Were the Apollo Moon Landings Hoaxed?

In this article, I would like to show why I believe that the moon landings were not hoaxed. It is my intention to present this article with a low-pressure attitude. I have a personal interest in space and astronomy and that is the main reason that I wrote it. There are far more important issues and I accept that there will be people who will not be convinced by my reasoning. If you feel strongly that the moon landings were a hoax and are not convinced by this article then can I please ask that we disagree without being disagreeable?

I’m a Creationist and I believe that the Bible is accurate and that it can be trusted.

I believe that because I see the Bible as work of eyewitnesses and as Lee Strobel points out in his book “The Case for Christ”, there is other evidence to corroborate it as well. (Lee Strobel has videos of interviews related to the topics of his books. The videos can be viewed for free on his website). Lee Strobel investigated the life; death and resurrection of Jesus based on the eyewitness accounts and weighed up the evidenced as if it was a court case.
So I want to apply a similar approach as Lee Strobel and see if it is reasonable evidence that the moon landing occurred.
For my research I have used and recommend the following materials.

Space Race - Deborah Cadbury
Failure is not an option - Gene Kranz
The Two Sides of the Moon - David Scott and Alexi Leonov
Apollo Thirteen (formerly titled “Lost Moon”) - Jim Lovell
Soul Obsession - Nicky Cruz

Let’s take a look at the eyewitness accounts, at NASA’s supposed motive to hoax the landings (and see if it is still valid after all these years) and some of the evidence (both for and against). Your job is to sit on the jury and make up your own mind.

The witnesses

There were many witnesses who were involved in the Apollo program. There were the astronauts themselves, there were the flight controllers, the engineers, the contractors, the radio operators (who talked to or heard the astronauts), the naval personnel (who retrieved the astronauts from their capsules) and many others besides.
There were seven missions that were sent out with the intention of landing on the moon. One of the missions failed (Apollo 13), the book “Apollo 13” (formally titled “Lost Moon”) was written by Jim Lovell and in the book Jim talks about his life as a test pilot, his application for the space program and the 4 space missions that he flew. The movie “Apollo 13” is based on the failed Apollo mission that Jim was the commander of. The special edition DVD features documentaries as well as a commentary by Jim Lovell and his wife, which is interesting for what you can learn about the Apollo program. Ron Howard also has a commentary that is interesting because it portrays how difficult it was to film scenes where the action is supposed to take place in zero gravity. Howard actually used a special jet that NASA uses to train astronauts. The jet reaches high altitude and then deliberately dives toward the ground. The jet and the people onboard are effectively in freefall but experience the same sense of weightlessness that someone in orbit around the Earth would. Howard was only able to film in short burst of less than thirty seconds. (Except in the studio where the zero-g effect was mimed).
There were seven attempted moon-landing missions and six successful ones. If you count the other two missions (Apollo 8 and 10) that only orbited the moon then there were supposedly 9 NASA missions that were faked, (that is if man never went to the moon), there were 24 astronauts who flew on these missions, (there were 3 astronauts on each mission but some astronauts flew on more than one Apollo mission).
Why would someone think it was a good idea to fake between 7 and 10 missions? Why fake the landing more than once? Wouldn’t that be asking for trouble? It would be hard enough to fake the landing once let alone six times. If Apollo 13 was a hoax and the lives of the crew were never really in danger then why draw the attention of the entire world to the mission? Why would NASA cooperate with not only with the makers of the movie “Apollo 13” but also with “Capricorn 1” (the movie about a hoaxed Mars landing that portrays NASA as the bad guys)? Is it unreasonable to conclude that NASA cooperated in the making of both of those movies because they had nothing to hide?

