The Daily Mirror seems to have found out about the Moon hoax nonsense, and of course - are republishing the nonsense, with just some minor token sceptisism thrown in. So let's sort em out, again.
But were the Moon landings really mankind's greatest scientific leap or the most fantastic hoax ever pulled?
Well I wouldn't call it mankind's greatest scientific leap. I'd call it humanity's greatest engineering triumph.
But anyway on with the nonsense:
In 1979, when the first suggestions began to emerge that NASA might have been up to some dirty tricks, six per cent of Americans thought the Moon landing was a hoax. In 1999, the number had risen to 11 per cent.
When they counted again recently, they discovered no fewer than 22 per cent believed that the Apollo 11 Moon landing never happened.
OK, but that's two different polls. One asking if the Moon landings were a hoax, and the later one asking if Apollo 11 landed on the Moon - there could be genuine ignorance about that particular mission - maybe it was one of the orbiters. Either way the figures aren't comparable.
Ever since President John F Kennedy pledged at the start of the 60s that man would travel to the Moon and back within a decade, the Americans were desperate to beat the Russians in the space race.
The Americans had already lost the space race on April 12th 1961. Surely you can only consider something a race if the other side is competing in that race.
That summer of 1969, Moscow was only a month from launching its own manned Moon shot.
False. "Moscow" didn't even have a rocket capable of such a mission, let alone the lander and everything else you need, all of which existed only on paper. Development of a rocket capable didn't even start until 5 years after the Saturn V. The N-1 was designed to launch heavy cargos into Earth orbit, like space stations and large military satellites, sure the N-1 could have been adapted to use for a manned lunar mission, that's certainly what Mishin would have liked but let's face it, after Korolev died in 1966 that was that, Mishin had no chance of getting funding for any serious lunar attempt, Brezhnev just wasn't interested. The N-1 was under-funded and never worked, it was scrapped in the 1970s and development on the Energia superbooster started instead.
The USSR did however launch a series of robotic missions to the Moon, including sample returns and even rovers, perhaps they're getting manned and unmanned mixed up?
Technology then was positively primitive. The computer developed for the Apollo programme had only a tiny fraction of the power in a home PC today. The satnav that guides your car is many times more sophisticated than the machine which, so we are assured, steered a mission 250,000 miles to a few square yards of the Sea of Tranquility and back.
...And you can fly a plane with no windows with a map, watch and a compass, so what? The biggest technological hurdle were the engines, not the onboard calculator.
Even recently, when President George W Bush announced the USA's ambition to return to the Moon, he was told it would take 11 years to put the engineering together.
If NASA had a proper budget they could do it in 10 years, if the United States kept science and engineering education up to a civilised level - and education wasn't bogged down fighting creationism and religious fundamentalism. They could probably do it in 5 years.
How, for example, could an astronaut (below) be walking through a shadow, or have the sun at his back, and yet be brightly lit from the front, showing off all those bits of his spacesuit, especially the Stars and Stripes flag, in technicolour?
Err because the lunar surface reflects light surprisingly.
If you were posing this in a studio, with so-called in-fill lights blazing from every angle, you couldn't have produced a better result. The response from NASA? Well, you have to understand that on the Moon light can behave in odd ways.
Light on the Moon works the same way as light on the Earth. It's just these dumbasses don't even know how it works on the Earth - light reflects off things and illuminates things. That's why shadows aren't infinitely black, because there's light coming around from their environment, off walls, the floor or anywhere else - just like on the Moon where you have a big white Lunar surface reflecting light at the astronauts.
There isn't the atmosphere to spread it around like on Earth, but there is an open surface to reflect it where you might least expect it. So where are the stars? In every photo, the sky was ink black, with nothing at all twinkling out there.
That's because they were taking photos of the Moon - not the stars. They used fast exposure times on their cameras because it was day time on the Moon - the Sun was up lighting everything up. Even standing on the Moon with the Sun up you won't see stars unless you hide the bright lunar surface and the Sun from your view - then if you give your eyes some time to adjust to the lower light levels you'd be able to see stars.
To capture the stars you'd need exposure times of several seconds, and the lunar surface would be massively over-exposed.
The lunar surface during the day is very bright. It's been compared with ice or snow on the Earth.
And how come, when the spidery landing vehicle hovered above the surface and fired blasts from its retro-jets to lower itself down, it didn't even appear to have disturbed the very ground underneath it.
Because the thing had a throttle - if they were firing the engines at full blast they'd be taking off not landing.
Secondly unlike the Earth there is no atmosphere, therefore the actual flame from the engines would have to touch the lunar surface to disturb it.
And the flag planted by Armstrong and Aldrin. The sceptics say the shadows cast by the astronaut, the lander and various rocks seem to go in all directions when they should be parallel, while the flag doesn't cast any shadow at all.
Look at shadows running over some bumpy ground on the Earth, they all change direction slightly (none of the lunar photos show shadows going in all directions), as the shadow follows the contours of the ground.
Perhaps most outrageous of all conspiracies is that three men did indeed go to the Moon but there was not the technology to bring them back. They were sacrificed for US pride. The Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, who reappeared on Earth were lookalike actors
I'm sure their wives would of noticed something a bit different after 40 years!
Today only Aldrin, now 78, keeps a high public profile. He was confronted two years ago by a TV reporter who demanded he swear on the Bible that the landing wasnt a hoax. Aldrin's response? He punched the guy on the nose and narrowly escaped prosecution. More proof, said the HBs, of the pressure of keeping a 40-year secret
He wasn't just asked to swear on a bible - he was called a "coward and a liar, and a thief". Here's the video:
Bart Sibrel has been harassing the Apollo astronauts for years - it's about time he got what he deserved. Nice punch Buzz.
That small step begins to look even more mysterious than ever.
Nah - you're just dumber than usual.