Did we go to the Moon?

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Walter

Institute of Astronautics
TU München, Garching
© 2004

"We just live in a society where there is no law forbidding the propagation of stupidities and nonsense and even earn money with it." These are the words of actor Tom Hanks regarding the conspiracy theory, which claims that the US-Americans have never been to the Moon, as the dangers would have been too high to risk a setback. Tom Hanks' words are very serious, since he played the role of the Apollo 13 commander in the movie, and became more famous than the astronauts he played. But still not all the supporters of the conspiracy theory want to be called fools. And one of them wanted to know it very precisely. In December 2002 he faced Edwin Aldrin, the first person to walk on the moon together with Neil Armstrong on 20^th July 1969, in broad daylight, with a Bible in his hands, and demanded Aldrin should swear on that Bible that he had really been to the Moon. At that time, Aldrin was already 72 years old, and he did what a good many people would have done as well in such an absurd situation: he gave him a good hook to the chin without wasting his breath answering him.

The argument may have been quite staggering, but certainly not convincing, especially for those people who had not yet made up their mind regarding the conspiracy theory, and were still waiting for a sound argument in favour of the moonlandings. And there are many people of that kind. There is hardly a week nobody asks me on an event or during a lecture about the conspiracy theory and wants to know what I think about it. But before explaining my own thoughts, just a short overview of how the conspiracy theory came about.

The theory seems to have been triggered by an American movie called "Capricorn 1" from 1978. The story is about the first manned US mission to Mars. As apparently the environmental control and life support system is faulty, but the future of NASA depends on the success of that mission, the astronauts are removed from the capsule without further ado, and they are taken to a secret place. The mission takes place without the astronauts, and NASA stages the mission in a studio for the TV viewers, the astronauts are forced to cooperate with the threat of reprisals. And in fact they even kill some colleagues of the astronauts in the course of time, because they want to go public with the truth. It gets quite uncomfortable for the studio astronauts when the capsule burns up during its return flight from Mars, and they realise that they are now supposed to be dead. 

Some people took up the idea that space flights could be faked as they are too dangerous, and they transferred it to the Apollo missions. Bill Kaysing, an employee of the "Rocketdyne Research Departments" in Southern California was very active in that field. From 1956 until 1963 Kaysing had been responsible for the technical publications of that company, which was a NASA supplier for parts of the propulsion system of the Saturn rocket. But still it was a rather quiet affair, until it was announced in public when the US TV station "Fox TV network" on 15^th February 2001 broadcasted the programme "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?", which received considerable attention. Kaysing along with other supporters of the conspiracy theory had a lot of time to explain his version of the Apollo missions. He claimed that an internal feasibility study (which was not proved to exist) had shown that the probability of a successful manned Moon mission would only amount to 0.0017 percent. The Americans simply did not yet have the necessary technical possibilities, and apart from that, flying through the radiation belt on the way do Moon would have anyway killed the astronauts. The pressure created by Kennedy's statement, the Americans would land on the Moon until the end of the 1960s as well as the race with the Russians had led the NASA to film the whole mission in a studio, of course in the legendary Area 51.

Apart from Kaysing, a certain Ralph Rene also got a chance to speak. As an engineering autodidact he had had a closer look at the moonlanding pictures, and had apparently found some inconsistencies, which according to him uncovered the NASA fraud. On the video recording apparently the US flag waved in the wind. Wind on the Moon? And it was not possible to see any stars on the black sky in the background of the photos, although you should be able to see them. So had the studio people forgotten a few things? During that programme about ten of these apparent proofs were presented, and it seemed that this convinced many viewers.

figure 1: Where are the stars?

And such a bestseller is not to be missed in Germany. In the middle of the same year 2001 the programme Spiegel-TV broadcasted a dubbed version of the programme, and so the so-called moon hoax virus, as it has been called since the Fox programme, also spread in Germany. Since that time, programmes of that kind are regularly broadcasted once a year. It is quite interesting to have a look at an Internet survey by Spiegel-online about whether the viewers believed in the moon hoax or not. I made two snapshots of that survey on 2^nd July 2002 and on 30^th July 2004, which you can see here:

The result: One year after the first broadcasting about 44% of the viewers in Germany were convinced that the Apollo missions had indeed taken place, and only 36% supported the conspiracy theory, but in 2004 it was the other way around: Only 39% believed NASA and 43% believed the opponents. And, if you only have a look at those who voted in the time span between 2^nd July 2002 and 30^th July 2004, only 34% of them believed NASA and 58% are supporters of the conspiracy theory. Although the survey is not representative, it reflects a certain trend: that more people became doubtful and demand proofs.

