by
Morgan Reynolds

Originally published August 4, 2012 on LewRockwell.com

At 12:31 a.m. central time August 6 NASA will bless us with its latest extravaganza, a multi-billion-dollar, decade-long effort to launch a six-wheel rover dubbed ‘Curiosity’ on the red planet 154 million miles from home. Reading the newspaper one morning, I was amused to learn about the Rube Goldberg “braking” system invented to control landing on Mars. A huge parachute is supposed to slow the craft despite an atmosphere only one percent of the earth’s, followed by freefall, then eight rocket engines ignite and lurch the craft out of the path of the trailing parachute somehow previously jettisoned, followed by a second freefall episode beginning at 66 feet altitude followed by a ‘sky crane’ lowering the rover as it unfurls its wheels, capped off by pyrotechnic charges that send blades to cut the nylon tethers. Oh my.

The rationale for this dubious landing system? “In theory, the rockets could provide a gentle enough landing to finish the job. But in practice, they would kick up such a dust storm that it could ruin the rover.” Ah yes, I agree the inevitable dust storm would be a big problem. Engineers must design around that. But why wasn’t a dust storm a formidable problem on July 20, 1969, the occasion of man’s “greatest technological achievement,” landing a man on the moon and returning him safely via Apollo 11? The moon is plenty dusty too.

Dust, or lack of same, is one of many puzzles about the Apollo missions NASA showed us over four decades ago: how the heck could there be no surface disturbance below the lunar module (LM), no crater blown out by the LM’s rocket engine? All six moon landings NASA “conducted” (Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17) showed the same ‘no hole’ below the LM. No disturbance whatever (notice no stars in the background too?). If we trust the NASA-generated “real time” broadcast, Neil Armstrong called the surface “fine and powdery” and continued: “Okay. The descent engine did not leave a crater of any size. It has about one foot clearance on the ground. We’re essentially on a very level place here.”

Click on image to enlarge. Source: NASA

How fortunate. And impossible, well, impossible if the landing was real. There was no dust on the LM support legs or leg pads either and no sign the engine nacelle or ground below it was burned, singed or melted. How could that happen? A 10,000 lb. thrust engine, even if throttled back to 3,000 lb. must blow out a crater, down to bedrock for heaven’s sake, making a landing treacherous because of virtually zero visibility and unknown terrain exposed. The motor would generate heat of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and even if throttled back to, say, 3,000 d.F., only 1,300-2,400 d.F. is required to melt and fuse rock. None of what we expect happened.

Despite a rocket descent engine allegedly working hard a few feet below Armstrong and Aldrin, incredibly, and I do mean incredibly, Apollo 11’s moon landing was remarkably quiet beneath the voices of astronauts and Houston control. It should have been loud as all-get-out, around 140 dB. The engine displayed admirable noise-vibration-harshness properties too, setting off no shake, rattle and roll aboard the flimsy craft, no heat problem, in fact, no problems of any kind. Oddly, Armstrong did not hover like a helicopter pilot does during landing, despite the difficulty of controlling an LM in a vacuum versus earth atmosphere. It was the first time anyone had landed a LM yet reverse thrust control went flawlessly, like everything else with Apollo. By contrast, Armstrong was nearly killed when he could not control the LM simulator on earth in May 1968 but for a timely ejection.

Abundant evidence proves NASA never pulled off the moon landings back in the slide-rule days of the 1960s. The biggest obstacle remains the lethal radiation unprotected astronauts must encounter above low earth orbit from three sources: the Van Allen radiation belts, galactic cosmic rays, and solar particle events, aka sun flares. Radiation makes manned deep space travel impossible to this day. Dr. James Van Allen, credited with discovery of the radiation belts, knew it full well and in 1970 courageously supported U.S. Senator William Proxmire (D, WI) and three other Senators in their attempt to eliminate NASA’s manned space flight program.¹

Neil Armstrong could have said, “One small step for man, one giant leap of faith for mankind,” injecting a note of honesty into this governmental swindle. The moon fraud will bite the dust eventually, of that there is no doubt, if only because it failed to sprinkle enough moon dust out from under the Lunar Module as well as into our eyes.

