How to fake a moon landing
August 3rd, 2007
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Or how to make people think you went to the moon, when in reality you did something far more difficult
Could NASA fake the moon landing?
Well maybe, but it seems it would be a hell of a lot harder than actually going there. Remember that at the time, the
The Soviets also had some of the best rocket engineers in the world and more experience than the 
From a technical perspective, the
With this kind of observation, it would be important to leave nothing out. A nation like the
Furthermore, there would be no problem verifying the capabilities of the Apollo craft in later years, with both the Apollo-Soyuz mission, or the lift capacity of the Saturn-5 with Skylab. (If you think Skylab was faked too, ask
In order to fulfill this scrutiny, NASA would need to design and build a fully capable capsule and launch system AND to create an unmanned means of simulating a lunar landing.
Here’s in brief some of the things they would need to do (for each lunar mission):
1. The Saturn 5 rocket takes off from cape Canaveral with no persons aboard. Instead, the astronauts are taken off site, possibly
through the “escape slide” system to a secret location to be hidden for the duration of the mission.
2. The automated systems kick in and begin playing the voice tapes as well as the data tapes which contain all the information down linked from the supposed spacecraft, doing so in perfect synchronization and without any skipping or artifacts which might clue in an observer to the situation.
3. The upper stage of the Saturn 5 and the automated space craft begin on a trajectory designed to simulate a manned mission to the moon to any optical, radar or radio direction finding equipment.
4. The controllers on the ground, who have already been rehearsing for months communicate with the unmanned capsule. They obviously cannot say the wrong thing or get their timing off before one of the astronaut transmissions, as there could be press present or there could be listeners to the earth-to-moon transmissions. Thus, if one of their comments does not match the astronauts comments, then there is trouble.
5. The fake moon capsule must now somehow fake the radio transmissions from a mission to the moon. It must be 100% automated, as control signals would give away the plot. Even if the control signals were encrypted, a Soviet eavesdropper would be able to discern there is a suspicious amount of data being exchanged between the earth and the spacecraft.
6. To fake the transmissions complete with Doppler effects, proper vector directions and signal quality, the craft must head to the moon itself OR, a series of satellite could be used, each with signals timed to the pico second or less and perfectly phased and synthesized to appear to be coming from the correct direction and being of the correct nature. This would be difficult, even with today’s technology.
7. Nasa must now figure out a way to get a laser reflector to the surface of the moon (presumably with an unmanned mission) and to place the stages of the Saturn-5 in a trajectory which either causes them to crash into the moon or to fly around the sun and return to earth orbit decades later. Because these tasks are impossible without actually sending a craft to the moon, and because faking the radio transmissions from the moon are so difficult, they would probably be best off just sending the unmanned craft to the
moon.
8. Nasa must begin playing the video tapes from the craft, which depending on the mission, will be of varying quality. However, they must get the lunar surface 100% correct in these and in later published images, as the Soviets already had this info from their probes.
9. The fully automated, video and audio tape-laden capsule must now return to the earth and burn up in the atmosphere, leaving no possibility of any of it surviving enough to discern what the nature of the capsule is.
10. The astronauts are loaded into a pre-heated pre-scorched capsule and flown to a very high altitude in a high altitude balloon, in a container made out of radar-absorbing material. Then in perfect timing with the burning up automated capsule it is released to fall into the sea, near the USS Hornet, in front of sailors and television cameras.
11. The astronauts walk out and the capsule is unloaded of it’s perfectly fakes lunar samples.
IF ANY OF THESE ACTIONS FAIL AT ALL:
The
As it turns out, just sending a couple of men to the moon is a lot easier than achieving all the listed objectives and not even once slipping up and getting caught.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Good Science, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 3rd, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Hey Drbuzz0 , I didn’t even know you had a blog! I dig your BAUT posts , now I have another great blog to read! Excellent.
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August 4th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Whoops, check the blog entry, has some coding there.
