Теории заговора о фальсификации высадок на Луну

Claims that the Apollo Moon landings were faked

Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim of these conspiracy theories is that the six crewed landings (1969–1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually land on the Moon. Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid 1970s that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, and Moon rock samples. Much third party evidence for the landings exists, and detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims have been made. Since the late 2000s, high definition photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the Apollo landing sites have captured the Lunar Module descent stages and the tracks left by the astronauts. In 2012, images were released showing five of the six Apollo missions' American flags erected on the Moon still standing. The exception is that of Apollo 11, which has lain on the lunar surface since being blown over by the Lunar Module Ascent Propulsion System. Despite the fact that they are demonstrably false and universally regarded as pseudoscience, opinion polls taken in various locations have shown that between 6% and 20% of Americans, 25% of Britons, and 28% of Russians surveyed believe that the crewed landings were faked. Even as late as 2001, the Fox television network documentary Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? claimed NASA faked the first landing in 1969 to win the Space Race.

An early and influential book about the subject of a Moon landing conspiracy, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was self published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Despite having no knowledge of rockets or technical writing, Kaysing was hired as a senior technical writer in 1956 by Rocketdyne, the company that built the F 1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. He served as head of the technical publications unit at the company's Propulsion Field Laboratory until 1963. The many allegations in Kaysing's book effectively began discussion of the Moon landings being faked. The book claims that the chance of a successful crewed landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.0017%, and that despite close monitoring by the USSR, it would have been easier for NASA to fake the Moon landings than to really go there. In 1980, the Flat Earth Society accused NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that writer director Peter Hyams' film Capricorn One (1978), which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, might have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post Vietnam War era. Dégh sees a parallel with other attitudes during the post Watergate era, when the American public were inclined to distrust official accounts. Dégh writes: "The mass media catapult these half truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance." In A Man on the Moon, first published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar orbit mission in December 1968, similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.

Those who believe the Moon landings were faked offer several theories about the motives of NASA and the United States government. The three main theories are below.

Motivation for the United States to engage the Soviet Union in a Space Race can be traced to the Cold War. Landing on the Moon was viewed as a national and technological accomplishment that would generate world wide acclaim. But going to the Moon would be risky and expensive, as exemplified by President John F. Kennedy famously stating in a 1962 speech that the United States chose to go because it was hard. Hoax theory debunker Phil Plait says in his 2002 book Bad Astronomy, that the Soviets – with their own competing Moon program, an extensive intelligence network and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data – would have "cried foul" if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing, especially since their own program had failed. Proving a hoax would have been a huge propaganda win for the Soviets. Instead, far from calling the landings a hoax, the third edition (1970–1979) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (which was translated into English between 1974 and 1983 by Macmillan Publishers, and was later made available online by TheFreeDictionary. com) contained many articles reporting the landings as factual, such as its article on Neil Armstrong. Indeed their article on space exploration describes the Apollo 11 landing as "the third historic event" of the space age, following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin's flight in 1961. Conspiracist Bart Sibrel responded, incorrectly asserting that, "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep space craft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly canceled." Those missions were canceled, not abruptly, but for cost cutting reasons. The announcements were made in January and September 1970, two full years before the "late 1972" claimed by Sibrel. (See Vietnam War below.) In fact, the Soviets had been sending uncrewed spacecraft to the Moon since 1959, and "during 1962, deep space tracking facilities were introduced at IP 15 in Ussuriisk and IP 16 in Evpatoria (Crimean Peninsula), while Saturn communication stations were added to IP 3, 4 and 14," the last of which having a range. The Soviet Union tracked the Apollo missions at the Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence gathering and surveillance equipment." Vasily Mishin, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered," describes how the Soviet Moon program dwindled after the Apollo landings. In May 2023 Dmitry Rogozin, former director general of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, expressed doubt that U. S. astronauts landed on the Moon. He complained of not receiving a satisfactory answer when he asked his agency to provide evidence. He said his colleagues at Roscosmos were angry about his questions and did not want to undermine cooperation with NASA.

