Re: Moon landing Hoax

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 01:39 AM 2/21/01 -0700, Larry Smith wrote:
> As Sagan kept
> saying, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and I think
> the hoax claim is even more extraordinary than the claim that we achieved
> what NASA says we did.

Yes, that really gets to the point.

*) The question is not whether we see hoaxes on television.  My cable
service offers the choice of several different hoaxes at any given moment.

*) The question is not whether there have been fake moon landings.  People
have been filming fake moon landings since 1902!
  http://www.filmsite.org/voya.html

*) One general question is whether 14-year-olds should be able to tell
what's a hoax and what's not.  Indeed they should.  Mostly they are pretty
good at it.  Mostly they know that a food product endorsed by a talking
Chihuahua is not guaranteed to be any better than competing products.

*) The more specific question is whether the Apollo project was a
hoax.  The project made extraordinary claims, so we must apply the rule
that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

Answer: in fact, the main claims of the Apollo project are extraordinarily
well attested.
  1) At its peak, the project was spending something like 5% of the
federal budget, and you can't spend that kind of money without quite a few
people noticing.
  http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollomon/Apollo.html

  2) We have available to us not only the claim that it was done, but a
wealth of detail on _how_ it was done.  Some of this is online.
  http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/diagrams/apollo.html
Lots more is on microfilm, including the blueprints
  http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/facts/faq10.html

  3) For that matter, there are three leftover Saturn rockets that you can
go look at.
  http://www.nasm.edu/apollo/spacecraftsV.htm

  4) I have lots of good second-hand knowledge.
   --) I've talked with Jack Schmidt.
        http://members.nbci.com/tguettler/apollo17.html
   --) I know lots of people who helped build the hardware,
       plan the missions, et cetera.  They weren't fooling around.
       Like I said, you can't spend 5% of the federal budget
       without a lot of people being in on it.
   --) I know people (besides Jack Schmidt) who were present
       when the moon rockets were launched.  It's unlikely that
       these people could have been deceived as to whether there
       was a 180 million horsepower engine being operated.

Summary:  Consider the hypothesis that they built all this stuff, which
manifestly COULD have gone to the moon, and then for some reason didn't
actually go.  That's far more implausible than the hypothesis that they
actually went.

*) The final question is whether the Fox approach to these matters was
totally unscientific.  It should take less than 5 seconds to figure out
that it was.  They ignored mountains of evidence on one side and
highlighted pathetically invalid evidence on the other side.  This
constitutes either outright lying or reckless disregard for the truth
(which comes to the same thing).

Some people devoted years of work to this.  Some people risked their
lives.  Some people lost their lives.  Lying about whether this really
happened is beneath contempt.

This show is less believable than a talking Chihuahua.  There's some chance
that the Chihuahua is telling the truth.