Who Parked The Moon?

[Spook]

Don't mind me, however. I'm merely an anonymous handle on an obscure forum, sitting in my chair in a comfortably ventilated room, ruminating on readily available information gleaned from a global repository created by a govt agency. Physics tells me there's a chance everything outside my window, along with me and my chair, are all part of an elaborate simulation or hologram. Clearly, my typed words should be taken with a grain of salt.

I'll pay that!.

[coffin_dodger]

Hey Ben - in that post from 2009 that you referred to above - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22930&p=248929&hilit=worked+on+Apollo#p248929 - you followed it up a couple of posts later with this:

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.

Have you a link to the outcome of this (back in 2009) - and did it prove the naysayers wrong?

[RocketMan]

Whew, thanks for linking to that 10-year old thread. Passions ran high! One of my friends who's a space/aeronautics reporter for a magazine well and truly had a total meltdown at me when the subject came up and I said something vague about it as a joke... It triggers people I guess. I don't see why people should get so angry just because someone's open to the possiblity.

BenDhyan, what an interesting life you've led! Thank you for sharing your story, I hadn't come across it before.

[stickdog99]

I think what makes it so easy to believe there is something amiss with the "Men walked on the Moon" legend is that no company or country just ever landed there again in over 45 years, even with an unmanned lander. It just seems very strange that what was once such a walk in the park that the US managed to land humans there 6 separate times within a 4 year period with just a single hitch (which was a predictable result of triskaidekaphobia, of course) is still so difficult for us almost 50 years later that it took until this very year for any country or company to land there successfully and then operate a robotic rover for more than 24 hours.

Before China landed Chang-e 4 and released Yutu-2 to rove around on the dark side of the Moon just this year, there had been just a single mission that even attempted an unmanned landing on the Moon (Chang-e 3, that landed in the Moon in late 2013, more than 40 years after the last Apollo mission), and that landing was followed by Yutu-1's malfunction within 24 hours. Israel's attempt a few months ago resulted in a crash landing, after which India delayed its scheduled attempt indefinitely. Russia has now delayed its proposed attempt 5 times, that neither NASA nor the ESA has any plans to land anything, human or robotic, on the Moon in the near future.

It's as if Lindberg's plane ride had been followed up by 50 years of intercontinental boat rides, and we spent the 1980s celebrating the first drone to cross an ocean successfully.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Indeed, a succinct/astute summary of the conundrum.

----------------------------


With respect to this:

Hey Ben - in that post from 2009 that you referred to above - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22930&p=248929&hilit=worked+on+Apollo#p248929 - you followed it up a couple of posts later with this:

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.

Have you a link to the outcome of this (back in 2009) - and did it prove the naysayers wrong?

I believe I located the results of this recon mission. First, a preface, which seems to be nothing short of overt trolling on the part of NASA:

Original link from 2005:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/11jul_lroc.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20090808020 ... l_lroc.htm

The date was Dec. 19, 1972, and history was about to be made.

Suddenly, soundlessly, Challenger split in two (movie). The base of the ship, the part with the landing pads, stayed put. The top, the lunar module with Cernan and Jack Schmitt inside, blasted off in a spray of gold foil. It rose, turned, and headed off to rendezvous with the orbiter America, the craft that would take them home again.

Those were the last men on the Moon. After they were gone, the camera panned back and forth. There was no one there, nothing, only the rover, the lander and some equipment scattered around the dusty floor of the Taurus-Littrow valley. Eventually, Rover's battery died and the TV transmissions stopped.

That was our last good look at an Apollo landing site.

Many people find this surprising, even disconcerting. Conspiracy theorists have long insisted that NASA never went to the Moon. It was all a hoax, they say, a way to win the Space Race by trickery. The fact that Apollo landing sites have not been photographed in detail since the early 1970s encourages their claims.

And why haven't we photographed them? There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right?

Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.

Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

The spacecraft's high-resolution camera, called "LROC," short for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, has a resolution of about half a meter. That means that a half-meter square on the Moon's surface would fill a single pixel in its digital images.

Apollo moon buggies are about 2 meters wide and 3 meters long. So in the LROC images, those abandoned vehicles will fill about 4 by 6 pixels.

What does a half-meter resolution picture look like? This image of an airport on Earth has the same resolution as an LROC image. Moon buggy-sized objects (automobiles and luggage carts) are clear:

Drum roll, folks. We can now view the images referenced, which surely will remove any doubt NASA artifacts were discarded on the moon all those years ago. Evidence of the moon landings - at last.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/ ... sites.html

Check out the detail and unquestionable markers in this offering:



Don't see it yet? Here, this one will surely put it to rest:

Apollo 11 landing site


or this one:

Apollo 16


Careful now -- don't strain too hard.

This last sample... well, now they're just outright laughing at us: a photo of what appears to be a depiction of the moon's surface, but projected by a low-resolution monitor screen (note the vertical lines):




Any of these photos look like the same level of detail/zoom proximity as the sample airport shot above?

