On July 20, 1969, NASA successfully sent three men, Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins, to the Moon for its Apollo 11 mission, one of the many missions in the Apollo program. About seven years after the landings, in 1976, a man named Bill Kaysing released a book title We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, in which he claimed that the entire landing was simply a hoax. Since then, many people have read this book (or similar books) or heard about the conspiracy theory online and on television programs, causing it to become practically mainstream. Today, there are numerous arguments claiming to disprove the Moon landing, though many of these are easily disproven by even those who are not experts. Still, there remain some relatively strong arguments about the technology of the time, and some arguments about abnormalities in the photographs that require some more thought. Nonetheless, these are all incorrect.
One of the most common claims regarding the technology that was used in the mission was a figure of data published in Bill Kaysing’s book. In particular, a likelihood of success that was calculated in the late 1950s was used; the chance calculated at the time was 0.0017%. Although this number was …show more content…
The problem with this claim is that the cameras were specifically set for a short exposure so that they would not get too bright, and stars are not bright enough from the Moon to appear in pictures with very short exposures. Had they not been set like this, the image would appear to be almost completely white, making it impossible to see anything but the stars in the image. This is the same reason for why pictures of the earth taken from orbit do not have stars in the background.
One of the most common claims regarding the technology that was used in the mission was a figure of data published in Bill Kaysing’s book. In particular, a likelihood of success that was calculated in the late 1950s was used; the chance calculated at the time was 0.0017%. Although this number was …show more content…
The problem with this claim is that the cameras were specifically set for a short exposure so that they would not get too bright, and stars are not bright enough from the Moon to appear in pictures with very short exposures. Had they not been set like this, the image would appear to be almost completely white, making it impossible to see anything but the stars in the image. This is the same reason for why pictures of the earth taken from orbit do not have stars in the background.