It Wasn’t Just The US
People seem unaware that the moon landing was an international effort, as the ABC reminds people in their article, Fond memories of ‘the dish’ for moon-landing veterans.
If the moon landing had been faked, as PZ Myers noted that a CNN poll indicates some people seem to believe, it would have been an international conspiracy that would have had to include the Russians, because the signal from the surface of the moon was available for anyone with the proper receiver, which includes the Russians and certain people flying funny airplanes around with antennas all over them. All you needed was to be in a position to see the moon at the time of the transmission, something Australia could do, but the sites in the US couldn’t.
11 comments
Bryan,
I must ask — were you by any chance flying around in a funny airplane with antennas all over it during a moon landing?
Best,
Jim
It looked very surreal on a green oscilloscope, rather than a standard TV. [We got everything else on board, but no one had time to get one small enough to fit the space available.]
Someone has to research electromagnetic wave propagation in the Arctic.
HAARP. 😉 😆
Australia had more involvement than just the Parkes Observatory, and Honeysuckle Creek.
It was before ‘my time’ (in Intel), but I was totally fascinated as a child. When i worked in Canberra, I did take time to hunt up official reports (some still classified at that time). It was a global effort, even long before the launch. There were many groups that didn’t want it to succeed, and most people will probably never realise how close it came to not happening (at least at that time). *Terrorism* didn’t just begin in the USA on 9/11, they just made the term *Terrorism* official. Before 9/11, it was mostly known as ‘espionage’, which included more than just spying, disruption was also a big part of International espionage. And many groups were quite good at it. It seems that the good old ‘covert’ (quiet) days of espionage are mostly over. Everyone wants publicity these days it seems. 😉
I’m astonished at the reasons people come up with for asserting… screaming… that the Moon landing was faked. One of them pointed out the crispness of the footprints as if the lunar surface contained water; of course, there was a good scientific explanation. Some people seem determined to disbelieve any result of any kind of research, scientific or otherwise. (Obama “birthers” and global climate change deniers seem similar to me… it’s not an issue of science; it’s a matter of personal determination a priori to disbelieve something. I have no great love of Obama, but he is an American citizen… and men did in fact land on the Moon.) The two best answers I saw to the allegations of a faked Moon landing were a) why would Russians cooperate, and b) why would the U.S. go to the trouble and expense of faking it, not once, but nine times?
I can’t help it: I think of those as America’s great days. I shall not live to see another Moon landing by humans, and I regret that. And yes, I blame Ronald Reagan for reorienting the space program toward SDI (“Star Wars,” if you prefer). What a waste… then and now.
In those days the US, UK, Canada, and Australia were very tightly aligned, much more than today, and the level of sharing and swapping was much higher. We used each others facilities and people to fill in gaps, and readily moved raw data around in case someone else saw something we’d missed. The UK had a much deeper institutional memory that the US effort, and they were particularly helpful with knotty problems.
The Shrubbery has pretty much destroyed that. I wouldn’t collaborate with the US on anything, because you couldn’t be sure it would be safeguarded.
The 1970s was the end of espionage and the beginnings of the media operations. It was really annoying in Europe with the IRA trying to blow you in Britain and the Bader-Meinhof Gang making the autobahns dangerous. The Palestinians were a PITA with their incompetent attempts to blow up my barracks every other month. [The squadron refused to buy a cooler and bar-b-que grill for the parking lot, so we could at least get a cold beer and ‘wurst while waiting for the bomb squad to clear the building.]
People, somehow, missed that, and don’t understand why I can’t get excited, and don’t feel like surrendering my civil rights because of “terrorism”. Been there and done that.
If you need an answer for the footprints, tell to dump a bag of flour on the floor and walk across it in Vibram boots. You will see the same “crispness”, something you don’t see with anything that isn’t that fine.
PZ had Obama’s birth certificate up. It is one of the new ones on the “copy protected” background. I had to get a new one, because my original birth certificate was hand-written and didn’t have a raised seal, which was the procedure when I was born, back before fire.
