by Mike Bara
Apollo hand-held photo of the Earth from the surface of the Moon.
Claim 6 – How could NASA take TV images of the LM ascending on Apollo 15, 16, and 17 if there was no one on the Lunar surface to man the camera?
Now, most of the Moon Hoax accusations are pretty dumb, but this one really has to take the cake. As you can see from the collection of images above (from two different missions) on the later Apollo missions (15-17) the astronauts left the TV camera pointed at the LM so that viewers on Earth could watch the liftoff. Initially, the camera was unable to track the ascent stage as it rose into space, but by Apollo 17, NASA had figured a way to get the camera to track upward and follow the spacecraft. All they did was calculate the time difference for radio transmissions from the Earth to the Moon and send a command for the camera to pan upward to follow Lunar Module ascent stage as it rose. So the answer to this one is also simple and obvious—the camera was remotely controlled from Earth.
Still frame captures of liftoff from the surface of the Moon.
Section Two – The Mechanical Arguments
Most of these claims come from James Collier’s book Was it only a Paper Moon?
Claim 7 – The astronauts could not have egressed and ingressed the LM because they could not fit through the hatch and there was no room to even open the hatch in the LM.
It’s hard to know just how to respond to this one beyond simply stating that it is wrong. As you can see from the artist’s concept below, the astronauts were positioned on either side of the central cockpit panel, with the main EVA door between them. There was in fact plenty of room to open the hatch. On Apollo 11, Armstrong would have been manning the left position in this view and Aldrin the right. The door was latched to Aldrin’s side, necessitating that the door be swung open inward, and effectively “trapping” Aldrin momentarily on his side of the LM. In fact, this is the main reason that Armstrong went out first. Once he was out, Aldrin was able to close the hatch, move over to Armstrong’s position, and exit the LM himself.
Diagram of LEM cockpit interior.
Buzz Aldrin exiting the LM.
As to the issue of whether the astronauts could fit through the hatch, as you can see, they must have. This is a photo taken from a film shot by Armstrong of Aldrin egressing the Lunar Module. The entire sequence is available from the NASA archives, and shows the whole procedure from start to finish, including Aldrin opening the hatch and crawling through it.
Furthermore, if it turns out that the astronauts could not fit through the hatch, this will come as quite a shock to our friend and contributor Ken Johnston, Jr. He spent many hours in the vacuum chamber at Houston, fully suited up including the backpack, crawling in and out of the full scale mockup of the LM, to test exactly that. He’ll be very upset to learn that he wasted all that sweat for nothing.
Claim 8 – The Lunar Rover was too big to fit in the LM.
Well, this is strictly true if you take the measurements of the Rover when it was fully deployed and assembled. However, the Rover came packed into a very tight little package which fit neatly into the space provided in the LM.
To deploy the Rover, all the astronauts had to do was pull on two nylon cords and the it popped right out of its berth and down to the lunar surface. As it did so, the wheels, which were folded over (as you can see in the photograph above) deployed outward and were then locked into position. The main purveyor of this claim that the Rover was too big to fit into the LM is Collier, who took his measurements by going to the Johnson Space Center (where there is a full scale mockup of the Rover in its deployed configuration) and then compared those numbers to the containment bay on the LM. Anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of engineering could have figured this one out—simply by looking at the hinges which allowed the wheels to fold out when deployed. This whole aspect of the controversy could have been avoided by a trip to the film archives which have plenty of footage from the Apollo missions showing the astronauts actually unfolding and deploying the Rover on the Moon.
Diagram of Lunar Rover stowage and deployment.
Claim 9 – The astronauts could not get from the Command module to the Lunar module with their space suits and pack on.
Again, strictly true. They never did go from the CSM to the LM and back with their packs on for one very good reason—they didn’t have to. The back packs were stored in the Lunar Module the whole time. Beyond that, they did not wear their packs at all until they actually went out on their moon walks.
