Area 51
Kaysing claims that Area 51 is where they filmed the Apollo hoax and similarities to the desert surrounding Area 51 as well as craters near the site to the lunar landscape is evidence of that. And of course, it's off limits today because presumably the sets are still there. I wonder why that might be, considering the top secret research that is apparently being done in the area.
Astronaut deaths
The show claimed that 10 astronauts died "under mysterious circumstances" during Apollo. Mysterious apparently includes accidents in high performance jet aircraft and accidents in new untested spacecraft. Astronaut deaths: Ed Givens (car accident), Ted Freeman (T-38 crash), C. C. Williams (T-38 accident), Elliot See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 accident), Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee (Apollo 1 fire). So who are the other 2? According to the show, two other pilots were shown, but they weren't astronauts, at least by NASA standards. One was X-15 pilot Mike Adams who was the only X-15 pilot killed during the X-15 flight test program. Mike Adams, though not a NASA astronaut, had flown his X-15 above 50 miles which is considered space and technically, he could be considered an astronaut along with a number of the other X-15 pilots. The other was Robert Lawrence, a would be Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory pilot who died in a jet crash shortly after reporting for duty to that program.
Later, they claim that the Apollo 1 fire may have been a murder conspiracy to silence Gus Grissom's outspoken criticism of the Space Program. The FOX producers obviously have not researched Gus Grissom at all. He was enthusiastic about the program and very aware of the dangers of spaceflight while trying to make his spacecraft as safe as possible. His hanging a lemon on the Apollo simulators has been widely misinterpretted as disatisfaction with the entire Apollo program.
They also claim that the death of NASA worker Thomas Baron was a murder and a coverup of a 500 page report on the Apollo 1 accident. A more likely version of the story is that the man might have committed a murder/suicide in distress over the loss of the crew. It's amazing that more workers didn't do the same.
These unfounded claims of murder and conspiracy are libelous, particularly as they lack any significant evidence to support those claims.
No Blast crater under the Lunar Module
The Hoax believers claim the LM descent stage used its full thrust of 10,000 pounds at lunar landing and that it should excavate a large blast crater under the LM. At landing in the low lunar gravity (which is 1/6 of Earth's gravity), the LM only needed a throttled down to about 3,000 pounds of thrust. The blast of rocket exhaust is not nearly as large as the 10,000 pounds claimed and results in a scouring of the topmost layer of lunar soil along the ground path and under the LM. The LM had 6 foot long landing probes under 3 of the 4 footpads and when any of the probes contacted the surface, the crew shut down the engine so that the LM would fall the last few feet to the surface, so the engine was more than 6 feet above the surface at its closest. You can even see effects of the blast in some of the lunar images including any taken under the LM and one set taken on Apollo 12 which shows a disturbance along the ground path of the LM before landing. The dust is clearly visible flying out at high speed away from the LM prior to touchdown in all of the lunar landing films taken from the LM cabin windows during approach and landing. Given that the descent stage engine bell is about 5 feet across at the bottom, and that thrust of the engine at touchdown was about 3,000 pounds, that blast pressure of the rocket exhaust was only about 1 pound per square inch.
Why would we expect to find a blast crater under the LM? Does a garden hose sprayed at high pressure into the dirt create a blast crater? It certainly blows away some of the surface dirt in a radial direction and will create a small depression or hole, but not a crater in the form that the haox proponents suggest. There is even an Earthly example of a rocket landing on dirt. The DC-X was a test flight program of a vertical takeoff and landing rocket. On one of its last flights, it made an emergency landing outside of the pad area. Despite the hydrogen/oxygen engine producing a thrust of some 60,000 pounds, the engine produced a mark on the desert floor that was barely recognizable.
No dust on the LM footpads
Kaysing cites the lack of dust on the LM footpads as evidence for fakery without considering the high velocity of the dust blown away by the descent engine. That dust flew far away from the lander and very little of it settled near the LM itself. Consider the flight of a dust particle blown off at an initial velocity of 100 meters/second (a little over 220 miles per hour) and at an angle above the horizon of 10 degrees. It's horizontal initial velocity is 92.5 meters/second while its upward initial velocity is 17.4 meters/sec. In the atmosphere-less 1/6 lunar gravity, it would fly upward for 10.6 seconds before reaching its maximum height of 92 meters above the lunar surface. About 10.6 seconds later, it impacts on the lunar surface almost 2.1 kilometers away from the lunar module!
