10.4 The Apollo astronauts never left Earth orbit
Another popular twist on the Apollo fakery claims is the idea, championed for example by Bart Sibrel, that the Apollo astronauts did indeed go to space on their Saturn V rockets and returned with the splashdowns that the world watched on TV, but didn't go all the way to the Moon: they hid in Earth orbit.
In this way, it is argued, they didn't have to cope with the allegedly lethal radiation of the Van Allen belts and they were able to shoot the TV and film footage in which they are seen to be weightless inside the spacecraft. This solved the problem of simulating weightlessness, and only the footage on the Moon would have to be faked, greatly reducing the workload and the number of participants involved in the hoax. The spacecraft would actually be fully functional and would actually fly, and only a small group of people would need to know the actual flight plan.
The liftoff would be real, and so would the reentry, and the astronauts would actually be in space, where nobody could bump into them by mistake and where they would be subjected to the physiological effects of weightlessness.
Conspiracy theorists make it sound easy, but this scenario clashes with the basic fact that the lunar TV and film footage of the Apollo missions was nevertheless impossible to fake with 1960s-era movie effects.
There's also the problem that the astronauts' radio and TV transmissions would arrive from Earth orbit instead of from deep space, and this would entail a very conspicuous difference in the aiming of any radio antenna that received these signals. An orbit around the Earth below the Van Allen belts last no more than a couple of hours and therefore the antennas would have to swing rapidly to chase the spacecraft as it moved across the sky, whereas real lunar transmissions would instead require them to stay trained on the Moon. The wrong aiming would be obvious not only to local technicians but also to anyone nearby, who would wonder why the giant dish-like antennas were not pointed at the Moon.
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Figure 10-7. What's a Lunar Module doing in Earth Orbit? Nothing mysterious: it's the Apollo 9 test flight. Photo AS09-21-3183. [foto in boek]
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Moreover, the Soviets, who were competing with the United States for the prestige of the first Moon landing, would have been able to detect the fakery by using their own radio telescopes.
Ham radio operators such as Sven Grahn,
78 who listened in on the radio transmissions from the Apollo spacecraft, also would have noticed that the signals were not coming from the Moon or its vicinity: they would have found that the signal vanished periodically when the spacecraft, as it orbited around the Earth, went beyond the local horizon.
There's another objection that renders the Earth-parking scenario visibly absurd: the Apollo spacecraft would have been observable from the ground by any amateur astronomer. Even small satellites can be spotted because they reflect sunlight and therefore stand out as bright moving specks against the dark sky after sunset or before dawn. A vehicle of the size of Apollo (with or without the S-IVB stage) would have been very easy to spot, giving away the secret.
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78 Tracking Apollo-17 from Florida, by Sven Grahn,
www.svengrahn.pp.se.
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For example, the International Space Station, the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station or the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which orbit the Earth at much higher altitudes than those alleged for the Apollo spacecraft, are visible to the naked eye and can be photographed in detail with a good telescope (as demonstrated magnificently by Thierry Legault's images at Astrophoto.fr) and their transit times and paths are easily available. Indeed, the Apollo flights were spotted in this way not only during their brief period in Earth orbit but also during their journeys to the Moon and back by professional and amateur astronomers all over the world.
The photographs shown in Figure 10-8, for example, were taken by the Smithsonian observatory in Maui on December 21, 1968 and show Apollo 8, the first manned mission to leave low Earth orbit and fly around the Moon, as it fires its engine to accelerate toward the Moon. The subsequent dumping of the residual fuel from the S-IVB stage was even visible to the naked eye and was documented by many amateur astronomers in the United Kingdom.
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Figure 10-8. Ignition of the S-IVB stage of Apollo 8. Credit: Smithsonian observatory, Maui. [foto's in boek]
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During the Apollo 13 crisis, the initial explosion released a cloud of oxygen that was documented visually from Earth. NASA, moreover, resorted to help from the professional astronomers of the Chabot observatory in Oakland to determine the exact position of the crippled spacecraft so as to calculate the last firing of the lunar module engine, used as an emergency retrorocket, and bring back safely the three astronauts. Details of these and other Apollo sightings are in Bill Keel's Telescopic Tracking of the Apollo Lunar Missions.
