YES, WE WENT TO THE MOON
A PUSU Fact Sheet for Young People · draft for schools
THE CLAIM
The Moon landings of 1969 to 1972 were faked by NASA in a film studio.
» Mirrors you can still bounce lasers off
The astronauts left special mirrors on the Moon's surface. Scientists on Earth
still fire lasers at them today and time the reflection to measure the Moon's
distance to the centimetre. You cannot leave a working mirror on the Moon from
a film studio.
» Rocks from another world
The missions brought back 382 kilograms of Moon rock, shared with laboratories
all over the world. The rocks formed with no air and no water and are unlike
anything on Earth. Nobody has ever managed to fake one.
» Even America's rivals agreed
This was the Cold War. The Soviet Union badly wanted to catch the Americans
cheating and tracked the flights with their own radar. They never once claimed
the landings were faked.
» Too many people -- and the sites are still there
About 400,000 people worked on the Apollo programme; a hoax would need every
one of them to stay silent for over fifty years. Today, space probes -- some
from other countries -- have photographed the landing sites, with the
equipment and the astronauts' tracks still visible.
★ TRY IT YOURSELF ★
The famous 'waving flag' did not prove wind. The flag hung from a horizontal
rod, and with no air to slow it down it kept swinging long after being touched
-- the opposite of what a breeze would do.