Tag Archives: Moon

Why Do People Persist in Denying the Moon Landings?

Posted on by
22

In the summer of 2009 the United States celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the first Moon landing, Apollo 11. Amidst all of the hoopla virtually every news story, especially in the electronic world, made some comment about a supposedly rising belief that humans have never landed on the Moon.  Why?

Buzz Aldrin

This image of Buzz Aldrin saluting the U.S. flag on the Moon in 1969 is often used by Moon landing deniers as evidence that the landing was filmed on Earth, because the flag appears to be waving in the breeze, and we all know there is no breeze on the Moon. When astronauts were planting the flagpole they rotated it back and forth to better penetrate the lunar soil (anyone who’s set a blunt tent-post will know how this works). Of course the flag waved—no breeze required!

Of course, from almost the point of the first Apollo missions, a small group of Americans have denied that it had taken place. This group seems to be expanding as the events of Apollo recede into history. Aided by a youth movement that does not remember what went down in the Apollo era and for whom distrust of government runs high, it is among that cadre of Americans where those who are skeptical have proliferated. Jaded by so many other government scandals, these younger members of society whose recollection of Apollo is distant to begin with finds it easy to believe the questioning they see on myriad Moon hoax web sites. Lack of understanding of science and failure to employ critical analytical skills make them more susceptible to this type of hucksterism.

There has been considerable research on the parts of society that embrace conspiracy theories of all types. Arguing that conspiracism writ large represents a fundamental part of the political system, legal scholar Mark Fenster claims in Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minnesota, 2008), that such conspiracies represent “a polarization so profound that people end up with an unshakable belief that those in power ‘simply can’t be trusted’.”

At the time of the first landings, opinion polls showed that overall less than five percent “doubted the moon voyage had taken place.” Fueled by conspiracy theorists of all stripes, this number has grown over time. In a 2004 poll, while overall numbers remained about the same, among Americans between 18 and 24 years old “27% expressed doubts that NASA went to the Moon,” according to pollster Mary Lynne Dittmar. Doubt is different from denial, but this represents a trend that seemed to be growing over time among those who did not witness the events.

Perhaps this situation should not surprise us. A lot of other truly weird beliefs exist in society. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt has been philosophical about this turn: “If people decide they’re going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there’s not much you can do with them. For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education.”

While it is inappropriate for us to take this denial seriously and opinion surveys show consistently that few do, for those raised in the postmodern world of the latter twentieth century where the nature of truth is so thoroughly questioned it is more likely to gain a footing.

The media, especially, have fueled doubts over the years. While this may not be viewed as a definitive statement, a child’s bib I have seen places the blame squarely on the media’s back. It reads: “Once upon a time people walked on the moon. They picked up some rocks. They planted some flags. They drove a buggy around for a while. Then they came back. At least that’s what grandpa said. The TV guy said it was all fake. Grandpa says the TV guy is an idiot. Someday, I want to go to the moon too.”

No question, the February 2001 airing of the Fox special Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? changed the nature of the debate. In this instance a major network presented a conspiracy scenario without any serious rebuttal that might have been offered. As USA Today (April 9, 2001) reported in the aftermath of the show: “According to Fox and its respectfully interviewed ‘experts’—a constellation of ludicrously marginal and utterly uncredentialed ‘investigative journalists’—the United States grew so eager to defeat the Soviets in the intensely competitive 1960s space race that it faked all six Apollo missions.”

JFK

The Decision to Go to the Moon: President John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961 speech before a Joint Session of Congress, in Washington DC, USA. Vice President Lyndon Johnson (left) and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (right) are in the background.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans made it possible to reach the Moon. This launch of Apollo 11 represents one of the most watched events in human history. It defies credulity that so many people could have perpetrated such a hoax.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans made it possible to reach the Moon. This launch of Apollo 11 represents one of the most watched events in human history. It defies credulity that so many people could have perpetrated such a hoax.

The Fox show raised the profile of Moon landing deniers. And it sparked considerable response. Marc Norman at the University of Tasmania quipped, “Fox should stick to making cartoons. I’m a big fan of The Simpsons!”

