Walking on the Moon

I remember watching Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set foot on our Moon on July 20, 1969. I was in high school but it was summer vacation so all of my friends had been outside being teenagers. But everyone went home to watch the astronauts.

I went home before 3 pm EST because that was supposed to be when they would be landing. I looked it up today and Apollo 11’s Eagle lunar module landed at 20:17 GMT (3:17 my time) and then Neil Armstrong (who was closest to the door) was the first man to step on the Moon.

They landed in an area known as the Sea of Tranquility. When his feet touched the ground Armstrong spoke words that would become famous: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He later said that he had actually said “That’s one small step for a man” but the audio cut out and the “a” was lost.

Buzz Aldrin called for a moment of silence shortly after the landing to give thanks for their survival. I read today but I don’t recall that he took communion with a wafer and a tiny chalice of wine.

Aldrin on the Moon in a photo by Armstrong, who can be seen reflected in Aldrin’s visor. NASA Image and Video Library, Public Domain

Buzz Aldrin grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, not far from my hometown. In 2016, his hometown middle school in Montclair was renamed Buzz Aldrin Middle School. I was the poet-in-the-schools person there for a few years. Students knew a bit about him – astronaut, Moon landing – but almost nothing about the actual landing or the space program. When I told them about watching the landing, they looked at me as if I was time traveler. I must be as old as their grandfather.

A teacher there told me that when they did the dedication Aldrin came to the school for an assembly and was kind of cranky and a bit “inappropriate” in his remarks to the pre-teens. Hey, he had been on the Moon!

The video from the Moon landing was not very good quality by today’s standards but the idea that it was coming from so far away made it amazing. Most people today still have no real understanding of how that picture appears on their Tv screen whether it travels by antenna, cable, or from their phone.

I have to shake my head and wonder about people who still doubt that we ever landed on the Moon. There is something in humans that seems to be attracted to conspiracies and doubt. My favorite crazy theory is that director Stanley Kubrick did 2001: A Space Odyssey the year before. One source claims that Kubrick initially declined the offer, only relenting when NASA threatened to out his little brother as a member of the Communist Party. Knowing what I do about Kubrick, he would have had a hard time shooting bad video because he was so demanding as a director.

That theory (which came mostly from one person and one book he wrote called held that Kubrick spent 18 months on a soundstage shooting the footage for the Apollo 11 and 12 Moon missions. Hey, in his 1980 film The Shining, the boy does wear an Apollo 11 sweater at one point. The 1978 film, Capricorn One, is about a journalist who uncovers a government hoax about astronauts landing on Mars. That prepares us for how they will fake the Mars landing one day.

I still look in wonder at the Moon most nights and it still seems incredible that we can send a spacecraft to the Moon or Mars. And how about that a telescope is now orbiting around the Sun at a distance of nearly 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth and sending back amazing photos of stars and planets? Using the JWST, we will be able to capture extremely distant galaxies as they were only 100 million years after the Big Bang – which happened around 13.8 billion years ago. We will be able to see light from 13.7 billion years ago. That must be fake too, right?

The “Phantom Galaxy” NGC 628 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI/JUDY SCHMIDT

Crossposted from the One-Page Schoolhouse website

50 Years of Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories

This month had lots of tributes to the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon. It also saw the re-emergence of some of the Moon landing conspiracies that the whole thing was faked –  an elaborate hoax.

It would have been one helluva hoax. It would have involved thousands of people who have miraculous all stuck to their non-disclosure agreements and kept the secret. That alone is enough reason for me to believe it could never have been a hoax.

Of course, there were good reasons to believe that the pressure was on for NASA to get a man on the Moon.  President Kennedy on May 25,1961 had said to Congress”

” I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

The decade was running out in 1969, so if NASA wanted to stay with that target it had to get a man on the Moon that year. Some people apparent;y thought we weren’t ready to do it for real, so we would have to fake it. There was also the perceived “space race” we were in with Russia to get there first.

One article that caught my attention this past week was titled “How Stanley Kubrick Staged the Moon Landing.” Despite that title, the article is more about debunking the conspiracy theorists who believed that the Moon landing was a hoax and other theories about that July 20, 1969 event at 3:17 P.M. E.S.T. that was so important in our history

Kubrick had directed 2001: A Space Odyssey the year before. That film was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s writing and the script, book, and film did predict manmade satellites, GPS, maybe even smartphones and tablets, along with a space station.

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in NASA’s training mockup of the Moon and lander module. Were the films of the missions made using sets like these?

Actually, the stories of a space hoax predate the Moon landing. There were doubters going back to the first manned launches.

But the big hoax has always been the actual Moon landing. The Knight newspaper company in July 1970 found that 30 percent of Americans believed the Moon landing had been faked. Six years later, a Gallup poll found that 28 percent of Americans believed that the Moon landing had been staged by the U.S. government, and that was pretty consistent throughout the 1970s.

Wikipedia has an article on the Moon landing conspiracy theories, but many of them had their start with Bill Kaysing who wrote We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle . This book started a “the Moon landing  is a hoax” industry in 1970s.

Kaysing got attention because he was the head of the technical presentations unit at the Rocketdyne Propulsion Field Laboratory from 1956 to 1963. when the major planning for the engine and components of the Apollo project was being done. Though Kaysing later admitted that he knew nothing about rockets, he did hold security clearances with the U.S. Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission for his work and that sounded pretty official to many people.  These clearances are fairly common for anyone who works on government and DoD or military contracts.

Kaysing was a technical writer for Rocketdyne, but he was convinced after he left the company that the U.S. was just not capable with our current technology to put a man on the Moon.

There have been 6 successful Apollo manned missions to the Moon, and a dozen men have walked the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972. But it is that first lunar mission that is the focus of the conspiracy theories.

Kaysing’s 1976 self-published book explained his theories. He did believe that he was a whistle-blower letting the public know that there had been a cover-up.

A few of the inconsistencies he stated were easily debunked. He claimed that the American flag the astronauts planted on the moon should have been hanging down since there is no air or wind on the Moon. NASA had thought of that early on and not wanting that floppy effect had put a cross beam on the pole to hold the flag in a windy attitude. When Buzz Aldrin was twisting the pole into the surface it caused the flag to briefly move as if it was flapping in wind.

Another part of the hoax “evidence” is the multiple directions of shadows in photos and on film. Since the only source of light would be the Sun, this was said to prove that multiple movie lights had been used on a set. Actually, there were multiple sources of light during the lunar landings from the Sun, reflected from the Earth and from the lander module and from the astronauts’ space suits and helmets.

Aha, the lunar photos show no stars in the pictures! Where did they go? The moonwalks were made during the lunar morning and just like here on Earth, you don’t see stars when the Sun is out. We don’t even see them at night if we are in a brightly lit area that washes out the sky, such as at a stadium.

Kaysing even questioned how Neil Armstrong’s first steps onto the Moon were filmed if he was the only one there.  Quite simply, a camera had been mounted to the side of the lunar module.

Kaysing didn’t doubt that a rocket blasted off in July of 1969, but claimed that the astronauts had been taken off before takeoff. They were then taken to Nevada which is where the studio set was to fake the landing photography.

The Hollywood film Capricorn One was based on the hoax theories and was about a faked mission to Mars. Some scenes from the faked Mars landing scenes have turned up in Moon landing hoax conspiracy documentaries, such as the TV show Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On The Moon and the film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.

America was ripe for conspiracies with the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War revelations in the news showing us that the government was doing a lot of things secretly and hiding the truth from the public.

Which brings me back to Stanley Kubrick. If you had to pick a director to shoot believable Moon landing footage, Kubrick would be a good choice. Kubrick’s astronauts in his 2001 film landing on the Moon look a lot better than the actual lunar landing footage. It would have been easy for him to stage scenes that didn’t have to look as good. From what I have read about Kubrick’s directing style, it would have been a lot harder to get him to shoot the landing without many takes and certainly impossible to get him to do a live shoot. Kubrick shot 2001 without computer graphics, so he would have to use models and actual sets and props such as the space station and a Moon surface with rocks and lunar dust. He had done the research.

I do believe that on July 20, 1969, the lunar module Eagle landed on the surface of the Moon, carrying Neil Armstrong and Edwin A. “Buzz” Aldrin.  I believe that Armstrong was the first human to set foot on the moon and Aldrin was the second human on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited above. They stayed on the Moon for 21 hours and 36 minutes.