Conspiracy theorists claim that NASA faked the landings to avoid humiliation and to ensure that it continued to get funding. NASA raised "about US$30 billion" to go to the Moon, and Kaysing claimed in his book that this could have been used to "pay off" many people. Since most conspiracists believe that sending men to the Moon was impossible at the time, they argue that landings had to be faked to fulfill Kennedy's 1961 goal, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." In fact, NASA accounted for the cost of Apollo to the US Congress in 1973, totaling US$25.4 billion. Mary Bennett and David Percy claimed in the 2001 book Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle Blowers, that, with all the known and unknown hazards, NASA would not risk broadcasting an astronaut getting sick or dying on live television. The counter argument generally given is that NASA in fact did incur a great deal of public humiliation and potential political opposition to the program by losing an entire crew in the Apollo 1 fire during a ground test, leading to its upper management team being questioned by Senate and House of Representatives space oversight committees. There was in fact no video broadcast during either the landing or takeoff because of technological limitations.

The American Patriot Friends Network claimed in 2009 that the landings helped the United States government distract public attention from the unpopular Vietnam War, and so crewed landings suddenly ended about the same time that the United States ended its involvement in the war. In fact, the ending of the landings was not "sudden" (see Space Race above). The war was one of several federal budget items with which NASA had to compete; NASA's budget peaked in 1966, and fell by 42% by 1972. This was the reason the final flights were cut, along with plans for even more ambitious follow on programs such as a permanent space station and crewed flight to Mars.

Many Moon landing conspiracy theories have been proposed, alleging that the landings either did not occur and NASA staff lied, or that the landings did occur but not in the way that has been reported. Conspiracists have focused on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. The foremost idea is that the whole crewed landing program was a hoax from start to end. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was lacking or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible. Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson, scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, have given detailed answers to conspiracists' claims on the laboratory's website. They show that NASA's portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common mistakes as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections. Using the scientific process, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. The 'real landing' hypothesis is a single story since it comes from a single source, but there is no unity in the hoax hypothesis because hoax accounts vary between conspiracists.

According to James Longuski, the conspiracy theories are impossible because of their size and complexity. The conspiracy would have to involve more than 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, the 12 men who walked on the Moon, the 6 others who flew with them as command module pilots, and another 6 astronauts who orbited the Moon. Hundreds of thousands of people – including astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers – would have had to keep the secret. Longuski argues that it would have been much easier to really land on the Moon than to generate such a huge conspiracy to fake the landings. To date, nobody from the United States government or NASA linked to the Apollo program has said the Moon landings were hoaxes. Penn Jillette made note of this in the "Conspiracy Theories" episode of his television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in 2005. With the number of people involved, and noting the Watergate scandal, Jillette noted that someone would have outed the hoax by now. The physicist David Robert Grimes estimated the time it would take for a conspiracy to be exposed based on the number of people involved. His calculations used data from the PRISM surveillance program, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the FBI forensic scandal. Grimes estimated that a Moon landing hoax would require the involvement of 411,000 people and would be exposed within 3.68 years; Grimes's study did not consider exposure by sources outside of the alleged conspiracy. It only considered exposure from within the alleged conspiracy through whistleblowers or through incompetence.