As a further side note on this, Aldrin has told the story in recent years that during the process of putting on their backpacks for the first Moon walk, one of them inadvertently broke off the arming toggle switch for the ascent stage’s main engine. Had Aldrin not used a ball point pen he was carrying to flip the switch to the armed position, he and Armstrong would have been stranded and died on the lunar surface.
Claim 10 – There can’t be any pictures taken on the Moon because the film would melt in the 250° temperatures.
Any normal film exposed to 250° would indeed melt at that temperature. There are only two problems with this Moon Hoax claim—this was no ordinary off the shelf film, and it was never exposed to those kinds of temperatures in the cameras.
The 70mm film used in the Hasselblad cameras the astronauts carried was a very special transparency film designed specifically (under a NASA contract) for hostile environments like the Moon. According to Peter Vimislik at Kodak, the film would at worst begin to soften at 200° F, and would not melt until it reached at least 500° F. So, a worst case scenario of 250-280° F for a totally uninsulated, non-reflective camera would still be well within the film’s operational parameters. The film itself, in terms of its light- gathering abilities, was also quite amazing. It was a special extended range color slide film called “XRC” that allowed the astronauts to take perfect National Geographic quality pictures on the lunar surface, even though they were hardly experienced photographers. This has truly opened up whole web pages of controversy—with the Moon Hoaxers claiming that such a film simply doesn’t exist In fact, Richard Hoagland actually used many rolls of this super lunar film, back when he was advising Walter Cronkite at CBS.
In addition, the cameras were also protected inside a special case designed to keep them cool. Although it is true that in the direct, airless sunlight the temperature can reach upwards of 250° – 280° Fahrenheit because there is no air, it’s also fairly easy to keep cool for the same reason. The situation is a lot different than in your oven, for instance. With no convection or conduction, the only type of heat that is of concern on the Moon is radiative. The best way to reflect radiative heat is to wrap the object (like a camera or person) in layers designed to reflect as much heat as possible, usually by simply being colored white. Most all of the astronaut’s clothing and the camera casing were indeed white, which very efficiently directed heat away from the both the astronauts and camera film.
Claim 11 – The LM engine was very powerful. How come it did not leave a crater below the spacecraft? Why didn’t it kick up any dust when it landed?
The truth here is once again very straightforward. At all of the landing sites, the astronauts found that the lunar surface had about a two inch layer of dust. Below that was pretty much hard pan. As you can see from the image below from Apollo 11, not only is the upper layer of dust blown away in a radial pattern (as if from a thruster?) there is also a small depression below the nozzle. Since the LM descent engine only made about 3,000 pounds of thrust (compared to a modern jet fighter which makes between 18,000 and 22,000 pounds of thrust), this is pretty much as any engineer or geologist would expect things to look.
Blast pattern from Lunar Module descent engine.
And what of the charge that no dust was kicked up by the LM as it descended? Again, we’d recommend any of the fine NASA videos on the Apollo program. They show that in each and every case, the LM did indeed create a literally blinding swirl of dust blown radially outward from under the descending LM, as it grope
d its way down, balanced on its 3000-lb thrust engine, to its final lunar resting place. You simply have to be willing to find the films and watch them.
Section Three – The Radiation Arguments
Claim 12 – The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen belts and solar flares.
Actually, of all the issues put forth by the Moon Hoax advocates, this is the one that requires the most digging into. The Van Allen radiation belts are a pair of toroidal (donut-shaped) belts of high-energy electrons and ions trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. Any object leaving Earth’s orbit to visit the Moon or beyond must pass through them. The inner region is centered at about 1,865 miles above Earth and has a thickness of about 3,100 miles. The outer region is centered at about 9,300 – 12,500 miles above the surface of the Earth and has a thickness of between 3,700 – 6,200 miles. According to a document called “Radiation Plan for the Apollo Lunar Mission,”1 the radiation in the belts was of some concern to the scientists working on the problem. However, they actually considered a rogue solar flare to be a much bigger problem.
The Van Allen radiation belts.