Whereas NASA had refrained from officially responding to these charges—avoiding anything that might dignify the claims—the Fox show demanded that it change its approach. After the Fox program first aired, NASA released a one-paragraph press release entitled, “Apollo: Yes, We Did,” that was minimalist to say the least. It also posted a NASA information sheet originally issued in 1977 to readdress some of the concerns and pointed people with questions to various Internet sites containing responses. NASA officials added, “To some extent debating this subject is an insult to the thousands who worked for years to accomplish the most amazing feats of exploration in history. And it certainly is an insult to the memory of those who have given their lives for the exploration of space.”

Denials of the Moon landings appropriately should be denounced as crackpot ideas. I look forward to the time when we return to the Moon and can tour “Tranquility Base” for ourselves.

Roger D. Launius is a senior curator in the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

Barbara Marx Hubbard and the Origins of the Pro-Space Movement in the 1970s

Posted on by
2

The formal beginnings of the modern “pro-space movement”—really an extension of the ad hoc efforts to gain and sustain public support for an aggressive spaceflight agenda earlier led by Wernher von Braun and others—might be best traced to the June 1970 formation of the Committee for the Future (CFF), a small group of space activists, dreamers, and misfits.

Meeting in the home of Barbara Marx Hubbard, daughter of the toy king, and her husband, artist-philosopher Earl Hubbard, in Lakeville, Connecticut, they proposed establishing a lunar colony. They unabashedly offered this as a great utopian experiment in which humanity, free from the constraints of everyday society, could create a perfect community.

Barbara Marx-Hubbard

Barbara Marx Hubbard

The CFF’s charter clearly voiced these utopian ideals: “Earth-bound history has ended. Universal history has begun. Mankind has been born into an environment of immeasurable possibilities. We, the Committee for the Future, believe that the long-range goal for Mankind should be to seek and settle new worlds. To survive and realize the common aspiration of all people for a future of unlimited opportunity, this generation must begin now to find the means of converting the planets into life support systems for the race of Men.”

They concluded, “A Challenge of this magnitude can emancipate the genius of Man.” They also offered shares in the lunar colony to millions of investors, immediately creating a constituency that could lobby Congress for funding for bold space ventures.

They convinced Representative Olin Teague, a longtime supporter of Apollo, to sponsor a resolution calling for a study of the feasibility of this lunar effort. When NASA, the aerospace industry, and the science community opposed the resolution, fearing that it might jeopardize other plans, it died a prompt death in Congress. CFF then rewrote the bill to propose a “citizens in space” mission in low-Earth orbit, called “Mankind One,” but NASA opposed that as well and it met a similar fate.

Many within NASA apparently agreed with the ideology of the CFF, although they eschewed its political strategies. Barbara Hubbard wrote how upon first meeting Christopher C. Kraft, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (renamed the Johnson Space Center in 1973), he told her, “This step into the universe is a religion and I’m a member of it.” Hubbard was deeply troubled, however, by the reaction of NASA to the CFF’s proposals. She wrote, “The corporate decision of NASA as a government agency was less responsive than the decision of any of its individual members.” One may trace to this incident the beginnings among the Committee for the Future of a wariness that NASA might not “do the right thing” in opening the space frontier to “citizen activities.” Such wariness continues to the present among many in the pro-space movement.

Organizing symposia, called “synergistic convergences” or SYNCONs, and publishing literature about a hopeful future in space, members of the CFF converted a sizable group of mostly young people to a utopian future in space. Space groupies came from everywhere to participate in the SYNCONs, some wearing “Star Trek” uniforms, energizing a loyal base of activists who firmly believed that only through space settlement will the human destiny of a perfect society be realized. While the Committee for the Future ceased to exist as a separate organization in the mid-1970s, Barbara Hubbard continued her commitment to an expansive human future in space.

Most assuredly the space professionals at NASA and in industry considered Barbara Hubbard and the CFF, both then and now, somewhat “wacky” and without substance. But the CFF represented a strain of spaceflight enthusiasm that could not be ignored—one that emphasized individual activism and blatant utopianism and it gained a greater respectability when later espoused by more credible advocates such as Princeton University professor Gerard K. O’Neill and Cornell University astrophysicist Carl Sagan in the latter 1970s.