That brings us to the decisive question: What are the proofs for the Apollo missions? Or let's put it differently: Do the pictures of Rene not prove that the Americans have not been there?

The central term here is "proof". What is a proof? I have to get a little bit formal here, because the whole misery of the moon hoax discussion depends on this point. Well, from a purely logical point of view proof means "the irrefutable demonstration that a statement and the facts are consistent". I think we all agree on that. But unfortunately there is a catch to the application of this logic, as the facts are not in the present, but in the past. If I have to prove that the sky is blue, the evidence is simple. I only have to point to the sky and say: "You can see it there: it's blue". But how do you prove facts that lie in the past and have already passed? Indeed, you can only definitely prove things that exist at the moment by referring to them. Well, you can try to use an argumentative chain in order to come up with a causal connection between the present facts and the supposed facts in the past. It is however virtually impossible to demonstrate that this chain is true without any doubt. And that is exactly the catch to it.

I want to make this example clear. The Bible maintains that the World was created within seven days. Clever believers tried to calculate the exact date of the creation of the World by summing up all the years that lie between the creation of the World and the birth of Jesus, just as they can allegedly be found in the Old Testament. One who, according to his own opinion, did that very exactly, was the archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, James Ussher, in 1658. He suggested: "The beginning of time was the beginning of the night before the 23^rd day of October in 4004 B.C."So we would know it very precisely, if it weren't for the pushing palaeontologists (the ones who study old bones of former beings), who present the Church with the bones of dinosaurs and of our forefathers and say: These bones are far older than 6004 years, and that is the proof that the Bible is not right after all. So is that a proof? Well, no, it is not, because you could object and ask, how do you know that the bones are really older than 6004 years? In that case the palaeontologists would put forward very complicated reasons like the ¹⁴C method and geological determinations etc. It could all be correct. But is it a proof without any doubt? The religious fundamentalists in the US say no, and their argument is: God created these old bones with exactly these features and put them exactly in those places to tempt the palaeontologists to assume the facts would be the way they say. But in fact nothing existed before 23^rd October 4004 B.C. You may smile at that argument from the Church. But smiling is not a proof to the contrary. Now: Where is the proof without any doubt that the World is older than 6004 years? Well, there is none. Just as the Church is also not able to prove that the World is only 6004 years old. And faith does also not help.

This leads us to a very important finding: the past cannot be proved without any doubt. You may start brooding and think: Don't I clearly recall my own wedding, and I also have those photos, don't they clearly prove it? Well, I am sorry, but they don't. The alleged photo as a proof for the wedding is just coloured pigments in a special arrangement on high gloss paper. Our brain converts it into a memory which apparently convinces us. But anybody could use coloured pigments on paper, maybe in order to deceive us. So the proof is linked with our memory. But we all know that memories can be deceitful, and we know that even mass hypnosis exists. And: memories are just a specific linkage of certain neurons in our brain. Is such a linkage able to work as a proof that a certain constellation (wedding) took place in the past? Of course not, as there might be a lot of different circumstances that might have led to exactly the same linkage of neutrons.

So there is no 100% proof without any doubt about facts that took place in the past. That should not be a surprise, as the past does not exist anywhere. It only exists in our head, and that is the reason why we will never be able to travel into the past. The only thing that exists and is provable is the present. So it would not even be a proof for the NASA if in the future duty-free trips to the Moon were offered to look at the old lunar ferries from the Apollo era behind a barrier with the sign "Do not touch!".The lunar ferries would then only exist in the present, and would not necessarily have had to exist in the past as well. So NASA might have put them there afterwards covered in the corresponding patina to cover up the non-existing Apollo flights. But maybe NASA has good relationships with aliens, as some people suggest, and NASA asked them to take the old lunar ferries there secretly. That sounds really weird, but that is not the important point. The important point is the proof without any doubt that on the 20^th of July 1969 Armstrong and Aldrin were on the Moon. This proof does not exist and it cannot exist. It seems that NASA suspected such a thing. Because in November 2002 it was made public that they would withdraw the order of €15000, for the renowned space historian James Oberg, who was supposed to prove in a book that NASA had taken astronauts to the Moon and back.

