This conspiracy theory dates back to the days of Apollo itself, but it gained momentum thanks to an absurd Fox TV show
Writer Phil Plate wrote for the magazine Space Illustrated that he was not surprised when the Fox television network broadcast a program trying to prove that NASA faked the Apollo missions to the moon between the years 1968 (Apollo 8 which only circled the moon) and the last landing of Apollo 17 in 1972. This conspiracy theory dates back to the days of Apollo itself, but it gained momentum thanks to this absurd TV show.
Those who believe in the conspiracy theory say that they have evidence for their belief. But their claims show ignorance in science, from the basic principles of photography to geology and physics. For example, the first piece of evidence offered by proponents of the theory is the recency of stars from the photos taken by the Apollo astronauts. This is true. Almost every image taken from orbit around the moon and from the surface of the moon showed a completely dark sky completely devoid of stars. If the moon had no atmosphere, the conspiracists argue, the sky should have been full of stars.
Not true. On the surface of the moon, the cameras contained slow speed film (Akata-Chrome 64 for color photography and Panatomic X for black and white photography) which were also designed for exposure in bright sunlight - and therefore in such exposure, of a fraction of a second, even the brightest stars - which are 100 times paler than the full moon as which is visible from the earth and 10 million times more blind than the sun - will not be seen, and many seconds of exposure will be needed to see them. Such an exposure would have caused the burning of the photos of the astronauts, the spacecraft and the moon itself. A well-exposed photo taken on the bright side of the Moon - just like the one where the Earth occupies a large part of the frame - will not pick up even a single star.
Moreover, the astronauts took pictures in which stars are visible. On Apollo 16, for example, John Young used a small ultraviolet telescope and placed it in the shadow of the landing compartment to photograph distant stars and galaxies. And in several Apollo missions, the unlucky astronauts who remained in the chamber that circled the moon, and passed by its night side, photographed some stars as well as the pale corona of the sun using very fast films and long exposures.
Conspiracy theorists watched hours and hours of video transmissions transmitted from the moon, most of them in color and with good clarity, and saw them as evidence of fakes. In fact, these are the films that prove that people did walk on the moon. When the astronauts put their feet on the ground, the loose lunar soil dispersed. In the absence of an atmosphere, the dust particles behave like tiny rifle bullets and move in a ballistic trajectory - a perfect parabola that raises them up and lowers them down. If this was faked in a movie studio in Nevada, as the conspiracy theorists claim, these fine grains would rise up, supported by the Earth's thick atmosphere.
Ironically, even though the Moon's gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth, the dust falls faster because there is nothing to keep it aloft. So the only way is for the film to be shot in an airless, lower gravity environment. For comparison, the 1968 film, A Space Odyssey 2001, best demonstrated Hollywood's ability to show images from space during the Apollo era - but even there the directors were unable to predict the exact characteristics of walking on the moon.
However, if you want to see the best evidence that humans have reached the moon, go to one of the museums where the stones are (the best place is the Houston Space Center, which I had the privilege of seeing myself. AB). About 381 kg of rocks and earth were brought by the astronauts to Earth. Thousands of scientists around the world who studied the Apollo samples agree: they did not come from Earth.
Unlike the rocks on Earth, the lunar samples are completely devoid of water, even within their crystalline structures. Their chemical composition, especially the ratio of iron to magnesium, separates them from any rock of Earth origin. They are also extremely ancient, some as old as the solar system itself. It is possible, and this is more important, because their surface shows the impact of micro-meteor shells that moved at high speed as well as subatomic particles from the solar wind - none of which reach the earth thanks to the atmospheric screen that protects us. All these things were destroyed by rocks that flew from the moon and landed on Earth as lunar meteorites. The enormous heat generated by their passage at high speed through the atmosphere would have erased every trace of the surface. The Apollo samples had to arrive gently from the moon and in fact it was a door-to-door mission.
The other dozens of claims of the conspirators are very easy to refute. Solid explanations are for some reason rarer on the Internet than those of conspiracy theorists, but they can still be found. And yet, despite all the evidence against the theory, it continues to flourish. Articles criticizing Fox's program on American websites received hundreds of thousands of responses from people who saw the program and many accuse the scientists of being complicit in the conspiracy, others thank all those who took it upon themselves to solve the problem. This Space.com writer even received a thank you email from Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke thanking him for his efforts.
Something good might come out of it. It is clear that the subject touched the hearts of many people and made them think about space flights in general, and about landing on the moon in particular. Hopefully these people will be skeptical enough and do some research and learn the real story of the Apollo missions. When they do, they will find that the "moon trick" is no more solid than the void in space.
