A quarter of Americans believe the first moon landing was faked by NASA to win the space race. Scientist Matthew Genge ends the speculation.
It was 1957, Elvis had released Jailhouse Rock, Alec Guiness appeared on the silver screen in a film about a bridge, and the Soviet Union had just shocked the world by launching the first satellite, Sputnik. With its eerie beeping, Sputnik announced the arrival of the space age and turned the Cold War from a brooding silent conflict into a heated race to reach the moon.
The winner would prove not only its technological superiority, but also demonstrate the essential virtue of its basic ideology. However, even with such high stakes, would any nation dare go as far as faking a landing on the moon?
In a recent survey 25 per cent of Americans said they believed NASA did just that, and that humans had yet to walk on the surface of our nearest neighbour in space.
But why do so many people believe such an absurd notion, and is there any real evidence to back it up? Surprisingly there is.
Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that the Apollo missions were faked comes from inconsistencies in the photographs and films taken on the moon. Shadows in many of the pictures are cast not in straight parallel lines as from the sun, but as if they were from a nearby floodlight. NASA would say perspective and an uneven land surface have the same effect - but then they would say that, wouldn't they?
Then there are the crosses etched on the lenses of the Apollo cameras. These should always be on top of the objects in the pictures. But sometimes they are not, suggesting the images were added later. Is this evidence the pictures were faked? Possibly, but it could also be that the bright objects are overexposed, such as in flash photography, and the crosses have been bleached out.
How about the identical hills in photographs taken on supposedly different parts of the moon? Surely this is evidence that the same set was used to fake the images? Someone from NASA would no doubt shrug and say one bit of the moon looks very much like another, and perhaps they would be right.
The list of Apollo inconsistencies goes on and on, and it might be unfair to dismiss as crackpots the observant souls who have noticed them. As with most conspiracy theories, it is a case of who you want to believe.
So is there any irrefutable evidence that the Apollo missions really took place, that one of the most momentous events in human history actually happened and that we have not all been taken for one huge public relations ride?
Luckily, the answer is in the rocks.
The Apollo missions returned 382 kilograms of rock, and there is one thing that is absolutely clear: they are not from Earth. The oldest Apollo rocks, for example, are 4.44 billion years old, and thus were formed about 640 million years before the oldest rocks found on Earth.
There would be no way of faking these rocks. Stuffing the right elements into minerals, so they appear to be ancient, simply cannot be done. It is a case of the round hole and the square peg. Only if the peg starts off round and through billions of years of radioactive decay ends up square, by turning itself into another element, can it make it into the mineral.
Perhaps then the Apollo samples really are not Earth rocks at all, but some rare meteorite cleverly adopted by NASA? However, the oxygen they contain is very different from known meteorites, except those from the moon, and similar to that of the Earth. Only if the Apollo rocks come from an object that formed at a similar distance from the Earth as the early sun could this be explained. The moon is, of course, the prime candidate.
Conspiracy theories are unfortunately such attractive notions to the human psyche that scientific evidence, however elegant, often fails to impress. There is, though, one final piece of evidence. Although the Russians never put a cosmonaut on the moon, they landed the Luna probes, which returned 100 grams of lunar soil. They are identical to the Apollo samples. Case dismissed.