Moon landing conspiracists focus heavily on NASA photos. They point to oddities in photos and films taken on the Moon. Photography experts (including those unrelated to NASA) have replied that the oddities are consistent with what should be expected from a real Moon landing, and are not consistent with tweaked or studio imagery. Some main arguments (set in plain text) and counterarguments (set in italics) are listed below. 1. In some photos, the crosshairs appear to be behind objects. The cameras were fitted with a Réseau plate (a clear glass plate with a reticle etched on), making it impossible for any photographed object to appear "in front" of the grid. Conspiracists often use this evidence to suggest that objects were "pasted" over the photographs, and hence obscure the reticle. This effect only appears in copied and scanned photos, not any originals. It is caused by overexposure: the bright white areas of the emulsion "bleed" over the thin black crosshairs. The crosshairs are only about 0.004 inches thick (0.1 mm) and emulsion would only have to bleed about half that much to fully obscure it. Furthermore, there are many photos where the middle of the crosshair is "washed out" but the rest is intact. In some photos of the American flag, parts of one crosshair appear on the red stripes, but parts of the same crosshair are faded or invisible on the white stripes. There would have been no reason to "paste" white stripes onto the flag. 2. Crosshairs are sometimes rotated or in the wrong place. This is a result of popular photos being cropped and/or rotated for aesthetic impact. The Apollo astronauts used high resolution Hasselblad 500 EL cameras with Carl Zeiss optics and a 70 mm medium format film magazine. 4. There are no stars in any of the photos; the Apollo 11 astronauts also stated in post mission press conferences that they did not remember seeing any stars during extravehicular activity (EVA). Conspiracists contend that NASA chose not to put the stars into the photos because astronomers would have been able to use them to determine whether the photos were taken from the Earth or the Moon, by means of identifying them and comparing their celestial position and parallax to what would be expected for either observation site. The astronauts were talking about naked eye sightings of stars during the lunar daytime. They regularly sighted stars through the spacecraft navigation optics while aligning their inertial reference platforms, the Apollo PGNCS. Stars are rarely seen in Space Shuttle, Mir, Earth observation photos, or even photos taken at sporting events held at night. The light from the Sun in outer space in the Earth Moon system is at least as bright as the sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface on a clear day at noon, so cameras used for imaging subjects illuminated by sunlight are set for a daylight exposure. The dim light of the stars simply does not provide enough exposure to record visible images. All crewed landings happened during the lunar daytime. Thus, the stars were outshone by the Sun and by sunlight reflected off the Moon's surface. The astronauts' eyes were adapted to the sunlit landscape around them so that they could not see the relatively faint stars. The astronauts could see stars with the naked eye only when they were in the shadow of the Moon. Camera settings can turn a well lit background to black when the foreground object is brightly lit, forcing the camera to increase shutter speed so that the foreground light does not wash out the image. A demonstration of this effect is here. The effect is similar to not being able to see stars from a brightly lit parking lot at night – the stars only become visible when the lights are turned off. A special far ultraviolet camera, the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, was taken to the lunar surface on Apollo 16 and operated in the shadow of the Apollo Lunar Module (LM). It took photos of Earth and of many stars, some of which are dim in visible light but bright in the ultraviolet. These observations were later matched with observations taken by orbiting ultraviolet telescopes. Furthermore, the positions of those stars with respect to Earth are correct for the time and location of the Apollo 16 photos. Photos of the solar corona that included the planet Mercury and some background stars were taken from lunar orbit by Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Al Worden. Photos of the planet Venus (which is much brighter than any of the stars) were taken from the Moon's surface by astronaut Alan Shepard during the Apollo 14 mission. 5. The angle and color of shadows are inconsistent. This suggests that artificial lights were used. Shadows on the Moon are complicated by reflected light, uneven ground, wide angle lens distortion, and lunar dust. There are several light sources: the Sun, sunlight reflected from the Earth, sunlight reflected from the Moon's surface, and sunlight reflected from the astronauts and the Lunar Module. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many directions, including into shadows. Shadows falling into craters and hills may appear longer, shorter and distorted. Furthermore, shadows display the properties of vanishing point perspective, leading them to converge to a point on the horizon. This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing". 6. There are identical backgrounds in photos which, according to their captions, were taken miles apart. This suggests that a painted background was used. Backgrounds were not identical, just similar. What appear as nearby hills in some photos are actually mountains many miles away. On Earth, objects that are further away will appear fainter and less detailed. On the Moon, there is no atmosphere or haze to obscure faraway objects, thus they appear clearer and nearer. Furthermore, there are very few objects (such as trees) to help judge distance. One such case is debunked in "Who Mourns For Apollo?" by Mike Bara. 7. The number of photos taken is implausibly high. Up to one photo per 50 seconds. Simplified gear with fixed settings allowed two photos a second. Many were taken immediately after each other as stereo pairs or panorama sequences. The calculation (one per 50 seconds) was based on a lone astronaut on the surface, and does not take into account that there were two astronauts sharing the workload and simultaneously taking photographs during an Extra vehicular activity (EVA). 8. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground. These may be labeled studio props. The C shaped objects are most likely printing imperfections and do not appear in the original film from the camera. It has been suggested that the "C" is a coiled hair. 9. A resident of Perth, Western Australia, a woman named Una Ronald (a pseudonym created by the authors of the source), said that for two or three seconds she saw a Coca Cola bottle roll across the lower right quadrant of her television screen that was displaying the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 EVA. She also said that several letters appeared in The West Australian discussing the Coca Cola bottle incident within ten days of the lunar landing. No such newspaper reports or recordings have been found. Ronald's claims have only been relayed by one source. There are also flaws in the story, e. g., the statement that she had to stay up late to watch the Moon landing live is easily discounted by many witnesses in Australia who watched the landing in the middle of their daytime. 10. The 1994 book Moon Shot contains an obviously fake composite photo of Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon with another astronaut. It was used instead of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors seemingly felt were too grainy for their book. The book publishers did not work for NASA, although the authors were retired NASA astronauts. 11. There appear to be "hot spots" in some photos that look like a large spotlight was used in place of the Sun. Pits on the Moon's surface focus and reflect light like the tiny glass spheres used in the coating of street signs, or dewdrops on wet grass. This creates a glow around the photographer's own shadow when it appears in a photograph (see Heiligenschein). If the astronaut is standing in sunlight while photographing into shade, light reflected off his white spacesuit yields a similar effect to a spotlight. Some widely published Apollo photos were high contrast copies. Scans of the original transparencies are generally much more evenly lit. An example is shown below:

