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Skeptics question lunar landings

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-17 14:12

WASHINGTON: Forty years after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the surface of the moon, there are still those who insist that his giant leap for mankind happened on a film set in Arizona, not on the lunar landscape.

The deniers insist that NASA went to extraordinary lengths and great expense to stage a moon landing in a film studio because it wanted to distract a public weary of the Vietnam War, or felt it had to beat the Soviet Union in the space race but feared it didn't have the technology to win the space race.

This NASA file image shows U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 11 Mission Commander, standing next to the Lunar Module "Eagle" on the moon July 20, 1969. [Agencies]

Or maybe the US space agency headed to the studio because it was cheaper and less risky than flying to the moon, the deniers have also said.

Hoax theorizers variously ask why astronauts weren't fried by radiation when they passed through the Van Allen belts, why there are no stars in the sky in the (daytime) photos, why the American flag fluttered in videos of the lunar landing, and why there are shadows in many images. NASA has explanations for most, but the skeptics are a tough bunch to satisfy. A New York Times poll recently revealed that 6 percent of Americans don't believe the moon landing happened.

Related readings:  NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it  US remembers 40-year anniversary of moon landing  Moon-lovers remember Apollo with radio chit-chat  Moon talk before China's moon walk

Lunar landing negationists may fade into the background again when the US returns to the moon, but will they die out entirely? Probably not, said American astronomer Seth Shostak.

"We'll go back to the moon and find all this hardware and take pictures of it and say, 'Look! Their bootprints!'

"And people who like to think that the US government has nothing better to do than fake a moon landing will say, 'Well, you faked that, too.'"

AFP - China Daily