On August 27, 2008, The Discovery Channel will air a new episode of Mythbusters entitled “NASA Moon Landing”. This episode was created to challenge the wild but persistent urban legend that NASA never really landed humans on the moon in the 1960s and 70s.

This special episode was first announced on NASA TV in February of 2008. To film the episode, Adam, Jamie, and the rest of the Mythbusters cast chose to visit the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. A team of Marshall scientists helped the Mythbusters with several of their tests.

Proponents of the Apollo Moon Landing hoax conspiracy theories insist that NASA and the US Government intentionally deceived the public by fabricating the manned moon landings. Although exact details from the episode are mum, NASA has reported that the Mythbusters’ tests included a feather, a weight, a lunar soil boot print, and a flag in a vacuum.

 
MythBusters is an American pop science television program on the Discovery Channel. It stars special effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who use their expertise to test the validity of various rumors and urban legends.

Hyneman and Savage often use their extensive engineering and construction expertise to construct complex devices with which to perform experiments. The tests are usually a two-step process. First, an attempt is made to recreate the myth to determine if the circumstances, as described, achieve the alleged outcome. If that fails, they attempt to expand the parameters as much as necessary - often to absurd lengths - until the desired results are duplicated. There are some myths and urban legends the MythBusters refuse to test. Paranormal concepts, such as aliens or ghosts, are not addressed because they cannot be tested by scientific methods. The program also avoids experiments that cannot be tested safely, such as whether a wet poodle could be dried in a microwave oven.

Busted, Plausible, or Confirmed?

By the end of each episode, each myth is rated "Busted", "Plausible", or "Confirmed."

Confirmed: The MythBusters are able to recreate the myth’s purported outcome with the described circumstances. A myth can also be confirmed with documented evidence that it actually occurred.

Plausible: The myth’s results can only be produced by expanding the parameters within a reasonable margin (that is, if the circumstances needed to make the myth work are impractical, but still possible), or by the practical necessity of setting additional parameters that may or may not have been part of the myth described. This judgment is used if a myth is possible but unlikely, or if documented accounts of the myth exist that the MythBusters were unable to duplicate (for safety or cost reasons).

Busted: The myth’s results cannot be replicated via either the described parameters nor reasonably exaggerated ones. The myth’s results could not be reproduced or could only be reproduced with parameters so unusual that the validity of the myth is unlikely.

THE MYTHBUSTERS LOOK AT THE MOON LANDING HOAX

Apollo moon landing hoax debunkers point out that in the first instance, the moon walks happened during the lunar day and therefore the stars were obscured by the sun's light. In the second instance the American flag that was raised on each of the Apollo landing sites were stiffened by wires, which caused the seeming "swaying in the breeze effect."

Also, the Japanese lunar orbit probe Kaguya recently imaged the burn marks of the Apollo 15 lunar module descent engine at the Apollo 15 landing site. Special effects artists who worked on films like Apollo 13 and TV series like From Earth to the Moon have suggested that the technology just wasn't available to fake the moon landings in the 1960s.

The whole idea of an Apollo moon landing hoax is just an insult to the men and women who made the moon landings possible. People, like the crew of Apollo1, died to make the moon landings happen. Others, engineers and scientists whose names will never be known, sacrificed long hours and suffered ruined marriages and wrecked health so that men could walk on the Moon. The idea that it was all faked seems like a way to try to cheapen all that work and sacrifice.

It is doubtful that despite this debunking or what the Mythbusters team concludes that Apollo moon landing hoax conspiracy theorists will be swayed. Conspiracy theories are not generally about evidence, but rather the desire for fame and the paranoid style of history, to paraphrase Richard Hofstadter.

And what will happen when human beings return to the Moon, sometime in the next decade? Dr. Dwayne Day suggests, rather tongue in cheek, that it won't be faked on a sound stage. That's so 20th Century. Instead, the Orion/Altair missions will be faked on a computer. Just the sort of thing Dick Cheney would think of.

I would like to add that I doubt any moon hoaxer was old enough or even born when we landed and walked on the moon. Had they been of age, they wouldn't have hoaxed the moon. The event was just too grand.

Source: Mythbusters
Source: The Great Moon Hoax
Source: Associated Content
Space Review – It can easily be done by computer

 
                                                        

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