The Dark Side of the Moon.

[stickdog99]

i'd suggest that NASA probably doesn't feel it is required to answer the critiques of self-described conspiracy theorists.

they likely feel that the evidence they've compiled during the original missions was compelling enough.

i mean, honestly, can you imagine a NASA scientist making a case to his boss for multi-billion dollar mission whose SOLE purpose would be to prove that several other missions had actually happened?

How long would he keep his job?

How about sending a Moon orbiter for any other of a long multitude of purposes, but then simply lowering its orbit to the point where it could take photos with sufficient resolution in order to honor the single greatest technological achievement in human history? Why would that suggestion get one fired? What cost would it add to the mission?

I mean, why were the original Apollo landing sites chosen if they are so uninteresting to survey closely?

[marmot]

I know there's distortion from the earth's atmosphere that would effect the optics in a ground based telescope. But why can't an amateur astronomer turn his scope on the moon for pictures? And, what exactly would they be looking for in terms of proof for or against a moon landing. Would the tracks still be there after forty years?

[OP ED]

I know there's distortion from the earth's atmosphere that would effect the optics in a ground based telescope. But why can't an amateur astronomer turn his scope on the moon for pictures? And, what exactly would they be looking for in terms of proof for or against a moon landing. Would the tracks still be there after forty years?

the landing modules would have left stages there. actual physical equipment, plus the other stuff.

[Penguin]

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/scienceques2002/20030425.htm

Is any of the scientific equipment left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts still in use?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is yes. Scientific experiments from Apollo continue.

Although the Apollo astronauts left the Moon for the final time in 1972, they left behind an array of equipment, including the bases of the Lunar Landers, the Lunar Rovers, a variety of scientific equipment, and at least one golf ball. From Apollo 12 to Apollo 17, a scientific package called Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP) was deployed and left by each mission (Apollo 13 obviously an exception). The ALSEPs were powered by Radioisotopic Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) and had arrays of scientific experiments. By the Fall of 1977, the power from the RTGs was beginning to dwindle, and so was funding for collecting the data from the ALSEP experiments, so the ALSEPs were turned off. Although there has been some talk about trying to re-activate them, no action has been taken.

etc.

[freemason9]

I just can't look away.

[marmot]

I know there's distortion from the earth's atmosphere that would effect the optics in a ground based telescope. But why can't an amateur astronomer turn his scope on the moon for pictures? And, what exactly would they be looking for in terms of proof for or against a moon landing. Would the tracks still be there after forty years?

the landing modules would have left stages there. actual physical equipment, plus the other stuff.

I see. Then, maybe, perhaps, they should first look at the un-maned landing sites, and then compare any evidence to the 'supposed' site of the Apollo 11 landing.

[Penguin]

How about sending a Moon orbiter for any other of a long multitude of purposes, but then simply lowering its orbit to the point where it could take photos with sufficient resolution in order to honor the single greatest technological achievement in human history? Why would that suggestion get one fired? What cost would it add to the mission?

I mean, why were the original Apollo landing sites chosen if they are so uninteresting to survey closely?

Indeed...SMART-1 did that, it fell closer and closer in its falling orbit, until it was purposefully crashed to the moon. To send up a plume of moon matter. But the photos? Mm.

[marmot]

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/scienceques2002/20030425.htm

Is any of the scientific equipment left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts still in use?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is yes.

thanks, Penguin!

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

How the Did We Really-Moon Landing Hoax started:

In the mid-70s lots of USG and CIA dirty laundry was coming out and fringy entertainment woo (sorry) was hyped both as a competing distraction and to embroil and discredit some dangerous topics which would discredit institutions and horrify the masses even more than they already were.

See Seymour Hersh's book, 'The Sampson Option.'

One of these scandals involved the keyword "Apollo" but was not the space program. It was nuclear proliferation, a subject where the USG postures but really markets nukes for political purposes or turns a blind eye for allies like Israel to get what they want, all very hush-hush.

In Apollo, Pennsylvania is a small nuclear-fuel-processing plant called Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC).

This Apollo plant was targeted by the Israelis and eventually over 200 pounds of materials was missing, to over-simplify a long story.

A NUMEC file on this turned up in 1975 in the hands of an analyst with the newly formed Nuclear Regulation Commission. The hot potato got tossed around bureaucratically until (from Hersh's 'The Sampson Option' page 253)-

In October 1977, Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter's press secretary, publicly announced that "four years of continuing investigation" by the AEC, FBI, and General Accounting Office had "failed to reveal" a diversion of uranium to Israel.

October 1977. Ah, yes.
Eight months later a movie was released in June 1978, the famous OJ Simpson movie about the "moon hoax," 'Capricorn One,' a what-if portrayal of the Apollo moon landings as a national psyop.

Which it really was on a nationalist psychological level, exactly as the NASA shill played by Hal Holbrook rants while he tries to convince the three astronauts to play along with the government’s deception of the public for the Good of the Country. (A similar truth-nested-in-woo rant is in the 1976 movie, 'Network.')

