Was Neil Armstrong really the first man to go to Moon?

• I've heard that a scientist has proved that the video clipping which showed Neil's journey was fake. He has given many evidences like- How was the flag placed on the Moon fluttering as there is no air or wind on the Moon!

• Answer:

  Most people who believe that the Moon flights were faked do so because they have seen very bad “documentaries” made by people who have been described by Patrick Moore as having an ignorance of science that is so great that it’s hardly worth talking to them. They certainly have an amazing ignorance of the space programme, and also of basic photography. They use a *very* selective choice of photos and video, and they only give a very small part of the story. One thing to realise is that at the time of the flights, we simply didn’t have the digital imaging techniques that would have been needed to fake video and photos. In fact, even now we wouldn’t be able to fake everything, because some of the images can only be produced on the Moon! I give lectures on space exploration and this is a question that often comes up. I watched all the Moon missions and I have DVDs of the uncut transmissions from Apollo 11 and other missions. So let’s make a start with the waving flag … 1) The flag “waves” when it should remain still. In every case the video used to illustrate this is from a sequence when the astronauts are still setting the flag up, so of course it’s waving around. They are doing their best to push the pole into the ground and set the upper part with the flag in place. Incidentally, the flag (which is nylon, not aluminium) is held out at right-angles to the pole by a wire stiffener, otherwise it would hang straight down and would hardly be seen. However once the astronauts let go and the vibrations that are moving the flag die down, IT NEVER MOVES AGAIN – not even when the astronauts run past it. On Earth, this would stir up air currents which would make the flag move, but in the vacuum of the Moon, it stays still. 2) There are shadows that go in different directions. All the shadows should be parallel. Shadows in photos taken on Earth as well as the Moon appear to converge – it’s due to perspective. Shadows caused by the sun will be parallel if (a) the objects that make them are parallel and (b) they fall on a flat surface. One of the famous photos used in this regard shows Jim Irwin by the flag on Apollo 15. Firstly Irwin is leaning forward, towards the camera, to counterbalance the mass of his backpack, whilst the flagpole is clearly leaning to one side – it may well be leaning backwards as well. Secondly, the surface of the Moon is not flat; it has craters and hills of all sizes and this means that shadows are very unlikely to fall in the same direction. In fact the pictures are very strong proof that they were not taken in a studio. To do so would have certainly required more than one light, as there is no studio on Earth large enough to have a movie set a quarter of a mile wide (an absolute minimum requirement for scenes like this) that can be lit by a single source, which itself would have to be even further away. However if more than one light was used, they would have each produced shadows, and every item would have more than one shadow – one from each light. Now it can’t be argued that they were spotlights focussed on each object, because the ground would not be illuminated evenly (there would be “hot-spots”) and there would be occasions when, say, an astronaut walked by the flag and both shadows would have been visible. In fact there isn’t a single photo that shows an object with two shadows. If this was all filmed in a studio, it couldn’t be done in real-time, as they couldn’t create the slow-motion that has been proposed. This means that all the filming would have had to have taken place before the mission. Yet the astronaut’s time was all accounted for. 3) The scenes on the lunar surface were actually filmed on Earth. The footage of astronauts kicking up the surface material and the dust flying off the wheels of the lunar rover show that it all follows a parabolic trajectory back on to the ground. In an atmosphere, this dust would produce clouds of material. Just watch any footage of a car travelling on sand or something similar and you will see how this is churned up into the air and takes ages (even under the higher earth gravity) before it settles. This shows that they were in one-sixth gravity and in a vacuum. There is nowhere on Earth that a vacuum chamber exists of the size required to fake this. 4) The shadow areas should be absolutely black as there is no air to scatter the light. This is similar to “All the mountains should be sharp as there is no weather to smooth them”. That was what we originally thought, before we reached them Moon and realised that the mountains really were smooth because – without an atmosphere – there was no protections from millions of years of micrometeorites that battered its surface. Yes, the air on Earth does scatter the light, but a much greater effect is simply the reflection of the sun off the ground, and anything else. The reason we can see the Moon at all is because the sunlight reflects off its surface, and it reflects in all directions. Again, there is one famous photo used to make this point – Aldrin descending the ladder to the Moon. In this picture, Armstrong is looking almost towards the sun, (which is out of the frame,) which means that the light is coming towards him and bouncing off the surface of the Moon back on to the Lunar Module and Aldrin. 