And that is transparently not the case. So while the market value of the 1981 Apple, with its 5 Meg hard drive, would be less than a penny if mass-produced today, computers people buy in 2009 are many many thousand times more expensive than a penny because they are many many thousand times more sophisticated. The same would necessarily hold for a future moon mission, which will inevitably lead to the bill being vastly more expensive, even in real dollars.

Even if you could somehow get to the moon for $2 B (highly highly doubtful), why would Russia or China or anyone else go…today? Joking aside, I’m pretty sure there is no fountain of youth there. Why on earth…or the moon…would you expect such countries to incur such costs just to land a human on a barren rock that the US achieved several decades ago? Clearly, when Russia and China indicate an interest in the moon, they intend to do something much more meaningful and groundbreaking than “just” land a man there, which the US did in 1969, and thus the Chinese or Russian effort would be even more costly. Probably Russia or China wants to not only land a human on the moon, but also have him spend several days there, maybe stop for a burger and beer in the Hooters on the moon, where the chicks are still voluptuous but there isn’t much atmosphere.

Finally, to the conspiracy – you are right that the net of a conspiracy can sometimes be wide, and the CIA example is a good one. I’m sure the CIA has engaged in dubious behavior that is unknown to the masses, behaviors of which many CIA staffers are aware. For example, you mentioned the suspicious acts at Area 51; if I had to guess I’d say the “aliens” that were famously, grainly autopsied on Fox (narrated by Riker), were probably humans, perhaps even US military guinea pigs, who were exposed to a nuclear blast to determine whether a pilot could carry out his mission after such exposure. If so, there might be quite a few people who knew about it, and so the net would be relatively wider than any proposed Trig switcheroo conspiracy, for example.

But you are overlooking an absolutely essential difference between Area 51/the CIA and the moon landing – the net of a conspiracy can be cast wider when all participants have skin in the game. Everyone in the CIA/Area 51 has their careers – and possibly, their status as free citizens – tied to the keeping of the secret. When that condition holds, you can certainly sustain a somewhat wider conspiracy.

But the “skin in the game” condition clearly fails in regard to the Apollo program. What did the French astronomer have to gain by saying “I aimed my super-duper telescope at the spot where the moon rover is supposed to be, and there is nothing?” Surely he, or the British guy, or the German guy, would be motivated to tell the truth if the thing were a fraud, which is a vastly different case from the CIA/Area 51 example. Similarly, all the amateur astronomers training their backyard telescopes on the returning Apollo capsules, what did they have to gain by hiding the fact that there was nothing out there? Did any of them have skin in the game?

Finally, there are even some cases where suspicious events are not followed up by the masses – but simply because not enough people care (which frankly described the Trig birth story, and will do so more and more as time passes). However, even that couldn’t possibly describe the motivated German astronomer saying “Ach! Where is that rover!”

It just couldn’t possibly happen that way.

2) How can you argue against the fact that there is interest in “returning” to the moon? Why would Russia and China both be trying to get to the moon for the last 20 years and plan manned moon missions, but they won’t be able to get there any sooner than 2020?!?

3) So what the tapes don’t exist. The moon landing was only the most important accomplishment of the 20th century. I can see where they taped over ALL 200+ tapes of the mission.

Regarding your point towards isolation being key to conspiracies, the CIA is a massive group of people, who are sworn to secrecy, up to a point that not even their own family members know they work for the CIA. What goes on at Area 51 in Nevada? There’s a lot of people that work there and have done work there, nobody’s talking are they? How many people have spilled the beans about that place? No one, so it’s not really THAT difficult to keep secrets when there’s a place people are so curious about, but nobody that’s ever been inside that base has ever talked about what goes on in there.

P-thread, I read your link, Russian space programs were pretty much abandoned after the US moon landing, and then completely defunct around 1975. Also the article says that Russians were never anywhere near being able to get a man near the moon. Which is my point. How can a program that is ahead of the United States in every space advancement get passed so seemingly easily?

If there wasn’t such a strong motive for the US to fake the moon landing, it might be harder to argue this point, but NASA was on it’s way to being defunded and ultimately becoming defunct because it not only failed repeatedly in launches and every damn monkey they sent to space died during or shortly after the flight that it was clear they weren’t getting it done. Scientists openly stated that we wouldn’t get to the moon in our lifetimes (in the 60s). NASA started faking this stuff to continue getting funded. Another motive is that Kennedy guaranteed we’d land on the moon before the end of the 60s, we’re stuck in a crap war in Vietnam, nationalism is at an all time low. This was the galvanizing moment that re-instilled nationilstic pride in the country. Our slain hero, JFK, realized the promise he had made, America beat the Rooskies to the moon. USA!!! USA!!! USA!!!!

