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I have commented on HN before that I have been skeptical of the moon landing ever happening, but I've spent some time on apolloinrealtime.org listening and read

• newfonewhodis 3y ago
  > I have been skeptical of the moon landing ever happening I'm curious - what caused you to question it ever happening?
  • phnofive 3y ago
    Extraordinary claims, etc. Of course, there is extraordinary evidence for this one.
  • osigurdson 3y ago
    They right way to look at any conspiracy is to assess how many people would be required to pull off the fakery. In the case of the moon landing, it would have to be thousands of people, this very unlikely. A soccer or hockey game on the other hand really only requires two people: the goalie and someone paying the goalie. I’m not suggesting that hockey or soccer are rigged however, it is merely an example.
    • jimbob45 3y ago
      Isn’t Katyn hard counterproof against that strategy?
      • earthboundkid 3y ago
        You know about Katyn.
      • throw0101b 3y ago
        Reference: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
    • mrangle 3y ago
      The amount of people necessary to fool people believing something happened that didn't isn't necessarily (much) greater than the amount it would take to pull it off. For argument's sake, imagine that everyone at NASA was working to fake the landing instead of landing. With a unified purpose, it would be enough. The theater would be grand enough. The political pressure to accept would be grand enough. Any group working toward a goal is a conspiracy. NASA actually working to go to the Moon was a conspiracy. The fake Gulf of Tonkin Incident that was accepted for decades is proof that big lies are possible. Extrapolating to an "unbelievably large" amount of people that it would take to pull of the hypothetical of a Fake Moon Landing conspiracy isn't an actual argument against. It just means that you'd be willing to quote whatever number would be minimally "unbelievably large".
      • HelloMcFly 3y ago
        > With a unified purpose, it would be enough. The theater would be grand enough. The political pressure to accept would be grand enough. I suppose they could pull it off if everyone truly bought in, but I don't believe for one second that that many people committed to science and engineering would be as committed and diligent as they would need to be to keeping the lie intact at the time, and I certainly don't believe the commitment to the lie would sustain over time. This goes double given the lack of popular support for doing it. Further, I am not sure even if everyone at NASA that would have to know it was fake was working with automaton-like commitment to their task that we could fool the USSR with a fake landing given they'd have every incentive coupled with the technological means to prove it was fake.
        • mrangle 3y ago
          Arguing the personnel politics of the hypothetically fake Moon landing addresses a different argument than the one that I and the OP were addressing. Whether or not I agree with your assessment. In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe. To illustrate, do you think that US alphabet agencies haven't uncovered critical top secret and massively damaging information about the USSR / Russia since WWII? And vice versa? Perhaps uncovering such information on a constant basis? Why don't these agencies ever publicly reveal it? Virtually ever? The public's concept of government is not the same as that of leadership.
    • aidenn0 3y ago
      Boxing has long been considered the easiest sport to fix; only needs one person in on it.
  • nvusuvu 3y ago
    Not OP, but apparently in the movie Interstellar a school teacher is convinced that the moon landings were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union. I've spoken to an amateur Apollo historian/buff and I am convinced we landed on the moon in the 1960s.
    • toyg 3y ago
      The Soviet Union was actually so wealthy, in the early 1960s, to make these bankruptcy-based conspiracies look really silly. I mean, the West perceived it as a threat largely because their economic system appeared superior for a pretty long time. It wasn't until the late '70s that the Soviets really started to sputter.
      • mywittyname 3y ago
        Americans really don't appreciate the Soviet Union at the height of its power.
        • OGWhales 3y ago
          Americans themselves benefited greatly from it as our government felt it needed to do more to compete against socialism. Granted, much of that was undone/tapered off after the threat was gone, but it’s an interesting piece of history.
  • teekert 3y ago
    The insane amount of conspiracy theories surrounding the landing.
  • jimbob45 3y ago
    Not much of a stretch to believe the country responsible for MKULTRA would fund a huge and fake propaganda piece against the USSR. That said, it would have been pretty silly to waste as much money as we did in the rocket program if the goal was to fake it all along. Plus, the Soviets weren’t exactly knocking on the moon’s door.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      For anyone with Apple TV+, For All Mankind is a great series predicated on the idea that the Soviet N1 rocket was successful.
      • zgluck 3y ago
        I've ultimately become disappointed with For All Mankind. It has its moments of greatness but literally two thirds of it is anti-exploratory, anti-science angst bullshit. I guess it's a a lot cheaper to film that stuff.
