Okay, let's start:

The Radiation Argument

Well are you denying that anybody went into space? Because based on that, nobody could have gone because there is no protection! We just had well made protection. I've heard the argument that going through the van Allen belt would be too much radiation. But this is also just stupid. There is not enough radiation there. Also, we passed through it too quickly. We were in and out fast enough. Also the metal ship would block its share of the radiation.

Extreme Heat

"The moon's surface reaches + 250 f. Film would melt at that temperature." Yep, I lot of things would be very damaged at that temperature, including humans. Do you think it was + 250 f inside the guys suits? Isn't it possible that they had specially protected cameras just like they had specially protected people? It's very simple to create protection for a camera like that.

No Dust Kicked Up Under The LEM

On the moon there is no air push things around. You have to directly apply force to things to get them to move, and so the only dust to move around would be the dust directly touched by the exhaust or dust hit by other dust. Also since there is no air, it's really tough to create clouds, although you can do it. The dust wouldn't be held up on the thick air. It just sorta falls back down to the ground. If you watch the rover drive around, clouds don't form around the wheels and in the rover's path. The dust just falls back down to the ground. And as for the crater, the rockets certainly have the ability to create a crater but when it's landing, its rockets aren't on full blast. They have to ease into the landing just like you would have to ease into any landing.

No Stars In Photographs

Well, just to start off, you can see stars when you are on the moon. In fact you can see them all day long because there is no air or atmosphere and so the sky is dark enough to see them all the time. Well, they didn't show up in pictures because of the cameras themselves. To take a picture of your craft, your crew, or the lunar landscape you would have to set the shutter speed very fast because of the extremely bright surrounding. (And all of these pictures were taken when the sun was shining very bright) The stars just to faint to see with such a bright sun and a fast shutter speed. The picture was taken too quickly to see them.

Shadows All Wrong

Well "with a single light source" this would be true, but there is more than one light source. There are three. First there is the sunlight as mentioned above, and then there is the Earth. Think about how much light is reflected from the moon down to Earth. Well, Earth is much larger and reflects light much better also. It is about 100 times brighter than the moon. Those two easily fill in the shadows, but there is also the moon itself. The surface of the moon is brightly lit and would reflect plenty of light into the shadows.

I hope if you read this, this was an adequate explanation.
renderer: I dont think I quite understand what you mean. What did it have to do with my explanation?

I would like to add two things to BigHoliday's rebuttal:

No Dust During Landing of the LEM
There is, of course, a lot of dust on the moon. There are also a lot of rocks. As BigHoliday noted, dust that makes it off the ground falls immediately back to it on the moon. In addition, in many places slightly below the surface is a layer of rock, which is what the LEM landed on.

Weird Shadows
Conspiracy theorists fail to take into account that the moon is an uneven surface, and as a result shadows are distorted. In one of the more common photographs "proving" this two astronauts are in the frame and one clearly has a much longer shadow than the other, and the highly uniform luminosity of the surface makes it difficult to resolve elevation detail.


The arguments for the moon landing being a hoax have been removed. I will summarize them here:

The Radiation Argument
People on Earth are protected from radiation in space by the ozone layer. So how did they survive leaving protection of said ozone layer for so long?

Extreme Heat
In direct sunlight, things get hot. Real hot. The surface of the moon will reach as much as 250 degrees fahrenheit. How did the cameras survive? How did anything survive?

No Dust Kicked Up Under The LEM
The lunar excursion module comes in for a landing and turns on that big thruster underneath to make it a little more gentle. It should have kicked up some dust - right?

No Stars In Photographs
On Earth, the atmosphere obscures stars (during the day, the sky is bright blue. unless it's cloudy). On the moon, then, even directly above the horizon is straight black with stars in.
At least, there should be stars in. Why aren't they in the photographs? Was NASA too lazy to make the fake really complete?

Shadows All Wrong
Look closely at the photographs. Shadows go all over the place! The only reason for shadows of two people in the same photograph to be so wildly divergent is if two photographs were spliced together with a light source being someplace different in both of them.

Seams in photographs
Look very, very closely at some photographs taken (particularly at the ground). If you look long enough, you'll find a seam where there's a break in the ground that clearly doesn't match up.
The rebuttal to this is that JPEG works like that sometimes, and that if you saw the original there would be no seams.

