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Men on the Moon as a Matter of Fact
By Phil Plait
Special to Space Illustrated Magazine
I wasn’t surprised when the Fox television network aired a program earlier this year alleging that NASA faked the Apollo Moon missions that took place from 1968 to 1972. This particular conspiracy theory has been around as long as the Apollo program itself, but has had its life breathed anew thanks to this absurd television show.
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| Astronomer Phil Plait of Sonoma Statu University authors the website badastronomy.com. |
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The conspiracy theorists say they have proof for their beliefs. But their claims reveal tremendous ignorance of science, from the basic principles of photography to geology and physics. For example, the first bit of "proof" usually offered by the conspiracy theorists is the lack of stars in the Apollo images. It’s true: nearly every picture taken from lunar orbit and from the Moon's surface shows a jet-black sky, completely devoid of stars. If the Moon has no air, the doubters say, the sky should be filled with stars!
That’s just plain wrong. On the lunar surface the astronauts' cameras were loaded with low-speed film (Ektachrome 64 for color and Panatomic X for black and white) and set to expose for bright sunlight—that is, for a fraction of a second. Even the brightest stars—which are 10,000 times fainter than the full Moon looks from Earth and 10 billion times fainter than the Sun—would require exposures of many seconds. That would have drastically overexposed any scenes of the astronauts, their lander and the Moon itself. A properly exposed photo made on the day side of the Moon—just like one taken here on Earth of a brightly lit playing field at night—wouldn't record any stars.
Furthermore, the astronauts did take some pictures that show stars. On Apollo 16, for example, John Young used a small ultraviolet telescope, placed in the shadow of the lunar module, to photograph distant stars and galaxies. And on several Apollo missions the orbiting command module pilots, while flying over the Moon's night side, photographed the stars and the faint solar corona, using ultrahigh-speed film and long exposures.
The conspiracy theorists look at the hours and hours of video transmissions sent back from the Moon, much of it in color and of very good clarity, and see in it evidence of fakery. Actually, it’s that very footage which proves men did walk on the Moon. When the astronauts’ booted feet hit the surface, the loose lunar soil sprayed up. In the vacuum environment, the dust particles act like little cannonballs, following a ballistic trajectory— perfect parabolas that take them up and directly back down. If this had been faked in a Nevada film studio, as the conspiracy theorists claim, the extremely fine-grain dust would have billowed up, supported by the Earth’s thick atmosphere. Ironically, even though the Moon’s gravity is only one-sixth that of the Earth, the dust falls faster because there is no air to keep it aloft. Therefore, the only way this footage could have been taken was in a low gravity vacuum environment. For comparison, the 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey is Hollywood's best portrayal of spaceflight on film made during the Apollo era -- but it doesn't come close to portraying the visual characteristics of a Moonwalk accurately.
But if you want to see the best evidence that humans went to the Moon, go to any museum that has a Moon rock on display (the best exhibit is at Space Center Houston, located next to NASA's Johnson Space Center). A total of 840 pounds of rocks and dust were brought back by the astronauts. The thousands of scientists around the world who have studied the Apollo samples agree: They could not have come from Earth.
Unlike Earth rocks, the lunar samples are totally devoid of water, even within their crystal structures. Their chemical compositions, in particular the ratio of iron and manganese, set them apart from any of Earth’s native rocks. They are extraordinarily ancient, some almost as old as the solar system. Perhaps, most importantly, their surfaces show the effects of bombardment by high-speed micrometeorites and subatomic particles from the solar wind—neither of which can affect terrestrial rocks because our atmosphere screens them out. These so-called "zap pits" would have also been wiped out had the rocks fallen to Earth as lunar meteorites; the tremendous heat generated by their high-velocity passage through our atmosphere would have erased any such surface features. The Apollo samples must have been brought back from the Moon—and indeed they were hand-delivered.
The rest of the conspiracy theorists' claims—dozens of them—are just as easily debunked. Solid explanations are somewhat rarer on the Internet than the cries of the conspiracy theorists, but they can be found. And yet, with all this (and more) evidence against it, the conspiracy theory is flourishing. When I reviewed the Fox program on my own Web site, I received hundreds of thousands of hits from people who had seen the show—many accusing me of being part of the conspiracy, others grateful that someone had taken this problem on. I even got an e-mail from Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke thanking me for my efforts.
Some good may yet come of this. Clearly, this issue has touched many people, and it certainly has them thinking about space travel in general, and the Moon landings in particular. Hopefully, people who might be swayed by the skeptics will do a little research and learn the real story behind the Apollo missions. When they do, they’ll find out that the "Moon hoax" has no more substance than the vacuum of space.
