The Dark Side of the Moon.

[pushall]

The question why haven't gone back to the moon is the wrong one. The question that needs to be answered is why go back to the moon? This question must be answered in such a way that a large part of the world's population will be willing to pay for it. NASA could not find a reason to go back to the moon that satisfied the U.S. Congress nor sufficent number of people in the U.S. to have popular support for more moon missions. At the time manned missions to the moon ended the left in the U.S. felt that the money could be better spent on other programs and the right thought it was a waste of money.

[Penguin]

Yup. It aint a cheap picnic.
And imho, even the money spent on the first trip was ill spent.
There are far more pressing problems on this home rock -
problems that could use that money.

9000 billion for bailout money
UN estimate for money needed to end hunger - 20 billion

Trip to moon wont even start to cover the bailout!

[waugs]

The question why haven't gone back to the moon is the wrong one. The question that needs to be answered is why go back to the moon? This question must be answered in such a way that a large part of the world's population will be willing to pay for it. NASA could not find a reason to go back to the moon that satisfied the U.S. Congress nor sufficent number of people in the U.S. to have popular support for more moon missions. At the time manned missions to the moon ended the left in the U.S. felt that the money could be better spent on other programs and the right thought it was a waste of money.

i think this is a fair argument.

[§ê¢rꆧ]

I"ve been to the mooon a few times myself. I don't see any reason to doubt the USG's been there too.

[Penguin]

I have a feeling China wont be going either, now. A tad too much disgrutlement at home, perhaps.

[StarmanSkye]

OK, my dos centavos (again, on this issue) as if ennybody needed it.

I have no prob with 'understanding' all the apparant anomolies pointed-out by the MoonHoax'ers as proof the whole set-up was contrived on a sound stage. Tho the early-program astronaut's OWN skepticism sure gives me cause to pause and reconsider my OWN beliefs here.

The photographic shadow/strange fill-in light effects in the absence of stars -- Look, as I understand it -- the initial slide-film positives were used to create contact-negatives, which THEN were very elaborately, painstakingly used in typical darkroom developing/printing techniques to create master positive large-format prints -- The photo developers had very specific intentions to create the very best, scientifically-useful, interesting and visually intriguing results, using dodge-and-burn practices to tease every nuance of information that the original specifically-engineered positive(slide)-film stock managed to capture through the miracle (sic) of silver-deposition in the case of B&W film, and sophisticated dye-transfer chemistry in the case of color film, reacting to the light which was precisely focused through a lens or series-of-lenses and shutter-plane mirrors and through a given aperature-stop opening according to a set shutter-speed. After the huge technical and financial investment in getting a custom-designed film TO the moon and using the best practices available in custom-modified Haselblad cameras (IIRC) to record and document thousands upon thousands of astronaut-directed scenes, the very last thing NASA and their photo-developers would do is drop-off the slide-film to your basic one-hour Walmart assembly-line machine-developer type service which doesn't do anything much more than establish and print/develop to a baseline average formula which is perfectly fine for family snapshots and other 'consumer' amateur photograph-taking purposes, but NOT for something like the first actual pghotographs taken ON THE MOON. You'd expect several magnitudes more care and attention-to-detail in the developing of moon-photos essentially serving as a visual record as well as providing the basis for an enormous amount of scientific and related moon-geology/minerology study. I'm sure at the time NASA never even considered telling their film devolopers to make SURE to avoid all seemingly-possible disparities and inconsistencies of light and shadow and 'missing' starlight, weird reflectance and 'impossible' fill-in effects etc. that diehard skeptics might possibly find as proof that the moon-missions were faked. IOW: The photo-print standards NASA required were of a very high order, essentially CREATING the very results now being used to question the missions. There was absolutely no reason for the photo techs to tease every last buried-in regions of excessively overexposed or underexposed film to dodge-or-burn-in the overly-thick-or-thin silver/dye depositions (as the case may be) telltales of starlight or foreground/background details, shadows and high-reflectance surface-planes, the thousand-and-one artifacts and properties of the photo-filmaking process which was state-of-the-art at the time, now greatly replaced or at least appended with modern digital-imagery technology using light-sensor diodes/emitters to store and represent data/information. Early B&W tv-broadcast technology consisted of rudimentary forms of this digital information-storage/processing using CDCs, with far less capability to readily enhance obscure details or to adjust the values of shadows and highlights, and so positive slide-film at the time was the best method available to document and then access and study the info/data collected on the moon circa late 60's, early 70s.

