9 ms·

July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)

263 points by houseofshards 12y ago

CmonDev 12y ago
Leaps of mankind in this particular field: 1) first satellite - USSR; 2) first man in space - USSR; 3) first man-made object to impact Moon - USSR; 4) first man-made object to land Moon - USSR; ...
- vadman 12y ago
  shrug History is written by the winners, and the USSR lost the Cold War. All of these will be swept away. BTW, there are more USSR achievements: 5) First spacewalk 6) First woman in space
  - spacefight 12y ago
    Not to forget: 0) first animals in space: US fruit flies.
- kteofanidis 12y ago
  Also the Russians made most of the advances on habitable space stations. Most important achievement for the long term exploration of space IMO. I think it's a shame that many of the achievements will be lost to history for political reasons but I guess it doesn't really matter who did what. The cold war in itself was probably a good thing in that regard.
- mpyne 12y ago
  5) Best scale model imitation of the US space shuttle. 6) first failed Mars probe (and second, and third, and fourth, and fifth...) It's possible to commemorate LANDING A MAN ON THE MOON, on its anniversary, without it necessarily having to be a political dick-waving contest you know. But since you brought it up, it does make you wonder how the US so completely outleaped the USSR to the moon, given how far ahead the USSR was in space development. The USSR wasn't even second to putting a man on the moon, no one has done it since Apollo.
  - rsynnott 12y ago
    > Best scale model imitation of the US space shuttle. Scale model? It was about the same size, though internally very different (it's thought that they used the shape to save on doing some of their own re-entry validation). http://www.buran.fr/bourane-buran/img/STS-Buran-grand.jpg http://www.buran.fr/bourane-buran/img/STS-Buran-grand.jpg It's really kind of ridiculous how similar it looked versus how different it was; the big thing on the Buran stack is a rocket, not a tank, for instance, and the boosters are kerosene. > But since you brought it up, it does make you wonder how the US so completely outleaped the USSR to the moon, given how far ahead the USSR was in space development. Well, first, the USSR wasn't that far ahead, perhaps a few years. But its moon programme was inadequately funded (and not funded at all until 1963 or so), not terribly focussed (there were designs based on Proton/Zond for flybys, tested unmanned shortly before Apollo 10, based on the N1, a giant kerosene rocket, on the UR-700, an ultimately undeveloped giant Proton, and so on), and subject to political interference, both from the government, and between the design bureaus. It also wasn't pursued as the ultimate goal in the same way the US one was; at the time the USSR was also working on the Almaz (later Salyut) space stations, an automated sample return system, a greater focus on interplanetary probes (albeit without much success except for the Venus stuff) and other bits and pieces. If they'd been willing to take the risk, they could probably have had the first manned flyby; there were a number of Zond missions, using a modified Soyuz, unmanned, in the couple of years before Apollo 10. It would have been _extremely_ risky, though; most of the Zond missions were at least partial failures.
nether 12y ago
We mighty app developers are following in their legacy. God bless.
- bennettfeely 12y ago
  I hope you're kidding.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    I'm waiting for the 'Let's build a Moonbase' Kickstarter.
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      Next best thing: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaellaine/space-elevator-science-climb-to-the-sky-a-tethered https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaellaine/space-elev...
trothamel 12y ago
Perhaps of relevance to Hacker News: Four minutes before the moon landing, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing 1202 and 1201 alarms - indicating that it wasn't completing its processing loop in time. Here's the audio from the flight director and guidance loops, as they troubleshooted the problem in real time, clearing Apollo 11 to land. http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35230.0 http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35230.0
- daigoba66 12y ago
  And I thought zero-downtime web app deployments were stressful... this really puts stuff into perspective.
  - ProAm 12y ago
    It's embarrassing that web apps have has much downtime as they do given the processing power they are given.
    - davidw 12y ago
      It actually makes sense given the economics of the situation: time invested in high availability is a poorer use of resources than, say, adding features for most web sites. We can make web sites that stay up, always. It's just that it costs a lot more and / or they do less.
- thezach 12y ago
  Oddly enough Google is throwing an error on that file.... to many people downloading the file recently.
  - trothamel 12y ago
    I've rehosted it here: http://share.rothamel.us/Apollo_11_Landing.mp3 http://share.rothamel.us/Apollo_11_Landing.mp3
- ryangee 12y ago
jf 12y ago