12. Who filmed Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon? Cameras on the Lunar Module did. The Apollo TV camera mounted in the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) of the Apollo Lunar Module gave a view from the exterior. While still on the Module's ladder steps, Armstrong deployed the MESA from the side of the Lunar Module, unpacking, amongst other things, the TV camera. The TV camera was then powered on and a signal transmitted back to Earth. This meant that upwards of 600 million people on Earth could watch the live feed with only a very slight delay. Similar technology was also used on subsequent Apollo missions. It was also filmed from an automatic 16mm movie camera mounted in a window of the Lunar Module.

1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation (see radiation poisoning and health threat from cosmic rays). Some conspiracists have suggested that Starfish Prime (a high altitude nuclear test in 1962) formed another intense layer on the Van Allen belt. The inner belt is the more dangerous one, containing energetic protons. The outer one has less dangerous low energy electrons (Beta particles). The Apollo spacecraft passed through the inner belt in a matter of minutes and the outer belt in about 1 1/2 hours. Furthermore, the orbital transfer trajectory from Earth to the Moon through the belts was chosen to lessen radiation exposure. Phil Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem (10 mSv), which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years. The total radiation received on the trip was about the same as allowed for workers in the nuclear energy field for a year and not much more than what Space Shuttle astronauts received. Furthermore, film carried by uncrewed lunar probes such as the Lunar Orbiter and Luna 3 (which used on board film development processes) was not fogged. 3. The Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted. There is no atmosphere to efficiently bind lunar surface heat to devices (such as cameras) that are not in direct contact with it. In a vacuum, only radiation remains as a heat transfer mechanism. The physics of radiative heat transfer are thoroughly understood, and the proper use of passive optical coatings and paints was enough to control the temperature of the film within the cameras; Lunar Module temperatures were controlled with similar coatings that gave them a gold color. Also, while the Moon's surface does get very hot at lunar noon, every Apollo landing was made shortly after lunar sunrise at the landing site; the Moon's day is about 29 1/2 Earth days long, meaning that one Moon day (dawn to dusk) lasts nearly fifteen Earth days. During the longer stays, the astronauts did notice increased cooling loads on their spacesuits as the sun and surface temperature continued to rise, but the effect was easily countered by the passive and active cooling systems. The film was not in direct sunlight, so it was not overheated. 4. The Apollo 16 crew could not have survived a big solar flare firing out when they were on their way to the Moon. No large solar flare occurred during the flight of Apollo 16. There were large solar flares in August 1972, after Apollo 16 returned to Earth and before the flight of Apollo 17. 5. The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts fluttered despite there being no wind on the Moon. This suggests that it was filmed on Earth and a breeze caused the flag to flutter. Sibrel said that it may have been caused by indoor fans used to cool the astronauts since their spacesuit cooling systems would have been too heavy on Earth. The flag was fastened to a Г shaped rod (see Lunar Flag Assembly) so that it did not hang down. The flag only seemed to flutter when the astronauts were moving it into position. Without air drag, these movements caused the free corner of the flag to swing like a pendulum for some time. The flag was rippled because it had been folded during storage – the ripples could be mistaken for movement in a still photo. Videos show that when the astronauts let go of the flagpole it vibrates briefly but then remains still. This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing". 6. Footprints in the Moondust are unexpectedly well preserved, despite the lack of moisture. Moondust has not been weathered like Earth sand and has sharp edges. This allows the dust particles to stick together and hold their shape in the vacuum. The astronauts likened it to "talcum powder or wet sand". If the landings were filmed outside in a desert, heat waves would be present on the surface in mission videos, but no such heat waves exist in the footage. If the landings were filmed in a sound stage, several anomalies would occur, including a lack of parallax, and an increase or decrease in the size of the backdrop if the camera moved (footage was filmed while the rover was in motion, and yet no evidence of any change in the size of the background is present). This theory was further debunked on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".