Because I'm 99.999... pretty-sure the moon-missions happened, I'd fully expect that all the 'missing' starlight and flagpole et al. shadows are IN the original slidefilm and contact-print negatives used to make the first generation(s) of master prints from which all successive, publicly-distributed reproductions were in-general, made from. It's just that, the film-techs weren't working with the goal of faithfully and accurately recording the rather trivial, inconsequential bits of 2-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene that MoonHoax'ers have obsessed over.

Likewise, I understand the 'other' seeming inconsistencies as having valid scientific explanations which aren't really all that complex requiring specialized or expert knowledge to *get*. I mean, I get the drift of seemingly non-parallel shadows as a function of perspective and non-flat surfaces w/o needing to write the equations -- I can SEE examples in ordinary terrestrial photographs, fer chrisakes. This line of 'evidence' is really a waste-of-time no-brainer/distraction IMO in talking about the possible fakery of ther moon-launches. Which of course, the US/NASA sure had GREAT incentive to hoax IF an actual, successful moon-landing was near-impossible or unfeasable due to level of scientific capability or budget or the great resources/time it might have taken. And I acknowledge, there's probably no way REALLY to ever be sure about such a thing that requires such extended chains of information-reporting and documenting. It isn't as if I or we can actually GO THERE and see for ourselves, eh?

And sure -- Like, no rocket noise. WHAT? Somebody is critiquing the moon-launch who lacks such elemental knowledge of physics they don't realize sound requires a medium???? Like, HellO? (cue <roll eyes>, UP X-files soundtrack, overlay Twilight-Zone visuals, fade to green ...)

I'm pretty sure the astronauts were in spacesuits and the cabin depressurized during landing (in-prep for open cabin, exit, and during relaunch too) so that recording mics wouldn't be 'hearing' rocket exhaust. But even more likely, the moon-surface astronauts were ONLY recording their in-cabin radio-transmissions between themselves and with their orbiting partner and to Houston Control via helmet-mics -- there wasn't even any mike recording ambient cabin sounds. So this whole line of query is dumb and a major waste of brain-cell activity, K?

(Challenge my understanding on this if you think diff.)

Howsumever, I too find this whole issue of doubt ITSELF to be more interesting, as a phenom of widespread public skepticism over what we are TOLD via gov. and officialdom and the captive-lackey (prostitute-press) mainstream media.

THAT says a lot about changing attitudes, perceptions and beliefs in society, questioning basic 'public' precepts and their sources, ie. 'who benefits? and Why?' -- which could be a good thang ... IF peeps had a firmer base on which to form their own informed opinions, and not just a reactionary response prone to following someone's agenda.

Y' know.
Right?
( ;


PS:
Even the highly-detailed moon-mapping sat images recently and now being made CA be doctored to show the 'evidence' of past landings, with several capsules and abandoned billion-dollar Rovers and discarded/left-behind scientific instrument packages and footprints/tire-tracks etc. IF the landings were hoaxed, I'd expect NASA to go to great lengths to keep the fraud going until AFTER other nations or ind. space programs provided compelling, damning evidence of their fakery.

BTW: Whatever happened to these high-res. images that were supposed to resolve moon-surface details down to dozens-of-meters at the very least -- which the Mon-landing True Believers not-long-ago claimed as being the final, utter vindication of their faith in the official record (which as I said I too share, with only .000000...1 (about, give or take a coupla percent) reservation, er qualification?

I'd expected by now that this issue wouldda been put to rest insofar as photos NOW could 'prove' we'd been there, done that ...
Not that photos CAN'T or DON'T *lie*. But, ya know. Another point to debate, ennyway.

I'm reasonably sure the US doesn't have a secret moonbase or several and a whole fleet of next-generation spacecraft 'n stuff they've been keeping on the QT.

While I'm open to the distinct possibility the US has advanced aircraft and can or does mimic UFOs esp. aircraft-carrier sized optical displays to WoW the earthbound mortal public, I'm equally open to the sus that UFOs are Magical and/or exra-dimensional xtra-terrestrial/cosmic phenom, whose purposes we -- and most certainly I -- can't begin to really know. Mebbe foreign (hEh! Like REAL non-documented AlIeN!!!) entities are observing and studying humans, or else prob. the far-superior-
in-intelligence-and-ethics and interest Dolphins, dogs, Whales, dung-beetle, or the incredibly vibrant, diverse, interdependant and *unique* in the Milky Way mebbe, the earth biosphere as a whole.

So, the relative Truth or Falseness of the US's Moon-landing program is not something I'm real invested in or keenly on-edge, gotta-know fer-shure -- tho of COURSE I'm curious, AND skeptical by-nature (or moreso thru experience and waking-up to the reality of para-and-deep politics, hugely & thankfully to a goodly extent on RI and the wise souls here;

Reverant and respectful Hat tip to All!