5) All the photos are absolutely perfectly framed and exposed. Most of the photos that are shown on TV and printed in books and magazines are a tiny selection of the ones taken by the astronauts. Most of them are also cropped to show the picture composition at its best, because the editors want to show only the best views. However many photos were very well composed and exposed as the astronauts had spent ages being trained in how to use the cameras. In addition they had experts in Houston passing recommendations on exposure for particular shots during the missions. What the general public doesn’t normally see is the huge number of other images, which include many badly exposed and composed shots. Obviously NASA gives out the best shots for publication, but you can see all the rest on-line. 6) The are no stars in any of the pictures. A photo taken on Earth showing a night scene won’t show any stars either. They are simply too faint to be seen normally. The human eye adjusts to different light levels, and our pupils expand to let in more light, so we can take in a night scene and then look up and, as our pupils expand further, see the stars. A camera iris can be opened up in a similar way, but the difference in the brightness of the ground and the stars is such that to correctly expose a picture to show stars would completely overexpose everything else. You can have this confirmed by any photographer. 7) The astronauts just went round the Earth. Give the Russians some credit. We can track spacecraft out to the limits of the solar system. The Russians sent the first probe to the Moon in 1959. If Apollo 11 didn’t actually go to the Moon they would have been the first to jump up and down and say so. 8) On Apollo 15, David Scott dropped a feather and a hammer which fell at the same rate and reached the surface of the moon at the same time, just as Galileo predicted. Even if the feather was a fake which weighed the same as the hammer, its surface profile would have been different, so air resistance would have made it unlikely that they would fall together. They must have been in a vacuum. Speak to any special effects person, and they will tell you that it is impossible to slow down TV footage for some actions whilst maintaining speech at the correct speed. It would have also meant that the entire action must have been pre-recorded. In which case, when was it done? The astronaut’s movements, locations and activities were known during the time prior to the flight. 9) The astronauts could not have survived the radiation from the van Allen belts. The radiation from the van Allen belts was less than a dentist uses to take an x-ray. Don’t forget that the astronauts were flying outward from the earth and at the time they passed through the belts their velocity was about 20,000 mph. If they had been orbiting the earth at the altitude of the belts that might have been another thing, but they went “across” the belts, not “along” them. 10) The rocks are fake. Now this is just silly. It is impossible to manufacture rocks, whatever ceramics laboratory NASA is supposed to have. In any case, Moonrocks are not made of ceramic! What they are is 4.6 billion years old, much older than the oldest rocks ever found on Earth. They contain small glass-like beads, called spherules, which are larger than their counterparts on Earth, because they formed under a lower gravity field. They also contain materials in different combinations to Earth rocks, One such type was called armalcolite, after the initial letters of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. Ask any geologist about armalcolite and see what s/he replies. Samples have been distributed to hundreds of scientists all over the world, and in over 35 years, not a single person who has studied the Moon samples has ever expressed the slightest doubt about their authenticity. There is one point that the conspiracy theorists totally refuse to discuss, as they know they don’t have a leg to stand on: The astronauts left reflector arrays that are still used to bounce lasers fired from Earth. By timing the pulses, the distance to the Moon can be measured down to a few centimetres. It is impossible for lasers to be reflected in this way from anywhere else on the Moon. At the peak of the Apollo programme, NASA employed over 400,000 people, and not one, not an astronaut, a mission controller, anyone who worked at any of the NASA centres, nor any of the contractors has ever stood up and said “It was a fake”. On the contrary, there are hundreds of tons of documents about the missions, the plans, the equipment, the training; thousands of hours of film; hundreds of thousands of photos. Why create all of this? Why build the Saturn V rockets? Why fake something like Apollo 13? Why would the University of Hawaii fake the photo of the oxygen cloud leaking from Apollo 13? The fact is, it would have actually been easier to go to the Moon than it would to have faked everything. The principle known as "Occam's razor" essentially says that the simplest answer is probably correct. So did the Apollo astronauts fly to the Moon in full view of the world, tracked by other countries including Russia; land there and set up reflectors that are being used today; and bring back samples that have been validated by bona fide scientists all over the world … or did we fake the whole thing; put the astronauts into Earth orbit for a week although no-one detected their craft and no-one saw it orbiting overhead in the night sky, and then let them splash down into the ocean to be picked up by the navy; produce thousands of photos and hours of film with a load of "mistakes" in them; manufacture rocks when we don't know how to; and secretly send reflectors to the Moon using unmanned craft that no-one saw being launched and no-one tracked??? Casting doubt on the Moon landings does a dis-service to everyone who was involved in them, and to science in general. What we should be doing is to promote science, to use space to inspire youngsters to study science and technology, and to be proud that we have achieved a most amazing feat that has resulted in humans walking on the surface of another world. Jerry Stone Freelance presenter on Astronomy and Space Exploration Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society