Great Moon Landing Hoax

Did NASA actually send humans to the Moon in the 1960's? Of course, but some people claim that NASA lied about the Apollo program and faked the landings. Actually, it would have been harder to fake the whole thing than to do it! Still, many people are confused about it, so let's look at a few points of contention and clear it up.

There are no stars in lunar photographs.

This is really simple to understand. The sun was shining brightly on the surface of the moon where the astronauts were working. With no atmosphere, that's some very bright light. In order for any photographs to come out and not be overexposed, the camera had to be set for a very fast shutter speed, which would prevent the much fainter stars from showing up at all.

The American flag seems to be waving in the breeze.

Try this. Take a flag on a short pole and wave it back and forth vigorously. You'll see that it stands out and ripples, but the moment you stop waving, it settles down. This is because of Newton's laws and gravity. The flag stops waving because of the friction from our atmosphere and settles down because of our gravity. If you tried the same experiment in space, the flag would continue to wave. Well, there is no atmosphere on the moon and the gravity is 1/6 that of Earth. So, when the astronauts had to twist the flag pole back and forth to get it to go into the lunar surface, it caused a ripple affect to be seen on the flag for quite a while.

Thanks to the moon's gravity, the flag did eventually settle, as much as the second, horizontal pole would allow. In fact it dropped even further eventually. As the Lunar Module launched to rejoin the Command Module, the blast knocked the flag over.

Why aren't the shadows darker? Objects can be seen in the shadows. Since the sun is the only light source and without an atmosphere to scatter its light, those objects should not be visible.

OK, this might be a bit confusing. Even though the Sun is the only light source, that light is being reflected by many things; the astronauts' suits, the lunar Lander, Earth, and most especially the Lunar surface, itself. This creates multiple light sources.

No human could survive the Van Allen Radiation Belts, so the astronauts could not have actually gone to the moon.

On the surface, this sounds pretty reasonable. If a human being stayed inside these areas of trapped solar wind particles for any length of time, he would die. The answer is really rather simple. The astronauts were not unprotected, nor did they spend any length of time in the radiation belts, probably not much more than an hour. They did not need lead shielding to be protected, the hull of the spacecraft provided more than enough protection.