In fact, as stated in this official government report, the scientists working on the problem of Van Allen radiation considered it to be minor compared to other design hurdles to be conquered. Protection against the radiations of the Van Allen belts was a complex problem recognized long before Apollo or even before the advent of manned space flight. Prior to 1958, scientists knew that ions and electrons could be trapped within Earth’s magnetic field. 1957 and 1958 were designated as the “International Geophysical Year”—a time in which the first artificial satellites were launched by both America and the Soviet Union for the first overall surveys of the Earth from space. The Soviet’s Sputnik and America’s Explorer I (the latter instrumented by James Van Allen) were both launched in 1957, and 1958, respectively. Explorer I carried Van Allen’s Geiger counters to observe cosmic rays, but the instruments mysteriously appeared only to work at the lower altitudes of its elliptical orbit. Explorer III followed two months later with more sophisticated instruments, and detected very high levels of radiation. Vast numbers of energetic particles were detected hitting the counters at higher altitudes, and in specific, belt shaped regions. These “belts” (which had literally saturated Explorer I’s more limited detectors, accounting for their apparent failure to detect the belts at higher altitudes) were eventually recognized as doughnut shaped regions where both protons and electrons are trapped within Earth’s magnetic field. Particles within the belts were seen to spiral around the Earth’s magnetic lines of force, therefore changing orientation continuously in relation to a moving spacecraft.
These two radiation belts have different origins and compositions. The inner belt discovered by Van Allen occupies a region above the equator, is a byproduct of high-energy cosmic radiation, and is populated by protons of energies in the 10- 100MeV (Million electron Volt) range. These can penetrate spacecraft and on prolonged exposure, damage instruments and astronauts. The outer belt is an electron-plasma trapped in the magnetosphere from the Sun’s expanding solar wind, and has energies in the 0.1–10 MeV range.
Before we proceed, it is necessary to define a few terms. A RAD or Radiation Absorbed Dose, is a unit of measurement that determines the actual absorbed amount of radiation by any given material. The material can be plastic, metal, or biological, or anything else for that matter. It does not define the degree of biological damage that can occur to the absorbing individual, since different types of radiation can cause differing levels of damage to human tissues. Rather, it is a blanket number defining total radiation exposure of all types.
The REM, or Roentgen Equivalent Man, is a unit used to derive a quantity called an equivalent dose. This relates the absorbed dose in human tissue to the effective biological damage of the radiation. Not all radiation has the same biological effect, even for the same amount of absorbed dose. To determine equivalent dose (REM), you multiply absorbed dose (rad) by a quality factor (Q) that is unique to the type of incident radiation.
There are several mitigating factors that can affect the amount of damage done to human tissue by radiation exposure. Even if a specific type of radiation is very damaging to humans, if you limit the time that a person is bombarded by that radiation, you can reduce the effect on the person’s cells. This is why fair skinned people will not get sunburned if they are only outside without a sunblock for a few minutes. If they are outside for a few hours, they can get a very painful radiation burn. Continuous exposure of this type of radiation over years can lead to skin cancers.
This time element, or exposure, must always be considered alongside the intensity and quality of the radiation a person is exposed to. As a rule, acceptable doses for high risk individuals like astronauts are expressed in RAD’s. For example, 100 RAD’s will induce vomiting, over 150 RAD’s are fatal if untreated, and a 500-rad dose is fatal even with medical treatment. Delayed effects include cancer and other genetic changes. These long-term effects can occur even when the dose rates are far below the thresholds for any prompt effects.
After years of extensive study, NASA’s solution was simple; avoid exposure to the radiation in the belts by keeping the spacecraft at low Earth orbit altitudes while in parking orbits, and then send them through the belts at high speed. The eventual escape speed, some 25,000 miles per hour, would have passed them through the belts in less than an hour, keeping their dose well below 1 RAD. There was a modicum of shielding from the equipment, but in the end this was not necessary as the transition speed kept the dose below harmful limits—both going to and returning from the Moon.
