While the LRO images have been enjoyed by the scientific community as a whole, they have not done anything to convince conspiracists that the landings happened. Moon-landing conspiracists focus heavily on NASA photos. Those who believe the Moon landings were faked offer several theories about the motives of NASA and the United States government. 10. A remote Ohio facility used to test NASA's new moon-bound spacecraft has been renamed for the first astronaut to step foot on the lunar surface. The second stage of the launch rocket or the Lunar Module ascent stage or both made no visible flame. Dgh writes: "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Like Atlas Obscura and get our latest and greatest stories in your Facebook feed. Nevertheless, Opration Lune is still taken at face value by some conspiracy believers. NASAs astrophysics department plans to test high-altitude balloons in the chamber, and the U.S. Army plans to test components for unmanned aerial vehicles there, according to the IG. The Space Power Facility (SPF) at the NASA Glenn Research Center's (GRC) Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio is already the home of the world's largest thermal vacuum chamber. [166], China's second lunar probe, Chang'e 2, which was launched in 2010, can photograph the lunar surface with a resolution of up to 7m (23ft). Sibrel said that it may have been caused by indoor fans used to cool the astronauts since their spacesuit cooling systems would have been too heavy on Earth. In May 2008, JAXA reported detecting the "halo" generated by the Apollo 15 Lunar Module engine exhaust from a Terrain Camera image. One rebuttal by Sibrel to this claim is that NASA had compartmentalized all of the work on the Apollo program. 6. ", "End of Conspiracy Theories? Oberg says that belief in the hoax theories is not the fault of the conspiracists, but rather that of teachers and people (including NASA) who should provide information to the public. Because von Braun was a former SS officer (though one who had been detained by the Gestapo),[170] the documentary film Did We Go? Plum Brook Station is a test facility for NASA's Glenn Research Center. Analyses by scientists worldwide all agree that these rocks came from the Moon no published accounts in peer-reviewed scientific journals exist that dispute this claim. After Apollo 18 was canceled, the other LRV was used for spare parts for the Apollos 15 to 17 missions. NASA and ERDA constructed larger wind turbines at other sites around the country to study the integration of wind energy into the local power grids. The Gas Handling Area was removed in March 2010, followed by the High Energy Rocket Engine Research Facility (B1) and Nuclear Rocket Dynamics and Control Facility (B3) facilities in fall 2010. An episode of MythBusters in August 2008 was dedicated to the Moon landings. [38] The counter-argument generally given is that NASA in fact did incur a great deal of public humiliation and potential political opposition to the program by losing an entire crew in the Apollo 1 fire during a ground test, leading to its upper management team being questioned by Senate and House of Representatives space oversight committees. Discover the best publication that space professionals throughout the world turn to first. The photos were taken by a hyperspectral camera fitted as part of the mission's image payload. In 1961, NASA's Plum Brook Reactor Facility in Sandusy, Ohio went live, with a focus on researching nuclear-powered vehicles first airplanes, and then rockets. Parkes supposedly had the clearest video feed from the Moon, but Australian media and all other known sources ran a live feed from the United States. As a result, Lewis partnered with the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) to construct a series of experimental large horizontal axis wind turbines. Plum Brook is situated on 6,400 acres in Sandusky and is home to some of the world's most powerful space simulation chambers that support the Artemis mission to return to the moon, making this. [191][192][193] In 2009, a poll held by the United Kingdom's Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of those surveyed did not believe that men landed on the Moon. ", "Clavius: Bibliography una ronald and the coke bottle", "Clavius: Photo Analysis buzz's hot spot", "A Detailed Look at the Camera Gear Behind the Historical Apollo 11 Moon Landing", "How NASA Broadcast Neil Armstrong Live from the Moon", "Clavius: Environment radiation and the van allen belts", "Van Allen Probes Discover a New Radiation Belt", "Radiation Protection and Instrumentation", "Phenomenology of soil erosion due to rocket exhaust on the Moon and the Mauna Kea lunar test site", "Clavius: Bibliography cosmic dave's 32 questions", "Clavius: Bibliography the Collier article", "One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures", "The Search for the Apollo 11 SSTV Tapes", "The GSFC Scientific Data Storage Problem", "The Apollo 11 Telemetry Data Recordings: A Final Report", "NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it", "Apollo 11 Partial Restoration HD Video Streams", "Clavius: Technology beating the Soviets", "Women in Space Part One, Female Firsts in Flight for Space Exploration and Research", "Xerox commercial from 1972 shows the computer as your personal assistant", "Your smartphone is millions of times more powerful that all of NASA's combined computing in 1969", "What It's Like to Be a Moon Landing Conspiracist in 2019", "Comments on the Fox special on the Hoax", "NASA Apollo Mission Apollo-1 Baron Report", "Did U.S. Astronauts Really Land on the Moon", "Clavius: Bibliography the Kubrick article", "How Stanley Kubrick Faked the Apollo Moon Landings", "Faked Moon Landings and Kubrick's 'The Shining', "Moon Landings 'Fake': Shock video shows 'Stanley Kubrick' admit historic event was 'HOAX', "Apollo 15 Landing Site Spotted in Images", "Can we see Apollo hardware on the Moon? [163] The photos show the descent stage of the landers from each mission on the Moon's surface. Two of these a wind tunnel called the Hypersonic Test Facility, and the Cryogenic Components Laboratory, which is now slated for demolition have not been used in four years, the IG wrote. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (19691972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon. In terms of astronaut/cosmonaut time, the USSR had 534 hours of crewed spaceflight whereas the United States had 1,992 hours. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick is accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollos 11 and 12, presumably because he had just directed 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is partly set on the Moon and featured advanced special effects. One of the old tapes has been sent to NASA for analysis. [23] Indeed their article on space exploration describes the Apollo 11 landing as "the third historic event" of the space age, following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin's flight in 1961. Since 2012, Plum Brook Station has received about $31 million in annual funding from NASA, most of which comes from the agency's Construction and Environmental Compliance account the budget. Apollo 17 LM leaving the Moon; rocket exhaust visible only briefly, Apollo 8 launch through the first stage separation, Exhaust flame may not be visible outside the atmosphere, as in this photo. [a][15] Folklorist Linda Dgh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams' film Capricorn One (1978), which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, might have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post-Vietnam War era. By 1977 the Hare Krishna magazine Back to Godhead called the landings a hoax, claiming that, since the Sun is 150millionkm (93millionmi) away, and "according to Hindu mythology the Moon is 800,000 miles [1,300,000km] farther away than that", the Moon would be nearly 151millionkm (94millionmi) away; to travel that span in 91 hours would require a speed of more than a million miles per hour, "a patently impossible feat even by the scientists' calculations. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was lacking or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible. The radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia was able to receive the telemetry from the Moon at the time of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Its walls are 2 feet thick to withstand the blast of powerful . The mockumentary based on this idea, Dark Side of the Moon, could have fueled the conspiracy theory. NASA Glenn's Space Power Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, contains the world's largest space simulation chamber. [163] Photos of the Apollo 12 landing site were released by NASA on September 3, 2009. The Apollo 15 retroreflector was deployed on July 31, 1971, and was detected by McDonald Observatory within a few days. SELENE orbited the Moon at about 100km (62 miles) altitude. [181] The Apollo 14 astronauts deployed a retroreflector on February 5, 1971, and McDonald Observatory detected it the same day. This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This suggests that it was filmed on Earth and a breeze caused the flag to flutter. The presence of retroreflectors (mirrors used as targets for Earth-based tracking lasers) from the Laser Ranging Retroreflector Experiment (LRRR) is evidence that there were landings. The center did not bring the Rocket Systems Area sites, which had fallen into disrepair during the interim, back online. NASA responds to Bill Kaysing's book, We Never Went to the Moon, by identifying one of his claims of fraud regarding the lack of a crater left on the Moon's surface by the landing of the lunar module, and refuting it with facts about the soil and cohesive nature of the surface of the Moon. In November 2004 the Dynamics Stand (E Stand) became the first to fall. The three main theories are below. On the makeup of the Moon rocks, Kaysing asked: "Why was there never a mention of gold, silver, diamonds or other precious metals on the moon? [183], In a 1994 poll by The Washington Post, 9% of the respondents said that it was possible that astronauts did not go to the Moon and another 5% were unsure. Activities at the reactor were terminated immediately, and the other facilities would shut down by fiscal year 1974. The documentary reinvigorated the public's interest in conspiracy theories and the possibility that the Moon landings were faked, which has provoked NASA to once again defend its name. Engineers carefully deactivated the facilities in such a way that they could be restored in the future. [6], An early and influential book about the subject of a Moon-landing conspiracy, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was self-published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer with a Bachelor of Arts in English. 4. The only real success story in terms of actual customers was, and still is, the Space Power Facility. Moon-landing conspiracists claim that observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope should be able to photograph the landing sites. The 1994 book Moon Shot[76] contains an obviously fake composite photo of Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon with another astronaut. [128] Three of them were carried to the Moon on Apollos 15, 16, and 17, used by the astronauts for transportation once on the Moon, and left there. Typical delays in communication were about 0.5 seconds. [185] Officials of the Fox network said that such skepticism rose to about 20% after the February 2001 airing of their network's television special, Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, seen by about 15 million viewers. These beautiful wineries were at the center of Lake Erie's "grape belt" back when the Midwest dominated American wine production. Rep. Kaptur introduced the legislation on a bipartisan basis alongside Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH). In August 2021, the facility was renamed to honor Apollo astronaut and Ohio native Neil Armstrong. M113751661L", "Apollo Moon flags still standing, images show", "American Flags From Apollo Missions Still Standing", "The Flat-out Truth: Earth Orbits? In 1985 the Office of Management and Budget recommended that NASA relinquish control of Plum Brook Station. The first was a 100-kW experimental wind turbine at Plum Brook that Lewis researchers erected and operated. Plum Brook Station, located about 50 miles west of NASA's Glenn Research enter in Sandusky, Ohio, is home to several unique space-related test facilities, including the Space Power Facility (SPF), an environmental simulation chamber used to test hardware in a simulated space or planetary environment. 