How to Prove We Went to the Moon

Every so often you come across someone who claims the Moon landings were faked back in 1969, and it’s all a NASA hoax.  Wouldn’t you love to have a great rebuttal?  Keep reading, and we’ll cover the Top 8 Ways you can prove we walked on the Moon.

1) The Soviet Union did not dispute it

This was at the height of the cold war. If there were any way to discredit America, you can be sure the Soviets would have found it. The political damage would have been enormous.  And yet they did not.

2) Photographic evidence

There were tens of thousands of photos and video frames taken on the Moon.  Not a single one has been convincingly discredited.

3) Video evidence

You can see the dust kicked up by lunar rovers on the surface. The speed at which the dust falls exactly matches what would be calculated by lunar gravity, and we didn’t have the technology in the early 1970’s to fake the video.

It’s worth a pause here at this point, because invariably this is where someone says, “It’s easy to fake video”.  That is certainly true in 2020. The special effects we have now are virtually indistinguishable from reality. But what about in 1969?

Let’s compare the computing power of an off the shelf iPhoneX vs the 1969 Apollo Command Module computer.

	Apollo 11 Guidance Computer 1969	Apple iPhone X 2020	iPhone Advantage
Availability	Custom very high-end computer	Basic consumer technology	Universally available
Size	32,000 cm3 without power supply	90 cm3 with power supply	>354X smaller
Weight	32 kg	0.12 kg	267x lighter
Processor	16 bit processor 200K instructions/sec	Six core 64 bit processor 5 Trillion instructions/sec	25 million x faster
Memory	4 kB	128 GB+	>32 million x more
Power	55 watts	0.45 watts	122x less
Price	$150,000 ($1,085,810 in 2020$)	$499	2176x cheaper + cameras, PC, WiFi, talk, data, video, GPS, compass, barometer, accelerometer, TV, music player, web browser, address book…

The simple fact is we did not have the technology back then to fake what was shown on television.

4) Rock samples

The rock samples returned from the Moon are geologically unique. They are all 600M years older than any rocks ever found on Earth.

5) No one on the inside disputed it

There were over 400,000 people working on the Apollo program, and none of them ever disputed the Moon landings. Wouldn’t this be a difficult secret to keep?

6) They went 6 times

If you were going to fake it, do it once and then don’t press your luck.  Why spend billions more and risk exposure after the first fake success?  That makes no sense whatsoever.

7) Retroreflectors

Astronauts left mirrors on the Moon pointed at the Earth.  Lasers fired at the reflectors return data that is exactly consistent with a) the size of the reflector, b) the location of the reflector,and c) the distance to the Moon (to the centimeter!).

8) Current photos agree

Subsequent high resolution photos of the surface from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter exactly match landing claims made in the early 1970’s.  Until recently, our camera resolution was insufficient to see fine details on the lunar surface. Now, public domain photos reveal our old landing sites.

A Side Story

Incidentally, something else was happening elsewhere on the Moon on July 20^th, 1969.  The Soviets had wanted to steal the spotlight from the Americans, and had a plan.

They planned to send a robotic probe to the Moon which would gather a soil sample and then return to Earth, beating the Americans.

The two countries shared their flight plans to ensure the ships didn’t collide, but the Soviets hid the true purpose of their mission.

While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were taking their first steps on the Moon, Luna 15 lost control and crashed into a mountain a few hundred kilometers away.  The Apollo 11 crew would go on to create history.

Mutual Respect

While their governments were opposed at the time, the astronauts and cosmonauts shared a common bond.  Yuri Gagarin, the first man to reach space, died in 1968. His widow asked Neil and Buzz for a favor.

Could they take one of Yuri’s medals to the Moon and leave it there as a tribute to Yuri? 

The men brought a small parcel of Yuri’s things with them to the Moon, and as a last task before leaving the surface, they left his medals there.  Later, Apollo 15 made a similar tribute.