As to the issue of solar flares and the danger they presented, there simply weren’t any major flares during any of the Apollo missions. So the biggest reason that none of the astronauts died from their radiation exposure was that the actual doses, in RAD’s, that the astronauts received were quite small. NASA spent millions to develop the necessary technology to insure that the astronauts that went to the Moon were protected from the physical threats of deep space and they were monitored at all times while travelling to and from the Moon.
Claims from “Conspiracy Theory—Did we Land on the Moon?”
In 2001, Fox Television broadcast a TV special called “Conspiracy Theory—Did we Land on the Moon?” Because this program raised some additional issues we did not specifically cover yet, in the interest of closure I have decided to address them here. Make no mistake, I was so unimpressed with this laughably stupid presentation initially that I was quite willing to let the previous part of this book be my final statement on the matter. But I guess I just can’t resist.
Claim 13 – There are cross hairs on pictures taken on the Moon that appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them, where they should be.
The crosshairs, called reseau marks, were geometric indicators specifically put in the Apollo cameras by the vacuum deposition of a set of whisker-thin aluminum “crosses” on an optical glass plate, subsequently placed just in front of the film plane. The purpose of this (according to NASA) was to enable the NASA-Houston developers of the film to align multiple image panoramas vertically and horizontally, so that they might appear geometrically correct when printed.
The Fox special showed four examples of the crosshairs appearing behind objects in the pictures. One example each from Apollo 11 and 16, and two from the same frame on Apollo 12. In addition, I found another example on the Project Apollo image archive, AS16-117-18818. The four that were presented on the show are the same ones that seem to make the rounds of all the Moon Hoax sites, and I have not seen any other examples although, as I just demonstrated, it seems fairly easy to do so.
Reseau crosshair appearing behind an instrument.
Crosshair blending into astronauts’ white suit.
The argument made by the Moon Hoax advocates (primarily the late James Collier, David Percy, Bill Kaysing, “brilliant lay physicist” Ralph
Rene, and the late Dr. Brian O’Leary) is that these obscured reseau marks “prove” that the photos taken on the Moon are faked. They imply that the marks were added after the photos were taken to make it appear that they were taken on the moon but that NASA screwed up some of these fake reseau marks.
It’s hard to follow this convoluted logic. If NASA were faking these pictures in a movie studio at Area 51, as Fox and Kaysing alleged, why wouldn’t they simply have used cameras with the same aluminized, pre-marked plates in them that were used on the real Apollo cameras? Wouldn’t that be easier than painstakingly adding the marks one by one by hand to every single Apollo hand held photograph? And if the pictures were all faked, why add the marks at all? Wouldn’t it be easier to just avoid the whole hassle by skipping the reseau marks completely?
Now, in fairness, some of the Hoax crowd has claimed that these apparent retouches aren’t truly just stupid mistakes by NASA after all, but a deliberate code. They claimed (without evidence) that certain “patriotic Americans” working in the NASA photo lab and outraged by the huge hoax being perpetuated by Apollo, deliberately made “little mistakes” in placing the crosses on some photographs. The purported purpose was to telegraph the fact that the whole Moon program was as fake as the photographs themselves. As ingenious as this explanation might appear to some, there is a far simpler and more likely solution.
For one thing, in all the pictures presented, the marks are obscured by white areas of the pictures. Be they the white stripes of the American flag, the white covering of a scientific instrument, or an astronauts’ spacesuit. Anyone who has ever developed color film will tell you that white tends to bleed a bit into other colors, and given that the crosshairs are only few thousands of an inch across, it’s easy to assume that this is the explanation. As far as I know, none of the Moon Hoax advocates has ever actually examined the negatives of these frames, either. Certainly, if the blotting out of the crosshairs is an anomaly of the printing process, then the negatives should probably have the full reseau marks visible and we will have our explanation. It is also probable that the highly reflective white surfaces just got slightly overexposed in some photographs, simply blotting out the razor thin marks.