Does that mean that we are not able to make credible statements about our past? Oh yes, we can. But we need to rummage through the sciences a bit. Because the scientists have a similar, basic problem just like NASA: Scientific theories cannot be proved. They are merely more or less probable. Despite that fact scientists have been very successful in the last century when it comes to tracking down the truths of nature. So there must be procedures to distinguish truth from untruth. There are indeed two basic procedures. First of all the procedure to prove theories which describe circumstances in the present. This procedure was closely described by the philosopher Karl Popper and is based on the principle of falsification of theories. But that is not important for us at the moment, because we are talking about proofs of circumstances in the past (whether the World did exist or did not more than 6004 years ago) with circumstatnces of the present (bones that were found). The procedure which is applied here became famous under the name of "Occam's razor". 

figure 2: William Ockham, 1285-1347

Of course we are not talking about a real razor. It is the procedure of the scientist Occam, which makes it possible to distinguish between useful and pointless things, you can separate them in a razor-sharp process just like with a razor. William Ockham (Latin: Occam), 1285-1347, was an English Franciscan working as a scholastic philosopher of nature. The following words are ascribed to him: "Plurality should not be posited without necessity" ("Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.") And: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." ("Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate."). He indeed never said it exactly like that, but only something similar. But that is not the point. Everything these words are to express, the philosopher Wittgenstein once described as follows: "Look for the most simple law which harmonises with the facts." Or the inimitably witty Einstein: "A theory should be as simple as possible, but not more simple than that." What does that mean? Well, it is about favouring that self-consistent theory about circumstances in the past which explains the facts of the present most simply. And "simple" does not mean that the theory as such is simple, but that it does not include any additional assumptions.

Now, let's use this razor for our problem of the age of the World. The Church offers quite a possible explanation, but it uses the unprovable assumption that God exists, and that He wants to lead the palaeontologist up the garden path. In Occam's view this is an unnecessary, multiplying assumption. As there is a theory of the palaeontologists without this additional assumption, which is simpler in that sense. So the theory of the palaeontologists is to be preferred. Modern science goes even further. Usually at any given point of time there is a minimally simple theory describing the given circumstances. Let's just call it the "top dog". This theory is generally accepted, as it can be a considerable effort to thoroughly look into that theory and make sure that it is indeed simple and self-consistent (a very important feature, but we do not want to look into it right now). That's why it falls to a new theory to prove that it is even more simple and also self-consistent, or that the top dog proved to be wrong.

After this little trip into the sciences let's get back to the moon hoax with our newly acquired knowledge. We are looking for the most probable theory for the question of whether on the 20^th of July 1969 astronauts were on the Moon. We know that there is no absolute truth, as the past does not exist anymore, and thus cannot be proved. The top dog is the theory that "NASA was on the Moon". This theory is self-consistent: Millions of people saw the launch of a Saturn rocket live. On the 20^th of July 1969 there was radio communication coming in from the direction of the Moon. Even the suspicious Russians testified it. The devices the astronauts set up on the Moon (the so-called Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP) stations), emitted signals about the seismology of the Moon until October 1977 to the Earth. Even today laser beams sent to the Moon are reflected back to the Earth by means of the Laser Ranging Retroreflector, LRRR, which was set up by the two astronauts; this would be impossible without such a device! And this theory is extremely simple, it does not need an additional, unprovable assumption.

figure 3: The ALSEP experiments of Apollo 15. In the background as a cuboid the central station with a transmitter to the Earth.

Now let's have a look at the moon hoax theory. It states that the Saturn rocket took off (that's obvious, it would be quite weird to say that millions of people were wrong during the launch), but then it had merely circled the Earth and everything else that could be seen on the TV screens took place in a telestudio in Area 51. This theory may be consistent (it still has to be proved), but it uses many unprovable assumptions:

·          There was a conspiracy in the NASA and the US government comprising many thousands of employees, and it had to be guaranteed that all of them kept silent during their whole life.