NASA is toying with the tinfoil hatters, I tell ya.

Well-played, NASA. Keep us guessing and scrutinizing in futility.

[DrEvil]

I think what makes it so easy to believe there is something amiss with the "Men walked on the Moon" legend is that no company or country just ever landed there again in over 45 years, even with an unmanned lander. It just seems very strange that what was once such a walk in the park that the US managed to land humans there 6 separate times within a 4 year period with just a single hitch (which was a predictable result of triskaidekaphobia, of course) is still so difficult for us almost 50 years later that it took until this very year for any country or company to land there successfully and then operate a robotic rover for more than 24 hours.

Before China landed Chang-e 4 and released Yutu-2 to rove around on the dark side of the Moon just this year, there had been just a single mission that even attempted an unmanned landing on the Moon (Chang-e 3, that landed in the Moon in late 2013, more than 40 years after the last Apollo mission), and that landing was followed by Yutu-1's malfunction within 24 hours. Israel's attempt a few months ago resulted in a crash landing, after which India delayed its scheduled attempt indefinitely. Russia has now delayed its proposed attempt 5 times, that neither NASA nor the ESA has any plans to land anything, human or robotic, on the Moon in the near future.

It's as if Lindberg's plane ride had been followed up by 50 years of intercontinental boat rides, and we spent the 1980s celebrating the first drone to cross an ocean successfully.

The main difference here is the destination. Going to the moon is like going to the North Pole. Once you've been there and planted your flag you're kinda done. You may go back a few times for some follow-up research, but that's it. No one is going to spend billions on going somewhere there's no point in going (unless you plan on staying and turning it into a place worth going, which is what's being considered now). Airplanes on the other hand had plenty of destinations and a clear benefit over ships.

Personally I think we sent people to the moon. I don't buy the argument about the landers looking flimsy. You don't need reinforced hulls in a place with no atmosphere and no friction, but you most definitely want to cut down the weight as much as humanly possible to save on fuel. In theory a seat with a rocket strapped to it could have done the job.

There's also the stuff the astronauts left behind, like the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment.



Anyone with the right equipment can point a laser at it and confirm it's there.

There's also the small matter of the Soviet Union. They were watching everything like hawks and would have screamed bloody murder if something was off, but they didn't.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

There's also the small matter of the Soviet Union. They were watching everything like hawks and would have screamed bloody murder if something was off, but they didn't.

Click back a page; I referenced an interestingly-timed deal with the Russians back in the early 70s that was in direct contradiction with their 'enemy' status.

Regardless of the merits of the 'under the table agreement' theory with Russia, along similar lines of my recent comment in the AOC thread: outward optics, especially in politics, are not a reliable barometer for actual relations behind the veil.

The Nazis are a case in point. Uber-Enemies with the U.S. during WWII, yet what happened shortly after the war?
Project Paperclip, which is particularly apropos here given the transfer of a number of these German scientists within the annals of NASA as part of the, er, transition agreement.

All is not what it appears.

[Karmamatterz]

Missing video tapes.
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/16/10663706 ... o-11-tapes

Lost telemetry data.


The usual debunking of conspiracies.
https://www.popsci.com/military-aviatio ... oax#page-2

The funny thing is that the government keeps a lot of employment records for who worked where and when. But magically those people can't be tracked down and asked what happened with piles of boxes and tapes? It's just laughable.

Frankly, isn't it time we bring the alien thing into the discussion? We haven't been back because..........the aliens told us never to return! Stay away from our secret bases on the Moon!

The aerial images that BS posted show what a joke this whole thing is.

But still, it's incredibly hard for people to realize that it could be a hoax cuz:


The Soviets keeping a secret for the U.S.? Why is that so hard to believe? It was in both their interests to protect certain lies. We are only told what they want us to hear. One can only wonder at how much of the Cold War was really all bullshit. The "fight" against the Soviets and communists globally could have been genuine, but much of it could have also just been the military industrial complex ramping up their new found powers to foment endless war and profit.

[BenDhyan]

.

Indeed, a succinct/astute summary of the conundrum.

----------------------------


With respect to this:

Hey Ben - in that post from 2009 that you referred to above - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22930&p=248929&hilit=worked+on+Apollo#p248929 - you followed it up a couple of posts later with this:

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.

Have you a link to the outcome of this (back in 2009) - and did it prove the naysayers wrong?

I believe I located the results of this recon mission. First, a preface, which seems to be nothing short of overt trolling on the part of NASA:

Original link from 2005:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/11jul_lroc.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20090808020 ... l_lroc.htm

The date was Dec. 19, 1972, and history was about to be made.

Suddenly, soundlessly, Challenger split in two (movie). The base of the ship, the part with the landing pads, stayed put. The top, the lunar module with Cernan and Jack Schmitt inside, blasted off in a spray of gold foil. It rose, turned, and headed off to rendezvous with the orbiter America, the craft that would take them home again.