I couldn’t have scripted it better myself.

As an example, this critical criteria is what makes the proposed Trig birther conspiracy so elegant. While the Trig switcheroo “may” have worked in a small town that the Palin family dominated, it wasn’t obvious that it would work, especially given the many complexities of, and potential outsiders involved in, a Down Syndrome birth, so the conspiracy – if true – explains Palin’s silence until after the fact much better than the official story does.

However, the 6 fmoon landings fail the containability test about as miserably as any commonly-held conspiracy. When NASA trotted out the moon rover on its last three “faked” moon landings, do you think there was some possibility that a hostile Brit at the Limey Intergalactic Observatory or a hostile Frenchman at the Fromage Planetarium or a hostile German at the Krauthammer Institute for the Study of Space would want to know the coordinates so they could see for themselves? How was the silence of such folks bought?

Or even back to Apollo 13: when that disaster was hurtling back to earth, didn’t every amateur in his backyard point his telescope at the sky to watch the dangerous return of that vessel? How did NASA buy all of their silence all these years?

IOW, while there is no doubt that things are often not what they seem, in order for conspiracy to work, you have to believe that the secret can be kept. There aren’t many proposed secrets that would be more impossible to keep than the six successful, and one failed, missions in the Apollo program.

1) Cost. Sandy argues that in today’s dollars, a moon mission would cost something like $2 B, which is a pittance to Richard Branson. That seems about right…if the mission is using 1969’s technology. Could Richard Branson even find the infrastructure to support 1969-era technology to take a shot at the moon? Get some guy in Houston to fire up an old Intel 8088 and give it a go?

Obviously, any individual or country, even an undeveloped Third World country, wouldn’t take a shot at the moon without 2009 technology. That would be maybe 100 times more costly than the 1969 effort, or, say, $200 B, or about 1/10th of the cost of Iraq, which (at least) in the eyes of the folks who get their civics lessons from Glenn Beck’s chalkboard, is a fight for the future of freedom in the USA. No one has 1/10th as grandiose notions about landing a man on the moon.

2) Space, the final frontier. Its interesting that Sandy repeatedly pushes the notion that manned moon missions are so obviously valuable that its incomprehensible that no one picked up the ball after the seven Apollo missions. In your most recent post you compared the Apollo program to the discovery of the New World, which prompted a thought.

Like many of you, I used to think it somewhat bizarre that Ponce de Leon really thought there was a fountain of youth in Florida, a place so magical as to be worthy of emptying the exchequer in pursuit. In de Leon’s defense, when you visit Florida, it does seem fountain-of-youth-ish, without knowing better, you might think the place had some magical properties.

By contrast, the moon seems like…a big rock. Yes, it synthesizes water in somewhat unusual ways, but then hydrogen and oxygen have an affinity for each other, as humans have known on plain old earth for centuries. We’ve been sending unmanned missions to the moon for nearly 50 years, is there a Fountain of Youth there that demands another human visit? I never thought so, but after Sandy’s post 33, I’m starting to have my doubts.

3) Those missing tapes. The smokingest smoking gun for the conspirators, and no doubt it looks bad. Does the disappearance of those tapes mean the thing was staged? Well, the invaluable Wikipedia reminded me of something that I had forgotten, which bears on this question: Apollo 13 wasn’t the last mission in the program….there were four more.

Given the choice between: a) the tapes were erased to maintain the myth that the moon landing was real, or b) the tapes were erased because there was either 1) some malfeasance in Apollo 13 or 2) the things that went wrong in Apollo 13 were much more dangerous than anyone realized, and with 4 more missions in the can, NASA wanted to cover that fact up, explanation b) is surely the better one.

Remember before Richard Feynman started sniffing around the space shuttle program, the official word from NASA was that the space shuttle was “safer than passenger air travel”, and then Feynman came along and said that defects in the O-rings made the risk of tragedy something like 1 in 35? The Wikipedia page does a pretty good job describing the risks, the cover-up, and how NASA made it seem like the O-ring system was safe…when they knew it wasn’t.

With Apollo 14-17 still to come, isn’t the erasing of the tapes far more likely explained as NASA – who would return to this well with Challenger – covering up the underreported dangers of the Apollo program? That is a much much better, Nixonian and Watergate-esque, explanation for the missing tapes than the wilder belief that the whole thing never actually happened.

