pap

Gotta love Viz.

I don't really think the point-insult point-insult approach is helping much. The only person defending the moon landings even close to burying me yet is Horley. First, because he makes good points. Second, he isn't being a tube.

I've seen a picture of a unicorn. Doesn't make it real, even if NASA published it. What really makes me laugh is that in other threads, I get the sense that you're keen on your history. I say again. Secondary evidence coming from a single agency. Primary evidence is massively important. Corroboration is equally important with second-hand evidence. Forget about the moon landings for a second. On principle, how seriously would you take any piece of secondary evidence from a single organisation and the only eyewitnesses are members of that organisation?

Only in the sense of Betamax reflectors vs VHS reflectors. You don't know what they actually look like. The information is secondhand and comes from a single government agency. Keep plugging away at this one though. This is like a British Rail excuse. "sorry mate, wrong type of reflector on the lunar surface".

The point stands. Retroreflectors have gotten all the way to the moon, without human assistance in deployment or setup. Still being used today. You accuse me of pedantry when you can't even concede this point.

Read the linked article. Covers a lot of your proof.

I believe there could have been, and I think I've been clear on my stance. Proved to a decent standard, I'm happy. The bloke I linked has a better and cheaper standard of proof. He'd be happy enough if he could get images of the landing sites from the VLT in Chile. They claim they can resolve detail as finickity as the headlamps on a car. Not much of an ask, is it?

No it's not. If we had to use a building material analogy, I'd say one of the planks has fallen from your edifice. You too insisted this could not be done without a man. The moment you are proved wrong, you constrain your set of conditions. "You can't get a retroreflector on the moon without a human. I don't think you understand the robotics of the time. Oh, what I meant to say was you can't get a certain type of reflector onto the moon without a human" I paraphrase, but that's a decent enough summary of your behaviour on this matter. Juggling sand? FFS, mate - you can't even keep your mockery to one thread.

I should qualify that link by saying he uses the word propagandists a lot

I do have a post ready to go for Horley here, but yep, I do think radiation is a huge issue. The Soviets did too. Their attitude to putting a man on the moon involved waiting until it was safe to do so. Horley mentions Van Allen himself saying that the belts are not that dangerous. That's very nice, but a bit of scientific analysis would be preferable. Move past the contested Van Allen belt, and you get to the moon itself. No magnetic field and no atmosphere, the two things that keep Earth from being an irradiated dustbowl. This bloke, Jarrah White, lists three smoking guns, of which the radiation is one. Well worth a read. http://moonfaker.com/faqs.html

Respectfully, you don't know that. You are relying on the second-hand evidence of a single government agency to make your assertions. You have no clue what those retroreflectors really look like, or how they were placed on the ground.

It proves that the technical capability to do what you said was impossible, a "job for humans", existed around the time of the Apollo programs. Still, I'm not expecting you to concede the point.

That's because you're making the assumption that the retroreflectors look like the ones in the pictures.

Or Russian unmanned vehicles, which managed the precise feat which you say is impossible. http://physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/apollo/lrrr.html This was in 1970 and 1973.

Charlie, your magic bullet as far as physical proof goes are the retroreflectors. From your opening post, you've insisted that they can only be delivered by human hand. I do not believe that to be the case.

Seriously, how much robotics do you need to get a mirror safely delivered and pointing upward? Especially if they did the same thing with the Surveyor craft?

And FFS Charlie, the indirect boll0cks again... "I see the originator of this thread..." It's like being in a room with someone who is pretending another person isn't there. What next? You going to start getting other people to be go betweens? "tell pap...", etc, etc. I don't think you called me a liar, btw. I was perfectly clear. You made an untrue statement or you don't read the posts. I don't think it's that difficult to understand.

You should really check out the Surveyor missions, Charlie. You keep asking for proof that the Americans were able to put something on the moon. Official records indicated that they succeeded at least a couple of times in the years building up to Apollo. Still need that proof?

This is a fairly easy one for them to nix, then. Couldn't they just release the original photos?

Horley. Good post. Will look your links up in the morning.

