Why Have We Never Had Men on the Moon Again

Information technology took 400,000 Nasa employees and contractors to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 – but only one man to spread the idea that it was all a hoax. His proper noun was Beak Kaysing.

It began as "a hunch, an intuition", earlier turning into "a true conviction" – that the Us lacked the technical prowess to brand it to the moon (or, at least, to the moon and back). Kaysing had actually contributed to the Usa space program, albeit tenuously: between 1956 and 1963, he was an employee of Rocketdyne, a company that helped to design the Saturn V rocket engines. In 1976, he self-published a pamphlet called We Never Went to the Moon: America'south Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, which sought testify for his conviction past means of grainy photocopies and ludicrous theories. Yet somehow he established a few perennials that are kept alive to this 24-hour interval in Hollywood movies and Play a trick on News documentaries, Reddit forums and YouTube channels.

Despite the boggling volume of evidence (including 382kg of moon rock collected across six missions; corroboration from Russian federation, Japan and Cathay; and images from the Nasa Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the tracks made past the astronauts in the moondust), belief in the moon-hoax conspiracy has blossomed since 1969. Among ix/eleven truthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrailers, flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers and Sandy Hook conspiracists, the idea that the moon landings were faked isn't fifty-fifty a source of anger whatsoever more – it is just a given fact.

The podcast kingpin Joe Rogan is among the doubters. So too is the YouTuber Shane Dawson. A sociology professor in New Jersey was exposed last year for telling his students the landings were fake. While Kaysing relied on photocopied samizdat to alert the world, now conspiracists have the subreddit r/moonhoax to document how Nasa was "so lazy" it used the same moon rover for Apollo 15, 16 and 17; or how "they have been trolling us for years"; or to bring up the fact at that place is "one thing I can't get my head around ..."

"The reality is, the cyberspace has made information technology possible for people to say whatever the hell they like to a broader number of people than ever before," sighs Roger Launius, a former chief historian of Nasa. "And the truth is, Americans beloved conspiracy theories. Every time something large happens, somebody has a counter-explanation."

Bill Kaysing, the man who started the moon-hoax conspiracy.
Bill Kaysing, the man who started the moon-hoax conspiracy. Photograph: www.billkaysing.com

It turns out British people dearest conspiracy theories, likewise. Final year, the daytime TV evidence This Morning time welcomed a invitee who argued that no 1 could take walked on the moon as the moon is made of light. Martin Kenny claimed: "In the past, you saw the moon landings and there was no fashion to cheque any of information technology. Now, in the historic period of technology, a lot of immature people are now investigating for themselves." A contempo YouGov poll institute that ane in six British people agreed with the statement: "The moon landings were staged." 4 per cent believed the hoax theory was "definitely true", 12% that information technology was "probably true", with a further nine% registering as don't knows. Moon hoaxism was more prevalent among the young: 21 % of 24- to 35-year-olds agreed that the moon landings were staged, compared with xiii% of over-55s.

Kaysing's original queries are fuelling this. I is the fact that no stars are visible in the pictures; another is the lack of a blast crater under the landing module; a third is to do with the fashion the shadows fall. People who know what they are talking about take wasted hours explaining such "anomalies" (they are to do with, respectively, camera-exposure times, the way thrust works in a vacuum and the reflective qualities of moondust). Yet until his death in 2005, Kaysing maintained that the whole thing was a fraud, filmed in a Goggle box studio. "Information technology's well documented that Nasa was often badly managed and had poor quality control," he told Wired in 1994. "But equally of 1969, we could suddenly perform manned flight upon manned flight? With complete success? It's just confronting all statistical odds."

He was right about that at least. When the Soviets launched Sputnik one in October 1957 (followed one month subsequently past Sputnik 2, containing Laika the canis familiaris), the US infinite program was all just not-existent. Nasa was founded in 1958 and managed to launch Alan Shepard into space in May 1961 – but when John F Kennedy announced that the U.s.a. "should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth", it seemed a stretch. By the mid-60s, Nasa was consuming more than than 4% of the U.s.a. federal upkeep, just while the Soviets were achieving more firsts – the first woman in infinite (1963), the first extra-vehicular activity, ie spacewalk (1965) – the Americans experienced various setbacks, including a launchpad fire that killed all three Apollo 1 astronauts.

If you have e'er been to the Science Museum in London, yous will know that the lunar module was basically fabricated of tinfoil. Apollo 8 had orbited the moon in 1968, merely, every bit Armstrong remarked, correcting course and landing on the moon was "far and away the almost complex part of the flight". He rated walking effectually on the surface one out of 10 for difficulty (despite the issues he had with the TV cable wrapping effectually his feet), "simply I thought the lunar descent was probably a xiii".

That is until you compare it with the difficulty of maintaining a prevarication to the entire world for five decades without a single sideslip from any Nasa employee. You would also take to imagine that 2019-era special effects were available to Nasa in 1969 and not one of the 600 meg TV viewers noticed anything amiss. Stanley Kubrick'south 2001: A Infinite Odyssey (1968) is a decent indication of what Hollywood special effects could do at the fourth dimension – and it'due south extremely shonky. Information technology genuinely was simpler to film on location.

If nosotros pass over "Earth war two bomber establish on moon" – a Sunday Sport front page from 1988 – the moon-hoax theory entered the modern era in 2001, when Play tricks News circulate a documentary chosen Did We Land on the Moon? Hosted by the X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi, it repackaged Kaysing'due south arguments for a new audience. Launius, who was working at Nasa at the time, recalls much banging of heads against consoles. "For many years, we refused to reply to this stuff. It wasn't worth giving it a hearing. Simply when Fox News aired that and then-called documentary – stating unequivocally 'We haven't landed on the moon' – information technology really raised the level. We began to receive all kinds of questions."

