Originally Posted by zeldask8r

Now before you go an tell me how much of a nut case I am, and that I'm stupid to beleive such a thing, please hear me out. I know you think I'm the weirdo who beleives that 9/11 was a set up, and that I'm probably just crazy, but this time around I have some very serious evidence that greatly supports that the apollo lunar missions were faked!

For those of you who don't know, or maybe you live in another country so you've never heard of it, the apollo missions were space missions run by N.A.S.A ., funded by the government, who's objective was to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth. Now, what spurred this desire was the "space race". During the cold war with russia, the soviet union sent the first satelite into space, called sputnik in 1957 , you probably already know that. The us imediately started research and funding for rockets, and other kinds of space related things. It was obvious that the two countries were determined to out-do on another. Anyway, as early as 1960 the united states started sending manned vessels into space, starting with the launch of an ape named "ham". By the date of 1962, it was clear that the soviets and the U.S. had set their eyes on being the first to explore the moon.

in fact, John F. Kennedy himself said that he wanted to land a man on the moon and safely return him before the end of the decade. You don't think it's a slight coincodence that man landed on the moon in 1969? the last year of that decade? I think that nasa realized they couldn't possibly land a man on the moon within the decade, so they faked the 5 apollo misisons that made it to the moon, so that they would seem more technologicly advanced than their rivals in the soviet union. And below is the proof of that.

Originally Posted by Bad Astronomy

Kaysing's exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.''

This is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!

It was also disingenuous of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they were worried about radiation before men had gone into the van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not only survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the program.

Originally Posted by Bad Astronomy

In this case, the Sun really is the only source of light. The shadows are not parallel in the images because of perspective. Remember, you are looking at a three-dimensional scene, projected on a two-dimensional photograph. That causes distortions. When the Sun is low and shadows are long, objects at different distance do indeed appear to cast non-parallel shadows, even here on Earth. An example of that can be found at another debunking site. The scene (near the bottom of the above-linked page) shows objects with non-parallel shadows, distorted by perspective. If seen from above, all the shadows in the Apollo images would indeed look parallel. You can experience this for yourself; go outside on a clear day when the Sun is low in the sky and compare the direction of the shadows of near and far objects. You'll see that they appear to diverge. Here is a major claim of the HBs that you can disprove all by yourself! Don't take my word for it, go out and try!

Originally Posted by Bad Astronomy

Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself.

New stuff added March 1, 2001: Many HBs show a picture of an astronaut standing to one side of the flag, which still has a ripple in it (for example, see this famous image). The astronaut is not touching the flag, so how can it wave?

The answer is, it isn't waving. It looks like that because of the way the flag was deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal rod which telescopes out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they couldn't get the rod to extend completely, so the flag didn't get stretched fully. It has a ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed. In later flights, the astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose because they liked the way it looked. In other words, the flag looks like it is waving because the astronauts wanted it to look that way. Ironically, they did their job too well. It appears to have fooled a lot of people into thinking it waved.

This explanation comes from NASA's wonderful spaceflight web page. For those of you who are conspiracy minded, of course, this doesn't help because it comes from a NASA site. But it does explain why the flag looks as it does, and you will be hard pressed to find a video of the flag waving. And if it was a mistake caused by a breeze on the set where they faked this whole thing, don't you think the director would have tried for a second take? With all the money going to the hoax, they could afford the film!

Note added March 28, 2001: One more thing. Several readers have pointed out that if the flag is blowing in a breeze, why don't we see dust blowing around too? Somehow, the HBs' argument gets weaker the more you think about it.