Judging from your tone, and your subsequent post, I fear that this will only be treated on a grade between contempt and condemnation. In your barnstorming opening post, you conclude:- You dress it up in the Chapel End Charlie style, but you're essentially calling me a lowlife for even to suggest the question, or some variant thereof. I'd invite readers to reread post #67 in full. In the same post, Charlie (the scamp!) equates anyone placing any stock in any conspiracy theory as some kind of religious zealot. So yep, you do smear. You generalise; keep it vague but it's not the Mona Lisa, mate. People aren't going to spend centuries theorising over what you really meant. It's just not that abstract. You're doing the same thing in this very post, using the same blooming words, and further on down this finely woven tapestry of opinion, you've taken the hump to me allegedly calling you a liar. First, that was a multiple choice accusation. I said that your statement was either untrue or indicative of someone who doesn't read any of the forum's posts. Take your pick; you've either seen a less reasonable position on here or you don't read the posts. Subjective I know, but I've seen plenty of posts on here that are far less reasonable than that. Perhaps more objective, I'm currently one of the biggest losers in the bad boy charts; rocking a massive nil infraction points. So what, untrue statement or not seen a lot of posts? Take your pick. What a gauntlet you've laid down there as well. Unless I can conjure precise details of the specific technical details, my point is null and invalid. That's not really debate; it's an attempt at a smackdown by asking me for something I cannot possibly deliver. I don't think my burden of proof is unreasonable. Physical evidence and independent verification decide other cases where matters are in dispute, such as in the justice system. This is mankind's greatest achievement; it can withstand a bit of scrutiny. If you are correct, repeating the Apollo missions should be a cinch. We managed this all 40 years ago. Why aren't we doing this now? You mention cost as a major problem, but generally things get cheaper when the refinement cycle kicks in, as we see all the time in other areas of technology. The argument may well be academic; 50th anniversary of the original mission coming up soon. Get back to me on that multiple choice liar/don't read the posts conundrum.

Can I just ask? Who would take being called a nob end by Brian Cox seriously? Have you seen his shows?

'Tis a fair question, The Kraken. I hope I shall approach it with honour and dignity. My interest is in the moon landings. I'm happy enough with the concept of manned space-flight. You bringing up the ISS is quite apt, because it's almost the complete opposite to the situation with Apollo. It is an international effort in every sense. It's not just the cohort of international astronauts; different countries have built different parts of the space craft. The list of experiments is public, they have a live feed of everything that is going on and as you rightly point out, you can see the bugger from Earth. The evidence in verifiable in ways that Apollo is not. Contrast that with Apollo. Original footage gone. Leaving aside anything else, how the f**k does that happen? I'd bet the vast majority of happily married people on here still have their wedding negatives or digital equivalent. Yet we're supposed to believe that original footage of man's greatest achievement has been lost in a box? C'mon. It stretches credulity. I think someone correctly pulled up the definitions of primary and secondary evidence earlier on. It's history 101. I find it amazing that as budding young history students, we can all get on board with the idea that Stalin doctored himself into the photography of the Bolshevik revolution. The evidence for the Apollo landings is second-hand by default. In practical terms, it's little better than the evidence that Stalin had when he was revising himself as an early Bolshevik leader. I'll concede that the Americans had video, but then they also had Hollywood. Consider the times. The Apollo landings were book-ended with wars, crises, conspiracies, assassinations and civil strife. The Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the JFK assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Martin Luther King, Vietnam, the Six Day War and Watergate following shortly afterward - all within the framework of the Cold War. These were not geopolitically stable times - pretty much the closest humanity has ever come to extinction. And if you accept that the murder of JFK was likely orchestrated and assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, and consider all the other crap that was going on at the time, it's not a stretch to suggest that some conspiratorial elements were present in the late 60s/early 70s US administrations. So in conclusion; I don't think that the entire space program is a load of crap - I'm pretty much happy with anything orbiting around Earth; from LEO to geostationary. They're constantly verifiable. If we'd got our expected 1980s moonbases, they'd be constantly verifiable. If enough people tell you they've been to a moonbase, or live on a moonbase, or you go there yourself - you can be pretty sure that we got to the moon. I can definitely see compelling reasons for wanting to fake the landings. From the get-go, Lyndon Johnson's goal was to achieve world leadership through propaganda. Did he actually need to put people on the moon to achieve that goal?

So, er, real big stuff then?

Has a point though. The DJs are partly complicit, but nothing happens in a vacuum.