Talk:Apollo Moon landing hoax claims/Archive 1

Specificity of sources
Even if one believes in the hoax, some of the claims just don't meet reasonable standards of CZ quality: Kaysing claimed that two NASA engineers admitted that the landing was a hoax: "I received a call from a Margaret Hardin of Portland, Oregon. She said that she had met a hooker in Reno in 1970 who admitted to her that two NASA engineers told her the Moon trips were a hoax."

Howard C. Berkowitz 16:01, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

WP?
I compared a couple of paragraphs with the WP article, and especially the first para is too close a paraphrase for my taste. Also, I wonder if it's worth commenting at all about what WP deletes. What evidence is that? Some anonymous person somewhere asks to delete a WP article? Is that solid evidence for the suppression of a conspiracy theory? (Howard, sign your posts) Russell D. Jones 15:16, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Plausibility of details
Again not challenging the basic theory, there are a number of details that don't quite seem right.

For example, NASA "Greenbelt Goddard Spaceflight Center" in "Washington DC" is mentioned as a place of fakery. First, Goddard is not in Washington, but the suburb of Greenbelt, MD. Its mission is primarily deep space and basic science, although it does have a network operations center; it's not primarily associated with manned spaceflight. If one was preparing fakery, would it not make more sense for that to be done at Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston, TX, where all the training equipment and Apollo simulators are based?

"Area 51" is mentioned. That's principally a sensitive flight test center. We are talking, here, about a lot of optical special effects. At the time of Apollo, the National Photo-Interpretation Center was in Building 213 at the Washington Navy Yard, which probably had the most sophisticated optical processing in the US government.

That the Atlas engines were less reliable than the Saturn F1 doesn't seem to prove much. They used different technology; the Atlas was a 1950 design, and it's sometimes easier to build a large than a small device -- miniaturization is hard. For example, the weight penalty in an Atlas required the fuel tanks to be pressurized or their extremely light metal would crumple; Saturn fuel tanks could free-stand.

I freely admit that I'm not fan of conspiracy theory articles, especially when we don't have mainline articles to compare and contrast. In this case, I exercised my authority as an Engineering Workgroup Editor to put this into Engineering as well as Astronomy. If you think about it, most of the alleged fakery deals with aerospace, optical, and electronic engineering, not astronomy. Howard C. Berkowitz 16:09, 20 August 2009 (UTC)