Was The Apollo Moon Landing Fake?


In July 1969, more than 600 million people watched in awe, as Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the surface of the moon.


Why they would fake it


The Soviet Union had been making all the early advances and the greatest progress in the great Moon race.

The Soviet Union launched the first man and the first women in space in 1961 & 1963 and were also the first to orbit the Earth.

With the above happening the US Government had to make some kind of success with President Kennedy promising that the US would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's.

Many people believe that NASA had released that it was not possible to go to the moon with the technology available (Computer chips being as powerful then as a modern washing machines chip) so they resorted to faking the landing to ensure a victory of the Soviet Union and keep the dollars coming in for real space projects.


Motives

Several motives have been suggested for the U.S. government to fake the moon landings - some of the recurrent elements are:

1. Distraction - The U.S. government benefited from a popular distraction to take attention away from the Vietnam war. Lunar activities did abruptly stop, with planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the US ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War.

2. Cold War Prestige - The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race with the USSR. Going to the Moon, if it was possible, would have been risky and expensive. It would have been much easier to fake the landing, thereby ensuring success.

3. Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars pretending to go to the moon. This could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity. In variations of this theory, the space industry is characterized as a political economy, much like the military industrial complex, creating fertile ground for its own survival.

4. Risk - The available technology at the time was such that there was a good chance that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted.

The Soviets, with their own competing moon program and an intense economic and political and military rivalry with the USA, could be expected to have cried foul if the USA tried to fake a Moon landing. Theorist Ralph Rene responds that shortly after the alleged Moon landings, the USA silently started shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of grain as humanitarian aid to the allegedly starving USSR. He views this as evidence of a cover-up, the grain being the price of silence. (The Soviet Union in fact had its own Moon program).

Proponents of the Apollo hoax suggest that the Soviet Union, and latterly Russia, and the United States were allied in the exploration of space, during the Cold war and after. The United States and the former Soviet Union today routinely engage in cooperative space ventures, as do many other nations that are popularly believed to be enemies. However, this suggestion is challenged by the impression of intense international competition that was under way during the Cold War and is not supported by the accounts of participants on either side of the Iron Curtain. Many argue that the fact that the Soviet Union and other Communist bloc countries, eager to discredit the United States, have not produced any contrary evidence to be the single most significant argument against such a hoax. Soviet involvement might also implausibly multiply the scale of the conspiracy, to include hundreds of thousands of conspirators of uncertain loyalty.



Enthusiasts of this theory claim that:

# The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation

# The photos were altered: the Crosshairs on some photos appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them where they should be

# The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.

# There are no stars in any of the photos, and astronauts never report seeing any stars from the capsule windows.

# Identical backgrounds in photos that are listed as taken miles apart.

# The moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted.

# No blast crater appeared from the landing

# The launch rocket produced no visible flame.

# The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts flapped despite there being no wind on the Moon.