This is in a sense a break with my usual practice of alternating posts on the Solar System and other matters, but this tends to have a different status in people’s minds than the other issues. I need to find a picture of the lunar rover before I continue.
Right, done that:
Before I get going on this, I want to say that I feel like I’m playing a “pronoun game” here, though not with pronouns. Sometimes, people who don’t want to out themselves or their significant others to the person they’re talking to will try to avoid using their pronouns. This can lead to all sorts of verbal acrobatics which can in fact cause people to notice what they’re doing when they wouldn’t’ve done so otherwise, and it needs to be done skilfully in order to prevent this. I feel a bit like this now because most of the time I try hard not to use the word “Moon” as a proper noun for the world closest to our own. You may have noticed, incidentally, that two entries ago I did in fact use the word, but it was in reference to a period of time rather than the neighbouring planet, as in “many moons ago”. There’s actually quite a tradition for referring to it euphemistically, and the Latin word “luna” is in fact a shortened form of “lumina”, meaning “lights”. This is because the previous word, “mensis”, came to mean “period” in the sense of menstrual flow and something like prudishness or sexism led to the word sounding obscene or tabu in some way. Moreover, there’s the fine Germanic tradition of kennings, which are substitute terms used for poetic or picturesque purposes in early Germanic literature, including Old English and Old Norse. For instance, the sea might be referred to as a “whale road” and a battlefield as a “raven feast”. There are a couple of kennings, rarely used, for that bright thing in the night sky. I should also say that although I’ve committed myself to calling it (her?) Cynthia, I actually think Selene works better and there are other options including Diana and Artemis, or perhaps words from non-Western cultures such as Tsuki-Yomi. The reason I do this? Just as I omit the article when referring to Earth, I want to foster a cosmic perspective and therefore refer to Cynthia by an actual name rather than making it “special” because it happens to be the nearest permanently associated spheroidal body of non-artificial origin to our own, but paradoxically at the same time ensure that it has its individuality recognised as something which is more than a mere adjunct to Earth. After all, as far as I know it’s the only “moon” in the Solar System which feels a stronger gravitational pull from the Sun than Earth, so in a sense it isn’t even a moon but a coörbital planet with Earth.
Whatever you want to call it, my position is very standard, the consensus in fact: thirty humans left low Earth orbit and travelled to orbit around Cynthia. Of these, a dozen set foot on the surface. One crew failed to do so due to an accident with their spacecraft. This is the “normal” view. The minimum view compatible with the facts, but quite contrived, is that thirty humans left low Earth orbit and travelled to orbit around Cynthia, six LEMs were deposited on the surface, there was a major series of sample return missions, spacesuits and the lunar rover were developed to function in a vacuum and that any filming or photography that took place was of an evacuated chamber on Earth. This is the absolute minimum the Apollo crew must have done which is compatible with what can be demonstrated. It isn’t sufficient to claim that there was merely filming in a studio or out in the open on Earth because vacuum conditions can be seen to be present in the images. I’m agnostic about the idea that showing them in slow motion could’ve led to the impression of lower gravity. It actually does seem feasible that that could’ve been done.
What isn’t feasible may be a strawman. This is the claim that the astronauts either didn’t leave Earth or travel past the Van Allen belts and that the filming was done by Stanley Kubrick in an ordinary film studio or outside in a remote area on Earth, or by anyone else. That particular position is completely untenable, but to be fair I’m not sure any serious person makes that exact claim. The real claim, so far as I can tell, is that the astronauts stayed in low Earth orbit and automatic probes were sent on a sample return mission, and also deposited laser reflectors, seismographs and other instruments. Also, that the aim was not to race against the Soviet Union but to unite humanity. This claim is closer to the absolutely minimally plausible one but it’s still implausible as such.
I’m not aiming to duplicate what’s been said on clavius.org here. That would make this redundant, and in fact after many years of attempting to debunk the idea that the Apollo missions were hoaxes on Yahoo Answers and elsewhere, I found I was repeating myself and might as well just direct them there. The point of this blog post is to be personal about it, and outline what I personally find convincing about the proposition that humans travelled there and set foot on it, because the emotional involvement and thorough understanding of the claims might be more convincing.
I should make the usual claim that science never aims to prove anything. Science can only disprove things because inductive inference is fallacious. An unbroken past string of conjunctions between events without any counter-examples can in theory be interrupted at any stage in the future. This makes inductive inference strictly speaking illogical, and rules out the possibility that science can prove anything. Logic and maths, however, can produce provable propositions. For instance, any planet with an unbroken fluid surface, either in the form of an atmosphere or an ocean, must at any time have at least two stationary locations where there is no current or wind. That’s a mathematically provable fact. What can’t be proven is whether there are any such planets. We seem to be living on one, but we can’t prove it because that’s in the realm of science. Hence nothing I say from now on constitutes proof that anyone at all went there.
I’m going to number my points in case anyone wants to respond to specific ones.
- Argument from personal incredulity:
This is not a scientific argument so much as a possible explanation as to why I believe they went and others don’t. It doesn’t relate to whether it actually happened or not.
I have no desire to deprecate the achievement of travelling to the lunar surface, landing on it and returning to Earth alive. That said, I wonder if one reason people tend to be sceptical is that they find it such a remarkable achievement that they don’t believe it. The radius of cis lunar space is less than ten times Earth’s circumference. I realise they didn’t travel straight up and down, but this fact is probably a factor in the ease I have in believing they went there and returned, and set foot on the lunar surface. A friend of mine has said that the reason they faked this and not a Mars landing is that it isn’t as far beyond believability. My view is that if they had aimed to fake it, they may as well have gone the whole hog and faked a Mars mission instead. The fact that the claim they only went to our natural satellite seems a lot more modest and credible than that to me, so my emotional reason for believing in it is that it really doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me.