Jim Irwin

Jim Irwin (Apollo 15) has publicly promoted his Christian beliefs. In his books, Jim Irwin professes faith in Jesus and actively endorses the accuracy of the Bible. Nicky Cruz is a former New York gang leader who was lead to the Lord by David Wilkerson (this was written about in David Wilkerson’s book “The Cross and the Switch Blade”). In his own book “Soul Obsession”, Nicky says, “Jim was one of my dearest friends, a true brother in the Lord …”. The chapter titled “From the Moon to the Ghetto” talks about the influence that Jim had on Nicky’s life. The Moon landing is presented as a fact throughout the chapter without the slightest hint that something sinister might have happened. Nicky makes it clear that he was a close friend of Jim and that they spent a lot of time together and they even went mountain climbing together.
Is Nicky Cruz part of the NASA conspiracy?
I personally accept Jim Irwin’s eyewitness account of his own moon landing and Nicky Cruz’s endorsement of his character as being good evidence that the Moon landings occurred.

The Dish

There is an Australian movie called “The Dish” that has come out about the Apollo 11 mission from the point of view of an Australian tracking station called Parkes. Parkes has a large Satellite dish that was used to communicate with the Apollo missions. Parkes was one of the tracking stations used when the Moon was on the wrong side of the Earth for America to communicate directly with the Apollo spacecraft. “The Dish” is based on real events but the characters in the movie are fictional and some of the events (such as the reception of the live television signals of Armstrong’s first step) happened at another Australian tracking station. The movie has a scene where the power goes down at Parkes, the emergency generator was not running and so the computer shut down and in those days that meant that they lost all their data (including the location of the spacecraft). You see the crew of the tracking station trying frantically to calculate where the spacecraft should be in order for them to regain contact with the spacecraft. In the end someone comes up with the idea to point the dish at the Moon and so they tried that and the result was that communication was restored. The blackout probably never took place but that highlights a question that I would like to ask. Wouldn’t it seem reasonable that the staff of Parkes would know if their Dish was pointed at the Moon or not? If the astronauts were really in some kind of movie studio then how did the guys at Parkes receive a transmission that seemed to be coming from the direction of the Moon? Are the staff members from Parkes in on NASA’s conspiracy? Perhaps NASA somehow managed to transmit the signal to the spacecraft, which in turn transmitted the signal right back again. The problem with that is that there would be a delay in response that was twice the length that it should be at any given time. Huston would have been on the wrong side of the Earth half the time, so they would have to relay the signals to transmitters on the other side of the globe and hope the links stay online. Not only that but there would still have to be spacecrafts in the right position anyway (one in Luna orbit and one on the Moon’s surface). Why would they send an empty spacecraft if they had the technology and could reach the Moon? If there was a problem with life support (as in the movie Capricorn 1) then what was that problem and why wasn’t it solved before Apollo 17?

The Motive

Let’s take a look at why NASA might be motivated to fake the Moon landings. The Apollo missions took place back in the late 60’s and early 70’s. That was during the height of the cold war, the Cuban missile crisis and the “Bay of Pigs” was fresh in people’s minds. The Soviet Union had performed a string of firsts, including the first satellite and first man in space. There was a great fear that the Soviets would control space and be able to win a nuclear war because of their advanced rockets and technology. The US was keen to beat the Russians at something and a manned Moon landing was their best hope. So if the Americans were struggling to win that race there would have been a huge incentive to fake the Moon landing to save embarrassment.
One huge problem with that idea is that NASA is not very good at covering up embarrassing facts from the ever-watching media, if you don’t believe me then read the book, “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz, or just keep an eye out for news about NASA on TV. If NASA had really faked the moon landing then why hasn’t NASA admitted it before now since every embarrassing moment of the Apollo program is now public knowledge? Many facts that NASA would find embarrassing can be read about in books like “Space Race” by non-partial authors like Deborah Cadbury of the BBC. (Unless the BBC is part of the cover-up!) Another problem with the “saving embarrassment” motive is that according to Neil Armstrong it was easier to fly the mission than it would have been to fake it (see the book “First man”). The cold war is over; the Cuban missile crisis is a faint memory, NASA no longer has a motive to hide any supposed hoax so why don’t they just come out and admit the hoax if there really was one? What about all the Apollo astronauts themselves? They no longer have their whole lives ahead of them, why hasn’t even one of them approached the scandal hungry media? (Is the media in on NASA’s cover-up as well?) Here is the ultimate problem with that motive; if NASA had the means to get to the Moon then they had an even bigger motive to go there than they did to fake it. The “saving embarrassment” motive only works if NASA could not get there and I’m yet to see any detailed hard evidence that they could not.