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79 www.astr.ua.edu/keel/space/apollo.html.
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Figure 10-9 shows, at the center, the command module, the service module and the lunar module of Apollo 13, over 23,000 kilometers (14,300 miles) from Earth, en route to the Moon, before the accident. The other four dots are the fairing panels that enclosed the lunar module and had been jettisoned.
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Figure 10-9. The Apollo 13 spacecraft en route to the Moon. Credit: James W. Young. [foto in boek]
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The picture was taken through the 60-centimeter (24-inch) telescope of Table Mountain, in California. The diagonal streaks are stars, distorted by the motion of the telescope to chase the spacecraft during the five minutes of the exposure of the film. The same observatory saw the Apollo 8 S-IVB stage and command and service module when it was nearly 320,000 kilometers (200,000 miles) from Earth.
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It should be noted that the locations and events reported and recorded by amateur and professional astronomers correspond perfectly to the ones described in NASA's technical documents for the individual missions.
10.5 The radio and TV signals came from an orbiting satellite
Another frequent conjecture among Moon hoax theorists is that the live TV broadcasts and the radio communications were prerecorded and then sent from an unmanned satellite that orbited the Earth or the Moon.
An Earth-orbiting satellite would have been out of the question, however, for the same reasons mentioned earlier: the Soviet space surveillance system and ham radio users worldwide would have been capable of intercepting the direct feed from the satellite and would have realized that its signal wasn't coming from the Moon because its source changed position constantly. Even a geostationary orbit would have revealed the trick, because it wouldn't have followed the orbital motion of the Moon.
Placing the transmitter in orbit around the Moon or on the lunar surface would have solved these problems, but it would have left another very conspicuous clue to the fakery: the frequency of the radio transmissions from a moving spacecraft varies depending on the speed with which it moves toward or away from the receiving station, just like the sound of an ambulance siren changes pitch as it approaches or moves away. This variation, known as Doppler effect, would have been detectable by any well-equipped radio enthusiast.
The transmitter would have to travel through space (or vary its transmission frequency artificially) by following exactly the mission profile stated by NASA, simulating not only the trip but also every lunar orbit, which entailed an increase and a decrease in the distance to Earth, with a consequent continuous frequency variation. A second transmitter, simulating exactly the movements of the lunar module when it detached from the command and service modules, would also have been necessary.
To add to the complexity of this concept, it would have been necessary to transmit not only the radio and TV communications but also fake telemetry data that reported the state of the spacecraft to Mission Control. All these data would have to be created from scratch with perfect authenticity and would have to match exactly the speed and direction of the spacecraft, which would have been detectable by means of the Doppler effect.
Worse still, any mistake in the characteristics of the transmissions from the fake spacecraft would have exposed the conspiracy.
Moreover, the deep space monitoring and transmission network wasn't entirely controlled by NASA or the US government. For example, most of the radio communications of the various missions and in particular the live TV broadcast of the first landing on the Moon went through the Australian radio telescopes of Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek, which were operated by local engineers.
These weren't nameless minions; they were (and many still are) very real people, who don't mince words about their role in the Apollo project and about the conspiracy theorists who accuse them of collusion. Here's what Mike Dinn, deputy manager of the radio monitoring station of the Manned Spaceflight Network in Honeysuckle Creek, Australia, during Apollos 7 to 13, has to say:
...as I was the Australian citizen employed by the Australian government responsible for running the operations at the prime Australian tracking site here near Canberra I can vouch for the scientific/engineering fact that we pointed our antenna at the trajectory to, at and from the moon and transmitted and received radio signals containing commands, telemetry, television together with navigation info from antenna angles, Doppler frequencies and two way range delays.
Impossible to fake.
I actually talked with Apollo 8 on the way out (see ALSJ for details) and my assistant ops man John Saxon spoke to Young and Duke on the lunar surface during Apollo 16.81
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81Interview with Mike Dinn by Steven Dutch (
www.honeysucklecreek.net/people/dinn.html); my personal communication with Dinn, 2010.