1. Mary Bennett and David S. Percy, Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle Blowers, 1999, pp. 310-11.

    

   ADDENDUM: I received an unusually large number of emails in response to the Moon Dust article; here is a rather lengthy but interesting sample:

   Email 1:

   PLEASE READ: David McGowan’s Website CENTER FOR AN INFORMED AMERICA “Wagging the Moon Doggie”

   And all of his writings and books.

   http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/

   Morgan’s reply:

   I already have!  Well, all of his wag the moondoggie and Laurel Canyon stuff anyway.  Excellent.

    

   Email 2:

   You write ‘But why wasn’t a dust storm a formidable problem on July

   20, 1969, the occasion of man’s “greatest technological achievement,”

   landing a man on the moon and returning him safely via Apollo 11? The

   moon is plenty dusty too.’

    

   As I’m sure others have pointed out by now, moon dust doesn’t hang

   around in the air after being stirred up, because there isn’t any air

   there.

    

   You also write “There was no dust on the LM support legs or leg pads

   either and no sign the engine nacelle or ground below it was burned,

   singed or melted. How could that happen? A 10,000 lb. thrust engine,

   even if throttled back to 3,000 lb. must blow out a crater, down to

   bedrock for heaven’s sake, making a landing treacherous because of

   virtually zero visibility and unknown terrain exposed. The motor would

   generate heat of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and even if throttled back

   to, say, 3,000 d.F., only 1,300-2,400 d.F. is required to melt and

   fuse rock. None of what we expect happened.”

    

   The exhaust is much cooler and more diffuse than that away from the

   motor, because it expands so much in a vacuum. The only terrain that

   would have experienced that would have been right around the landing,

   and then only for the final fraction of a second of descent before the

   motor cut out on touch down. That would not have heated it enough to

   melt it or similar (heat and temperature aren’t the same thing), and

   any dust raised there would have settled very nearby, very quickly.

    

   “Despite a rocket descent engine allegedly working hard a few feet

   below Armstrong and Aldrin, incredibly, and I do mean incredibly,

   Apollo 11’s moon landing was remarkably quiet beneath the voices of

   astronauts and Houston control. It should have been loud as

   all-get-out, around 140 dB. The engine displayed admirable

   noise-vibration-harshness properties too, setting off no shake, rattle

   and roll aboard the flimsy craft …”

    

   There wasn’t enough sound conduction for that, and likewise rockets

   don’t vibrate much in those conditions, without supersonic mixing and

   resonance from a surrounding atmosphere and so on.

    

   “Oddly, Armstrong did not hover like a helicopter pilot does during

   landing …”.

    

   That’s not how helicopters are usually landed; it’s more dangerous and

   takes more power than the preferred method because of a

   height/speed/reserve power tradeoff that gives rise to something known

   in the trade as a “dead man’s curve” (google it) – hovering like that

   would take them into a danger zone on the wrong side of the curve.

   They usually come in at a steep angle, slowing down as they go until

   stopping on touch down. Apart from the angle, that’s just what the

   lunar landers did, too, and for a similar reason of needing to stay on

   the safe side of a performance curve (though that curve is produced by

   a different physical process than in a helicopter); the ideal with

   those is to reach zero fuel, altitude and rate of descent all at the

   same instant.

    

   Morgan’s Reply #1:

   Baloney.

    

   Morgan’s Reply #2 an hour later:

   Great to hear about those kinder, gentler rocket engines and perfect landing

   in the first attempt by reverse thrust enabled by all the “can do”

   engineering from the U.S. government and its fab contractors.  You driving

   an American car instead of Japanese or German?  Great to hear from all NASA

   believers, libertarians at that, who buy into Big Bro big time.  No third

   party evidence necessary, just NASA-produced photos, NASA produced-videos

   and NASA employees testifying to their own greatness.  Not my cup of tea.

    

   Email 3:

   I’ve read your article “Moon Dust, Rocket Engines, and NASA“ with great interest. I do however have one question. Why didn’t the Soviets scream blue murder if the moon landing was so obviously faked?

    

   Morgan’s Reply:

   Short answer: I don’t know.  But agreed, the Soviets did not blow the whistle.

   Possibilities:

   1. “Best of enemies” charade.  The space race, militarization, national security state, etc., like the war on Islam, was mostly fake.  Note the alternating space achievements, like a ballet.

   2. Too many skeletons in Soviet closet, including the Soviet space program, you tell on me and I’ll tell on you, mutual black mail deterrence.