The Hostile Witnesses

If anyone would have a motive to expose a NASA cover up it would have been the Soviet Union. The Soviets had many secrets of their own. They kept the deaths of a few cosmonauts quiet for many years to save their own embarrassment.
The book “Space Race” tells the history of the Space program from the time that the Soviets and the Americans were racing each other to capture the German rockets and scientists up to the successful Moon landing. You get to read about the main disasters and embarrassments for both sides not just the high points. The Soviets would have loved to be able to expose the Americans if the moon landing was faked. It seems obvious to me that the Soviets would have monitored the entire US space program to the best of their ability and if there was the slightest hint that something was not right they would have loved to let the entire world know about it. That is unless the Soviet Union was in on the conspiracy. But that would not make sense, would it? Why would the Soviet Union conspire with the Americans to save the Americans from embarrassment? How is it that we can learn about the embarrassments that the Soviets had and yet somehow NASA has managed to keep their own embarrassment secret?

The evidence for - Video, Audio and Photographic Evidence

There are hundreds of Videos, pictures and audio files available for download from the NASA website. One item of special note is the Hammer and Feather video clip. David Scott was the commander of Apollo 15, the mission that Jim Irwin went on. Shortly before the leaving the surface of the Moon, David Scott held up a hammer and a feather at roughly the same height (The hammer head was a little lower than the feather). Scott dropped the hammer and the feather at the same time and the hammer hit the ground only a fraction of a second before the feather. But what impressed me the most about the experiment was the way that the feather flew, the feather did not float or swish from side to side but went straight down and bounced about three times. The video is a little blurry and the feather looks very blurry but if you watch the video carefully you can see that the object appears to be lightweight and flimsy (going by the way it flexes about in Scott’s glove). You see the full paths of the feather and hammer from Scott’s hands to the ground. (That was something that Tom Hanks did not attempt to reproduce in the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon” – The scene is cut, you see the hammer and feather start dropping then it cuts to them hitting the ground). There are also other videos of astronauts experiencing weightless/low gravity conditions. While it might be conceivable that such footage could be faked in a film studio (even back in the early 70s) it is difficult to accept that they could have done this in real time since special effect movies take a long time to make and they would have had to make many hours of simulated low gravity/zero gravity videos.

The Physical Evidence

There is positive evidence that they did land on the Moon. The astronauts brought back rocks from the Moon. The rocks are held in Museums right around the world. Geologists from around the world have examined the rocks. Moon rocks are different from Earth rocks. Admittedly it takes geologists to tell them apart from Earth rocks but the rocks show clear signs of being formed in conditions that were free of liquid water as well as oxygen and they also contain marks from micro meteors.
Are all the geologists that have viewed the rocks part of NASA’s cover-up as well? Not only do we have solid evidence on Earth but there is solid evidence that can be detected on the Moon as well. The Moon is moving away from the Earth at the tiny amount of nearly 4cm per year. To be able to measure that distance to that kind of accuracy lasers are used. The lasers are pointed at four mirrors that were left behind by four different Luna missions. Scientists would not make up a story about the Moon receding from the Earth at a rate of 4cm/year because that was not what the scientists believed before the distance could be accurately measured. Scientists believed that the Moon was in a stable orbit. See the DVD from the BBC called “The Sun/The Moon”. Are the people who operate those lasers in on the conspiracy?

The Evidence of Fraud

So what evidence is put forward to prove that the moon landings were a hoax? There is no real evidence that NASA could not put a man on the Moon. The evidence that is put forward is based people’s unfamiliarity with what it would be like to be on the Moon and a dose of suspicion as well as the power of suggestion that comes by watching movies like Capricorn 1.
There are a number of websites including NASA’s own that refute the supposed evidence of the alleged hoax and I don’t want to cover too much old ground but as an amateur photographer I would like to address few of these points.