Barbara Marx Hubbard has remained involved in futurist activities since this time. She was a founding member of the World Future Society, the Society for the Universal Human, and co-founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution.

Roger D. Launius is a Senior Curator in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum

Shaking It Up: Planetary Tectonics Throughout the Solar System

Posted on by
1

I first thought of putting together a book on planetary tectonics when I was working on a general subject matter book on the planets in the mid 1990’s.  That book had a “comparing the planets” section where I showed examples of tectonic landforms on Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.  Tectonic landforms are created when forces act on solid crustal material and they are found on objects of all sizes in the solar system.  The first step on the path to making Planetary Tectonics a reality was a topical session that my colleague and co-editor Rich Schultz and I chaired at the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in November, 2000 in Reno, Nevada. Many of the speakers in that session contributed to chapters in the book.

Sheep Mountain is a thrust fault structure in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming

Sheep Mountain Sheep Mountain, Bighorn Basin, WY. View toward the southeast looking upstream, Bighorn River. See Lovell-Greybull Area, Big Horn Co., WY, Department of Agriculture, Commodity Stabilization Service, 1961: Air photo BBN-3BB-110. (27Jun65). Source: www.geology.wisc.edu.

Amenthes Rupes

The Amenthes Rupes thrust fault on Mars is similar to Sheep Mountain here on Earth. Credit: NASA/Smithsonian.

Over the last decade, numerous planetary missions have returned new images and data on many solar system objects.  These include the NEAR mission to the asteroid Eros, the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, and the Cassini mission to Saturn.  The wealth of data from these and other missions greatly advanced our understanding of planetary tectonics during the time many of the chapters were in the process of being written.  As lead author on the Mercury chapter and a member of the MESSENGER science team, this proved to be both exciting and frustrating.  With three successful flybys of Mercury that coincided with the typesetting and proofing phase of the book, it was impossible to do justice to the sum of MESSENGER’s amazing new discoveries.

Messenger View of thrust fault structure on Mercury

A newly discovered thrust fault scarp on Mercury revealed by the MESSENGER spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Less than a year into its mission, spectacular new images returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have already revealed previously undetected tectonic landforms that are changing our understanding of the geologic evolution of the Moon.  After entering into orbit in March, 2011, I expect MESSENGER will write a whole new chapter in the tectonics of Mercury.

Tom Watters is the Senior Scientist of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies of the National Air and Space Museum

The Saga of Lunar Landscape

Posted on by
9

For more than a decade it has been my privilege, among my other duties, to serve as curator of the National Air and Space Museum art collection. It comes as a surprise to many folks to realize that the Museum has an art collection. In fact, it includes over 4,700 works by artists with names like Daumier, Goya, Rauschenberg, Rockwell and Wyeth, and is perhaps the finest and best-rounded collection of aerospace-themed art held by any of the world’s museums. People who are aware that I manage the Museum’s art treasures occasionally ask if I have a favorite work in the collection, I do.

“Lunar Landscape” by Chesley Bonestell. Reproduced courtesy of Private Collection

Chesley Bonestell’s mural, Lunar Landscape, was unveiled at the Boston Science Museum’s Hayden Planetarium on March 28, 1957. “No spaceship reservations are needed for a startlingly realistic visit to the Moon” announced a museum press release.  Measuring forty feet long by ten feet tall, the dramatic panorama of the lunar surface was the masterwork of an artist who had done more than his fair share to set the stage for the coming of the Space Age.

Born in 1888, Chesley Bonestell grew up on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, and survived the 1906 earthquake to emerge as a leading American architectural designer. Having left his artistic fingerprints on some of the best known structures of the era, including the façade of the Chrysler Building, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Golden Gate Bridge, he moved on to Hollywood, where his matte paintings provided the stunning backgrounds for such films as, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), and The Magnificent Ambersons. (1942).

