Tuesday 22 September 2015

earth - Was NASA's moon mission completely fake?

While "was the Moon landing a hoax?" is starting to be a tiresome genre, the points you make is somewhat legitimate. I am not going to address the issue in general, (Best to go here if you want that) as others have done that better before. But here you go for your issues specifically:



  1. "Van Allen Radiation Belt"

Yes, it exists, and the radiation is about 10000 times more intense than on Earth. But in a transfer orbit towards the Moon, they where only inside it for a few hours. Sure, that still corresponds to a few years of radiation on Earth, but as you may be aware of, that is not enough to kill you.



  1. Not enough time?

The decision in 1961 to send humans to the Moon did not come all of a sudden. It is not like all the technology required had to be invented after that. For instance, the Soviet Luna 3 probe had already performed a flyby of the Moon, taking the first images of the far side. From there, it is pretty much just scaling things up, and make a suitable landing craft. (That is still expensive, though.)



  1. Risk

Who said there was no risk involved? Out of the seven missions intended to land on the Moon, one of them, the Apollo 13, barely managed to return after an explosion on board. That is a (although the sample size is small) 14% risk of failure, much higher than any of the missions to the ISS. Also, the space station has operated for years, in contrast to the just over a week Apollo missions.



  1. Distance

In space, there is nothing to stop you if you have velocity in one direction. Therefore, you can literary travel for ever, with only a modest amount of speed. Therefore, distance is not a good way to measure difficulty. What really matters is how much change in velocity you need. The ISS travels at about 7800 m/s, and a transfer orbit towards the Moon is only 40% more than that.

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