2. Cataracts. Opacity in the lens of the eye usually begins to develop at about the age of 60. Here is a reference:
At the time of this study, thirty-nine former astronauts had developed cataracts. Of these, thirty-six had been on high-radiation missions such as Apollo. I presume the others were on Skylab but that’s just a guess. Nine astronauts have been on Skylab missions and thirty on Apollo missions which allegedly left Low Earth Orbit. Of these individuals, some started to acquire cataracts within five years of their mission and others took more than a decade to do so.
The youngest Apollo astronaut was 36 and the oldest 47. Even developing cataracts at fifty-seven is younger than average.
To me, this strongly suggests that all Apollo astronauts left low Earth orbit and got beyond the Van Allen belts.
- The change in how the lunar landscape was represented:
There was a famous artist called Chesley Bonestell, who did matte paintings for Hollywood and also paintings of space. He provided the backdrops for ‘Destination Moon’ in 1950 and ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’ in 1968. All of his illustrations up until 1968 show a craggy, jagged landscape without much dust because of the lack of erosion from wind and water expected there. The Apollo images show soft undulating hills and a great deal of dust. In popular culture, the lunar landscapes shown in the Anderson productions ‘UFO’ and ‘Space 1999’, dating from 1969 and 1975 respectively, show the same kind of landscape depicted in the Apollo photographs.
Leaving the Apollo photographs aside as potentially unreliable, there are images of the lunar surface from Lunar Orbiter 2 in 1967 and the Surveyor landers from 1966. These show the same kind of landscape as the Apollo images. If the claim being made is that no lander or orbiter has been genuine, one is left with the need to explain why the representation of the lunar landscape changed in popular culture after 1968. However, if the claim is merely that no Apollo astronauts have walked on the lunar surface, it’s possible that this representation on the Apollo photographs and elsewhere is the result of the Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter images. It does, however, strongly suggest that images of the lunar surface have been successfully obtained.
4. The trajectory of dust behind the wheels of the lunar rover (see photo at top of post).
When a wheeled vehicle raises dust in an atmosphere as dense as Earth’s, that dust hangs in the air as a cloud before gradually returning to the surface. The dust behind the lunar rover didn’t do this but rapidly described a parabola, meaning that it was not moving through a substantial atmosphere. If the rover was being filmed in a studio, that studio would have to be airtight and have had all of the air pumped out of it for that to happen. If it was possible to do that, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch for them to have gone all the way. They would, for example, have had to have spacesuits and a lunar rover which would have been able to function in a practical vacuum. Otherwise, there needs to be another explanation as to why the dust behaved in that way.
5. Moondust is distinctly hazardous and harmful, and unlike most kinds of dust we’re familiar with on Earth. It isn’t subject to weathering or erosion, or to reaction with water or the gases in the air. This makes it very abrasive and toxic, because it has very sharp corners and edges and is also likely to undergo chemical reactions with substances in the human body, particularly in the lungs, respiratory passages and on the skin. It’s often claimed that the rocks (with the exception of that one piece of petrified wood) are from Antarctica, where there are lunar meteorites. The dust, however, seems never to have been in contact with Earth’s atmosphere because it has these properties. For this substance to be both authentic and present on Earth without astronauts going there, there would have to have been a sample return mission. There have been such missions, pursued by the Soviet Union at about the same time as the Apollo missions and later by the ESA and China, and the maximum mass returned was 1.7 kilogrammes in 2020. The Soviet missions in 1970-72 managed to return 101 and 55 grammes. The Apollo missions returned between 22 and 101 kilogrammes. This is of course a much greater quantity. Artificial lunar soil has been created however, so once again this isn’t a clincher.
This is what Earth dust looks like:
6. In order for NASA to pull this off, they would’ve had to convince China and the USSR that they were going there unless the Cold War situation the public perceive is inaccurate and the other two countries were in on it. It therefore seems necessary not only to believe that Apollo was a hoax but also that there was a global conspiracy between the great powers of the twentieth century. If this happened, why would the USSR and China not also be allowed to fake their own missions? I am in fact somewhat sympathetic to the idea that the situation in the Cold War was faked to some degree although I’m aware that nuclear warheads very probably do exist due to friends in the peace movement who have broken into missile silos.
7. My father was an amateur radio enthusiast in the 1960s. In the ‘70s, he played me reel-to-reel tape recordings of an Apollo mission. The delay in the conversation increased with the passage of time and much of the conversation seemed ad lib and casual, suggesting that it was not scripted. As far as I know, the Apollo astronauts had little acting experience – I haven’t looked into this. Since this was recorded off the NASA Deep Space Network (no, I don’t know how he managed to do this but I do believe he succeeded), it was apparently clear that the signals were being broadcast from a transmitter which was constantly moving first around Earth, later across cis-lunar space, then in lunar orbit and finally from the lunar surface. I unfortunately cannot confirm any of this now, but am asking you to trust me that these tapes existed and that the direction of the signals was as I described them, and the distances involved accorded to such a journey with the appropriate delay in reception. If you prefer, you can disregard this last point as mere hearsay, but I do know this happened.
Other justifications could be made of course. However, these are mine and it was suggested I set them down, so here they are. None of them prove we went. However, the minimum plausible set of circumstances is that a number of astronauts left Earth orbit, travelled to lunar orbit and deposited artificial objects on the surface including laser reflectors and undertook a major sample return mission on a scale greater than anyone has succeeded in doing since, and also that special technology had to be developed in the form of a lunar rover, an evacuated hangar and spacesuits in order to fake a landing. I personally think the simplest explanation is that we did go.
None of this proves we did that. However, the probability that we didn’t would be multiplied by each of these points, which makes it increasingly improbable that we didn’t go.
A Box Of Chocolates 