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August 4th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Good article. I’ve always thought it would be harder to fake a moon landing than actually go. I never thought about the fact that we would’ve had to fake out the Soviets too though. Thanks….
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August 4th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
That’s a good point, although it had not occurred to me before. If you consider that the USSR and USA spent most of the cold war obsessing over eachother’s missile capabilities, naturally the soviets would be interested in the moon program. They even had their own lunar program, which failed due to the problems with the N-1 rocket.
These guys were well prepared to see through any problems. You could even argue they were BETTER at space flight than the US. Do you honestly think that the apparent “evidence” of the conspiracy, such as the lack of stars would be picked up by some theorist in the 1990’s, but completely overlooked by the Soviet scientists? NOT A CHANCE!
If they had smelled a rat then you have to know they would have giggled all the way to the UN where they would PWN the US in front of the whole world.
They had the motive to disprove the moon landing, the expertise and the equipment to notice any problems.
So why didn’t they? Because we really freakin went there!
Great article!
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August 4th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
A few more things to add:
The plans for the various spacecraft are available for modern engineers to check. Many are even on the web in PDF format. It’s been verified many times over by many engineers from many countries that the designs would work.
Tens of thousands of people from many companies – and several countries (like Canada) – worked on construction of the spacecraft. You couldn’t keep ALL of them quiet if it was a hoax. So, there’s no doubt the spacecraft were built. So, why not simply fly them? At this point it’s easier than a executing a hoax.
Look at the lunar dust kicked up from the feet and wheels of astronauts walking and driving on the moon. It’s quickly obvious that they’re not only in lower gravity, but the lack of “billowing” of the dust shows that there’s no atmosphere. This wasn’t possible to reproduce convincingly with CGI in 1999, and the very idea was pure science fiction in 1969.
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August 5th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Your method of faking the missions wouldn’t be able to reproduce Apollo as it took place. The astronauts talked to the ground about current events such as scores in sports games so the conversations couldn’t be prerecorded (at least not without another major layer of complexity and ways the hoax could be uncovered).
I do agree with the conclusion though, the easiest way to “fake” the moon missions is to build big honkin’ rockets and use them to launch the astronauts to the Moon (ie do it much as NASA says it was done).
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August 5th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
That is an excellent point that I had not thought of! Perhaps they had the sports games and such fixed?
Or rather than recording the details, they may have transmitted it to the fake capsul using encrypted transmissions split onto multiple channels over the entire radio spectrum and encoded with Gaussian modulation that makes the presence of the carrier undetectable.
The system in the capsule could then reassemble the transmissions from the thousands of bursts of encrypted data, over the radio spectrum and decrypt the information…
(Or maybe they actually went to the moon)
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August 5th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
This was 1969, and any hoax would have to be planned out in the early 1960’s. This is before the first microprocessors – the computers were made with transistors, and had less processing power than your wristwatch.
I don’t believe that assembling an encrypted, spread-spectrum signal with Gaussian modulation was even remotely possible for a building full of equipment, let alone in a tiny spacecraft running with only a small fuel cell for power.
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August 5th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Who’s to say they didn’t invent time travel in order to fake the moon landing
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August 5th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Consider this:
The space program was Lyndon Johnson’s means to drag the American south into the 20th century. There were labs and centers all over the south. Rocket design in Alabama. Rocket construction in Louisiana. Launches in Florida. Solid rockets in Utah. It worked: Huntsville *Alabama* now has more engineers per capita than anywhere else in the world, thanks to the rockets being designed there.
So…. The rockets and spacecraft were designed, built, tested and launched across the south. All the people who did this were in the south. The witnesses to the launches were in the south.
Obviously the US south *IS* the hoax. It doesn’t exist. I’ve never seen it, and you can’t show me any proof that can’t be faked.
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August 15th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
LOL Obviously. Well… wait… um… I’ve been to some of the states in the south.
But then again. How do you know I’m not one of them???