About of the calls came non from conspiracists, simply from parents and teachers. "People were saying: 'My child saw this, how practice I respond?' And so, with some trepidation, Nasa put upwardly a webpage and sent out some materials to teachers."

A particular bugbear in the Pull a fast one on News documentary was a poll claiming that twenty% of Americans believed the moon landing was faked. Launius says that polls tend to put the figure at between four% and 5%, merely it's easy to phrase poll questions to achieve a more eye-catching result. "Every time at that place's a hearing in a serious periodical – even an offhand comment in a movie – it just seeds this stuff." He cites a scene in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) in which a schoolteacher informs Matthew McConaughey'south character that the moon landings were hoaxed in social club to win the propaganda state of war against the Soviet Union. "It's a throwaway in the film. Only it really did churn up a big response."

Oliver Morton, the writer of The Moon: A History for the Futurity, believes the persistence of the moon hoax isn't surprising. Given an implausible event for which there is lots of evidence (Apollo 11) and a plausible consequence for which in that location is nix evidence (the moon hoax), some people will opt for the latter. "The indicate of Apollo was to bear witness how powerful the American authorities was in terms of actually doing things," he says. "The point of moon-hoax theory is to show how powerful the American government was in terms of making people believe things that weren't true." But the hoax narrative was only actually possible as Apollo never led anywhere – at that place were no further missions afterward 1972. "Every bit the American mind turns dorsum to paranoia in the 1970s, information technology becomes more pleasing to believe in this," he says.

Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever.
Bond'due south to blame ... Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever. Photograph: Allstar/UNITED ARTISTS

James Bail has to have a modest share of the blame. In Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Sean Connery busts into a Nasa facility by way of a Las Vegas casino. A hunt ensues across a moving-picture show set up dressed upward to look similar the moon, complete with earthbound astronauts. Only hither it's more like a visual joke, a way of justifying a moon buggy hunt across the Nevada desert. By the time of Peter Hyams' Kaysingian conspiracy thriller Capricorn One (1978), the idea that the government was fooling anybody was no laughing thing. Here it'southward virtually a Mars mission that goes wrong. The authorities opt to fake it and kill the astronauts (i of whom is played by OJ Simpson) to prevent them revealing the truth. In the post-Watergate era, the idea that the government could lie on this calibration had become much more plausible.

Apollo marked a turning point between the optimism of the 60s and the disappointments of the 70s. "Nosotros can put a man on the moon so why can't we do X?" became a common refrain. As Morton says: "Yes, the government can ready itself an extraordinary goal and go on to attain it, but that doesn't mean it can win the war in Vietnam, or clean up the inner cities, or cure cancer or any of the things that Americans might take really wanted more. The thought that the authorities isn't really powerful, it simply pretends it is – you can encounter how it feeds into the moon hoax."

Moon-hoax theories tend to be about what didn't happen rather than what did. Conspiracists are divided on whether the before Apollo, Mercury, Gemini and Atlas missions were also fakes, whether Laika or Yuri Gagarin ever made it into space, and what part Kubrick played. But while the first generation of lunar conspiracists were motivated by anger, these days it'southward more likely to exist boredom. The line between conspiracy and entertainment is far more blurry.

Still, while irritating for those involved – Buzz Aldrin punched moon conspiracist Bart Sibrel in 2002 – in one sense the conspiracy idea is harmless, at least compared with misinformation nearly vaccinations or mass murders. Morton notes that it is one of the few conspiracy theories that isn't tainted past antisemitism. Nor does it seem to be one to which Donald Trump, the ultimate product of news-as-amusement, subscribes. The dynamics of the modern internet have clearly not helped: look up Apollo videos on YouTube and earlier long moon-hoax documentaries start lining upwardly in the autoplay queue. But there is piffling bear witness that Russian disinformation agents have spread moon conspiracies as they have anti-vaxxing propaganda, for example. Although, if y'all recall about information technology, it would make perfect sense for them to exercise then: a bully manner of restoring Russian prestige while establishing continuity between the cold war and the information wars.

Then again, the USSR had the means to expose the Americans at the fourth dimension; it was listening in. "We were there at Soviet armed forces base 32103," the Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov recently recalled. "I swear to God nosotros sat there with our fingers crossed. We hoped the guys would make it. Nosotros wanted this to happen. We knew those who were on board and they knew u.s.a., too."

The growing strength of the hoax theory is "one of the things that happens as fourth dimension recedes and these events are lost", laments Launius. "We've seen it with the second world war and the Holocaust. A lot of the witnesses are passing from the scene and it's easy for people to deny that it took identify. Who is left to counteract things that are untrue? Mythologies develop and go the dominant theme."

Possibly the hardest thing to believe in is the thought that humans might have achieved something transcendent – something that even brought out the best in Nixon. "Because of what yous have done, the heavens take become office of man's world," he said in his phone call to Aldrin and Armstrong on the moon. "And as yous talk to the states from the Bounding main of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and repose to Globe."

We accept less faith in ourselves these days. Most moon conspiracists treat the whole thing every bit a joke, a rabbit hole to go downwards from time to time. Possibly if Nasa returns to the moon – possibly as early every bit 2024, depending on Trump's whims – it volition be replaced in time past Mars conspiracies.

Still, you could see the persistence of the moon conspiracy as a compliment to the Apollo scientists. "In a way, the moon hoaxers are taking the Apollo missions far more seriously than most people do," says Morton. "It's a sign that they really care. They call up that Apollo actually mattered." The truth is that the moon landings didn't really change life on Earth. Non even so anyway.

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/10/one-giant-lie-why-so-many-people-still-think-the-moon-landings-were-faked

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