1. The Lunar Modules made no blast craters or any sign of dust scatter. No crater should be expected. The thrust Descent Propulsion System was throttled very far down during the final landing. The Lunar Module was no longer quickly decelerating, so the descent engine only had to support the lander's own weight, which was lessened by the Moon's gravity and by the near exhaustion of the descent propellants. At landing, the engine thrust divided by the nozzle exit area is only about
Beyond the engine nozzle, the plume spreads, and the pressure drops very quickly. Rocket exhaust gasses expand much more quickly after leaving the engine nozzle in a vacuum than in an atmosphere. The effect of an atmosphere on rocket plumes can be easily seen in launches from Earth; as the rocket rises through the thinning atmosphere, the exhaust plumes broaden very noticeably. To lessen this, rocket engines made for vacuums have longer bells than those made for use on Earth, but they still cannot stop this spreading. The lander's exhaust gases, therefore, expanded quickly well beyond the landing site. The descent engines did scatter a lot of very fine surface dust as seen in 16mm movies of each landing, and many mission commanders spoke of its effect on visibility. The landers were generally moving horizontally as well as vertically, and photos do show scouring of the surface along the final descent path. Finally, the lunar regolith is very compact below its surface dust layer, making it impossible for the descent engine to blast out a "crater". A blast crater was measured under the Apollo 11 lander using shadow lengths of the descent engine bell and estimates of the amount that the landing gear had compressed and how deep the lander footpads had pressed into the lunar surface and it was found that the engine had eroded between of regolith out from underneath the engine bell during the final descent and landing. 2. The second stage of the launch rocket or the Lunar Module ascent stage or both made no visible flame. The Lunar Modules used Aerozine 50 (fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide (oxidizer) propellants, chosen for simplicity and reliability; they ignite hypergolically – upon contact – without the need for a spark. These propellants produce a nearly transparent exhaust. The same fuel was used by the core of the American Titan II rocket. The transparency of their plumes is apparent in many launch photos. The plumes of rocket engines fired in a vacuum spread out very quickly as they leave the engine nozzle (see above), further lessening their visibility. Finally, rocket engines often run "rich" to slow internal corrosion. On Earth, the excess fuel burns in contact with atmospheric oxygen, enhancing the visible flame. This cannot happen in a vacuum. 3. The Lunar Modules weighed 17 tons and made no mark on the Moondust, yet footprints can be seen beside them. On the surface of the Earth, Apollo 11's fueled and crewed Lunar Module, Eagle, would have weighed approximately On the surface of the Moon, however, after expending fuel and oxidizer on its descent from lunar orbit, the lander weighed about The astronauts were much lighter than the lander, but their boots were much smaller than the lander's approximately 3 feet (1 m) diameter footpads. Pressure (or force per unit area) rather than mass determines the amount of regolith compression. In some photos, the footpads did press into the regolith, especially when they moved sideways at touchdown. (The bearing pressure under Apollo 11's footpads, with the lander being about 44 times the weight of an EVA configured astronaut, would have been of similar magnitude to the bearing pressure exerted by the astronauts' boots.) 4. The air conditioning units that were part of the astronauts' spacesuits could not have worked in an environment of no atmosphere. The cooling units could only work in a vacuum. Water from a tank in the backpack flowed out through tiny pores in a metal sublimator plate where it quickly vaporized into space. The loss of the heat of vaporization froze the remaining water, forming a layer of ice on the outside of the plate that also sublimated into space (turning from a solid directly into a gas). A separate water loop flowed through the LCG (Liquid Cooling Garment) worn by the astronaut, carrying his metabolic waste heat through the sublimator plate where it was cooled and returned to the LCG. The of feedwater gave about eight hours of cooling; because of its bulk, it was often the limiting consumable on the length of an EVA.

First airdate: October 16, 2002. First airdate on Fox TV: February 15, 2001.