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September 9th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Glamour Photography
hey cool stuff
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October 6th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
radio telescopes work
I agree.
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October 16th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Earth Satelite
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting
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February 7th, 2008 at 9:33 am
.
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August 25th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
you go into a lot of detail but don’t forget the ussr used to send the u.s the info to track their unmanned moon probes after the u.s called them liars on the first 1 but u.s did’nt give the russians any of their info?all that nasa had to do was somehow fool the radio hams which would’nt be that hard,the men went up into orbit and read from a planned script the moon landing was pre filmed easily they had simulators with the same projection of the moon as we saw and mission control had been doing full scale sims for years even with the 1202 and 1201 alarm call and talking to the naughts in the simulated lem nasa even had a giant moon ball and closer parts of the moon laid out with a track and a vehicle with the same shape window as the lem! Now put that together with the very suspect footage of the landing and the strange marionette style movments of the naughts the strange photos etc etc and the ussr had no world wide deep space tracking unlike u.s also the lem was not even ready the windows blew out on a test and there was no re design they said we took a chance and they want us to belive that thing went to the moon 6 times no problem then took off perfectly and climbed to 100miles and then docked with an orbiting craft doing 4000mph now tell me would’nt it be easier to fake the radio transmissions and i belive the hams during apollo 17 were shocked that they were using a certain fm freqencey and not till much later switched to microwaves and then when they were meant to be on the moon they could’nt pick up the low signal at all.theres to much more to say but the truth will come out soon.
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August 25th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
john grisson,
get a clue;
http://www.clavius.org/
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August 26th, 2009 at 12:27 am
I’ve come to believe there really is such a thing as American self-hatred and nowhere is it more apparent than the moon landing deniers. The U.S.A., like all great nation-empires, has some skeletons in the closet it is true. In fact most small nations have periods in their history that they are not proud of, yet it seems only in America does a sizable and vocal fraction assume the very worst of everything and anything that their country has accomplished.
While there where some things that the U.S. did in the Twentieth-Century that were not done with the purest intentions, two of their greatest accomplishments were. The first was entering and winning the Word Wars, and the second was sending men to the Moon. Yet it is these two that seem to draw down the worst of the self-loathing from Americans themselves that I see on the net. If it is not endless hand-wringing over the use of nuclear weapons in Japan, it is the outright denial of one of the most impressive engineering feats in human history.
Why is this? What do you gain by doing this? Why do you seek to undermine your own country in areas that the rest of the world generally agrees were accoplishments of your nation at its best?
These are not rhetorical questions, I would really like to know what this group of people are thinking, and why.
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August 26th, 2009 at 1:18 am
john grisson said:
Actually, I recall reading that the US did provide some tracking data to the USSR for Apollo-11 on the off chance that there was a danger of a collission with Luna 15.
Anyway, they certainly didn’t need to provide any data. The general data was all public. The dates for launch and landing were publicly disclosed. The aproximate location of the missions landing areas was known as well and much of the orbital data was in the press kit.
NASA doesn’t generally keep things seceret like the military does. Apollo was never really classified to any extent.
Even if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t matter. It’s kinda hard to miss something like the launch of a Saturn-V.
The Soviets could track US launches with extreme precision all the way to the TLI phase using radar. They had an extensive space radar system which was intended primarily for ICBM tracking and detection, but also could track any major launch.
Beyond that they also had optical tracking. They had (and the Russians still do have) a number of large military telescope complexes for this purpose. See here: http://englishrussia.com/?p=2292
And NO.. you couldn’t fake it with a satellite. Not unless that satellite was in the same place as the moon. The spacecraft were tracked by a number of stations and in all cases the signal was precisely tracked to the moon. Satellites don’t stay in one place. Even geostationary ones don’t – they just stay in the same place relative to the earth. The moon orbits at a rate and in a position unique to its orbital period and plane.