First of all your Pyramid comparison to the moon landing hoax is totally ludicrous since you can buy a plane ticket to prove the pyramids are there, or were built or whatever it is that you’re comparing. The Luxor in Vegas is an improvement on that ancient design a 1000 times more modern and advanced, in terms of efficiency and practicality, which defeats your premise that nobody else built a pyramid since those of ancient history.

A more appropriate comparison would be to say that landing on the moon in the 60s would be like Christopher Columbo “discovering” America or Magellan discovering the Phillipines and then nobody in the civilized world really giving a damn about it. What happened after these pioneers landed on previously undiscovered new worlds way back when? Did everyone just sit on their asses and say well that was cool, there’s just a bunch of goof balls in loin clothes over there, so why bother? It would be the same thing today with space exploration. Landing on the moon 4 times and saying, “we’ve seen it forget about it” is completely ludicrous. The fact that NASA still sends landers to the moon and bombs the moon to observe whethere there is water there all the way in 2009 shows that there is still much to explore and investigate.

Jazz, I have thought about the APOLLO 13 film and the events they are based on, and previously considered those exact points. An interesting thing I saw in an interview with the director, Ron Howard, about the movie was that they had nothing to work off of, because there is no existing video or audio of the crisis to work from. It was all erased. To me that’s pretty interesting, and that interview was done before it came out that NASA doesn’t have any existing video from the Apollo 11 mission either.

P-Thread, I acknowledged that the US passed Russia when the US became the first to send men to orbit the moon. No person has EVER orbited the moon, other than Americans. That’s the ONLY time the US passed Russia in space exploration at that time in history. As I previously stated Russia put the first satellite in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first space station, first dog in space, etc. So, even if the US put the first man in orbit of the moon, how far ahead of Russia is could that possibly be? A couple years? It’s been 40 years, and Russia still hasn’t done it. There’s a reason they, and every other country, cannot put a man near the moon.

With regards to how expensive it is to go to the moon, the United States did it in 1969 for 335 million, which would be 1.75 billion in todays dollars. There’s a lot of Americans with enough money to go to the moon with that type of overhaed, forget about China and Russia who are set to go there no sooner than 2020 (two thousand twenty). So please stop with the “it’s so expensive” nonsense, it wasn’t. We spent that much money fighting the Iraq war THIS WEEK.

I think one could probably make an effective argument for that position, although I think a stronger argument could be made for the late 70s. I also think that, as far as things that we did go (because in reality most of the reason for the collapse was internal rot, not anything we did) Afghanistan probably played a larger role. And Carter started us down that path, not Reagan.

Surely when Kennedy announces in 1961 that we will reach the moon by decade’s end, he as a politician is partially motivated by the personal benefit of such theater. Had he lived, I’m sure Kennedy would have pushed hard for the moon landing to be moved forward a year, for roughly the same reason that Obama went to Copenhagen the first time in 2009…what a way to finish a brilliant 8-year presidency…

The 60s are an interesting decade, technology-wise. When that decade began, there were no more than a handful of mainframes in a few government locations. When it ended, many institutions of decent size had some sort of server technology. When the decade began, those few computer systems couldn’t talk to one another, and when it ended, ARPANET was packet switching, the precursor to the internet.

A very impressive decade of technological advances. On the geopolitical front, when the decade began, the Soviets had just gotten the bomb and the Red Menace was huge, losing the Cold War seemed a real possibility. Though pthread may disagree, according to my Russian History prof (full disclosure: just a class! Not a major!), by 1970 the Cold War was pretty much over, as the technological gap between the US/West and Soviet Union was simply too great to be overcome. The Soviets still had the command economy and guns and tanks to win lots of battles, but the war was basically lost.

To what should we credit the amazing technological advances of the 1960s? Many reasons, and others are smarter on this than I, but if this were like the Family Feud, and the top 5 answers were on the board, one must surely be the Apollo Program. In addition to the bread and circuses for retiring Presidents, countries seek the moon in order to kick start technological development (and leave their frenemies in the dust).

(Its true that a two-bit dictator like Kim Jong-Il may wish to go to the moon to flex his machismo for the world, but that goal can be achieved much more cheaply by firing a primitive nuke into the South China Sea.)

Thus the insight: if you listen to futurists talk about who is going to dominate the 21st century, China is the prime candidate, with the rest of the BRIC countries in second place. China gets first dibs because its economy is the most developed of the four.

