove whether they went or not.
Simply put, if you set the rate of fall of the dust from the wheels in the films according to lunar g, a fake film will run in slow motion but the real Mcoy will not.
Its not a very complex concept to understand.
what about those laser reflectors they put on the moons surface which are still being used today to track distance?

Do you not see, they sent these up with remote devices and then left them to rest on the moon. Also the radio signals that could be traced to the moon were actually bounced off a radio transmitter that was sent up as part of the mirror package

The most convincing thing to me is of all the 100's of people who worked for NASA during the three moon landings, no ones come forward yet to uncover the sham.

EDIT: I also tend to think its actually harder to fake a moon landing and get away with it, than to actually go there. The chances of you pulling it off are remote to insignificant.

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Chronos