No stars in the images
As usual, this was about the first argument used by the Hoax believers to debunk the lunar landing. We see no stars in the images because the images are exposed for the bright sunlit scenes. The stars are too faint to show up on the images due to their short exposure.
Flags waving in the breeze
The flags "wave in the breeze" of an astronaut touching and manipulating the flag and flagpole. Notice in each example of the flag waving, the astronaut is still moving it or has just finished adjusting the flag. The flag wobbles for a moment as the force applied to the flag and pole damps out and then it comes to rest. There is a film from one of the liftoffs from the LM cabin which shows the flag waving in the breeze of the rocket exhaust as well (and perhaps you can see the flags move in the rocket exhaust from the rover TV cameras, but those are far away and the cameras tried to follow the ascent stage...).
The flags look as if they are waving in the breeze when not being adjusted or blown by the ascent engine thanks to a metal rod that runs along the top of the flag that holds it out as if being blown in the breeze. This is a well documented piece of equipment.
Double speed of lunar video looks like it was filmed on Earth
Well, sure, that looks good, but does it really work? Turns out that you can't accurately simulate the lunar flight of objects in a vacuum on Earth without modern computer graphics techniques. If you shoot film on Earth and slow it down by a factor of two, the 1/6 lunar gravity is not simulated properly. Imagine for example a particle of dust thrown at a 45 degree angle off of the rover tires at the speed the rover was traveling, say about 10 kilometers per hour (I haven't actually measured the ejection direction of dust off the tires, but this is a good first approximation to estimate the height of the rovers roostertails of dust). 10 kph is 6.2 mph or 9.1 ft/sec. Thrown at a 45 degree angle, the upward velocity is then 6.4 ft/sec (as is its horizontal velocity). In the 1/6 lunar gravity, it should then fly upward for 1.2 seconds to a height of 3.8 feet. It would fly outward for twice this time before landing back on the surface about 15.5 feet from its launch site. In the case of a simulated film as the hoax proponents suggest running at half speed, the same film would have the rover traveling twice as fast on Earth with full Earth gravity in effect. So the initial launch veleocity of the dust would be 12.8 ft/sec. It would fly upward for 0.4 seconds in Earth gravity (or 0.8 seconds in the slowed video) and reach a height of 2.6 feet, landing some 10.2 feet away. In other words, you can tell the difference if you actually measure the speed of the dust or thrown object.
How can an astronaut on Earth wearing a bulky simulated moonsuit run at such high speeds as you'd need them to run to simulate the lunar imagery. The highest documented running speeds on the moon were about 5.4 km/hour. That's a rate of about a 9 minute mile in a bulky suit. I haven't seen any astronauts trying to run in their suits in straight 1-g conditions.
Shadows go in wrong directions, not parallel
The hoax proponents apparently don't understand simple convergence - the disappearing point which elementary school art students learn about in order to draw roads or railroad tracks disappearing into the distance. The shadows, though parallel from overhead, look to be going in different directions from the perspective of a person on the ground. You can see the same effects here on Earth. The most used image by the hoaxers is from Apollo 14 where the Lunar Module appears in the distance to be casting a horizontal shadow while the shadows of the rocks in the foreground are angled towards the camera. However, if you look closely at the LM shadow and the LM itself, you'll see the LM partly lit - similarly to the rocks in the foreground along the same direction and you can see that the shadow is not horizontal, but is greatly foreshortened. As usual, just a casual examination of the evidence contradicts the hoaxers argument.
The lunar surface is also very undulating with hills and craters in great abundance. Shadows appear longer if they go down a slope on the sunward side of a crater or hill or appear shorter on a slope that faces into the sun. Hills and craters can also change the apparent direction of a shadow to make it look non-parallel with adjacent shadows.