Even if somehow you could magically get a satellite to hang in the air directly between the tracking station and the moon, you’d need a real lot of them. The signal was tracked by Honeysuckle Creek, Tibitha, Carnavon and Parkes Observatory in Australia. It was also tracked in Goldstone California, Guam and on other missions in Madrid and on UK assets.
There were also dozens of semi-official and unofficial tracking efforts, many of which were sophisticated enough to measure things like the vector to the spacecraft to within a fraction of an arcsecond, the speed based on the Doppler shift, the relative signal strength etc etc. Some were hams. Some were professional communications techs and everything in between.
john grisson said:
Uh.. it would have been impossible to fake without sending a probe to the moon to do it. Different locations all had vectors pointing to the moon. You can’t do that with a low orbiting satellite.
You’re not correct about the frequencies. All the missions had a primary downlink using an S-band transmitter, or in the case of the latter missions, two S-band systems, with one dedicated for video downlinking. Apollo-17 used the RCA Lunar Television Camera. This was the best quality TV camera used during the missions. It had video quality comparable to broadcast tv but accomplished this using less bandwidth by using a field-sequential color system and specialized circuitry that made for a very effecient signal.
It had a dedicated transmitter, but it’s not easy to receive signals from the moon, especially when they’re transmitted from a portable system like that, which had a collapsible dish and a battery power supply.
The major tracking stations like Goldstone had huge high gain dishes. Goldstone had a 100 foot diameter main Apollo tracking antenna and extremely high quality amplifiers and feedhorns to pick up the signal.
One thing that I should note as far as picking up the signal by hams or other amateurs: It’s not necessarily that difficult to detect the signal – to detect the carrier and perhaps get some intermittent data off of it. However, television reception requires a very good solid signal and a low signal to noise ratio.
With a modest dish, like an amateur might build, you could quite easily tell the signal was there and perhaps even pick up a few words of the communication through the static, but you’d have a very hard time getting a TV picture.
There were some third parties with very good equipment though. For example, researchers and workers at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK independently tracked and received data from the Apollo-11 mission and some other missions. They were not an official part of the tracking network, they did it on their own time, after work, just for the fun of it.
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August 26th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
well you guys know more than me i just heard that ussr did’nt have world wide tracking at that time unlike u.s which had tracking around the globe but that aside i read an article about the russians covering up a lot of things of their own and two italian brothers who were hams tracked some of the russian missions that even nasa did’nt have the frequencies of?that aside the footage of the apollo 11 was not broadcast live only sound and a simulation from cbn was seen and yes i am old enough to remember it.but the main thing that bothers me if they truely went why is some of the footage quite clearly fake i have seen so many clips where you can see they are on wires 100% and then theres the way the lem blasts of from the surface with no sign of an engine and this has to reach an orbit of around 100miles and dock with a craft doing 4000mph it all seems a bit far fetched and hard to belive if they could do that 40years ago why have they not been back and have no plans? I recall on the day of the landings the head of the apollo project on tv saying by the end of the century we will have a man on mars.
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August 26th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
john grisson said:
They would not have needed a global network. The lunar missions were, at one time or another, detectable from almost any location. For example, Apollo-11 was received by Goldstone California and stations in Australia when it was conducting the EVA, but during the period where it was on the way to the moon and entering lunar orbit, it was tracked by Madrid. Apollo missions were also tracked by stations at Ascension Island, Madagascar, Guam and other locations. When you’re flying to the moon, you need worldwide tracking stations because the moon doesn’t stay over one area.
For their part, the Soviets had a variety of stations that could receive from spacecraft. Many were located in their own territory (remember, they were the largest single country in the world). Stations existed from Kazakhstan, through Siberia and all the way to East Germany.
