Moon landing a hoax?
2002-11-06 08:31
Washington - Moon rocks weren't enough. Neither was testimony from astronauts or even photographic evidence. So Nasa has commissioned a mini-book to show that yes, indeed, Americans did land on the Moon.
Most humans on Earth accept that US astronauts first got to the Moon aboard the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. But those who don't believe have created a sort of cottage industry of doubt, and that is what Nasa wants to combat.
"I'd been concerned for some time that there was this story that's circulating about how we never landed on the Moon and we would get, periodically, calls from people about how to respond to that, especially from teachers," said Roger Launius, Nasa's former chief historian.
Launius had long wanted to put together an educational aid for teachers and others who wanted to counter the doubters, and in September, Nasa agreed to pay aeronautics engineer James Oberg $15 000 to write a monograph gathering up materials answering the sceptics, point by point.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has dealt with the controversy for decades, without much fanfare, but Launius said the questioning intensified in 2001 after the Fox television network aired Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?
This programme gave another voice to the doubters, whose arguments are scattered broadly over the internet and have even spawned a backlash from scientists who view the doubters' contentions as simply ridiculous.
Those who doubt the Apollo moon landings maintained the United States lacked the technology to send humans to the Moon and was so desperate to appear to win the space race against the Soviet Union that it faked the moon mission on movie sets.
The doubters said the fake was done so poorly that there is ample evidence of fraud, including a picture of astronauts planting the American flag that allegedly shows the flag rippling in the wind. The skeptics contended there can be no breeze on the moon, so the picture must have been faked.
On its own webpage debunking the Apollo doubters - - Nasa agreed that there is no Earth-type breeze on the moon, and there is no atmosphere either.
Did the flag wave in the wind?
But when the astronauts struggled to plant the US flag in the lunar surface, they twisted it around a bit before it stuck, and that naturally created ripples in the flag.
The ripples would have dissipated within seconds on Earth, where the atmosphere would have stopped them. But on the Moon, the rippling went unchecked, making it look as if it were being carried by the wind.
There are other sites, including badastronomy.com , that take aim at the substance of the doubters' claims. The site's creator, astronomer Phil Plait, was blunt in his condemnation of the doubters, whom he calls conspiracy theorists.
"The craziness involves people who think that the Nasa Apollo Moon missions were faked," Plait said on the site. "There are lots of rumours spreading around about this, and rest assured they are all completely false. The claims made by these conspiracy theorists are actually all wrong, sometimes laughably so."
The controversy recently emerged from cyberspace in the person of Bart Sibrel, who has made a film questioning the Apollo Moon missions and who confronted astronaut Buzz Aldrin at a Beverly Hills hotel on September 9 and demanded that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he had in fact walked on the moon.
The 72-year-old Aldrin, the second man ever to touch the lunar surface, punched the 37-year-old Sibrel in the face. Sibrel asked that assault charges be filed, but Los Angeles County prosecutors declined. A videotape of the incident showed Sibrel following Aldrin on the street with a Bible and calling him a "thief, liar and coward", one prosecutor said.
Launius, who recently moved from Nasa headquarters to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, said he has no illusions about whether the upcoming monograph, which he describes as a short book, will change every doubter's mind.
"We know that there are groups of people out there, individuals out there, that you're never going to convince of something like this," Launius said. "That's not the audience.
"The audience are those who are basically coming to Nasa, looking for information, and obviously they'll make up their own minds, but we'll try to put the best possible information in their hands," Launius said.