WI: Moon Landing was a hoax?

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Capricorn One, June 2, 1978

The company made a little too much money on the life support system. They successfully put faking a Mars landing into play. Even a key U.S. Congressman is involved.

Basically, you just fake the last mile. A real launch, a real lunar orbiting module with live astronauts, simply a unmanned lunar landing with prepared audio and video tape. And yes, you fully plan to “make up” for this with future live landings.
This is a really popular idea for some reason that comes up often at this point but when you pause and think about it for a second it should quickly become obvious that this requires a bizarre scenario.

At the point where you have designed a fully functional moon rocket and a fully functional moon lander that is only lacking the human payload capability, it would already be much much much cheaper to just put an astronaut into the equation than to spend the R&D effort you would need to automate all this stuff with 60s tech for no good reason whatsoever.

Not to mention that with 60s tech, you do not reduce the danger of mission failure by removing a human pilot, you are severely increasing it. What good is that perfectly planned hoax going to be when you have to risk it all on that automated lander working perfectly and otherwise need to fake a mission failure in the ultimate exercise of pointlessness? You could just as well have risked everything on a manned lander which eschews the cutting-edge but idiotic moon-landing faking robot for an astronaut or two.

There is simply no point in the development process of the hardware where this decision could plausibly occur.

The only scenario I can imagine off-hand is a conspiracy in which Earth is under quarantine by an alien blockade (every human who tries to leave Early orbit will get shot down but probes won't, for reasons) and the US government knows.
 
This is a really popular idea for some reason that comes up often at this point . . .
You bring up excellent points and I fully acknowledge that faking the last mile has real logical difficulties.

However, as far as why it might appeal to us as drama, I think it’s because we’re familiar with it. As an example, take something as common as seeing the doctor. Say you have three questions important to you, and even after the second question the doctor makes it clear that his or her patience is running thin. And the doctor basically half-asses it and gives you a pat answer to your third question. That is, the doctor has for all intents and purposes faked the last mile.
 
You bring up excellent points and I fully acknowledge that faking the last mile has real logical difficulties.
Understatement of the decade.
So far, in over 45 years, nobody has been able to provide a comprehensive and sensible explanation for all the evidence, other than men landed on the Moon.

There is in fact no such thing as a Apollo Hoax Conspiracy Theory.
An actual theory has to explain all the relevant data.
All that Hoax Believers have is the notion that somehow all that evidence was faked.
 
You bring up excellent points and I fully acknowledge that faking the last mile has real logical difficulties.

The entire notion of faking the Apollo moon landings is a collection of logical difficulties, shading towards impossibility and absurdity. There is no credible way to fake the landings barring ASB intervention.
 
What about a much earlier hoax - ie before TV is common place enough for a live public broadcast and with a much smaller launch vehicle that doesn't do anything it claims.

I'm imaging a scenario where the space race starts earlier with an even better Soviet start and even worse US start so political pressure forces the fake to keep up appearances.

The Soviets presumably still realise its a fake so tell everyone, the US government loses a ton of credibility (would it count as a high crime or misdemeanour?). Hard to see the US getting desperate enough to try it. Could the Soviets have tried a fake?
 
The chance of keeping a secret drops significantly for each person that knows.
Many, many, many people would have to be in on this conspiracy.
 

Md139115

Banned
Here’s one possibility*: what if the actual moon landing was tried, but for some reason, it failed (say the Eagle landed too hard and was destroyed), and the government decides to air backup footage instead rather than admit that the first men to touch the moon are now a bunch of frozen corpses? They could even air said footage from the orbiting command module for realistic transmission. All the government would have to silence would be a few people in Mission Control, Michael Collins, and whatever actors they had playing Armstrong and Aldrin. They could even work out the kinks by Apollo 12 so that that one actually lands and cleans up the site of the fiasco.


* I do not believe in this for a second, if anything, because the speech Safire wrote in the event this happened was too beautiful to not be used rather than a bait and switch.
 
It would not work in several ways

Special Effects the end of 1960s the "analog" Technology was not ready to simulate Lunar gravity right, while CGI was science experiment at CalTec and MIT.
Take the Master of all Sci-Fi-fi movie 2001: a Space Odyssey from 1968

and actual Apollo mission


Let me say it like that, If NASA try to make Moon Hoax, to get it right, they went filming on location...
 
Any country with a half decent telescope could verify the landings. The whole "hoax" idea is the brainspasm of people who do not have a clue on how basic science work and who also believe the US and NASA are all that exists in the world...
 
I could scarcely believe that seemingly intelligent people on some other board believed the hoax claim. It's virtually inconceivable that Soviet intelligence, which penetrated the manhatten project, wouldn't have detected and exposed a moon landing hoax. In addition, I pointed to the Soviet Luna 15 mission, intended to "equal" the US achievement, to some extent. It failed but the Soviets obviously considered the US effort real or they wouldn't have tried it, or timed it to coincide with Apollo 11.
 
Essentially ASB, especially given ot was being monitored by dozens of nations, many of which would have EVERY incentive to expose a fraud, over 100,000 NASA employees all not saying a single word, and that the technology to fake the footage from the moon DIDN'T EXIST YET.

It was, per 1969 tech, impossible to fake.
 
Any country with a half decent telescope could verify the landings. The whole "hoax" idea is the brainspasm of people who do not have a clue on how basic science work and who also believe the US and NASA are all that exists in the world...

Ahem...
just send A Lunar orbiter with High Resolution Camera and take picture
311f7436133267e828229fa96b656c6e.jpg
 
Any country with a half decent telescope could verify the landings.
Only if you get your telescope close to the Moon.
There is no ground-based or orbiting telescope big enough, by a whole order of magnitude, to image the Apollo artifacts.

There's of course plenty of other 3th-party evidence though.

Ahem...
just send A Lunar orbiter with High Resolution Camera and take picture
311f7436133267e828229fa96b656c6e.jpg

There's been a notable decline in hoax believe since the LRO images were published.
Most conspiracists moved on to CTs that allow for hating the EvilGubmint™ that don't require actual knowledge about the real world.
The real dimwits and trolls moved on to flat-earth-ism.
 

Vuu

Banned
Let's say maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's all a half-truth - maybe it happened earlier or later. Either way, you get little use with endless speculation. The definitive truth will be discovered along with other, more important things.
 
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