Chesley Bonestell. Portrait by Ansel Adams, Gift of Pip and Frederick C. Durant, III

Always fascinated by astronomy, Bonestell began combining the best available science with his own artistry to produce paintings of the surface of other worlds. Life magazine published a spread of the artist’s extraterrestrial scenes in its issue of May 29, 1944. The editors of Mechanix Illustrated introduced their readers to Bonestell’s notion of a “Moon Rocket” in September 1945. In 1949, he collaborated with writer Willy Ley to produce the beautifully illustrated book, Conquest of Space. The next year, Bonestell teamed with producer George Pal and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein to create a classic space flight film, Destination Moon (1950). The artist contributed illustrations to a series of eight Colliers magazine articles on space flight that began to appear in the spring of 1952, and to the books describing flights to the Moon and Mars that spun out of the magazine series. A generation of youngsters, myself among them, nursed dreams of interplanetary travel inspired by Chesley Bonestell’s dramatic visions of other worlds.

Bonestell was at the peak of his powers in 1956, when the Boston Museum of Science commissioned Lunar Landscape, a work on canvas that would take up an entire wall near the planetarium. As in the case of all of his paintings, the artist planned the mural in meticulous detail. He positioned the viewer on a spot 1300 feet up the south wall of an imaginary lunar crater (“similar to Albateguius, but smaller”), located seven degrees from the Moon’s North Pole and five degrees to the left of the center of the lunar disc. He went so far as to specify that it was 3 o’clock, Boston time, on a late June afternoon, and calculated the position of the planets and stars accordingly (Jupiter over the central peaks, Antares below and to the right of the Earth).

Continue reading →

The Whole Earth Disk: An Iconic Image of the Space Age

Posted on by
9

Earth from Apollo 17. NASA Image #AS17-148-22727

Who has not seen the bright blue and white image of the Earth, swaddled in clouds and looking inviting, in numerous places and in various settings? Taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts on December 7, 1972, this photograph is one of the most widely distributed images in existence. It was the best one taken by these astronauts of a fully lit Earth, as the astronauts had the Sun behind them when they took the image. Sometimes called the “blue marble,” this photograph taken during the translunar coast en route to the Moon, showed the Mediterranean Sea area in the north and extended to a good depiction of the to the Antarctic south polar ice cap. There was a heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere but the majority of the coastline of Africa is clearly visible, especially the Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar, and portions of the Asian mainland.

As early as 1966, environmental activist Stewart Brand began a campaign for NASA to release an image of the whole Earth in space. Brand even made up buttons that asked, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the Whole Earth yet?” He sold them on college campuses and mailed them to prominent scientists, futurists, and legislators. Not until the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, however, did “Whole Earth” become a reality. As Brand recalled: “I was a big fan of NASA and of then ten years of space exploration that had gone up to that point, and there we were in 1966, having seen a lot of the moon and a lot of hunks of the Earth, but never the complete mandala… it was a bit odd that for ten years, with all the photographic apparatus in the world, we hadn’t turned the cameras that 180 degrees to look back.” This story has been told and retold in various ways, with some authors suggesting that Brand had alleged a NASA cover-up of secret photographs, although, his statements do not reflect this belief.

To capture this iconic image the astronaut/photographer used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera with an 80-millimeter lens. It was virtually impossible to tell who on the Apollo 17 crew actually took the photograph—Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, or Harrison Schmitt—all of whom took many photographs with the Hasselblad cameras aboard the spacecraft during the mission. More recent analysis credits Schmitt with the photo, but it cannot be determined for certain.

Stewart Brand put the photograph on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog. This image, and the other stunning photographs of the Earth taken from space, inspired a reconsideration of our place in the universe.  It became the rallying cry of environmental activists, politicians, and scientists during the annual Earth Day celebrations. They used it as an object lesson of the Earth as a small, vulnerable, lonely, and fragile body teeming with life in a dull, black, lifeless void. While self-regulating and ancient, humanity proved a threat to this place. According to Brand and other ecologists, the Earth required human protection and the Whole Earth disk signaled its fragility.

Earthrise as seen from Apollo 8 spacecraft while orbiting the Moon in December, 1968. NASA Image #EL-2001-00365

The whole Earth image, as well as the earlier Earthrise photograph prompted the people of the world to view the planet Earth in a new way. Writer Archibald MacLeish summed up the feelings of many people when he wrote at the time of Apollo, that “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.” The modern environmental movement was galvanized in part by this new perception of the planet and the need to protect it and the life that it supports.

Roger D. Launius is senior curator in the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum.