Telescope Reviews: How can I prove moon landings weren't a hoax?

Costanza:
I went through the same dilemma with a co-worker. A bright, technical guy in his forties, he saw the Fox special\\\\\\hoax and fell for it. It completely blew me away that he'd be so "dumb". I started to argue the points he raised from the show, but my ears started turning red and I broke off the discussion. I sent him Phil's "Bad Astronomy" link but I doubt he ever used it. More on that in a minute.

There are a couple of ways that anyone with some time and a few thousand bucks can verify that the US landed on the Moon and came back. The huge number of documents, photos, video and recordings, made over a half-dozen years should be enough evidence, but, like the idiot that "debunked" it in the first place, most people can't be bothered to look at that stuff, or dismiss the mountain of evidence as clever fakery.
But we did leave instruments and reflectors on the moon. Maybe someone could do a little research, buy the right radio equipment, and turn one of the seismic modules back on and listen, or something else that could be "verified". You could also buy a medium wattage laser and try to pinpoint the landing sites and guage the delays and doppler motion.

But some will insist that all of the equipment could have been landed by unmanned rockets. For them, I prescribe a year of college geology, with an emphasis on petrology, and then go examine the returned Moon rocks themselves. They are mostly basalts, looking a lot like igneous rocks from a lot of places on Earth. No big deal. Unless you know something about rocks.

You can't fake moon rocks. Igneous magmas have specific mixtures of minerals that cool and crystalize according to the pressure and temperature around them, affected by water, and CO2 and the gravity they grew cold with. Moon rocks have an entirely different history, of lower pressure, or even vacuum, of lack of water, of lack of atmosphere and a life under meteoric bombardment and cosmic rays since they solidified. You can't melt a rock on earth and make a lunar basalt; not in the best lab. You just don't have enough time to cool it slowly enough for the mineral differentiation to occur. The rest of the rocks, the "exotics" that were brought back are the same - some similar to rocks we know, but not exact, but many are newly discovered.

But getting back to a point raised above, nobody who believes in "faked" landings is going to go to that trouble. It doesn't really matter to their lives. They don't do anything that really depends on whether we went to the Moon, or even whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice versa.
It's just something to argue about.

This guy also believed that we were being visited by aliens and the government was covering it up, and the Moon stuff tied into that somehow (I found this out when we started talking about "why" the US faked the landings). I don't know about you, but if I really though aliens were here, I'd be somewhere else. Somewhere remote and safe and with a load of guns and no neighbors or any way to track me. But "aliens"? He didn't really care. Aliens could be sitting in the cubicle next over and it wouldn't really make a difference in his lifestyle.

When I worked as a geophysicist, a friend of mine got a degree in palynology, the study of ancient spores and seeds, even though he was a Biblical literalist. He thought through college that he could keep his work separate from his beliefs, but when he really had to work with the rocks on a daily basis and make judgements based on what he found, he couldn't handle the discrepancy. He quit geology and eventually became a vet.

If you get pressed into an argument, ask them what kind of evidence would convince them we were there. Make them figure out how tiny a target our landers are to a telescope. Make them look at the economy of the time, the inflation and debt, the war winding down and the cost of oil. Remind them that we haven't gone back because nobody's repeated the huge management system we needed to get parts to the rocket assembly on time and well made; the Shuttle is a poor shadow of that organizational ability, crippled by budget and lack of qualified people. The Chinese may get there before we do again, but when they do, they'll face the same challenges we did and they'll find our footprints there ahead of them. No amount of disbelief will erase them.

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Tom Faller
80mm StellarVue Nighthawk refractor
127mm Orion Maksutov-Cassegrain
200mm homebuilt Dobsonian with Discovery optics
10x50 Carton Adlerblick Binoculars
12" homebuilt truss Dob with Discovery optics