        • ghaff 3y ago
          I guess I haven't seen that at all. Certainly "For All Mankind" is presumably intended ironically as it very deliberately plays up the Cold War vibe but that seems understandable given the premise of the series. Of course, we can't really know what would have happened in this scenario but I wouldn't expect a great atmosphere of cooperation between the superpowers.
  • Animats 3y ago
    Tens of thousands of people saw the launches in person. As one of the astronauts said "Where do you think we went?"
    • adolph 3y ago
      Not as a moon-landing-denier, but as someone with an interest in epistemology: claiming thousands of people witnessing launches is not indicative of a moon landing, just a launch. By staking the existence of the entirety of Apollo missions to something that is logically proof of a small part, the validity of the larger claim is diminished to someone who is not already invested the validity.
      • mrangle 3y ago
        Don't interrupt grand nationalist narratives and proofs with logic. Especially when the proofs are in the form of cowboy quips from its heroes. You won't win.
      • Animats 3y ago
        If you're able to get a 50-story stack into orbit, the rest of the trip is not that difficult.
        • adolph 3y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon This records 165 attempts including non-crewed missions of all types, like flyby of impactor. Of 165, 87 had some form of failure. 40 at launch, 32 at spacecraft and 5 partial failures. 32/(165 - 40) is .25, so about 3/4 of the time a moon mission launched, it succeeded. This indicates to me that "the rest of the trip is not that difficult" mischaracterizes the difficulty. > $x("//tr/td[7]").length 165 > $x("//*[contains(normalize-space(text()), 'failure')]").length 87 > $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Partial failure']").length 5 > $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Launch failure']").length 40 > $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Spacecraft failure']").length 32
      • deleted 3y ago
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  > Do I think it was worth it? I suspect the semi-conductor industry thinks it was worth it. And by extension (he says typing on his laptop) I think it was well worth it.
  • Animats 3y ago
    > I suspect the semi-conductor industry thinks it was worth it. That was the USAF, which at one time was the largest purchaser of semiconductors. They pushed the technology. Especially on the reliability side. The USAF was into naming and shaming vendors. They had a reliability unit which would take failed transistors apart down to the microscopic level and publish pictures of flaws in Aviation Week. Some USAF generals were rather annoyed when, in the 1980s, commercial uses and technology passed military ones and the semiconductor industry stopped catering to the USAF.[1]
    • fomine3 3y ago
      I'd like to read [1]
      • Animats 3y ago
        Oops. Sorry. Here's [1] That gives you a starting point for the military influence on the semiconductor industry, and vice versa, in the 1980s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_High_Speed_Integrated_Circuit_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_High_Speed_Integrated_Cir...
  • m348e912 3y ago
    >I suspect the semi-conductor industry thinks it was worth it. Good example, but it's interesting how the world is mostly dependent on Taiwan and not the US when it comes to semi conductors.
• toyg 3y ago
  They also did it surprisingly safely. Those vessels were tin cans, with little shielding and just about enough fuel to complete a mission; the chance of them crashing to certain death or not being able to return, every time they went, was very very real. It is half a miracle that effectively nobody ever died as part of actual moon-bound missions, even during testing the fatalities were very low - even more impressive considering it was in the context of a high-pressure arms race.
  • glaucon 3y ago
    I'd just like to add that the fact the Lunar Module was flown successfully, when there was zero experience of flying it in 1/6 normal gravity, was a remarkable achievement, even more so when first time it was done there was 20 seconds of fuel left when they landed. I know there were flying simulators which attempted to simulate 1/6G in earth gravity but I still find it an amazing feat, and a great tribute to everyone involved, particularly, those with their hands on the controls.
• aerostable_slug 3y ago
  I'm not sure where the skepticism for moon landings comes from, given the fact that the Soviets had the means (via a variety of mechanisms, from technical to HUMINT) to know if we faked it. They would have every motivation to "out" us in a UN session with Cuban-Missile-Crisis-like imagery. A conspiracy between the powers to allow numerous US moon landings and returns to be faked while the Soviet program failed is beyond belief.
  • mywittyname 3y ago
    Especially considering the USA didn't land humans on the moon just once, it did so six times over the course of three years. Twelve humans have walked on the moon. It happened so often that public got bored of it and so funding for future missions was withdrawn. Now we've largely forgotten this fact. It always astonishes me that people speak of THE moon landing, as though it only happened once. One of the greatest achievements of humanity and we undersell it. It would be like Ancient Egyptians thinking there was only one pyramid.
• multiplegeorges 3y ago
  This is the response to the belief that the moon landing was faked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYFMU7XfyzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYFMU7XfyzE
• iancmceachern 3y ago
  Also check out the YouTube video from corridor crew on this topic. It will likely further convince you.