   3. We’ll wait for others to rat out the USA or let time do it for us. We’d sound like sore losers today.   We’d have to present extensive evidence and the world is too impatient and stupid to pay attention for long anyway.  Besides, we are hardly the most reputable presenters.

   Maybe you can imagine other reasons but those above provide a good start.

    

   Email 4:

   You might find the following link entertaining:

   http://davesweb.cnchost.com/Apollo1.html

   Prior to the moon landings, I had read a lengthy description of walking/running on the moon by Robert A. Heinlein in his juvenile SF novel “Have Space Suit – Will Travel”.  When I saw the moon walk, I said that looks nothing like what Heinlein described. It’s kind of hard to simulate 1/6 gravity in a movie studio located on earth. And does anyone really believe that Rube Goldberg contraption AKA the Lunar Module could land and take off from the moon? BTW, great article, and I’m sure you’ll get a lot of flack from the usual morons who believe whatever the government tells them.

    

   Morgan’s Reply:

   Thanks for the link.  I’ve read all his ‘Wag the Moondoggie’ articles as well

   as Laurel Canyon.  Great stuff.

   On 1/6 moon gravity, it may really be 2/3 of earth’s.  See Pari Spolter’s

   book “Gravitational Force of the Sun” on Amazon.com.  It would mean Newton

   was wrong about the role of mass in gravity.  Bennett and Percy mention some

   “anomalous” issues with moon gravity in their book but offer no details.

   This is a fascinating issue still unresolved for me.

   Further, there has been satisfactory proof that the moon walk “low gravity”

   stuff was staged, including “Peter Pan” wires, and shown at 60% speed to

   simulate 1/6 gravity.  One faux pas there was the 6″ jump (by Aldrin?) when

   calculations imply astronots should have been able to jump two meters in 1/6

   gravity!?

    

   Email 5:

   How do you explain the visible US Flags and equipment on the moon?

   http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012-07-31/flags-moon-apollo/56613308/1

    

   Morgan’s Reply:

   Source is NAZA.  That looks authentic to you?  A black oblong dot?  Looks photoshopped to me.  I want to cross-examine these guys under oath (penalty of perjury).  I would destroy them.  Manipulation, inauthentic, chain of custody, you name it.

   Email 5 Again

   Sorry heres the pix.

   Morgan’s Second Reply:

   You believe these pixels are flags?  REALLY!  I don’t see it.  Besides, look at the source: NASA = Never A Straight Answer.

   Not credible.  I want to get these guys under oath, cross examine, chain of custody, evidence of manipulation, etc.  Too many lies precede these photos.

    

   Email 6:

   Hi, I just wanted to respond to the article on the NASA moon landings. I am not a highly educated person but I have made a number of observations on this problem over the years and would like to voice them here.

   Questions:

   1. Is our moon (or any other celestial object,stars,planets,etc.) a real place, or perhaps just a projected image like in a planetarium? If the projected image is true then this discussion is over.

   2. If the moon is a real place is it possible to go there? How would it be done? If it’s not possible to go there why not? Detailed expiation please.

   3. If we did not go to the moon then are a all of the satellites,space stations, and other orbiting junk that I have seen on dark nights illusions also?

   4. I specifically want to know why the dust that the astronauts kicked up as they hopped around fell right down to the (alleged) lunar surface just as Galileo proved with his experiments which were not believed in his time. How was this faked?

   I don’t know about others but I contend that faking the moon landings would have been as difficult as actually going there. Now whether or not it is moral or worth it to use tax money to accomplish these ends I will leave to others. Also, in this post I will not go into how rocket engines operate in a vacuum and did not leave an observable crater.

   In conclusion I do believe that there are many conspiracies both in government and in private but I don’t believe this is one of them. I hope that that the Mars landing is successful.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   1. Did man observe the moon in the heavens since time immemorial, long before planetarium technology was available, you allege but fail to demonstrate, to project such an image?  Yes.  Are there ocean tides on earth caused by gravitational interactions, including that of the moon?  Yes.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide  The moon exists.  The universe (“everything”) extends far beyond our little if blessed planet.

   2. Safe manned travel to the moon and back is impossible with present technology because of deadly radiation.  Unmanned craft, yes, possible and proven.  No nation but the USA has even claimed to have attempted manned travel beyond low earth orbit.  The USA’s advantage is in Hollywood fakery, not superior 1960s bravery, engineering or any of that other propaganda about the inherent goodness and superiority of the USA.

   3. Things in low earth orbit enjoy much of the protection (Van Allen belts and atmosphere) from radiation we do on earth.  Orbits are mostly below 250 miles altitude.  There are radiation problems suffered aboard the International Space Station (ISS) because the astronauts stay up in the range of 210-250 miles for 2-3 months.  GPS coordinate satellites, on the other hand, are in medium earth orbit orbiting some 12,000+  miles up http://www.kowoma.de/en/gps/orbits.htm.

   4. I don’t understand what you are asking here but maybe this works: the moon’s gravitational field insures that its dust falls to the surface, just like any other large body’s gravity does.

   Yes, best for you to avoid presenting your argument for how a rocket engine in a vacuum does not leave a crater.  I suggest you study the moon landing further before concluding that Apollo was not a conspiracy.

   Email 7:

   I don’t know much about dust or LMs (landing modules), but I do know quite a bit about photography. In 1967, I bought my first camera, a well used Kodak Pony 135 for $12. It had adjustable aperture and shutter speeds, but no light meter. At 13 years of age, I couldn’t afford a meter. But when shooting in direct sunlight, you don’t need a meter. Photographers use the “Sunny Sixteen” rule to set the exposure in daylight.

    

   Set the aperture to f:16, and the shutter speed to the reciprocal of the ISO sensitivity of the film or sensor.

    

   What’s that mean? “F Stops” are fractions. Let’s say the diameter of the lens opening is 25mm, and the focal length of the lens is 100mm.  100/25=4. An f stop again, is a fraction. It’s the focal length of the lens, divided by the diameter of the aperture. So, when the focal length is 100mm, and the aperture opening is 25mm, the f stop is f/4. “F” over 4, or “F” divided by 4.

    

   If the aperture opening diameter is 1/16 the focal length, the aperture is now f/16. This is why the f stop number you see on a lens gets larger as the physical aperture gets smaller. It’s because the number you see marked on the lens is the denominator of a fraction. The focal length in the numerator. F stops allow a photographer to change lenses from one focal length to another and keep the same exposure. As long as the ratio between focal length and aperture diameter remains the same, the exposure remains the same.

    

   Film and digital sensors are rated for sensitivity to light by their ISO rating. So, lets say you’re shooting with your digital camera set to ISO 125. What does that mean? The camera manufacturer tested the sensor, or, back in the good old days, Fuji, Kodak, Ilford and others tested their film emulsions by setting the camera’s lens to f/16 and then made several exposures over a range of shutter speeds, while pointing the camera at a “grey card”, a surface that reflects 18% of the light shone on it’s surface, and the resulting image that fell smack in the middle of a scale from white to black (in other words, it looked the same as the original grey card) was used as the reference, the rest discarded.

    

   If that reference image was shot at 1/125 of a second, that’s the reciprocal of 125, and so that film emulsion or digital sensor is rated at ISO 125. If the reference image was shot at 1/400 second, the ISO rating would be ISO 400.

    

   So, for the photographer without a light meter but under a sunny sky, he can set his camera for perfect exposure simply by setting the aperture to f/16 and the shutter speed to the reciprocal of the ISO of the film or digital sensor. He can then change the aperture, but he must make reciprocal changes to either the shutter speed or the ISO, or both, to maintain correct exposure.

    

   What happens when you do that? If there happens to be a grey card in the image, it will appear to be the same density in the film as it appears in reality. Caucasian flesh tones will typically be a bit brighter than the surface of the grey card, in other words, they will be properly exposed. Negroid flesh tones will be a bit darker than the grey of the grey card, in other words, properly exposed. In fact, everything in the scene that’s directly illuminated by the sun will appear as it should; properly exposed. You don’t need a meter, since the output of the sun is virtually constant.

    

   Were you standing on the surface of Mercury, you couldn’t use the sunny sixteen rule to get perfect exposures, because, since Mercury is significantly closer to the sun than the Earth is, you would need less exposure for a perfect photograph, in other words, you’d need to compensate for the increased light from the sun falling on your subject. But the Moon’s distance from the Sun is virtually identical to that of the Earth, so no compensation is required. The light falling on each square inch of the Earth is the same as on each square inch of the Moon. Sunny Sixteen works on the Moon.

    

   Why am I telling you this? If you have a camera with adjustable apertures and shutter speeds, next time there’s a clear night in Alabama, set the aperture to f/16 and the shutter speed to the reciprocal of the ISO of the film or digital sensor. Point the camera up at the night sky with the beautiful stars shining and take a photo. Wait 12 hours and take another photo aiming the camera at the same point in the sky and keeping the same exposure. If it’s a sunny day with a blue sky, and if the sun doesn’t happen to be in the frame, the second image will be all blue, correctly exposed. And also, in the second image, you won’t see any stars.

    

   What do you see in the first image, the one you made 12 hours earlier?

    

   Nothing. The image is black. But you could see stars when you were standing out there taking the photo! What happened?

    

   Light from distant stars, while it starts out close to the same intensity as that of our sun, is spread out over a much larger area due to the distance from Earth to those distant stars, compared with the Sun. The difference is huge, many orders of magnitude. Those stars are still bright enough for us to see, and we can set a camera to expose them properly so that their images can be seen in photographs. But the exposure must be far greater to capture the image on the film or sensor.

    

   When I was 15 years old in the summer of 1969, I knew quite a bit about the upcoming moon landing. I lived and breathed photography, and it was quite exciting to anticipate seeing those images that the astronauts would bring back. I’d read in various magazines about the camera the astronauts would be using, Hasselblad 500EL single lens reflexes, slightly modified for use in space with bulky space-suit gloves. And I knew that the astronauts wouldn’t be bringing light meters to the moon. I knew that they wouldn’t need them. They would be using the Sunny Sixteen rule to set the exposure. Of course, I never gave a second thought to whether or not stars would be visible in the photos they took of each other and the surface of the moon. Just as stars aren’t visible in the photo you took of the daytime sky down in Alabama, they can’t possibly be visible in a photo shot on the Moon, when the camera is set to properly expose the surface of the sunlit Moon; Sunny Sixteen.

    

   If NASA had released photos showing properly exposed astronauts walking on what they “claimed” to be the surface of the Moon, and if those photos showed stars in the sky, every photographer on Earth would have either rolled on the floor laughing, or would have immediately (if they were working pros) gone to their editors and screamed “FRAUD!” They may have had to explain to their editors exactly why they believed (actually knew as absolute fact) that NASA was attempting to perpetrate a fraud, but once they had, virtually every newspaper on planet Earth would have had “FRAUD” or something equivalent as the headline on the front page. And if stars should have been in the photos that NASA actually did release, the same headlines would have appeared. In either case, the attempted fraud would have been a far bigger story than the Moon landing.

    

   There were no such stories. Only people who don’t understand the basics of photographic exposure believe the claims of people like Morgan Reynolds. These days, the rest of us roll on the floor.

    

   I’m less of an expert on the noise from rocket engines. But I do know with a high degree of certainty that there is no such thing as sound in a vacuum. Our ear drums move as a result of changes in air pressure. Sound waves are rhythmic changes in air pressure. Without air, there’s no change in air pressure, and therefore there is no sound. So, there is simply no way for the vibrations from rocket motors to be transmitted as sound to the microphones inside the astronaut’s helmets. It’s another absurd claim.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   From earth we can see stars at night and we can photograph them too, agreed.  We don’t see stars during daytime from earth nor can we photograph them during daylight because our atmosphere diffuses sunlight and makes our sky “blue,” thereby obstructing our view of stars (so-called Rayleigh scattering http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/sky_blue.html ).  By contrast, with no atmosphere on the moon, just as throughout space there is no atmospheric obstruction, the “sky” is “black” and poses no atmospheric interference to seeing stars far more brightly and far more of them than we can see from earth.  On the moon you would just turn your back or your camera away from the glare of the sun and you would see (or photograph) the stars in all their brilliance.   So Peter is wrong about “no stars” despite his photographic knowledge.

    

   NASA has remained silent about the issue of stars for good reason.  It was probably a mistake to have astronots “declare, many times, that the stars were invisible…Some Shuttle astronauts are having to repeat the same inconsistent stories, for to acknowledge the presence of stars in space would be to jeopardise the very fabric of the Apollo mythos” (Bennett and Percy, Dark Moon, p. 53).

    

   You might review Jack White’s studies of Apollo photos http://www.aulis.com/jackstudies_index1.html

    

   About sound, I agree that such waves do not occur in a vacuum but the LM would have had an internal atmosphere to sustain human life and the descent and ascent engines were integral parts of the LM.  Sound waves from a screaming LM rocket motor would be transmitted within the craft’s atmosphere.  The rocket engines probably would have shaken the flimsy craft (a piece of junk) apart via NVH = noise vibration harshness, though I did not and need not argue that proposition.

    

   Btw, in the article I conceded that the LM engine had a throttle but it is not in evidence and others have argued that it did not, which would make the alleged moon landings all the more impossible.  The LM ascent, descent and Command and Service Module (CSM) had the same alleged hypergolic motor (ignition when fuel meets oxidizer).

   Email 8:

   Your LRC <http://www.lewrockwell.com/&gt;  article titled “Moon Dust, Rocket Engines, and NASA” <http://lewrockwell.com/reynolds/reynolds23.1.html&gt;  is the most disgusting and inaccurate article I have ever seen appear on the LRC web site. As a retired Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineer who has worked on many different spacecraft missions, I must  say that I am appalled and disgusted that LRC would permit someone as scientifically ignorant as yourself to write an article about spacecraft for publication. It undermines my faith in the truth and accuracy of all the other articles on LRC. If Lew Rockwell will allow a scientifically illiterate economist to write an article about science, it calls into question the qualifications and veracity of all the other authors on LRC. Did it ever occur to your pea brain to ask one of the NASA or JPL Public Affairs Offices to explain the supposed anomalies you don’t understand because of your scientific ignorance? Is Wikipedia the extent of your scientific knowledge? Did you bother to spend a few minutes searching for articles explaining the things you do not understand and debunking your supposed “anomalies”?  Your implication that the moon landings were faked is ludicrous, and is something I never would have expected to see on an otherwise knowledgeable and respectable website like LRC.

    

   As a libertarian, I believe that taxpayer money should not be used to fund things like wars of aggression or space exploration (although I personally think space exploration is a very worthy goal and have gladly contributed some of my own money to it in the past). My paycheck came from the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH), but knowing that most of the money destined for JPL originated with taxpayers like myself did trouble my conscience during my years at NASA/JPL; however, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the stench emanating from your feculent pile of words on LRC. Until now, LRC has been one of my favorite websites to visit, but that is no longer true because of the garbage LRC has allowed you to publish on their website.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   I appreciate your passion but you have failed to cite or demonstrate a specific scientific error or inaccuracy in my article.  I would go about correcting it if I were convinced there is an error.

    

   Btw, discussion and debate of the Apollo missions or any (scientific or engineering) issue should not be confined to experts (popular definition: a guy from out of town).

   Email 9:

   You might want to check out:

    

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

    

   This experiment proves that we landed on the Moon.

    

   In 1970, I entered grad school in Astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz,

   the headquarters of Lick Observatory.  Faculty there related that when the first retroreflector

   results with the 120 inch telescope came in, the times were wrong.  “The telescope is in the

   wrong place.”  They then realized that someone had entered the usual coordinates for Lick

   Observatory, which were for the 36 inch refractor, the first major telescope there.

    

   With respect to dust on the Moon vs. Mars.  Dust in a ~0 barr atmosphere on the Moon

   will have a very different trajectory than dust in a .006 barr atmosphere on Mars.  The

   Apollo Lunar Lander dust will travel far whereas Mars dust will be slowed by atmospheric

   drag and not travel anywhere near as far.  The distance will also depend on the dust size,

   with smaller particles being more strongly effected by the drag.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   It does?

   1. Unmanned methods exist to deposit equipment on the moon and it is asserted “by an unmanned Soviet rover carrying a French-built reflector.” http://physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/apollo/basics.html

   2. It’s hard to find “any mention of this LR(3) making up part of the scientific instruments flown on this mission (14) in the many sources to which we have referred is hard, and explicit reference to its deployment on site by the astronauts even harder.” p. 328 Dark Moon.

   3. Bouncing laser ranging off the moon needs no LR retroreflectors and occurred before Apollo.

   The first successful tests were carried out in 1962 when a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology&gt;  succeeded in observing reflected laser pulses using a laser with a millisecond pulse length. Similar measurements were obtained later the same year by a Soviet team at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory using a Q-switched <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-switched&gt;  ruby laser <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_laser&gt; .[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment#cite_note-0&gt;

   Email 10:

   I love when I see people exposing the absurdity of the official moon landing

   story. Thanks for the humorous read, for I laughed. There will be many others

   I send it to who will laugh as well.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   Thanks.  I am getting a lot of negative emails, surprisingly, by “libertarian” believers in Never A Straight Answer so it’s nice to hear from a satisfied reader.

   Email 10 Again:

   Oh, I have a group who will laugh and laugh with this read, with delight.

   And yes, I posted your article on Facebook and have stirred a bit if a

   hornets nest with some. I must say though, the majority who have listed thus

   far have stated they always felt there was something suspect with these moon

   landings.

   I have a cousin who is a retired engineer from Boeing. He will be absolutely

   delighted at the boldness if your article. I know of nobody more willing to

   call the moon landings to be outright fraud than he does. He will bookmark

   your article and hail you.

   Email 11:

   I read your article on Lew Rockwell. Things in space are very different from

   earth and your intuition can fail you. There is a good reason there wasn’t a

   giant crater on the Moon under the LM. The decent engine had a very large

   expansion ratio which made its exhaust pressure very low. On the order or 1 or

   2 psi. Also being in a nearly perfect vacuum the exhaust gases rush out in all

   directions and don’t look like what you see in videos of rocket launches in

   our atmosphere. Look at this video from SpaceX. Once the rocket is above most

   of the atmosphere you can hardly see the exhaust and this engine is about

   100,000 lbf of thrust.

   The reason we can’t use this for Mars is mass. We don’t have a rocket large

   enough to put a large powered lander on Mars.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   Amazing to hear from so many apologists for Never A Straight Answer on a libertarian website.  Big Government is the grand lovely the left says it was after all.  Bow down and adore man’s greatest technological achievement as attested to by…government photos, government videos, and government employees.

   Nice to hear about those kinder, gentler rocket engines that NAZA engineered in the slide rule days too.  Your evidence?  None.  The vacuum vs. earth’s atmosphere diffuses that thrust into gentle rain drops too.  SpaceX exhaust (plume) as seen from where?  Via NAZA manipulated video?  No thanks.  Give me a credible independent source.

   Lander “curiosity” is a claimed six-wheeled one ton rover.  That’s not large?  What is large?  Nothing about Apollo can withstand critical scrutiny.

   Email 12:

   To this day, we use the laser reflectors placed by the Apollo missions to measure the exact distance to the Moon. YOU KNOW THIS.

    

    

   Quite apart from the amateur radio operators that tracked the Apollo transmissions, as you pointed out those were “slide-rule days”. There were THOUSANDS of technicians who knew exactly where the Saturn Vs were, and thousands more in the militaries and intelligence agencies of the world.

    

   Your claim that “space travel is impossible because of radiation” ignores DOSAGE; you sound like a whimpering Green talking about “deadly nuclear plants”. People stay on the crappy Space Station for SIX MONTHS*, it has no more shielding than an Apollo. You know this, as well.

    

   Not only were the Saturn Vs real, but even the lowly Soviets had moon rocket technology… they just didn’t have the money to use it. Aerojet General uses the original refurbished Soviet moon-rocket engines (stolen and hidden by Soviet technicians) TO THIS DAY (OK, maybe you wouldn’t know that, I am a pretty big rocket nerd).

    

   LewRockwell.com is a great resource for people studying Austrian economics, false-flag operations, etc. Just one National Enquirer article like this discredits the entire effort. It’s OK to be wrong; it’s not OK to lie.

   *Although they would have to leave if the Earth were HIT by a flare, which is why there’s a flare-detection satellite at the Earth-Sun L1 point. Most flares miss, of course.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   You’re accusing me of lying?  End of conversation.

   Email 13:

   How fortunate. And impossible, well, impossible if the landing was real. There was no dust on the LM support legs or leg pads either and no sign the engine nacelle or ground below it was burned, singed or melted. How could that happen? A 10,000 lb. thrust engine, even if throttled back to 3,000 lb. must blow out a crater, down to bedrock for heaven’s sake, making a landing treacherous because of virtually zero visibility and unknown terrain exposed. The motor would generate heat of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and even if throttled back to, say, 3,000 d.F., only 1,300-2,400 d.F. is required to melt and fuse rock. None of what we expect happened.

    

   Excuse me but uhhh..rockets are either on or off, you can not ‘throttle back’ a rocket.

    

   http://www.space.com/16855-russian-space-station-cargo-ship-docking.html

   An unmanned Russian cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station tonight (Aug. 1), less than six hours after it launched into orbit. The successful maneuver marked the first time a same-day docking has ever been accomplished at the massive orbiting outpost

    

   The robotic Progress 48 cargo freighter automatically parked to the Pirs docking compartment on the Russian segment of the complex slightly ahead of schedule, at 9:19 p.m. EDT (0119 GMT Aug. 2), as both spacecraft flew over the Pacific Ocean. In addition to delivering fresh supplies to the space station, the spacecraft also tested the novel same-day rendezvous and docking procedure.

    

   Well shoot…don’t that beat all? NAZA has been telling us for 30 years that that fastest the shuttle could do it was 3 days.

   I guess the Russkies have more powerful engines or have figured out a new orbit. Yeah, that’s it!

   A new secret orbit. Similar to the one they were going to use to avoid the Van Allen belt. Yeah, yeah…they found one of those holes in the belt!!!!

   Morgan’s Reply:

   A friend of mine makes a couple of interesting points above.

   Email 14:

   Excellent points. It’s a wonder that absence of dust on the LM and its

   support legs hasn’t been called into question in the past. The craft

   looks like it has just left the factory when it should be almost

   entirely covered with fine light gray powder. Perhaps the astronauts did

   one hell of a good job with feather dusters prior to the photo but that still doesn’t explain the lack of a crater.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   Cleanliness next to Godliness!  Especially in the heavens.

   Email 15:

   Love it.

   I grew up a believer.  I live in Florida, my dad worked on the Cape.

   However,  Lewrockwell.com has been teaching me to never believe the

   government story.  So,  it’s time to re-evaluate and hopefully some

   verifiable facts will emerge.  I guess my basic argument for NASA has always

   been that given the state of technology,  it might have been easier to

   actually go to the moon than fake it.  Radiation arguments not withstanding;

   I can’t prove that one way or the other.

   I haven’t fully thought it through yet but I would make an argument that

   maybe the missions happened but not according to the script we’ve been fed.

   I’m thinking some type of composite of faked and real parts.  I would

   contend that maybe all the photos claimed fake might be.  If you want a

   “money shot” the studio is the best place to do it.  I’m still thinking

   about a hypothesis that might handle what we know.  E.g. the astronauts

   could have stayed in orbit for the duration of the mission.  I think there

   was enough navy around that at least the splashdowns were real.

   Another piece of evidence?  The Soviets “gave up” their moon mission after

   we made it.  But why? they may and probably would have learned a great deal

   and the cold war was quite warm.  To my understanding, after studing them

   the Soviets prevented manufacture of microwave ovens.  Maybe the Soviets

   understand more about radiation affects than the US admits to.

   In any case, I love this stuff,  thanks

   Morgan’s Reply:

   Bennett and Percy argue for real landings too but not as NAZA presented it.

   They prove the Apollo stuff was faked.

   Read Bernard Lovell in their book.  The U.S. advantage over the Soviets was

   not engineering or rocket power but its access to Hollywood fakery!

   There is lots of good stuff available on the issue on the web: Bart Sibrel,

   Dave McGowan, Jarrah White, Aulis for openers.

    

   Email 16:

   I would like to share something with you that no one knows yet. The LEM was never loaded on any of the Apollo flights.  That will be a major element in the coming confession.

    

   Let me ask you this if you do not mind please.  What is the other hoax that people have been lead to believe that is many, many times worse than the Apollo moon missions hoax? It is a lie  that is literally destroying the very foundation of America itself.

   Morgan’s Reply:

   Very likely.  I’ve also heard that no second stage ever fired, only four J-1’s fired in stage 1 because they were more reliable, the exhaust plume was way wrong, plus many other issues in the Saturn V made it a fraud.  I can’t prove any of that but can prove the elements I mentioned in the article.  Oh, one other thing, some allege the LEM engine had no throttle and it was the same rocket engine as the CSM, making the Apollo missions all the more impossible if that’s possible!

    

   The other bigger lie?  I suppose you mean 9/11, right?  A total fraud to make war on the Islam world.  I’ve researched that for years, so visit nomoregames.net and drjudywood.com for more of my work.  Thanks much for your message.

   Morgan’s Reply to another emailer included this:

   Btw, I forgot to include this little jewel in my notes from Mark Robinson, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter principle investigator, at LRO press teleconference, July 17, 2009: “Although I believe you can see markings that were maybe made by the descent engine disturbing the soil.”