The Apollo nuclear fuel plant's owner claimed the missing fuel had 'merely' seeped into the environment and local "Apollo wives" like Cynthia Virostek raised hell about environmental contamination for years.

Since the House Select Committee on Assassinations was in progress and the Zapruder film was an issue again, it was very useful to fictionalize the concept 'optical tricks to cover up government murder' and reinforce the bogus Warren Commission findings on JFK with the moon hoax movie's slogan below -

[Penguin]

That could make sense (to me at least) - possible.
Damn, Ive seen that movie as a kid, it bothered me all the time - I couldnt remember its name or anything...

[elpuma]

Astronaut-authored report says NASA needs new direction

There is limited value in returning to the Moon, according to a report co-authored by Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin



NASA's performance since the Apollo programme has been "lacklustre" and the agency needs "serious reform or significant organisational overhaul," Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin and colleagues say in a draft paper released on Monday.

The draft paper, posted to the National Space Society blog, outlines a plan to replace George W Bush's 2004 Vision for Space Exploration, which called for returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020, with a plan that focuses on sending astronauts first to new targets, such as asteroids.

A shorter version of the report will be released formally in a few days and sent to President Obama's administration for review, says Feng Hsu, the paper's primary author and an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The Apollo lunar programme of the 1960s and 70s was an "astonishing success", the report says. But it goes on to argue that "post-Apollo NASA" became a "visionless jobs-providing enterprise that achieves little or nothing" in areas such as the development of reusable or affordable launch systems.

The space shuttle, which costs about $450 million per launch and requires a lot of maintenance, is one of a number of "wasteful projects with costly or unnecessarily complex and risky designs", the report says.

The report says the agency's downturn may have been inevitable, since Apollo had been a well-funded programme designed to beat the Soviet Union in the space race. "America's space program was destined to lose direction soon after winning the space race," the authors write.
No discussion

NASA's new Constellation programme is at "high risk" for continuing this downward spiral, they argue. The programme, which is developing rockets and an Apollo-inspired crew capsule to replace the ageing space shuttle, will send astronauts to the space station as well as the Moon.

Bush's plan to return to the Moon was not vetted by space policy experts, politicians or the public through hearings and was not funded well enough to achieve its goals, they say.

Crucially, it also "lacks strategic merit", the authors write: "There is neither significant (or short-term) science value nor space exploration and operation value in revisiting an Earth-orbit destination that was explored by mankind four decades ago."

Instead, the authors say the US human exploration programme should focus first on sending astronauts to an asteroid or to L2, one of five gravitational 'sweet spots' around Earth's orbit. There, spacecraft essentially could be parked so that they could keep pace with Earth on their orbits around the Sun.
Cabinet-level office

The authors say the site, which is farther away than the Moon, could host a space-station-like outpost. It could also act as an intermediate step on the way to Mars, where human missions could initially be sent to Mars's moon Phobos before landing on the Red Planet itself.

If the US did return to the Moon, the venture should be part of larger commercial or international efforts, the authors say.

To explore those options better, the authors propose that a new cabinet-level office be developed - the US Department of Space. It would take over from NASA and expand the agency's current efforts to work with businesses on space vehicles to reach destinations in low-Earth orbit, such as the International Space Station. The department would also help spur the development of other technologies, including beaming solar energy down from space.
'Rearranging the bureaucracy'

The recommendation to make the Moon an international target is "much to be commended," says Louis Friedman of The Planetary Society, which last year made a similar call for US astronauts to aim for asteroids and Mars.

Friedman says The Planetary Society was approached to sign on to the document, but Society officials have not yet decided to do so.

"I think that it's overly critical of NASA," Friedman told New Scientist. "NASA still delivers a lot to America and to the world. They have issues to solve, but they're normal issues. They do it in the glare of a lot of publicity," he says. "I don't know that rearranging the federal bureaucracy is the solution to any problem NASA is encountering right now."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16660-astronautauthored-report-says-nasa-needs-new-direction.html

[Silverfox]

On the other hand there really are a great number of very odd, curious, and even downright bizarro facts about our still quite mysterious moon. Enough at least for Knight and Butler to have asked the not as looney as you might think question of...

Who Built the Moon?
The Possibility of Intelligent Design

San Francisco, CA (10/1/05)…The Moon is certainly the most puzzling object in our corner of the universe. The many visits made by mankind to the Moon during the 20th Century did little to answer any of the pivotal questions regarding its origin or importance. In fact, our closest neighbor in space is probably more of an enigma now than it has ever been.

In Who Built the Moon (Watkins 2005), authors Christopher Knight and Alan Butler have opened a discussion for new questions regarding the existence of the Moon. They suggest that there are more than enough anomalies about the Moon to come to the conclusion that it is not a naturally occurring body and was quite possibly engineered to sustain life on Earth.

The authors virtually tripped over the Moon while researching ancient measuring systems in their first book together, Civilization One (Watkins 2004). In this book, they recreated a way of measuring distance, mass, volume and time that flourished at least five thousand years ago. The basic unit of length, the megalithic yard, is incorporated into the vast majority of the Megalithic monuments in Britain and France. Their work in Civilization One proved to Knight and Butler that this very specific measurement of 82.966cm had been deliberately designed to fit neatly into the circumference of the Earth. They also discovered a series of mathematical ratios regarding the relationship of the Earth, Sun and Moon.