--S

What I'm listenin' to?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApAwxS2j ... t_from=QL#

[Ben D]

People, I am now retired but spent most of my life in space related satellite communication systems and remote sensing imaging facilities.
During the late 60's, I personally was involved in the relaying of Apollo voice and video links from the Oversea Telecommunications Comission satellite ground station at Moree in NSW Australia, to the Comsat Oakland ground station in California.

Australia played a a vital part in the Apollo missions through the link from the Parkes 200ft diameter radio telescope used for communications between earth and the moon when the the alignment was appropriate. It was voice, data, and video to/from Parkes that was being relayed through the Moree/Oakland satellite link to complete the end to end link, Goddard Manned Space Flight Center to the Apollo Orbiter and Lander. We also relayed data from the Canberra NASA Tidbinbilla space acquisition complex.

During the Apollo missions, on shift we monitored on speakers all voice communications between the astronauts and Goddard space flight controllers while we worked, a remarkedly fascinating and awesome experience for me at the time.

I was also assigned on two occasions to OTC's W.A. Carnarvon satellite ground station that was located adjacent to the NASA's Carnarvon Apollo tracking station complex. The NASA complex was huge with over a hundred Australian technical staff present during the Apollo program, operating and maintaining the Apollo S-band communication links, Data recording and Relay, Apollo Laser Moon Experimental research, High Power Radar Facility, etc.. The OTC facility was staffed 24/7 and served no other purpose to exist than relay Apollo voice and command, control, and telemetry data for NASA Apollo program. I also had friends who worked at the NASA Apollo complex and got to see much of the operations and equipment on my visits.

To suggest that all the money spent on the creation of the Apollo earth wide data acquisition system for support the Apollo moon landing missions, and the good money every one got paid during those years was somehow a part of a hoax is absurd, forget it!

[Joe Hillshoist]

BenD, the ladies must have thought you quite the dish.

[Ben D]

Actually Joe, I've never gotten around to see that movie, perhaps the experience of direct though humble involvement in support of the Apollo missions is sufficient enough for my memories.

Like all complicated projects, things went wrong at times and the pressure was great for a quick fix.. Fortunately NASA spared no expense and even the old country open wire inter-town telephone links were patched to provide a contingency backup for the non-redundant microwave link to Moree for the vital voice and data links. However, despite a few hitches, history shows that it all went pretty well.

Without harping on it, it astounds me that 'the moon landings were a hoax' meme has gotten so much traction. Even my daughter who was age one at that time came to me some years back when the hoax conspiracy was building up a head of steam to clear the doubts that had arisen in her mind after catching the Apollo hoax meme virus, and to be honest, I'm not sure I fully convinced her, I mean how does one compete with the persuasive influence of TV media.


If skeptics can be patient a little longer, and if all goes to plan, NASA will place the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in orbit around the moon midway through this year and it will the following instrument on board with an agenda to image some of the Apollo stuff left behind and discredit the non-believers.

LROC — The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has been designed to address the measurement requirements of landing site certification and polar illumination.[12] LROC comprises a pair of narrow-angle cameras (NAC) and a single wide-angle camera (WAC). LROC will fly several times over the historic Apollo lunar landing sites, with the camera's high resolution, the lunar rovers and Lunar Module descent stages and their respective shadows will be clearly visible. It is expected that this photography will boost public acknowledgement of the validity of the landings, and discredit the Apollo conspiracy theories.

[Nordic]

The thing that creeps me out the most about conspiracy issues like this one is how beautifully they play into any disinfo ops being currently run. It's child's play to poke ginormous holes in them (as this thread is beginning to do), so they can be pointed out to non-conspiracy folks (I like to call them "coincidence theorists") to invalidate ALL of us.

Doesn't matter if we're focused upon serious issues like 9/11 or the mind control programs or false flag ops--we're all easily and quickly tarred with the same broad brush. And it becomes knee-jerk, accepted wisdom after a very short while, too. So, before long, most of society has an uninformed negative reaction to any and all conspiracy issues.

LilyPat

Yes. Yes, and yes again.

That is why this kind of shit is out there in the first place. Because it's pure fish-bait to the morons, who then get out there and make a lot of noise and make total idiots of themselves, and then ....

They are labelled "conspiracy theorists" ...

And then anything that isn't the "official story" gets labelled a "conspiracy theory" and

Viola!

It's so easy.

[Penguin]

I"ve been to the mooon a few times myself. I don't see any reason to doubt the USG's been there too.