I highly recommend the Discovery Channel mini-series "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions". This mini-series covers the entire breadth of the NASA missions, from Mercury to the International Space Station. This series is available on Netflix: www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70218722 If "When We Left Earth" sparks your interest. I suggest watching "Apollo 13" and "The Right Stuff" next. Lastly, I'm currently reading the excellent book "Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module". This book gives an insiders view of what it took to build the Lunar Module (LM). I particularly appreciate that the book covers a lot of the hard work, arguments, and drama that are often forgotten when we romanticize the past.
- houseofshards 12y ago
  "When we left Earth" - just started watching this. Great !! Thank you for recommending this, good sir.
- kyleslattery 12y ago
  Some more recommendations: the book "Apollo" by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox is really excellent as an overview of everything that it took to get to the moon, as is the HBO mini-series "From The Earth to the Moon"
- jedberg 12y ago
  You forgot "From the Earth to the Moon", which was an excellent miniseries produced by the same team that did Apollo 13.
  - jf 12y ago
    I haven't seen that yet. Thanks for the recommendation!
  - js2 12y ago
    Largely based on _A Man on the Moon_ by Andrew Chaikin. Excellent read.
- teh_klev 12y ago
  "The Right Stuff" is so repeat-watchable. I watch it two or three times a year, never gets boring. Sadly "When we left Earth" isn't available on UK Netflix :( One of my first vivid memories was watching Apollo 14 or Apollo 15 on my folks old black and white telly. I was four at the time and went to school completely obsessed with the Saturn V rocket and the idea of space travel. As I've grown older and come to appreciate the limitations of the technology of the day, I am even more in awe of the challenges the Apollo programme had to overcome to get two humans to land on the moon, and the mortal danger these individuals lived in from takeoff to landing. I wonder if we've plateaued in our ability and willpower to put humans into space and to break new barriers in space travel. I wonder if governments could ever stomach the 1960's attitude of "throwing caution to the wind" to send humans to Mars or beyond.
callmeed 12y ago
I know we marvel at the pace of technology lately but it blows my mind that humankind went from: 0. Bicycles in the early/mid 19th century (depending on your definition) 1. to motorized cars 50ish years later 2. to actually flying at the turn of the 20th century 3. to transporting humans into space and then on the moon just 66 years later I'd argue we haven't made such large, significant technology leaps in such a short span (just over 100 years) since then. Not sure we ever will (hopefully with energy).
- krisgee 12y ago
  >I'd argue we haven't made such large, significant technology leaps in such a short span In 1999 I used a card catalog at my rural library to get an encyclopedia from 1989. Just today I used my cell phone to call my friend who is quite literally halfway around the world and had a real time video chat with her. This happened in 14 years.
  - dingaling 12y ago
    > ... and had a real time video chat with her I'm not sure that's a particularly inspiring example of technology progress. In 1999 video conferencing over the Internet was already a reality, though it was very low quality. I know we tried it in work around that time. Skype launched in 2003 and basically solved that problem. So in the next 11 years the main development was in wireless networking, which was basically a refinement of military datalinks which had been in service at least since the AN/ARR-39 of 1956.
    - mootothemax 12y ago
      So in the next 11 years the main development was in wireless networking, which was basically a refinement of military datalinks which had been in service at least since the AN/ARR-39 of 1956. You might as well write the whole lot off as a glorified telegram, if that's the stance you're going to take.
      - krisgee 12y ago
tdicola 12y ago
The thing that really shocked me about the Apollo missions was how quickly they jumped from testing the hardware to actual mission to the moon. The _second_ manned launch of Apollo (and _first_ manned launch of the incredible Saturn V rocket) went straight out to the moon and orbited before returning back to Earth! The next missions did a few tests of the lunar lander in space, and the fifth manned mission was Apollo 11 which finally landed. Crazy to think of all the systems, hardware, etc. that just had a couple shakedown flights before the real deal. Incredibly impressive engineering to pull off such a feat without more problems.
- tempestn 12y ago
  There's a nice parallel there to the construction and launch of individual rockets, as described in another story on the homepage[1]. Many rockets are essentially designed to be single-use, so they can't be put through too much stress during testing. Therefore missions are essentially flown with completely new, largely untested rocket hardware. The work-around is to build two identical copies of the rocket. The first is a test unit which is tested to failure; the second is put through a very brief test to confirm that it appears to behave sufficiently similarly to the first, and then it's put into service. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060031