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Here is some footage that was not seen back in 1969.  I guess Kubrick had outtakes?

 

Walking on the Moon

July 20, 1969: the Apollo 11 moon landing. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of that event and I’m sure there will be some celebrations, but I thought about it the other night when I was staring up at that big Full Moon.

I remember the day and the live broadcast on CBS, with commentary by Walter Cronkite and former astronaut Wally Schirra and live audio from Mission Control in Houston and the Apollo 11 astronauts.

I went online and check my facts and put on The Police’s non-historical song “Walking on the Moon” in the background. “Giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon…”

July 1969 was only about 8 years since the flight of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and then the American Alan Shepard that started the “space race.” President Kennedy made the challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade was out.

NASA had made a rather bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon using the new massive Saturn V rocket. But they didn’t land. On July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center and 4 days later they would reach the Moon.

The Apollo 11 crew was Neil A. Armstrong, commander, Michael Collins, command module pilot and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot. I felt bad for Collins at the time because he didn’t get to actually step on the Moon.

I recall sitting in my New Jersey living room staring at the small black and white TC with its “rabbit ear” antenna that was pulling in a signal from CBS News in New York City, but I felt like it was getting a signal from the Moon.

I was 15. It was an eventful summer: Woodstock, the Manson murders, the Stonewall riots. We were a year out from the “Summer of Love.” I had been a year since my father had died.

In the summer of 1969, I was listening to my two new albums: The Who’s double album Tommy which launched a bunch of concept albums, and The Beatles’ Get Back which was a sad release because we knew The Beatles were done as a group. “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine in” by the Fifth Dimension was a pop hit version of the song from the radical Broadway musical Hair.

I finally got to see the film Midnight Cowboy which made a big impression on me. John Schlesinger’s film starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman was released with the dreaded X rating. I had to wait until there was a lazy teenager in the local theater box office who didn’t care if I bought a ticket. That year i also saw two other films that influenced me in very different ways: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Easy Rider.

I know there are people who still say that the moon landing was faked. I suspect some of that silliness comes from the fact that CBS News did use animation and simulations in their coverage and labeled them as such. No one could transmit live video footage from the moon, so CBS made their own animations and a mockup model so viewers could see something and get an idea of what was happening on the moon.

There is also the actual film footage of the lunar landing and walk from the 16mm film cameras mounted on the module that landed on the Moon and from the window video camera onboard Apollo 11’s Lunar Module “Eagle.” But much of that footage didn’t get to us until they returned to Earth.

It as a tense program to watch. Neil Armstrong’s heart rate peaked at 150 beats per minute at landing, as compared to his resting heart rate of 60 bpm. At around 10 minutes to landing, the astronauts link to Mission Control cut out briefly, which was a terrifying moment.

It is worth noting for people who did not live through that era that there were also intermittent program alarms and error codes from the rather primitive computers on board and even back in Houston. The Lunar Module’s computer only had 4KB of memory. This article takes up more than 4KB. As is often pointed out, your smartphone is several thousand times more powerful than the spacecraft’s computer.

I added some video below and you can see the CBS animation showing the fake LM landing on the fake Moon before the actual landing. They didn’t actually sync up with the real landing, so when Buzz Aldrin says “engine stop,” the animation had already landed us based on the scheduled landing time.

Armstrong and Aldrin walked around and collected samples for two hours. They returned safely to Earth.

Twelve astronauts walked on the Moon’s surface. Six of those drove Lunar Roving Vehicles on the Moon. Three astronauts flew to the Moon twice, of which two landed. None landed on the Moon more than once. None were women, so there is still history to be made.

The nine Apollo missions to the Moon occurred between December 1968 and December 1972. Gene Cernan, commander of the last Apollo mission left the lunar surface with these words: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.”

The “Summer of Love” was past. Vietnam was in at full power and my draft registration and draft lottery was a few years away. August 15-18 would be Woodstock. I started out for the festival but hit a ton of traffic and NY State Troopers who discouraged us and so we headed home. I wasn’t one of the nearly 400,000 people who showed up at a farm in Bethel, New York and saw Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and so many others.

The events of 1969 would help define that era.