And the Good Mr. DiCenso:2046 wrote:Funny you should ask . . .
Last weekend at a party two women claimed the moon landings were faked, noting that it's all over the internet. I was shocked, never having heard anyone actually say that in person before. Nuts on the internet are one thing, but I was in the same room with these!
I was about to ask them about their opinion of the Holocaust and 9/11, but decided it was probably best I didn't know any more of their opinions. Besides which, I didn't know all the latest moon hoax BS arguments, since I don't commonly waste my time with such drivel. I waste my time on entirely different forms of drivel. :-)
I did take great pleasure, however, in later correcting one of them when she claimed JFK was killed in 1969. I said that no, we landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, but that JFK was shot November 22, 1963. She tried to argue the JFK date but her attempt to smack me down via pulling it up on her iPhone resulted in her own crow-eating and asking how I knew that.
Needless to say, though that one-up I earned was not via an exercise in rational argumentation, I think it reverberated nicely among the listeners to the earlier moon landing conversation regarding who knew their shit and who didn't.
(Though honestly, I didn't know I remembered the dates with such specificity, but I was able to pull the info out of my ass. Apparently my ass thought she was stupid, too, and let me have the right information. Perhaps it has internet. I dunno.)
Well, their primary point was that NASA had supposedly lost the "original video". My reply was that they'd recently cleaned up the original reels and thus brought them to higher quality, which was all I knew at the time. That's when they said it was all over the internet and whatnot, at which point I said you can't believe everything you read on the internet. I was about to then ask them about the Holocaust and 9/11, but instead I simply changed the subject and they dropped it.Mike DiCenso wrote:For Moon Hoax busting, just go to BadAstronomy.com's pages for the salient issues and how to debunk them. In addition to that, there is also an excellent set of episodes of the Mythbusters and Penn and Teller's Bullshit that deal with this nonsense.
-Mike
Naturally, I researched things as soon as I could. As it happens, a special camera and transmission system (SSTV) was used to get video back from the moon. Upon reception it was put through a splitter . . . one side went to a recording device, the other side (basically) went to a monitor with a camera in front of it for conversion to TV standards, and then it was transmitted from there to the US and from the US to the world. We have the original recording of the conversion (parts of which were indeed recently remastered, as I said), but not the SSTV recording. I would argue that in both cases we have the original video, but we do not have the raw SSTV. To use that to claim the moon landings were fake is extreme horsecrap.
Considering that the only way at the time to record the raw SSTV radio transmission data by way of a radio telescope required the use of extraordinarily large and expensive tape reels that could only record 15 minutes at a time and were a hot commodity for radio telescopes anyway, the fact that these were lost is sad (since they'd be the best source from which to remaster the best-possible-quality images), but not surprising. After all, they went to the moon and returned and even the Russians acknowledged it, so the video had served its purpose. And we only recently found Apollo 11 Mission Control audio tapes featuring Gene Kranz, for example.
In any case, I did find one thing that the moon hoax nuts seem unable to answer. The Soviets would've had the capability to determine if we faked it (a large conspiracy, knowledge of our tech and if it would work, their own capacity to determine the origin of radio signals, et cetera), and would've had every reason to call us out on faking it if they could prove it. So far the 'best' claim I've seen from the hoax nuts is that the Soviets knew but decided to trade their silence for wheat deals in the 1970s, which is about the weakest possible retort in the history of conspiracy-loon retorts. It basically requires a conspiracy to beat the Russians that the Russians themselves were in on, which makes for both an excessively large conspiracy and a fundamentally retarded one.
During the Cold War, showing the half a billion who watched the moon landing that it was fake would've irrevocably damaged the name of the United States and helped to secure the Soviet Empire's dominance for decades. The world would've started referring to Washington as Hollywood, and the mistrust of the US even from our allies would've been like gold in the bank of the USSR. Our diplomatic position would've been crap, there would've been no Reagan (or if there was, this would've only solidified the Hollywood position), and with a United States that weakened I rather doubt the Empire would've collapsed yet.
The stakes were too high to fail, as the conspiracists claim, but they were also much too high to fake. Failure simply means you try again with tweaks to the infrastructure in place. But to have the fakery exposed means you have absolutely nothing to work with and, far worse, critical damage to your reputation. It is not a sane argument on that basis.