5. Proving a hoax would have been a huge propaganda win for the Soviets. In another blow for B-2, the European Space Agency apparently will not use the facility to test the upper-stage engine for the successor to its Ariane 5 rocket. Longuski argues that it would have been much easier to really land on the Moon than to generate such a huge conspiracy to fake the landings. Up to one photo per 50 seconds.[68]. Baron and his family were killed as their car was struck by a train at a train crossing. A Fraud! Jason Joey Berry, 39, of Montreal, Canada, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and import it into the United States, resulting in serious bodily injury and death. + NASA Home > Centers > Glenn Home > About Glenn > Testfacilities The criminal conspiracy involved distributing fentanyl and other similar substances from Canada and China into the United States, resulting in 15 overdoses, four of which were fatal. In northern Ohio, the glorious past of America's trains is on full display. Located on 6,400 acres in the Lake Erie community of Sandusky, Plum Brook is home to several world-class test facilities, which perform complex and innovative ground tests for the international space community. For example, he claims that, during the Apollo program, the USSR had five times more crewed hours in space than the United States, and notes that the USSR was the first to achieve many of the early milestones in space: the first artificial satellite in orbit (October 1957, Sputnik 1);[d] the first living creature in orbit (a dog named Laika, November 1957, Sputnik 2); the first man in space and in orbit (Yuri Gagarin, April 1961, Vostok 1); the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova, June 1963, Vostok 6); and the first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov in March 1965, Voskhod 2). [150], In 2002, NASA granted US$15,000 to James Oberg for a commission to write a point-by-point rebuttal of the hoax claims. Page Editor: Robert Arrighi The foremost idea is that the whole crewed landing program was a hoax from start to end. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Clipboard (Opens in new window), NASA Mars orbiter reveals Chinas Zhurong rover has not moved for months, SpaceX proceeding with Starship orbital launch attempt after static fire, Secretive military space agency stepping out of the shadows, China unveils lunar lander to put astronauts on the moon, The coming Chinese megaconstellation revolution, Crew-6 launch slips as Progress leak investigation continues. The war was one of several federal budget items with which NASA had to compete; NASA's budget peaked in 1966, and fell by 42% by 1972. Conspiracists often use this evidence to suggest that objects were "pasted" over the photographs, and hence obscure the reticle. NASA Glenn Research Center's Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, houses the world's largest, most powerful space environment simulation facilities, most powerful spacecraft acoustic test chamber, and highest capacity and most powerful spacecraft shaker system. Get top stories, military space news and more delivered to your inbox. He earned a bachelors degree in public communications from the American University in Washington. The astronauts had relied on computers to aid in the Moon missions. [124] In time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Lowry Digital had been tasked with restoring the surviving footage. WASHINGTON All but one of the five big test facilities at NASAs Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, have few or no customers, and the situation is unlikely to change any time soon, according to an April 23 report from NASAs inspector general (IG). The evidence was noticed by Misha Kreslavsky, of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and Yuri Shkuratov of the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine. All rights reserved. Much third-party evidence for the landings exists, and detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims have been made. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you . [174] Furthermore, lunar meteorites are so rare that it is unlikely that they could account for the 380kg (840lb) of Moon rocks that NASA gathered between 1969 and 1972. Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. [11], Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, have given detailed answers to conspiracists' claims on the laboratory's website. Its used for testing full-scale space hardware, including parts of rockets, Mars landers, and space stations. The lens was originally a still photo lens and needed changes to be used for motion filming. In even worse shape is Plum Brooks Combined Effects Chamber, which was designed for large-scale experiments with liquid hydrogen, but never used. Indeed, current plans for a Martian sample return would only gather about 500g (18oz) of soil,[175] and a recently proposed South Pole-Aitken basin robot mission would only gather about 1kg (2.2lb) of Moon rock. Penn Jillette made note of this in the "Conspiracy Theories" episode of his television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Dgh sees a parallel with other attitudes during the post-Watergate era, when the American public were inclined to distrust official accounts. Motivation for the United States to engage the Soviet Union in a Space Race can be traced to the then on-going Cold War. The photo of the Apollo 14 landing site also shows tracks made by an astronaut between a science experiment (ALSEP) and the lander. [20], Hoax theory debunker Phil Plait says in his 2002 book Bad Astronomy,[b] that the Soviets with their own competing Moon program, an extensive intelligence network and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data would have 'cried foul' if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing,[21] especially since their own program had failed. ), Conspiracy theorists claim that NASA faked the landings to avoid humiliation and to ensure that it continued to get funding. Moreover, the USSR did not develop a successful rocket capable of a crewed lunar mission until the 1980s their N1 rocket failed on all four launch attempts between 1969 and 1972. Using the scientific process, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. Fitted as part of the Apollo program the facility was renamed to Apollo... 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