Knight and Butler then set out to discover everything they could about Earth’s Moon. The very latest scientific discoveries show that its existence has been pivotal to the development of life on Earth. The presence of the Moon stabilizes an otherwise very ‘wobbly’ Earth, keeping it upright and sitting at exactly the right angle to ensure an even warming of its surface as it glides around the Sun. What is more, the Moon is now thought to maintain plate tectonics, a crucial factor in the development of the Earth and a phenomenon that has allowed nutrients to be constantly released to the planet’s surface – another essential to life.

Despite our present knowledge of the Moon one thing we don’t really know is how it came to be there in the first place. All previous models of the Moon’s birth have now been discounted for various reasons, leaving only one suggestion – the big whack theory. This most unlikely scenario suggests that the Earth was struck, way back in its history, by a Mars sized body, which gouged from its surface the necessary material to build the Moon. The only problem is that for the theory to work at all, the Earth would have had to be struck in just the right way by an equally large body going in the opposite direction. Even those postulating the big whack theory are far from happy about a level of coincidence that defies logic.

This is all fascinating stuff but it does not address the very unlikely nature of the Moon in a physical sense. Although it is extremely large relative to the Earth, the Moon is very light in mass, in fact only 1/81st part the mass of the Earth, despite being just under 1/3rd the size. This is all the more perplexing now that it is known for certain that the Moon is made from exactly the same sort of rock as the Earth – though with very few of the heavy metals that give our world is mass. What is more, studies of the Moon since humanity has walked on its surface have given us a much better idea about its composition but this has merely added to the mystery.

The same observable facts about the Moon that made it so attractive and mysterious to our ancient ancestors still display themselves on a regular basis. The most significant of these is the Moon’s ability to exactly cover the face of the Sun at the time of total eclipse. This is possible because the Moon is ‘exactly’ 1/400th part of the size of the Sun and also that its orbit takes it to a position 1/400th of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. In so large a universe as ours outrageous coincidences are certain to happen but this is far from being the end of the story. Such are the orbital characteristics of the Moon that its movements in the sky, when seen from Earth, exactly mirror those of the Sun. As an example, when the Sun sets north of west at midsummer, the full Moon sets south of west at the same time. Although not immediately obvious, this phenomenon might be even more remarkable than the possibility of total eclipse.

The size of a planetary body such as the Moon has little or nothing to do with its orbital characteristics, which are specifically tied to its speed. Yet time and again Knight and Butler came across number parallels that simply defy logic. For example the Earth is 3.66 times larger than the Moon and takes 366 days to go around the Sun. Another peculiarity emerged when it was realized that the Moon, which orbits the Earth in 27.322 days, takes a very neat 10,000 days to complete 366 orbits.

“We discovered so many peculiar mathematical relationships that we were astounded, but we eventually pared them down to a few very specific facts,” said Knight. “It amounts to this: The Earth is 109.3 times smaller than the Sun and the Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun. This inevitably means that the Moon must be 3.66 times smaller than the Earth. Add to this the fact that the Moon orbits at a distance exactly 1/400th that between the Earth and the Sun and what you are left with is so unlikely that it cannot be accounted for by simple chance.”

When all their evidence was in place, Knight and Butler were faced with one, massive, but inevitable conclusion. The Moon is an artificially created object, deliberately placed into the Earth/Sun system to serve the very functions it has managed so well for more than 4 billion years.

The problem that remains is trying to ascertain who the engineer might be. The immediate response of the religiously inclined would be to suggest that this is definitive proof of the existence of God. Meanwhile, those of a science fiction bent might be looking for beings that created and added the Moon in order to create a life-bearing planet.

The claims sound far-fetched but that doesn’t worry Knight and Butler. According to author Christopher Knight, “Much of our evidence concerns relationships shared by the Moon, Earth and Sun that simply cannot exist by chance. We believe that most readers will remain open-minded. It’s time to put past prejudices aside and take a long and deliberate look at one of the most mysterious bodies in space.”

[Luposapien]

Ah, what the hell. Let's just Blow the damn thing up.

[marmot]

Obama backs Moon return in NASA budget

[orz]

=
How about sending a Moon orbiter for any other of a long multitude of purposes, but then simply lowering its orbit to the point where it could take photos with sufficient resolution in order to honor the single greatest technological achievement in human history? Why would that suggestion get one fired? What cost would it add to the mission?

How about keeping ON AND ON asking confused and euphemistic rhetorical questions which will never be answered because nobody in the real world needs 'proof' that the moon landings happened and there is zero financial, moral, political, popular or scientific incentive for NASA or anyone else to provide it?

Also seriously give me just one factual reason that moon hoax enthusiasts would be unable to simply claim these new photos were faked too. This is not an attack, I'm not saying you personally would do so or anything like that, I'm simply asking why this new 'evidence' would have any more weight than all the rest for people who already believe the landings were fake?