- blantonl 12y ago
  Even more shocking is the fact that today's cell phones have more computing power than the Apollo computers had - talk about optimizing your code! Just think of the code reviews those developers went through. And, all the work that the Apollo program brought forth with physics, electronics, etc has powered decades of innovation.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Forget cell phones, your keyboard has vastly more power than the Apollo computers.
    - kabdib 12y ago
kschua 12y ago
Good luck Mr Gorsky
espiffany 12y ago
NASA is currently "live" streaming the mission: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
- phkahler 12y ago
  >> NASA is currently "live" streaming the mission: Like an old man telling a story about the good old days. Because, you know, it was the greatest thing NASA ever did and it was 45 years ago.
pitchups 12y ago
And remarkably, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) operated at just 0.043 Mhz (43 KHz) and had just 64 Kilobytes of memory. There is more computing power in modern toasters and by comparison the smartphones we all carry around today are supercomputers! And the complete listing of the AGC can actually be downloaded as a PDF here : http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/archive/1701.pdf http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a... And for the Lunar Lander here: http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/archive/1729.pdf http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a... It is fascinating to go through it!
JVIDEL 12y ago
In a little over 60 years we went from rickety wood planes that could barely fly a few meters to walking on the surface of the moon.
- peter303 12y ago
  My grandfather lived through that era. he grew up before planes, mass cars and electrifcation. And died after the moon landing, PCs and TVs. Didnt make it to smartphones.
quarterwave 12y ago
Growing up in the early 70's (1970's, that is) I got a small book as birthday present: 'Let's go to the moon'. It was about a bunch of racoons that build a lunar rocket, and a sly fox named Reynard up to no good. Wonderfully illustrated with racoons drawing up plans, wearing goggles, and welding away. Does anyone else remember this masterpiece?
ermintrude 12y ago
I'd like to see some refutation of the claims in this film (and not by the guy - physicist as I recall - in the film who just hand-waves say "well we know they went there and it can't possibly have been a hoax"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo5w0pm24ic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo5w0pm24ic
- rquantz 12y ago
  Why bother? People who believe that one of the most documented events in human history, in which 100s of thousands of people took part, was a hoax are not going to be convinced by refutation of the supposed "evidence" they bring forth.
  - ermintrude 12y ago
    Because if you watch that film and believe Apollo went to the moon, the only conclusion is that light has different properties on the moon compared to Earth. I'd like to know what could explain, for example, their shadows lengthening significantly when they move a small distance as shown in the NASA footage better than "the astronauts were close to a large artificial light source" as they claim in the film that physics implies.
    - rquantz 12y ago
      I don't know the answer to that. But this is just another in a long line of theories about the shadows in the photos and videos from the lunar surface, all of which are based on ignorance of how photographs work and how three-dimensional space translates into two dimensional images. Every claim of the conspiracy theorists gets proven wrong and then they come up with something else. Sometimes, things they offer as proof that the landing was a fake are actually proof that they're real! They say that it was obviously a set because that hill is in the background of two photos that were supposedly taken miles apart. Well, that's because the "hill" is a mountain bigger than any mountain on Earth, and if you analyse the parallax effect on that mountain in the two images it is consistent with the distance between the two photos. The point is that googling just about any claim from the conspiracy theorists will return results debunking those claims by experts in photography or other relevant fields, and if it doesn't, that's only because the claim is something new enough that the sisyphean debunkers, who undoubtedly have better things to do with their time given that they actually know what they're talking about, haven't gotten around to it yet. You can point to some trivia or artifact of photography that you don't understand and cling to that as proof of the hoax, whereas I can point to rocks that came from the moon, or to the fact that ham radio operators were able to pick up the tv transmission from the moon by pointing their receivers at the moon, or the fact that some of the missions placed mirrors on the moon that various third parties have bounced light off of. My evidence beats your "evidence."

263 points by houseofshards 12y ago

Leaps of mankind in this particular field: 1) first satellite - USSR; 2) first man in space - USSR; 3) first man-made object to impact Moon - USSR; 4) first man-made object to land Moon - USSR; ...

vadman 12y ago
shrug History is written by the winners, and the USSR lost the Cold War. All of these will be swept away. BTW, there are more USSR achievements: 5) First spacewalk 6) First woman in space
- spacefight 12y ago
  Not to forget: 0) first animals in space: US fruit flies.
kteofanidis 12y ago
Also the Russians made most of the advances on habitable space stations. Most important achievement for the long term exploration of space IMO. I think it's a shame that many of the achievements will be lost to history for political reasons but I guess it doesn't really matter who did what. The cold war in itself was probably a good thing in that regard.
mpyne 12y ago
5) Best scale model imitation of the US space shuttle. 6) first failed Mars probe (and second, and third, and fourth, and fifth...) It's possible to commemorate LANDING A MAN ON THE MOON, on its anniversary, without it necessarily having to be a political dick-waving contest you know. But since you brought it up, it does make you wonder how the US so completely outleaped the USSR to the moon, given how far ahead the USSR was in space development. The USSR wasn't even second to putting a man on the moon, no one has done it since Apollo.
- rsynnott 12y ago
  > Best scale model imitation of the US space shuttle. Scale model? It was about the same size, though internally very different (it's thought that they used the shape to save on doing some of their own re-entry validation). http://www.buran.fr/bourane-buran/img/STS-Buran-grand.jpg http://www.buran.fr/bourane-buran/img/STS-Buran-grand.jpg It's really kind of ridiculous how similar it looked versus how different it was; the big thing on the Buran stack is a rocket, not a tank, for instance, and the boosters are kerosene. > But since you brought it up, it does make you wonder how the US so completely outleaped the USSR to the moon, given how far ahead the USSR was in space development. Well, first, the USSR wasn't that far ahead, perhaps a few years. But its moon programme was inadequately funded (and not funded at all until 1963 or so), not terribly focussed (there were designs based on Proton/Zond for flybys, tested unmanned shortly before Apollo 10, based on the N1, a giant kerosene rocket, on the UR-700, an ultimately undeveloped giant Proton, and so on), and subject to political interference, both from the government, and between the design bureaus. It also wasn't pursued as the ultimate goal in the same way the US one was; at the time the USSR was also working on the Almaz (later Salyut) space stations, an automated sample return system, a greater focus on interplanetary probes (albeit without much success except for the Venus stuff) and other bits and pieces. If they'd been willing to take the risk, they could probably have had the first manned flyby; there were a number of Zond missions, using a modified Soyuz, unmanned, in the couple of years before Apollo 10. It would have been _extremely_ risky, though; most of the Zond missions were at least partial failures.

nether 12y ago

We mighty app developers are following in their legacy. God bless.

bennettfeely 12y ago
I hope you're kidding.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  I'm waiting for the 'Let's build a Moonbase' Kickstarter.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    Next best thing: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaellaine/space-elevator-science-climb-to-the-sky-a-tethered https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaellaine/space-elev...

trothamel 12y ago

Perhaps of relevance to Hacker News: Four minutes before the moon landing, the Apollo Guidance Computer began throwing 1202 and 1201 alarms - indicating that it wasn't completing its processing loop in time. Here's the audio from the flight director and guidance loops, as they troubleshooted the problem in real time, clearing Apollo 11 to land. http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35230.0 http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35230.0

daigoba66 12y ago
And I thought zero-downtime web app deployments were stressful... this really puts stuff into perspective.
- ProAm 12y ago
  It's embarrassing that web apps have has much downtime as they do given the processing power they are given.
  - davidw 12y ago
    It actually makes sense given the economics of the situation: time invested in high availability is a poorer use of resources than, say, adding features for most web sites. We can make web sites that stay up, always. It's just that it costs a lot more and / or they do less.
thezach 12y ago
Oddly enough Google is throwing an error on that file.... to many people downloading the file recently.
- trothamel 12y ago
  I've rehosted it here: http://share.rothamel.us/Apollo_11_Landing.mp3 http://share.rothamel.us/Apollo_11_Landing.mp3
ryangee 12y ago

jf 12y ago

I highly recommend the Discovery Channel mini-series "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions". This mini-series covers the entire breadth of the NASA missions, from Mercury to the International Space Station. This series is available on Netflix: www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70218722 If "When We Left Earth" sparks your interest. I suggest watching "Apollo 13" and "The Right Stuff" next. Lastly, I'm currently reading the excellent book "Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module". This book gives an insiders view of what it took to build the Lunar Module (LM). I particularly appreciate that the book covers a lot of the hard work, arguments, and drama that are often forgotten when we romanticize the past.

houseofshards 12y ago
"When we left Earth" - just started watching this. Great !! Thank you for recommending this, good sir.
kyleslattery 12y ago
Some more recommendations: the book "Apollo" by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox is really excellent as an overview of everything that it took to get to the moon, as is the HBO mini-series "From The Earth to the Moon"
jedberg 12y ago
You forgot "From the Earth to the Moon", which was an excellent miniseries produced by the same team that did Apollo 13.
- jf 12y ago
  I haven't seen that yet. Thanks for the recommendation!
- js2 12y ago
  Largely based on _A Man on the Moon_ by Andrew Chaikin. Excellent read.
teh_klev 12y ago
"The Right Stuff" is so repeat-watchable. I watch it two or three times a year, never gets boring. Sadly "When we left Earth" isn't available on UK Netflix :( One of my first vivid memories was watching Apollo 14 or Apollo 15 on my folks old black and white telly. I was four at the time and went to school completely obsessed with the Saturn V rocket and the idea of space travel. As I've grown older and come to appreciate the limitations of the technology of the day, I am even more in awe of the challenges the Apollo programme had to overcome to get two humans to land on the moon, and the mortal danger these individuals lived in from takeoff to landing. I wonder if we've plateaued in our ability and willpower to put humans into space and to break new barriers in space travel. I wonder if governments could ever stomach the 1960's attitude of "throwing caution to the wind" to send humans to Mars or beyond.

callmeed 12y ago

I know we marvel at the pace of technology lately but it blows my mind that humankind went from: 0. Bicycles in the early/mid 19th century (depending on your definition) 1. to motorized cars 50ish years later 2. to actually flying at the turn of the 20th century 3. to transporting humans into space and then on the moon just 66 years later I'd argue we haven't made such large, significant technology leaps in such a short span (just over 100 years) since then. Not sure we ever will (hopefully with energy).

krisgee 12y ago
>I'd argue we haven't made such large, significant technology leaps in such a short span In 1999 I used a card catalog at my rural library to get an encyclopedia from 1989. Just today I used my cell phone to call my friend who is quite literally halfway around the world and had a real time video chat with her. This happened in 14 years.
- dingaling 12y ago
  > ... and had a real time video chat with her I'm not sure that's a particularly inspiring example of technology progress. In 1999 video conferencing over the Internet was already a reality, though it was very low quality. I know we tried it in work around that time. Skype launched in 2003 and basically solved that problem. So in the next 11 years the main development was in wireless networking, which was basically a refinement of military datalinks which had been in service at least since the AN/ARR-39 of 1956.
  - mootothemax 12y ago
    So in the next 11 years the main development was in wireless networking, which was basically a refinement of military datalinks which had been in service at least since the AN/ARR-39 of 1956. You might as well write the whole lot off as a glorified telegram, if that's the stance you're going to take.
    - krisgee 12y ago

tdicola 12y ago

The thing that really shocked me about the Apollo missions was how quickly they jumped from testing the hardware to actual mission to the moon. The _second_ manned launch of Apollo (and _first_ manned launch of the incredible Saturn V rocket) went straight out to the moon and orbited before returning back to Earth! The next missions did a few tests of the lunar lander in space, and the fifth manned mission was Apollo 11 which finally landed. Crazy to think of all the systems, hardware, etc. that just had a couple shakedown flights before the real deal. Incredibly impressive engineering to pull off such a feat without more problems.

tempestn 12y ago
There's a nice parallel there to the construction and launch of individual rockets, as described in another story on the homepage[1]. Many rockets are essentially designed to be single-use, so they can't be put through too much stress during testing. Therefore missions are essentially flown with completely new, largely untested rocket hardware. The work-around is to build two identical copies of the rocket. The first is a test unit which is tested to failure; the second is put through a very brief test to confirm that it appears to behave sufficiently similarly to the first, and then it's put into service. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060031
blantonl 12y ago
Even more shocking is the fact that today's cell phones have more computing power than the Apollo computers had - talk about optimizing your code! Just think of the code reviews those developers went through. And, all the work that the Apollo program brought forth with physics, electronics, etc has powered decades of innovation.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Forget cell phones, your keyboard has vastly more power than the Apollo computers.
  - kabdib 12y ago

kschua 12y ago

Good luck Mr Gorsky

espiffany 12y ago

NASA is currently "live" streaming the mission: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

phkahler 12y ago
>> NASA is currently "live" streaming the mission: Like an old man telling a story about the good old days. Because, you know, it was the greatest thing NASA ever did and it was 45 years ago.

pitchups 12y ago

And remarkably, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) operated at just 0.043 Mhz (43 KHz) and had just 64 Kilobytes of memory. There is more computing power in modern toasters and by comparison the smartphones we all carry around today are supercomputers! And the complete listing of the AGC can actually be downloaded as a PDF here : http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/archive/1701.pdf http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a... And for the Lunar Lander here: http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/archive/1729.pdf http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a... It is fascinating to go through it!

JVIDEL 12y ago

In a little over 60 years we went from rickety wood planes that could barely fly a few meters to walking on the surface of the moon.

peter303 12y ago
My grandfather lived through that era. he grew up before planes, mass cars and electrifcation. And died after the moon landing, PCs and TVs. Didnt make it to smartphones.

quarterwave 12y ago

Growing up in the early 70's (1970's, that is) I got a small book as birthday present: 'Let's go to the moon'. It was about a bunch of racoons that build a lunar rocket, and a sly fox named Reynard up to no good. Wonderfully illustrated with racoons drawing up plans, wearing goggles, and welding away. Does anyone else remember this masterpiece?

ermintrude 12y ago

I'd like to see some refutation of the claims in this film (and not by the guy - physicist as I recall - in the film who just hand-waves say "well we know they went there and it can't possibly have been a hoax"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo5w0pm24ic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo5w0pm24ic

rquantz 12y ago
Why bother? People who believe that one of the most documented events in human history, in which 100s of thousands of people took part, was a hoax are not going to be convinced by refutation of the supposed "evidence" they bring forth.
- ermintrude 12y ago
  Because if you watch that film and believe Apollo went to the moon, the only conclusion is that light has different properties on the moon compared to Earth. I'd like to know what could explain, for example, their shadows lengthening significantly when they move a small distance as shown in the NASA footage better than "the astronauts were close to a large artificial light source" as they claim in the film that physics implies.
  - rquantz 12y ago
    I don't know the answer to that. But this is just another in a long line of theories about the shadows in the photos and videos from the lunar surface, all of which are based on ignorance of how photographs work and how three-dimensional space translates into two dimensional images. Every claim of the conspiracy theorists gets proven wrong and then they come up with something else. Sometimes, things they offer as proof that the landing was a fake are actually proof that they're real! They say that it was obviously a set because that hill is in the background of two photos that were supposedly taken miles apart. Well, that's because the "hill" is a mountain bigger than any mountain on Earth, and if you analyse the parallax effect on that mountain in the two images it is consistent with the distance between the two photos. The point is that googling just about any claim from the conspiracy theorists will return results debunking those claims by experts in photography or other relevant fields, and if it doesn't, that's only because the claim is something new enough that the sisyphean debunkers, who undoubtedly have better things to do with their time given that they actually know what they're talking about, haven't gotten around to it yet. You can point to some trivia or artifact of photography that you don't understand and cling to that as proof of the hoax, whereas I can point to rocks that came from the moon, or to the fact that ham radio operators were able to pick up the tv transmission from the moon by pointing their receivers at the moon, or the fact that some of the missions placed mirrors on the moon that various third parties have bounced light off of. My evidence beats your "evidence."