However, three of those four countries have their eye on the moon. The prediction here is: whichever one is serious, and lands a human on the moon in a high-tech, ultramodern fashion, will reap the salutary technological side benefits such that that country rules the century. Just a bit of investment advice for a Wednesday morning…

This is going even further off topic than this thread already has, but this meme is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Reagan’s actions played only a small part in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in reality if Reagan hadn’t existed it’s not unreasonable to suppose that things would have turned out similar (barring any butterfly effect type discussion).

Not that you seem married to that position (you did say, “it is said” and indeed it is said).

Your GNP argument is a good one that I hadn’t considered though.

I have a reason to believe the moon landing was real. My father was retired from the Air Force and worked on the project as a civilian programming trajectory computers. I believe the stories he told me of the project. Instead of telling me stories that were lies I believe he would have told me nothing at all.

Suppose that the moon program was all a conspiracy. This would mean that the moon launch occured on a sound stage in New Mexico (against a fake backdrop), then the media went back to worrying about Vietnam or whatever for a couple of days, then NASA alerted them again that the Eagle was about to land on the moon, happened on the same sound stage, then the media went back to Vietnam again, then a few days later the astronauts “landed” in a lake outside the sound stage.

At a very minimum, the conspirators would have heavily resisted any media coverage of the trip itself, since, there was no trip itself.

Given all this, how can we reconcile ourselves to “Houston, we have a problem”? It wasn’t a problem on landing, or liftoff, or one of the staged moments of the trip, it was a problem as Apollo was nearing the moon.

It was a problem that required any number of MacGyver-esque solutions over the next three days, all of which were documented in the movie Apollo 13, and none of which could possibly have been planned by conspirators. Think Richard Feynman and the O-Rings on the Shuttle disaster of 1986. It simply beggars belief to think that conspirators would have purposefully subjected themselves to that kind of scrutiny if it were all fake.

Such a plan would have to be pretty insane. Not saying that you are insane for believing it, I suspect that you haven’t really considered the Apollo 13 implausibility for the conspiracy, preferring to focus on broad themes like “what Russia would have done”, rather than the more germane particulars that make a conspiracy damn near impossible to have pulled off – or planned in such a manner.

Its true that man made it to the moon with extremely primitive technology in 1969. I wasn’t alive then, but my sense is that the thrill of reaching the moon was so great that the polity was willing to give it a try with 1969-era technology, and if that included something like a 40% or so chance of death, that was okay given the grandeur of the prize.

Compare that with any space shuttle mission, which always has dozens of people inspecting thousands of pictures of the launch, to ensure the craft is still intact. Two of the 127 space shuttle missions ended in disaster, which is 2 too many for a lot of Americans. As I perceive it, a 2/127 chance of disaster for a moon mission was a risk substantially everyone was willing to take.

So in a strange way technology makes the effort more difficult, as it raises the bar and expectations. All you need to convince yourself regarding the moon mission was that we had enough technology to give it a shot, even a dangerous shot, and we certainly did have enough for that.

You also suggested that other countries would have tried by now, which misreads another aspect of technology: other countries are not going to spend the billions on a moon mission until they can do it in a first-class, first-rate way. See Olympics, Beijing for an example of such developing world pride. Can China get to the moon in a 1989-era technological effort? Sure. Would they spend billions on such an effort? Not a chance.

This is why you are a wing nut.

I could go on at length about the reasons we passed them, from specific issues with infighting over design issues with the N1 rocket to the fact that innovation was stifled in the Soviet Union by the hyper-specialization of their engineers. I have a degree in Russian history, this isn’t some arbitrary BS that I’m pulling out of my ass. The idea that the Russians were ahead of us until the moon landing is patently false.

you must not have ever been to Las Vegas.

As long as you are willing to ignore the myriad number of logical, reasonable, and non-conspiratorial reasons why moon landings didn’t become regular occurences, I am going to continue calling you an idiot.

BTW, the first country to get an unmanned vehicle to the moon, the first country to send a satellite into space, and the first country to have a human orbit the earth, is planning to land a human on the moon in 2025. That means we didn’t just beat Russia to the moon we completely blew them out. I mean the country that was ahead of us in all space advancements, we beat to the moon by almost 60 years. That doesn’t really have the ring of truth to it does it, P-thread?

The US started to pass the Soviets in the mid sixties, with Apollo 8 being the first manned orbit of the moon, something the Soviets were trying for at the same time. You can read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Moonshot

You still haven’t responded to the fact that you can see all of our moon trash still up there.