1. Stars do not appear in the black sky of the pictures taken on the Luna surface.

NASA can supposedly do a great job of simulating every aspect of the Luna missions but someone forgot to paint the stars on the studio set. Out of all the people involved in the production, no one thought about the stars! Well here is an experiment you can try by yourself. Get out your camera go outside on a very bight day and make a note of the exposure settings that your camera would use for that exposure. This would be close to the right exposure setting for the highly reflective surface of the Moon during the Luna day. (Luna daytime lasts for nearly 15 Earth days and the astronauts were never on the surface during the Luna night) Set your camera to manual and use the same exposure settings that would have been used for bright sunlight. Now go outside on a clear moonless night point your camera at the stars (you could even try the planet Venus if you like) and take your photo. How many stars can you see in your picture? My guess is very few but most likely none if you did the experiment right.

Photo of "Crux" (The Southern Cross) 4 second exposure

Same area of the sky 1/180th second exposure

2. The cross hairs on the pictures appear to be faked because they seem to appear behind the objects that are being photographed.


Here is a second experiment you can do yourself. Get out your camera on a night where the moon is visible (A quarter Moon will do).
Place your camera on a tripod and position your camera so that a thin object like a telephone line or a thin tree branch is in front of the moon. Take a photograph with a reasonably long exposure say 1 or 2 seconds. If your photograph turns out the way I would expect then the wire will appear to be behind the Moon. Is that evidence that you did not take the photograph yourself but faked it?

The moon "eats" into a tree branch when using a long exposure


Taken with the camera in the same position but using a flash

3. The shadows point in the wrong direction.

Here is another experiment you can try. Get out your camera again and take pictures of upright poles that are spaced at regular intervals over a wide area. Use different lens settings - try using a wide-angle lens (35mm or less). Photograph the poles from various angles and distances and see whether you can get the shadows to look normal in every shot.
Now try taking a 360 panorama of the scene and joining the pictures together to make one picture. Does the result look weird or not?

4. The photographs are too good/too bad

This is a no win situation because the video and pictures of the Luna landing have been criticized for being both too poor a quality as well as too professional. As an amateur photographer I find that on the same day I can still manage to take some very poor quality shots but if I take enough shots one or two might turn out good enough to seem of reasonable standard to most people (except professionals). The astronauts were trained to use the cameras just like every other piece of equipment that they were required to use and on some occasions they got it right and on other occasions they made mistakes. Also it should be noted that there was more than one Luna mission and the quality of the cameras increased as new technology became available. From Apollo 15 through to 17 there were video cameras on the “Moon buggies” that were operated by remote control from Earth. It is also worth noting that video cameras did not have the same quality as the Haselblads that were used to take still photos.

Make your own conclusion

The disadvantage of examining something that happened in the past is that you can never be 100% certain if you were not there and did not see it for yourself. Having examined the evidenced for both the Moon landings and the life of Jesus Christ, I’m personally convinced that Neal Armstrong walked on the Moon and that Jesus is a real person who died and rose again. The difference being that Jesus is still changing people’s lives today and that is something that you can experience for yourself.

I don’t think that many people doubt that Sir Edmund Hillary made it to the top of Mount Everest or that Scott reached the South Pole but for some reason people doubt that Armstrong set foot on the Moon in spite of there being much more evidence that he did.
I have left out a number of other points put that are put forward by the people who claim that the landings were all hoaxed. These points are based mainly on the assumptions of people who have a limited understanding about Physics and what it is really like on the Moon.
Common sense is a disadvantage when it comes to making up your mind whether a photograph or video that was taken on the Moon is real or not. Suspicion and suggestion will only make matters worse.

I could add more to this article if I wanted to but I think I’ve said enough. A search of the Internet will give you more articles both for and against. Anyway there are more important issues to ponder than the Moon landing so I’ll leave it at that and let you make up your own mind.

I'll finish with a quote from Gene Cernan of Apollo 10 and 17; it comes from the ending credits of the documentary, "In the shadow of the Moon"

Truth needs no defense.

Nobody, Nobody can ever take those footsteps that I made on the surface of the Moon away from me.