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Robert Walker

Not possible. It’s one of those things that may seem convincing if you don’t know much about it. The reasons they give for thinking it is a hoax are easily disproved, e.g. even in a city, with bright lights, do you think you’d get any stars in photos including street lights and a night sky? Not without special processing. Well the Apollo photos included not just street lights, but a bright sunlit surface of the Moon in clear sunlight brighter than any light we get on Earth naturally. Of course the photos don’t show any stars in the night sky. Well almost never - there is one photo of Venus taken from Apollo.

Venus over The Apollo 14 LM - they worked out later that that’s where Venus was in the sky, as seen from the Moon.

Similarly, the flag was jostled when they planted it - and in the light lunar gravity, suspended from a horizontal support attached to the vertical pole (yes they did plan in advance to make sure it would hang in the lunar gravity) - of course it swung back and forth for some time.

The shadows pointing in different directions are exactly what you expect from shadows on an uneven surface - again easy to check.

Then the rocks are covered in microscopic micrometeorite impact craters - and they keep answering new questions that we pose using new tools to measure things they never thought of measuring back there. Lunar regolith also contains nanophase iron in every particle of dust. There is no way we can simulate all this now, never mind with the technology they had back then. We have so called lunar soil simulants - but they are only crude approximations of the real lunar soil. By way of example, because of the nanophase iron, if you put real lunar soil into a microwave, then it melts as easily as you can boil water, because of all the nanophase iron which catches the microwaves. The simulant doesn’t do that

Also you can see the astronauts pick up a rock, put it in a bag, and then scientists examine it back here, and it matches the location they picked it up from. So it’s not robotically returned material, and the Russians only returned a fraction of a kilogram robotically.

And, what do you think was launched in the huge rockets that took off from Florida, if not the astronauts? Plenty of eye witness accounts of them. Perhaps you think they carried astronauts to secret bases on Mars? This Mitchell and Web sketch covers that amusing dichotomy:

See also my answers, and the other answers to:

which go into more details

About the Author

Robert Walker

Robert Walker

Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.
Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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Top Writer2017, 2016, and 2015
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