Identical backgrounds in photographs from different places
The hoax proponents cite cases of finding the same exact background mountains in images taken from vastly different places around a landing site. In the case of the FOX special, they showed a picture of the LM with mountains in the background and a second image without the LM with the "exact" background mountains. The mountains in question are several miles away from the LM. Two pictures taken a few hundred feet apart can have a vastly different foreground (like LM and no LM) while having what appears to be exactly the same background. There's no mystery to that. Tucson has mountains surrounding the city and amazingly, from the University of Arizona Campus area, one can travel from one end of campus to the other and find not only very different buildings in front of you, but what appears to be the exact same mountain backdrop in the background. Apparently, the mountains around Tucson are a giant background painting if one follows the logic used by the hoax proponents.
Radiation was too high - Van Allen belts and solar storms
The hoax proponents consistently exaggerate the effects of radiation in space. Radiation was a definite concern for NASA before the first spaceflights, and they invested a great deal of research in it before flying the first astronauts into space. The most dangerous part of the journey to the moon for radiation exposure was during the passage of the spacecraft through the Van Allen belts. This is a zone from aobut 1000 kilometers up to about 20000 kilometers. The Apollo missions flew through this zone at very high speed - outbound starting around 40,000 kph and inbound at about the same speed. They spent a few hours within the Van Allen belts and estimates of the total exposure during their entire flights were about 2 rems (the equivalent of about 100 chest x-rays or about 40% of the maximum permissible dose of radiation according to OSHA standards). Doses of 100-200 rems cause a person to experience nausea several hours after exposure and fatal doses occure above about 300 rem. Solar flares were a concern as well, but typical doses due to flares that the Astronauts were exposed to were only a few rem. The crews wore dosimeters which were read back roughly daily during the flights.
Temperatures on the lunar surface were too hot
Daytime temperatures reach about 250 degrees F. Nighttime temperatures sink to a chilly -270F. The landings occured within a day or two of local sunrise so that the sun angles were low and the surface had not heated up to its full daytime levels. With no atmosphere, convection does not transport heat from object to object. Conduction of heat occures only when a hot surface is contacted and thermal radiation is the only other source of heat. Film in a camera is protected from direct sunlight except during exposures and a light colored or silver camera does not absorb heat efficiently. The lunar EVA suits were designed to withstand temperatures of +250F.
No plans to return to the moon and the Russians have never sent anyone
So if we went to the moon more than 30 years ago, why haven't we gone back, and why haven't the Russians sent anyone to the moon? Despite the apparent ease with which NASA flew 12 men to the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972, traveling to the moon was difficult, dangerous and enormously expensive. The advanced planning and preparation of the spacecraft and crews resulted in spectacularly successful missions which succeded despite the dangers and the inherent malfunctions of manmade equipment. The United States landed men on the moon while the Soviet Union failed in its attempts to build a lunar program despite its hard work. Once the U.S. succeded, the Soviets primary reason for going to the moon was eliminated and residual work dwindled. Despite the official word of the Soviet Union claiming that they were never in a race to the moon, the post-Soviet Union evidence demonstrates otherwise with lunar landing hardware and the huge N1 booster program as well as training programs for its Cosmonauts. To fly to the moon today would be nearly as difficult and probably more expensive (even accounting for inflation) than it was in the 1960s. Until there is enough motivation to do so, we are unlikely to mount any new missions to the moon in the near future.
Earth based telescopes should be able to see the Apollo equipment
A telescope's diffraction limited resolving power depends linearly on the aperture of the telescope. Groundbased telescopes also have to look through the murky and turbulant atmosphere so without corrective techniques that are just now becoming common in large telescopes (called adaptive optics), a telescopes resolution is limited by the atmosphere to about 0.5-1.0 arcseconds (3600 arcseconds are in one degree and 360 degrees around the whole sky). That limits groundbased telescopes to a resolution of about 2 kilometers on the moon. From space, a telescope is limited by its diffraction limited resolution. For the Hubble Space Telescope, that is a little less than 0.05 arcseconds or about 90 meters at the distance of the moon. To resolve the LM descent stage which is about 10 meters across, one would need to have a resolution better than 10 meters, perhaps 2-3 meters which means we need a telescope some 30 times larger than the HST in orbit around the Earth to resolve the largest equipment left on the moon.
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/
just to bring some sanity to this silly conversation...
DD
To any conspiracy theory there are always AT LEAST 2 sides 
