Examining the Evidence: Were the Moon Landings Real or Fake?

[Mceestix]

Hi, I am a grade 11 student currently taking physics 20. For an assignment, I was asked to prove whether or not I thought the moon landings really happened, or if they were faked.
If anyone can hit me up with evidence for either case, that would be cool.

 

[Simons]

I was asked to prove whether or not I thought the moon landings really happened

well that's easy...first decide what you think. Then, write it down and sign the document. Thats proof of which case you think is true. The signature proves that you agree with your own opinion.

or...you could let the *serious* forum members reply with their opinions

The only way to know would be to be there when they landed, or be one of the people faking it. Theres photos, and all the NASA funding, and witnesses of the launches, etc. I wonder if anyone has ever re-located the landing site from an Earth based telescope?

 

[Pengwuino]

I wonder if anyone has ever re-located the landing site from an Earth based telescope?

Well if you compute the minimum diffraction of a perfect optical system on earth, it is actually quite impossible to look at the landing sites since they are incredibly small and we are incredibly far away. NASA very recently sent up a probe (or is going to) that will take high resolution pictures of amongst other things, the moon landing sites!

It's rather hard to prove the moon landings were real since its somewhat illogical to provide evidence of an events occurance that doesn't entirely involve the event. For example, you can't say "well it's true because there were videos". Well a conspiracy theorist will say the evidence that they didnt happen were "the videos were fake". See what I mean?

A better question to answer is whether or not the evidence given by conspiracy theorists is valid and is scientifically plausible. Almost all of it is absolutely wrong and relies on a very bad understanding of physics. You will also notice that if you listen to a conspiracy theorists claim against the moon landings, it is really 1/4 personal attacks, 1/4 circumstantial evidence, 1/2 bad bad bad physics.

 

[Tide]

Peng,

Just a note - arguing against the conspiracists' claims on the basis of their faulty reasoning or misunderstanding of science is not evidence that the landing occurred. Rather, one must provide affirmative and supporting evidence to support the "hypothesis" that the landing was real.

 

[Pengwuino]

Peng,
Just a note - arguing against the conspiracists' claims on the basis of their faulty reasoning or misunderstanding of science is not evidence that the landing occurred. Rather, one must provide affirmative and supporting evidence to support the "hypothesis" that the landing was real.

Which is really impossible like I said... What can you say? "The videos show they were real". It's not exactly something that can be experimentally tested for example. That's where all the evidence against these landings come from; "The videos and pictures were fake".

 

[Tide]

There is other evidence. One could spectroscopically analyze the rocks brought back from the missions and find they are not of terrestrial origin.

 

[Pengwuino]

Yah that is true... that is 1 thing that was brought back but that's not exactly worthwhile evidence for this paper since the writer doesn't have access to the material.

 

[rachmaninoff]

Obviously people have gone into space - they go up on a rocket, and they eventually come back down, right? And obviously we have a few satellites in GEO - and that's almost as hard to get to as the moon (check the math?). Put two and two together - and we might as well send people out as far as the moon, with a little more effort; the real question you want is, did we actually land on it? With an engineering budget, was the principle feasible - do the landers on display at the National Air & Space Museum have everything necessary in them? Here's where you need to start to think: what are the engineering difficulties, and how are they solved - and what new problems does that bring up? You'll need to do some reading here . Especially with this being a physics assignment - you'll need to work out some of the physics on your own (e.g., how do rockets work?).

 

[Pengwuino]

I really don't think an 11th grader is going to understand the engineering difficulties (and engineering problems are not physics problems) required of the moon landings unless they are very generalized and many problems related to engineering seem to be "the devils in the details" types of problems.

 

[Physics Monkey]

Maybe an 11th grader wouldn't have the background to understand some of the details of the lunar landing, but I think they could certainly understand why physics tells us that it did happen.

In particular, one could write about how the hoaxer's arguments are incorrect (which doesn't prove we went) and then talk about the positive physical evidence like lunar reflectors and moon rocks. There is a wealth of basic physics to be found here, both in debunking the disbelievers and understanding the positive evidence. For example, why don't we see the stars in the photographs from the moon, or on the positive side, how can we know that the moon rocks aren't from the Earth?

Some good places to start:http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/apollohoax.html
http://www.braeunig.us/space/hoax.htm

 

[Renge Ishyo]

You will not have access to first hand evidence of the moon landing to test nor were you present when the moon landing took place (if you were you could have watched the shuttle leave orbit with a telescope or watched it's reentry etc.). Faced with such a situation I would answer truthfully, that at present time you lack the evidence to prove that it happened AND you lack the evidence to prove that it didn't happen. It is true that the photographs and videos could be faked. It is also true that your textbooks could be lying to you. These documents exist to describe an event that you did not observe directly so they do not count as concrete evidence. At the same time, space missions are STILL taking place in the present and those can be observed and verified. You can reason indirectly that if it is possible to send humans into space in the present that it seems plausible that at some point in our recent history we would have been able to journey to the moon if we so wished. This is not as wishy washy an approach as you might think, real scientists use observations in the present in order to try to form a hypothesis about what took place in the past (if not there would be no theory of evolution, or vast portions of Geology and Astronomy that deal with how things came to be).

That is stil speculation though and not concrete proof. In reality it is impossible to prove 100% that an event in the past that is no longer taking place *actually* took place. This is one of the limits of science in that it can only provide direct experimental evidence for things that people in the present can still experiment with. But do your best. Personally, I would dig up documents from the soviet union and other countries that verified that the moon landing took place. This would eliminate the "government conspiracy" argument (i.e. a fake moon landing in order to fool the American public) as our government would not be able to control the observations made by other governments. Then I would go into a description of the feasbility that at one point we were *able* to send astronauts to the moon and I would cite many space projects that NASA has performed since the reported date of the moon landing and would go from there.

 

[Integral]

This topic has already been beaten to death several times.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=93093&highlight=moon+landing"

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=82798&highlight=moon+landing"

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=72825&highlight=moon+landing"

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=42151&highlight=moon+landing"

These links were found by doing a seach in S&D. In the future try doing a forum search before starting a new thread. There is no room left for disscussion of this topic. You should be able to get plenty of information about the topic in the linked threads.