Exactly! My son was given his slide rule after his death. It sits in his drawer never to see the light of day again. :-)

Maybe because the Soviet Union was never anything more than a Third World country with a First World military? I visited there when it was still the Soviet Union (Good 'ol Andropov was the head cheese). I was in a hotel that was about 4 years old and the thing was ready for the wrecking ball. No matter how you slice it, sending people to the moon is an expensive and technically challenging proposition, and it was at the extreme edge, if not beyond, the capabilities of the Soviet Union.

Well, if this is right, we only have to put up with this for a couple more years.

It's called shielding. Works very well against radiation of all sorts. All spacecraft, manned and unmanned, have to use it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but are you buying? Given the financial hole the US is in, spending billions to put a person on the moon just isn't in the cards and very few other countries are rich enough to give it a go. Sweden is a wealthy country, but would you vote for Sweden to have a manned moon mission? I have good friends at NASA, and the Mars crapatola is shutting down just about everything else. Manned space flight is brutally expensive.

Aw, I want one of those things. I've seen one, and it is so interesting how they work.

I heard somewhere(I think it was my astronomy class) that there is a half-cube reflector thingy on the moon, and they used it to measure the speed of light.

Spacecraft still have to turn the electronic equipment off when passing through the Van Allen belts though. Observatories like Chandra and XMM-Newton (I can't remember which one this is true for, probably XMM) are on highly eccentric orbits, in order to minimise the time spent passing through the belts, too.

But anyway, I don't know if the whole Moon landing was a hoax or not. Reading about some of the stuff that makes people think it was, makes you wonder!

I wanna know why the hell we havn't went to Mars already. Slackers. Maybe I should change my major to astrophysics and build my own damn space ship, Hon Solo style.

I dont think manned space flight is really as expensive as it is... I think NASA has a bad reputation for being really inefficient with it's money. They get billions and dont make much progress, thats why people get pissy over it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying building a space ship is a piece of cake or anything, but damn. They've had private companies build little manned space crafts before for mere fractions of the costs that NASA spends on one that doesn't look as cool. I definatly think if we really put it back in gear and got on the ball we could be to Mars in no time, but it's sluggish.

yeah, must longer trip though. due to the orbits of mars and earth, once there we will have to stay a couple of years until earth is "close" enough for the return trip.

In my opinion, the rumor:

"Nobody really landed on the moon, it was made up"

was created by jealous people who cannot conceive the fact that NASA was the one that made it happen and not the Soviets or anybody else.

Yes... we went to the moon. There's no hard evidence for this but here's my take on it based on information at www.enterprisemission.com

Originally, a "studio" production was put together just in case an in-flight accident occurred. We were going to the moon damn-it and that was final. Cold-war politics. If something happened where we could not get to the moon then the "studio" production would have been broadacast.

We did however, get to the moon. Even though we got to the moon, did our "thing" and brought the astronauts back, things were seen on the moon that the government did not want the public to see. Aside from the various rumors about meeting aliens there, evidence was found of a previous secondary civilization that had long since been abandoned. This information was too sensitive and far too obvious to just be wantonly broadcast around the world. The government thought that this knowledge would have sent civilization into confusion and uproar. At the very least, the knowledge of this information would put us at an advantage to enemies.

So the production was choreographed as best as possible to real-time events to make the production and the real-thing as similar as possible and then the production was released live to fake a seemingly innocent moon landing when in fact it was much much more.

That's why now all of a sudden there is this renewed interest in going back to the moon. Whatever it was that we tried to hide up there we want back.

All speculation.

When it comes down it though... it's the freakin moon. So far away... there's no linux there... or oxygen. Not for me

And that makes me wonder, if your theory is correct, what the major governments of the world (that know "what" is up there, exactly) will do when private citizens start flying themselves into space on a regular basis, as they would eventually find out what was covered up and blow the whole thing wide open. Will the govts try to stop them just to protect the secret?

So far, 80.65% of the peoples who voted in this thread believe that man has landed on the Moon. This is pretty much the exactly results of Fox research 5 years ago. I still could not find anything about the Japanese expedition on the Moon. It looks like they have actually send an unmanned spacecraft over and took photos from the Moon's surface, but those images were not released to the public yet. Can anyone confirm this?

Has anyone watched the videos I've posted before? What do you think? It does show some flaws with the whole expedition, especially continuity errors when comparing the still images with the actual footage, happening at the same time. lightning is still a major issue in most of the images they've showed as well.

I've been reasearching the net for 5 days now about the Apollo missions. It's quite fun but definitely hard to find info than I thought it would

I believe Tintin and Captain Haddock were the first to land on the moon.

Personally i think that the americans can certainly have landed on the moon. Keeping a secret as big as a fake moon landing though, that's another matter all together.

The americans are the gossip queens of the world. A juicy little thing like the moon landings wouldn't stay secret for long.

At the risk of completely contradicing myself though, the american public can have any piece of rubbish shoved down their throat and believe it.
Thanks to people like Fox news 50% of americans believe there are WMD in Iraq. That's no shit, 50%. After you've been there for 3 years, searched every inch of the country and come up blank, if you still think there are WMD in Iraq you deserve to be punched in the face. That means that ~150million people need to be severly punched in the face in the US along. I would do it but my arm would get tired, meaning that some people woudn't get a face punching severe enough in relation to how big a tool they are for believing in WMD.

The point to the silly above rant is that whether they did or did not land, the american people would believe whatever their government told them to anyway.

This is even funnier than the whole movie studio theory. People really do have great imaginations.

When the American public was told that President Kennedy's challenge had been accomplished, just a few months before "the decade was out," no one questioned it at the time. It was what the nation wanted to believe.

Nearly thirty years later, though, the stunningly beautiful special effects that wowed us in Star Wars (Episode Four) are old-hat .. even a little boring. And the special effects that were used in the moon-shots are completely unbelievable.

However, let's face it, a whole lot of Americans still want to believe it, and maybe the people in a lot of other nations do, too. It's hard to admit that we are still "stuck on this planet" when we so want to dream for the stars. Maybe, all things considered, the best thing to do is to let a cherished illusion continue to do what it has done for so very long.

Let us continue to believe, then, that the technology of the 1960's could "hit the moon" not only once but half-a-dozen times; that the intense radiation that still fries sattelites today could not penetrate the paper-thin walls of an Apollo capsule. Let's not look too critically at what is reflected in the faceplate of that astronaut. Let's not bother to calculate how much oxygen the astronauts would need to consume during their "long" mission.

It does not make sense now. It's essentially provable now that it did not happen. But what is to be gained by breaking apart a cherished national illusion? Until mankind does really reach the Moon, it's all we have.

Only to loons who are willing to believe any absurd conspiracy theory.