May i add to the stuff people keep forgetting list?

It was done in a time where people were able to use sliderules.

And to the challenge/thought experiment thing:
What mathematical operation can a modern PC do that a Apple II or C64 (or a PDP-1) can not? (yes, you can make a c64 calculate with 64 bit words. you need more than 64 bits to store them, but you can calculate with them)

I dont know what pictures you have been looking at but the ones I've seen are top notch quality. Check out nasas official sites for high res pictures.

Originally posted by letthereaderunderstand
I ask you a question or anyone else who believes the moon missions are real.

Why do you believe it? Is it the scientific evidence or is it because, faking it seams unrealistic?

I believe it happened because of the amount of evidence that supports it and because I honestly think faking it would be harder than actually doing it. There were too many things you'd need to overcome in order to fake it, some things movies today still can't do.

If one were to believe in the various conspiracy theories regarding Apollo. It would require you to believe that NASA is both incredibly clever and incompetent at the same time. Being able to fool everyone, even the Russian's. Yet making silly mistakes that even amateur film makers wouldn't do. Like using shiny metal wires instead of matte black ones, which is the norm in movies. Things like that.

There were nearly half a million people who were apart of the Apollo program. Some of the brightest minds from the top Aerospace companies designed and built all the hardware for NASA. Either they all had to be in on it or they were all left in the dark. I find either option completely unrealistic. Had they all been in on it, you would probably have had hundreds of deathbed confessions by now.

And then there's all the evidence and tons of documentation that supports it. Some of the best evidence in my opinion, is the +800lbs of Lunar samples. Which can't be faked on Earth or found in Antarctica. Meteorites found on Earth are different in both appearance and in composition from the samples brought back from the Moon.

I could go on, but this sort of sums up why I believed it happened.

Originally posted by letthereaderunderstand
Everyone forget the fact that the navigation computers were not as powerful as a watch computer from the 80's?

I've run the actual apollo guidance software using an emulation of the actual hardware, it's powerful enough, it works.

The Van Allen radiation Belt?

2,500 rems per year or 7 rems per day, they spent less than a day transversing it, far from fatal.

[edit on 27-4-2009 by ngchunter]

Originally posted by letthereaderunderstand
Maybe it might of been much easier to just go, but it would of been a lot cheaper to fake it. Some black backdrops, sheet metal space ships, wires and grey dirt is the cost of making a b rate movie.

The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" which was released in 1968, the same year in which Apollo 7 and 8 flew. The special effects were state of the art at that time. The film had a budget of $10,500,000. That's no B movie budget. And as good as that movie is, it still doesn't come close to looking as real or totally believable. There are certain things that are impossible to overcome when filming on Earth, like 1G gravity and an atmospheric environment.

For example, when the Moon Shuttle lands at Clavius base in 2001. The thrusters blow dust off the landing pad. You can see that the dust billows up and remains suspended in the air like a cloud and slowly falls to the ground. But in reality on the Moon. The dust would fall back to the ground much quicker due to a lack of an atmosphere, (I know technically the Moon has an atmosphere, but it's extremely thin and not worth noting). If you watch any footage of the LM landing you can see the dust blowing out from under it. You can see that it doesn't act like it's in an atmospheric environment and doesn't remain suspended in the air like it would, if it were being filmed on Earth. The Apollo astronauts feet were always kicking up dust when ever they were walking around. Again you see the dust falling back to the ground right away. Unlike on Earth, when you kick up dry powdery dirt, you get a little cloud of dust hovering around your feet.

You'd also need a huge warehouse that's several KM in size for Apollo's 15 - 17 since they drove around in the Rover. There is no warehouse that big to my knowledge, let alone one that is a vacuum chamber. And then there's the issue with gravity. Cable rigs like they use in movies wouldn't work for Apollo since I believe they would limit your range of movement (like being able to only move forward and backward). Which is fine for movies, since they work on a shot by shot basis. But the Apollo astronauts were moving all over the place with several hours of uncut, live footage. Plus how would you edit out the cables and all the rigs and all related equipment the from live footage anyway? Plus the video camera did 360 degree pans (as did the astronauts with the still camera). And no film crew or support system for cables is ever seen.

So I must strongly disagree that some cheap B movie could pull off making a convincing hoax. Especially when Stanley Kubrick couldn't over come certain issues that were beyond his control. No amount of money would solve these problems. Unless of course that money is used to send people to the Moon to film there instead.