Those were the last men on the Moon. After they were gone, the camera panned back and forth. There was no one there, nothing, only the rover, the lander and some equipment scattered around the dusty floor of the Taurus-Littrow valley. Eventually, Rover's battery died and the TV transmissions stopped.

That was our last good look at an Apollo landing site.

Many people find this surprising, even disconcerting. Conspiracy theorists have long insisted that NASA never went to the Moon. It was all a hoax, they say, a way to win the Space Race by trickery. The fact that Apollo landing sites have not been photographed in detail since the early 1970s encourages their claims.

And why haven't we photographed them? There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right?

Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.

Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972.

The spacecraft's high-resolution camera, called "LROC," short for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, has a resolution of about half a meter. That means that a half-meter square on the Moon's surface would fill a single pixel in its digital images.

Apollo moon buggies are about 2 meters wide and 3 meters long. So in the LROC images, those abandoned vehicles will fill about 4 by 6 pixels.

What does a half-meter resolution picture look like? This image of an airport on Earth has the same resolution as an LROC image. Moon buggy-sized objects (automobiles and luggage carts) are clear:

Drum roll, folks. We can now view the images referenced, which surely will remove any doubt NASA artifacts were discarded on the moon all those years ago. Evidence of the moon landings - at last.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/ ... sites.html

Check out the detail and unquestionable markers in this offering:



Don't see it yet? Here, this one will surely put it to rest:

Apollo 11 landing site


or this one:

Apollo 16


Careful now -- don't strain too hard.

This last sample... well, now they're just outright laughing at us: a photo of what appears to be a depiction of the moon's surface, but projected by a low-resolution monitor screen (note the vertical lines):




Any of these photos look like the same level of detail/zoom proximity as the sample airport shot above?

NASA is toying with the tinfoil hatters, I tell ya.

Well-played, NASA. Keep us guessing and scrutinizing in futility.

Ahem....if you were to use higher resolution LRO images, you can even see the tracks in the lunar surface left by the lunar rover....

https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/584 ... 7_area.jpg

[Elvis]

^^^^ Thanks, BenD. Do you think it's possible that one or more of the subsequent landings were faked?

Rocket science is not all that complicated, I think we went, but not certain about the followup missions.

Also, what of the idea/claims that they found something on the moon (Hoagland's crystal skyscrapers e.g.) — and were quite anxious not to share the findings with the world. I consider this a possibility.

[BenDhyan]

Hey Ben - in that post from 2009 that you referred to above - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22930&p=248929&hilit=worked+on+Apollo#p248929 - you followed it up a couple of posts later with this:

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.

Have you a link to the outcome of this (back in 2009) - and did it prove the naysayers wrong?

Sure, here is a link to LRO images of the Apollo landing sites.....

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/379#extended

[BenDhyan]

^^^^ Thanks, BenD. Do you think it's possible that one or more of the subsequent landings were faked?

Rocket science is not all that complicated, I think we went, but not certain about the followup missions.

Also, what of the idea/claims that they found something on the moon (Hoagland's crystal skyscrapers e.g.) — and were quite anxious not to share the findings with the world. I consider this a possibility.

Hi Elvis, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged all Apollo landing sites. See here...https://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/how-to-see-all-six-apollo-moon-landing-sites/

Hoagland is not credible imho...

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Thanks for the added links, BenD. I have to say -- and yes, I know that this would be a predictable response by one [like me] who may question the moon landing -- but the coloring of those NASA-related artifacts on the surface of the moon, in those photos, seem unnatural/potentially doctored to me. They may well be genuine, of course.

I remain agnostic, alas. That said, I agree that Hoagland is not credible. As with 911, there will always be those that poison the well.

[DrEvil]

.

There's also the small matter of the Soviet Union. They were watching everything like hawks and would have screamed bloody murder if something was off, but they didn't.

Click back a page; I referenced an interestingly-timed deal with the Russians back in the early 70s that was in direct contradiction with their 'enemy' status.

Regardless of the merits of the 'under the table agreement' theory with Russia, along similar lines of my recent comment in the AOC thread: outward optics, especially in politics, are not a reliable barometer for actual relations behind the veil.

The Nazis are a case in point. Uber-Enemies with the U.S. during WWII, yet what happened shortly after the war?
Project Paperclip, which is particularly apropos here given the transfer of a number of these German scientists within the annals of NASA as part of the, er, transition agreement.

All is not what it appears.

Sorry, I missed that. Interesting stuff, but it happened after the first five Apollo missions so it wouldn't really apply there (unless "they" can plan crop yields years in advance /tinfoil).

I guess you could argue that the Soviets had iron-clad proof that everything was faked and that the grain deal was to buy their silence while the last (actually the first) Apollo mission went up and planted all the evidence, or any number of similar theories, but it seems kinda far-fetched. The simpler answer is they went there and they sold the grain because someone had a temporary attack of decency, or they just figured a non-starving Soviet Union was more predictable and stable than a starving one.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Quite right. Fractals of possibilities.

We can only speculate from our obstructed view, or simply believe, free of rumination.