Moon Landing Hoax Belief

Apollo Participants

People involved in the Apollo program included:

• Walter Jacobi (engineer, member of Wernher von Braun’s rocket team)
• Dave Scott (Apollo 9, Apollo 15)
• Ted Saseen (Apollo spacecraft engineer)
• Jack Cherne (lunar module engineer)
• James O’Kane (Apollo spacesuit engineer)

If the landings were a hoax, all of these people, and many more, would have had to participate in the deception. If no one ever went to the Moon, then, for all these years, they have kept the greatest secret in history. Perhaps it’s possible that they could be lying, but it does not seem plausible to me, because I looked in the eyes of astronauts John Young, Gene Cernan, and others as they shared personal memories of their time on the Moon with me. Prominent Apollo engineers told me about the hard work and long hours it took to create machines capable of carrying people to the Moon and returning them safely to Earth. Mission Control flight director Gene Kranz described to me how he felt during those long missions. It is easy to accuse men of lying when they are nothing more than printed names or two-dimensional faces on television. But when you meet them and listen to their heartfelt stories firsthand, it is difficult to imagine how they could all be liars. For example, Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke told me that he left a photograph of his wife and children on the Moon. Seems like overkill if he’s just protecting a hoax. It can’t be for the money, because an Apollo astronaut could make millions by coming clean and exposing the conspiracy. Besides, why would they go so far above and beyond the call of duty to sell a scam after so many years have passed? The Cold War ended a long time ago. The Soviet Union doesn’t even exist anymore. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon are all dead. I suppose it is possible that they all lied to me as they have to the world. Perhaps all of them are great actors. And maybe every one of them found the will to keep this secret for more than forty years. But I doubt it.

Where is the crater? If you look at photographs of the lunar module (the Apollo landing vehicle) on the Moon, you will notice that there is not a deep crater beneath it. Why not? ask hoax believers. Why didn’t the lunar module, with its powerful rocket engine, blast a big crater in the lunar surface? The answer is simple: Those clever NASA engineers thought to install a throttle in the lunar module.

What happens when sprinters cross the finish line in a 100-meter race in outdoor stadiums? They slow down, right? They decrease their effort and coast a bit before stopping short of running into a wall or a fence. They certainly don’t continue running at full speed until a wall or fence stops them. Same with the lunar module. When Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan wanted to descend to the lunar surface, he throttled back for a gentle landing. He didn’t make a crater because he didn’t land with the engine at full output. He couldn’t have, because an engine at full throttle would have made landing impossible.

As with many such odd beliefs, a little knowledge can go a long way with the Moon-hoax claim. Unfortunately, most Americans know very little about the Apollo program and know even less about the efforts of the US military and NASA that preceded it. They are also mostly unfamiliar with the Soviet Union’s important and successful space program. The Soviets were very sophisticated and ahead of the United States during much of the 1960s. They almost certainly would have figured it out if the United States faked the landings, and we can be sure that they would have told the world about it. The late Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, summed it up nicely: “It would have been harder to fake it than to do it.”

Only 5 percent of Americans know how many astronauts walked on the Moon. Most think it is only one, two, or three. The vast majority of people seem to think there was just one mission, Apollo 11, presumably. But the reality is that NASA made nine voyages to the Moon. Six of those landed, and a total of twelve men walked on the surface. This raises the question of why the government would have gone to all the trouble of faking it so many times. Every new filming session on a movie set somewhere would have increased the chances of being caught.

Perhaps if Moon-hoax believers were familiar with all of the Apollo missions and understood something about the critical preliminary Mercury and Gemini work of figuring out how to launch, orbit, spacewalk, rendezvous, and live in space, they would see this in a new light. No one just announced to the world out of the blue that men were on the Moon. Thousands of people put in years of very hard work to make it happen. This was one of humankind’s finest moments, one everyone should share in.