They also had several mobile tracking assets including observation aircraft and ships. Here’s one of the larger ones:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/DN-SN-90-01052.JPEG
Remember, there was more than one Apollo mission that went to the moon, or at least lunar orbit. Apollo 8 and Apollo 10-17 all went to at least lunar orbit. They would have only had to detect something suspicious in one of those missions to raise a red flag.
john grisson said:
Those were the Judica-Cordiglia brothers. They did manage to receive signals from some early satellites and their tracking was better than most amateurs, but the claims of ‘phantom cosmonauts’ are exaggerated. There’s no evidence that they ever detected anything other than a stray radio signal from a teresterial source.
Some of the most dramatic claims turned out to be extreme misstranslations. One says things like “I’m burning, I’m burning” and “I will reenter” but a group of native Russian speakers were hired to reinterperate that and they heard nothing like that in the recording.
john grisson said:
The “Simulations” on the newscasts with the audio were used during the landing. There was no television for that. The television broadcast started after they had landed and deployed the S-band directional antenna.
You can listen to the whole events in the recordings. There is no video when they touch down and do their various checks. About a half hour after the landing, Neil Armstrong exists the hatch and pulls down the MESA assembly, which contained the television camera. Buzz Aldrin flips on the television circuit breaker and the video begins.
john grisson said:
You are seeing a flare of light off of the PLSS antenna.
john grisson said:
The lunar ascent engine was powered by a combination of dinitrogen tetroxide and Aerozine-50 (a combination of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine) This is a type of hypergolic rocket engine. it’s very reliable and fairly simple. The reaction does not produce a very bright or visible flame. Note here in a Titan-2 launch the flame is barely visible: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/titan/g9/images/031019titan2launch2.jpg
The Apollo lunar module had a much smaller engine and in a vacuum, it would disperse the flame faster. Plus, the moon during daylight is extremely bright. It’s hard to get the impression from the photos, because the cameras were adjusted for that, but with direct sun illumination, it was very bright. This is why the astronauts almost always had their visors down.
Between the bright light, the vacuum conditions, the engine bell and the hydrazine fuel, the flame would be nearly invisible. Yes, flames can be invisible. I’ve seen plenty of them, such as when you burn pure hydrogen. All you can see is the convection shimmer of the air. You have to just about turn out all the lights to see anything more than that.
The whole thing with launching – it’s not as difficult with no air resistance and less gravity, especially with the small and lightweight lunar ascent stage.
If they failed to get into the proper orbit or something, there was a contingency plan for this. The command module had enough reserve fuel onboard that it could go to a lower altitude or change its orbital plain by several degrees to meet the LM.
john grisson said:
Cost. National priorities. Politics.
but that aside i read an article about the russians covering up a lot of things of their own and two italian brothers who were hams tracked some of the russian missions that even nasa did’nt have the frequencies of?that aside the footage of the apollo 11 was not broadcast live only sound and a simulation from cbn was seen and yes i am old enough to remember it.but the main thing that bothers me if they truely went why is some of the footage quite clearly fake i have seen so many clips where you can see they are on wires 100% and then theres the way the lem blasts of from the surface with no sign of an engine and this has to reach an orbit of around 100miles and dock with a craft doing 4000mph it all seems a bit far fetched and hard to belive if they could do that 40years ago why have they not been back and have no plans? I recall on the day of the landings the head of the apollo project on tv saying by the end of the century we will have a man on mars.
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August 27th, 2009 at 4:35 am
DV82XL said:
I’m perplexed by the self-loathing as well as someone who has lived in the US and continues to work there frequently, I have nothing against the country, but I don’t even see why that matters. If there are those who have a political view of self-hatred of the US or all western democratic nations and everything that Caucasians and Europeans have ever done (Bruce) then that doesn’t change the facts of the matter. The US went to the moon. Get over it. It’s history. It’s fact. Even the Soviets, who didn’t generally like the US or enjoy seeing the US accomplish something big admitted it.
Look, I sure don’t like the Soviet Union or what it stood for or did, but they sent the first satellite up and put the first man in orbit and I’m not going to pretend that isn’t so. Maybe I’d rather it were the US or Canada or maybe I’d rather it were me working in my garage doing it, but that’s not so!