In addition to the arguments rebutted above, there are others which the Moon landing conspiracy theorists say gives the game away for the NASA hoaxsters.

The flapping flag:

Those believing in a NASA conspiracy claim that the film of the Apollo astronauts planting the American flag into the Moon’s surface clearly shows the flag flapping as if in the wind. There is no wind on the Moon, so this flapping must be due to the breeze in the desert, or the air conditioning in the studio, where the hoax was filmed.

Well, indeed the flag (which is supported outwards by a pole across the top, attached at right angles to the top of the vertical pole) does flap, however this is not due to any wind. As the astronauts were planting the flag in the lunar ground, they did so with a twisting motion, thus causing the “pendulum” swinging motion of the flag. On the Earth, this motion is dampened by the air in the atmosphere. However, there is no atmosphere on the Moon, and as oppose to showing the flag flapping is indicative of a hoax, it actually serves to show that the flag was in fact planted on the Moon. Since there is not air to dampen the swinging of the flag fabric, the motion continues for far longer than on the Earth, thus giving the illusion of flapping in the wind.

The use of the cameras:

Many argue that the astronauts could not have operated the cameras with their cumbersome gloved hands. Not true – the cameras were designed to be operational with the large gloves of the spacesuits used. There is also an argument that the photos are too well framed to have been taken by the astronauts’ chest-mounted cameras, with which it was not possible to look through a viewfinder. Again, this is not a good argument. The astronauts received a great deal of training in the use of the chest cameras, and were even instructed to take them home and practice using them in their everyday lives. It is far from unreasonable to say that they would have learned to frame pictures correctly.

Slowed down film:

If you speed up the film of the astronauts moonwalking (in the literal sense, rather than doing their Michael Jackson impersonations!) it, apparently, looks remarkably like they are jumping around in the normal gravity of Earth. Well, it does (kind of) look like that. However, the relationship does not work both ways. If you make a film of someone leaping around at normal speed on Earth in a similar spacesuit to that used in the Apollo missions, then slow it down, the film loses that particular weightless and “floaty” quality that is seen in the Moon landing films.

Reasons why we DID land on the Moon:

  • Thousands of NASA scientists, technicians, and engineers worked on the Apollo program. If it was a hoax then the NASA bigwigs would have had to fool the very people working on getting men to the Moon, or else, all the thousands of Apollo workers would have to have been very good at keeping secrets for the last forty years.
  • When a meteorite collides with the Moon or the Earth, tremendous heat is produced from the high energy collision. This heat is enough to melt some of the debris that is thrown out of the crater. In such situations, “Spherules” are produced. These are tiny globules of molten rock and sand that cool as they fall back to the ground. On Earth, spherules are far from spherical due to the gravity and atmosphere. However, on the Moon, niether of these factors are as significant, so spherules are almost perfectly round. The Apollo missions brought back hundreds of these spherules. Dating tests on these have shown that many are billions of years old, and therefore cannot be manmade and must be lunar in origin.
  • The most striking evidence that men landed on the Moon is still up there. I’m not talking about the flags and other paraphernalia left up there by the astronauts, although if we were to return and find it, this would be conclusive evidence. What I’m referring to in this paragraph are the laser reflectors left on the Moon, which are still used today to measure the Earth’s exact position in the Solar System. Lasers are beamed up to the locations of these reflectors and the time taken for the reflected beam to return is used to calculate the Earth’s position.
  • The Jodrell Bank radiotelescope's scientists snooped in on the astronauts' radio transmissions and monitored the actual landing of the "Eagle" lunar landing craft for their own interest. Their records still exist.
  • If NASA really wanted to fake the Moon landings, they would not have been caught out by such trivial and obvious things that are cited as evidence by the conspiracy theorists.
  • Plus, with all the effort taken to construct such an elaborate hoax, wouldn’t it have been easier just to do it for real?
With every great expedition, exploration, and discovery, there has been doubters and disbelievers. People refused (and still refuse! - see Flat Earth Society) to believe the Earth was round, and the Earth moved around the Sun. This is no different, except that in modern times such things are refuted on the basis of some sinister conspiracy, derived from circumstantial or ill-informed evidence.

Face it – we landed on the Moon!

Well...I think we did anyway!


I must credit Channel 5's excellent documentary on this issue.

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