·          The three astronauts Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom, who died painfully by burning during an Apollo 1 test on 27^th January were deliberately killed by NASA to give the Apollo project a more realistic touch (at least according to the supporters of the conspiracy theory)

·          Right in the middle of the Cold War NASA bribed several thousand Russian space experts, so that they did not inform the media about the moon hoax, as the radio communication they intercepted of course as well, did not come from the Moon as expected, but from the Earth orbit.

·          NASA also bribed all the radio hams in the world. Because otherwise they would have shouted from the rooftops that the radiocommunication they intercepted (which is still a hobby among radio hams with shuttle missions and the International Space Station) did not come from the Moon, but from the Earth orbit. (Well, and how could NASA know all the radio hams in the world?)

·          The lunar rocks which appeared at the NASA after 20^th July 1969, which cannot come from the Earth because of its ³He content, and which amounted to a total of 382 kg after all the Apollo missions, might have been brought from the Moon by angels, or maybe also aliens (the conspirators do not make themselves clear on that point). The Americans were not able to manufacture it artificially, as they did not know the structure of the Moon. On the other side, they had to have known it, because otherwise the composition would not have exactly been the same as the one of the Russian lunar rocks which they brought back to the Earth later during their unmanned missions.

·          NASA bribed aliens, so that exactly from the 20^th of July 1969 onward, they reflect and send back laser beams to the Earth, which we send regularly to the Moon, e.g. from the fundamental station Wettzell in the Bavarian Forest, to determine the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon. It might also be possible that later on NASA send another unmanned mission to the Moon to install these reflectors afterwards, as in the long run, it became too expensive to pay the aliens for their services. Feel free to make other assumptions regarding that topic.

Well, there is no doubt, due to its simplicity, the NASA theory is obviously preferable.

Now, what about the supposed proofs that show that the astronauts have never been on the Moon? According to the described procedure it is not NASA's task to proof that the supposed proofs are wrong, but it would be the task of the supporters of the conspiracy theory to prove without any doubt that the existing facts are incompatible with the visit of astronauts on the Moon. And the words "without any doubt" are clearly highlighted. The comment that there are no star lights on the photo is not only not a proof, but can even be explained quite easily: If you make a picture of a gleaming bright surface of the Moon, the shutter speed and the aperture of the camera need to be so small that the dynamic of the film is not enough to convert the weak star lights into a blackening of the film. That's why you cannot see the stars on these photos.

Although according to the procedure it is not the task of the supporters of the NASA theory to refute the individual statements of the supporters of the conspiracy theory, some took the trouble to do that. And the result is an impressive collection of arguments which show that the supporters of the conspiracy theory do not know very much about physics, but only relied on the first impression. If you want to know more about that, have a look at the following Internet pages:

liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2001/news-moonlanding.asp

www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

www.mondlandung.pcdl.de

And here some important links regarding the Apollo missions:

www.apollosaturn.com

www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html

figure 5: The landing device of Apollo 17 seen from the moon's orbit of the Apollo 17 command capsule

Let's summarise: The assumption that "on the 20^th of July 1969 and also afterwards astronauts were on the Moon" is probably correct, because it is the most simple explanation for all the given facts. Should there be any facts that are not compatible with this assumption, then it is the task of the supporters of the conspiracy theory to prove without any doubt that these facts are not compatible with a moonlanding without having to resort to incredible assumptions. This has not yet been done, and we know that from a practical point of view, it is hardly possible. On the other hand there can never be any proof showing without any doubt that on the 20^th of July 1969 astronauts were on the Moon, as this day is in the past, and the past does not exist, thus the circumstances related with it cannot be proved without any doubt. It might be difficult for us, but we need to become familiar with the thought that, apart from a few tautological statements in logic, there is no absolute certainty in this world, even if we wanted that.

The answer might be a bit academic and overstated. But it is in fact very close to reality, as it gives us a practical guide which can be implemented fairly easily:

·         Be careful with drawing conclusions from present facts regarding the past.

·         The most simple assumption is probably the right one.

·         Complicated assumptions need to be proved by their supporters.

So, were the astronauts now on the Moon or not? Who could ever doubt that when you use common sense? But is it not also good to know that from a scientific point of view NASA is beyond any doubts?