I sure as hell don’t like a thing about the Nazis but I have to admit they invented the first spacecraft (if you consider a sub-orbital ballistic missile to quality). That’s just the truth. They were miles ahead of the world with jet engines too. I might hate their guts, but that’s just reality. That’s just the way it is!
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August 27th, 2009 at 10:25 am
ok guys you make good sence its just if you watch some of the footage on youtube it looks so fake take a look at lunarcy:fun with apollo 201 or the apollo fairy tale or lunarcy:reach for the stars or apollo astronots get lucy and many more and all the facts and figures don’t mean a thing also re the nazi’s watch operation paperclip nasa nazi. All i can say is if they did go some of the film was faked i trust my own eyes on this as i have 20/20 vision and an open mind.
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August 27th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I am unable to reconcile these two comments:
john grisson said:
and
john grisson said:
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August 27th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
john grisson said:
Okay, against my better judgement i searched out and viewed those videos. It’s a montage of crappy music and images of various NASA simulations and training exercises, like the 1/6 G harness training, various incarnations of the Lunar Module Simulator that they tried out between 1960 and 1969, a few shots from known simulations of the landings (which were admittedly staged, such as the one CBS news made to show viewers what they were planning on doing). There are a few clips totally out of context and a few of the classic images we’ve seen “OMG WIRES” when the extended PLSS antenna flashes or the constant talk of no stars by people who don’t understand the whole concept of ambient light.
john grisson said:
Operation paperclip was a the post world-war II intelligence program to assess Nazi technology and to capture examples of useful technology along with blueprints, schematics and so on. The technical intelligence program has long since been mostly declassified. The US boxed up and carted away dozens of V-2 rockets, Me-262 jet fighters, V-1 cruise missiles, Panzer tanks etc etc. The Soviets had their own such program. Also the top German scientists were generally recruited to work on the continued development of their respective technologies. The best known would be Werner Von Braun.
This is no secret. The first rocket used by the Mercury program was the Redstone. Redstone also was modified to produce the Juno and Jupiter II rockets that carried the first US satellites. The Redstone was a scalled-up V-2 in its basic design.
The war forced both sides to come up with a lot of new technology. In the case of the allies it included microwave radar, some of the first computer systems, the atomic bomb, the nuclear reactor, numerous advances in flight control and others. In the case of the Axis powers the advances included synthetic fuel, jet engine development, rocketry and several others.
The Nazi background of Von Braun and some others who developed the rockets of the US is well known. It’s something NASA generally doesn’t like to spend a lot of time talking about, but it’s no secret.
john grisson said:
Right…
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March 27th, 2010 at 11:53 am
[...] It has been mentioned here before that the landing of Apollo-11, as well as other Apollo missions were not only monitored by the official NASA communications and telemetry stations, but also by a number of amateur and professional facilities operating in an unofficial capacity. One of the most capable of these facilities was the Jodrell Bank Observatory in North West England. Despite having one of the largest radio telescopes in the world, Jodrell Bank was not an official tracking station for NASA’s Apollo missions. Instead, the European portion of the receiving network was located at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Center. [...]
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November 4th, 2010 at 11:15 am
You really have to be stupid to believe NASA, and that is exactly what they are banking on. It would be impossible to reverse-land the LEM using rocket technology. Remember, rockets are propelling you forward–not backward. Duplicate this on earth. You can’t. The LEM obviously is not large enough to store the rocket fuel needed to blast off and rondevous with the mother ship. Shame on all of you NASA guys.
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November 4th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Dr. Smith said:
((snicker))
Rockets propel you in the direction opposite of where they are pointing. That’s why the LEM had its rockets pointing downwards, to slow it on its way down and to lift it back up again. As for the size issue – didn’t they end up having to design the landing gear to be detatchable to solve that very issue?
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