Are those the Millennium Hoffmans?
I think I saw those, around when the 99 turned into 00.

[Penguin]

Because I'm 99.999... pretty-sure the moon-missions happened, I'd fully expect that all the 'missing' starlight and flagpole et al. shadows are IN the original slidefilm and contact-print negatives used to make the first generation(s) of master prints from which all successive, publicly-distributed reproductions were in-general, made from. It's just that, the film-techs weren't working with the goal of faithfully and accurately recording the rather trivial, inconsequential bits of 2-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene that MoonHoax'ers have obsessed over.

(Challenge my understanding on this if you think diff.)

Howsumever, I too find this whole issue of doubt ITSELF to be more interesting, as a phenom of widespread public skepticism over what we are TOLD via gov. and officialdom and the captive-lackey (prostitute-press) mainstream media.

THAT says a lot about changing attitudes, perceptions and beliefs in society, questioning basic 'public' precepts and their sources, ie. 'who benefits? and Why?' -- which could be a good thang ... IF peeps had a firmer base on which to form their own informed opinions, and not just a reactionary response prone to following someone's agenda.

Y' know.
Right?
( ;

In just about total agreement here.

[justdrew]

did it sound something like this Ben D?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3SXLWigVzo lol

amazing story Ben and thanks for doing that work, I for one don't doubt the reality of the trips to the moon. Was this the same facility that had the higher resolution video tapes? I remember something about there being a search on to find the tapes from an Australian site that were high res than what ended up in the video archives back in the states. IIRC... also US based video archives from the moon landings were almost lost and destroyed thanks to Regan administration induced bogus forced office moves handled incompetently.

[brainpanhandler]

That is why this kind of shit is out there in the first place.

I don't know if that is why it is out there in the first place.

Because it's pure fish-bait to the morons, who then get out there and make a lot of noise and make total idiots of themselves, and then ....

They are labelled "conspiracy theorists" ...

And then anything that isn't the "official story" gets labelled a "conspiracy theory"

Maybe so, but then who gives a flying fuck about the rest of the morons that are persuaded by this gambit? They were beyond enlightening anyways if they are willing to write off all conspiracy theory in every area because some people believe the moon landings were hoaxed.

I'd like to know what poll produced these results:

In 1979, when the first suggestions began to emerge that NASA might have been up to some dirty tricks, six per cent of Americans thought the Moon landing was a hoax. In 1999, the number had risen to 11 per cent.

When they counted again recently, they discovered no fewer than 22 per cent believed that the Apollo 11 Moon landing never happened.

That's more than 60 million suspicious Americans.

Howsumever, I too find this whole issue of doubt ITSELF to be more interesting, as a phenom of widespread public skepticism over what we are TOLD via gov. and officialdom and the captive-lackey (prostitute-press) mainstream media.

THAT says a lot about changing attitudes, perceptions and beliefs in society, questioning basic 'public' precepts and their sources, ie. 'who benefits? and Why?' -- which could be a good thang ... IF peeps had a firmer base on which to form their own informed opinions, and not just a reactionary response prone to following someone's agenda.

That's a big IF, so I made it even bigger, because without that firmer base or at least the ability to recognize a firmer base (of knowledge) is necessary or possible then we're back to Nordic's morons, which quite possibly number in the tens of millions.

Many members will chafe at having huge swaths of the population labeled "morons", and I understand their objection, but then again it never does any good in the long run to ignore reality. I'm quite often all for it on a short term, temporary basis though.

Consider this:

There are almost certainly unknown truths which are stranger than any fiction ever imagined. Those unknown truths might well have never been so much as tangentially touched upon in these forums. How would such truths be received? WOO? Moron bait?

[Ben D]

LOL justdrew, not really,..and that is why that vid is funny. I'm sure all were aware of the history making situation they found themselves in and and so played their roles accordingly. But don't get me wrong, there was a lot of banter and wit, but none of it blue.

No I don't know anything about the high resolution video tapes but it is technically true that with analogue video, which is what I understood was transmitted from the moon, suffers some degradation through any relay process and therefore the best quality video would be received initially by the big dish at Parkes, or at Goldstone, etc... When it came through Moree, it was in North American NTSC 525/60 TV line standard so that determines the resolution.

Personally, I've always understood that the Apollo video cameras on the moon were NTSC TV standard and if that is the case, any story about high resolution video is bogus for obvious reasons. We are talking about the late 60s and the digital revolution was just beginning. Believe it not, the actual hardware used in space was generally never leading edge except where there was no alternative, and in experimental and research spacecraft, it was the proven technology that won out over the new, especially when it concerned manned missions.