“All these conspiracy theories have the two basic problems: one, they believe the government is competent. And two, they believe the government can keep a secret.” – Richard Clarke
I think that about sums it up.
Very true. And yeah, been there, done that.
The thing that really pisses me off about 9/11, is that it truly should never have happened. It would never have even gotten close to succeeding in the 60’s-70’s, maybe 80’s. It really was amateurish by our standards (intel community) when I was there in the 80’s. We would have just laughed at the attempt and rounded them all up. The biggest shame for the USA is that it did happen, and I’m really disgusted with that! The *Terrorists* truly won the ‘war on terror’ on 9/11, and they know it. The USA became the Nation of Chickenshits!
AND… I do NOT believe for one second that Rumsfeldt/Cheney (and possibly GW Bush, certainly his father was involved) didn’t know it was coming. I suspect that GW wouldn’t have known much beforehand, he couldn’t be trusted. What I don’t actually know is whether they actively helped or just allowed it, or were just criminally stupid. They were most definitely politically/ideologically motivated either way. That makes them no better than any terrorist group.
And THAT, primarily, is why nobody out here trusts the USA any longer. And not even Obama will change that, not from what we’ve seen of him so far.
So yeah, the days of CoInt are well and truly over. I suspect that if a Nation discovered a plot against the USA, chances are nothing will be done about it, or it will at least be delayed, or parts kept quiet about. Most Americans don’t truly understand just how vulnerable they have become now, seriously. So in a hugly ironic twist, Americans *SHOULD* be afraid, but afraid of their own country for creating the conditions to allow terrorism to succeed.
…I was reading an interesting observation today that helped to put that whole “Capricorn I” conspiracy mess into perspective by raising a simple question: how do you make sure that 40,000 NASA employees, not to mention all those other folks at listening stations all over the globe, keep the secret for forty years. But what I thought made it illuminate the strange little world that (sometimes) otherwise seemingly normal people inhabit when they veer off into conspiracy theories was the whole question of how do you pull off this hoax six separate times and wrap the world up in the gripping drama of Apollo 13 (which presumably would also have to be a hoax if they were supposed to be faking the whole thing in some huge blimp hanger in New Mexico where Elvis Presley is presumably serving as a body-double for Buzz Aldrin…or whatever)…
It should come as no surprise that the poll numbers of those suspecting a hoax supposedly increased (according to FAUX News execs) after FAUX News ran a special on the subject called “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” on February 15, 2001, which is alleged to have supported the premise of those conspiracy theories…
.-= ´s last blog ..And That’s The Way It Was =-.
They had “other priorities”, Kryten, and al Qaeda was a “Clinton dodge”, not a real threat, which is why Ashcroft eliminated anti-terrorism funding from the FBI budget on 9/10/01. They have buried the analysts in worthless data, and burned many reliable sources who wouldn’t go along with their Iraq fantasy.
It will be decades before the US regains what it had in 1970. The political officers that were assigned to intel have forced out the competent people and put their corrupt friends in those slots.
At least we have some new people in charge who know that everything is screwed up.
Jack, I have a friend locally who worked on the Gemini and Apollo missions. He goes ballistic every time someone even hints that those missions didn’t happen. He was one of the thousands of technicians who worked on those spacecraft, and gathered at the data center when the telemetry came in to be sure that whatever he had worked on performed as required. He takes it very personally, the same as being called a liar.
The current lunar orbiter is taking hi-rez pictures of the landing sites, and is only missing one site to complete the set, that will be released in the near future. The tracks that were made on the surface are still there, because there is no weather to disturb them.
I wonder how they think the one-sixth G was achieved, or the golf shots.
I think we really need mental health coverage in the national health plan because a significant portion of the population has separated themselves from reality.
Whaa? We landed on the moon?
Just kidding… I remember.
.-= ´s last blog ..Friday Cat Blogging – Can’t remember this cat’s name. =-.
If you were aware at all it was hard to miss, OWL. 😉