In 1969, it was easier to go to the moon than to fake the landing!
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
17 August 2014
As mentioned last
week, there is a group of non-scientists who claim that the moon
landings of the late 1960s and early 1970s were hoaxes staged by the
America Space Agency, NASA. I
was surprised by the large number of Kenyans who asked me to “prove”
that it actually happened!
After a few days of
research, I cannot find proof that the landings were hoaxes. There is no
astronomer who has ever published an article in any scientific journal
disputing the moon landings. Furthermore, the Soviets were competing
with the Americans for space supremacy; they were keenly following the
missions and would have been the first people to detect any hoax.
Remember, they were the first to put a satellite in space, and also the
first animal (a dog), the first man as well as the first woman!
Now the Moon Hoax
Sayers have three main arguments: firstly, that there wasn’t enough
technology to go to the moon in 1969; secondly, that there is
photographic evidence proving the whole thing happen in a studio; and
thirdly that there is no way a human being can pass through the van
Allen Radiation Belts that surrounds the earth.
My response to the
first argument is that anyone who thinks that there wasn’t enough
technology in 1969 to take a man to the moon should also have great
difficulty in believing that, 500 years earlier (in 1497 to 1499), Vasco
da Gama sailed from Europe, round the Cape of Good Hope, through
Mombasa, Malindi and onwards to India without GPS! One of the great
challenges of technology is that it makes people believe they can’t do
without it.
On the second
argument regarding the photographic evidence, I came across a very
different view from S. G. Collins, a filming profession. He asserts that
in 1969, it was not possible to make a fake film of the moon landing.
The technology required to produce the apparent slow-motion videos
hadn’t been invented yet. In his words, “the only way to make a fake
moon landing video would have been to go to the moon!” If you are
interested, go to Youtube.com and search for “moon hoax not”.
The third argument
appears to be the most convincing for the Hoax Sayers. It is true that
there are belts of highly energetic charged particles that can kill any
human being. These “van Allen Radiation Belts” exist from about 1,000km
to 60,000km above the earth.
However, the
scientific community was aware of these radiation belts and therefore
the trajectories followed by the Apollo spacecrafts passed through the
low density zones and also at very high speeds so the crafts spent less
than 10 minutes inside.
It is estimated that
the outer surface of the space crafts received only about 10% of the
radiation that can cause sickness. It was much less for the astronauts
inside the Apollo – less than one per cent. In other words, less than
what you get when you go for an x-ray!
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