The irrefutable and definitive proof that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon



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It is the 43rd of an exclusive series of 50 articles, published daily until July 20, which explore the 50th anniversary of the very first landing on the Moon. You can check every day 50 days on the moon.

The United States sent astronauts to the moon, they landed, they wandered, they deployed many instruments, they packed close to half a ton of moon rocks and they went home. them.

No stupid conspiracy has been involved.

There was no movie set in Hollywood.

Anyone who writes about Apollo and talks about Apollo will be asked how we actually know that we went to the moon.

Not that the intelligent person who asks the question has doubts, but how make we know we went, anyway?

It's like asking how we know there was an independence war. Where is the evidence? Perhaps the current government has decided to force us to think of America in a special way.

How do we know that there was a Titanic it went down?

And by the way, when I go to the battlefields of Gettysburg – or even to Normandy, from elsewhere – it does not look much like a battlefield for me. Can you prove that we fought a civil war? The Second World War?

In the case of Apollo, in the case of the race towards the Moon, the answer is perfect.

The race to the moon in the 1960s was actually a real race.

The success of the Soviet space program – Sputnik to Strelka and Belka to Yuri Gagarin – was the reason for Apollo. John Kennedy launched America on the moon precisely to defeat the Russians on the moon.

When Kennedy was frustrated by the fact that the Soviets were the first to cross all important milestones in space, he asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson to understand it quickly. The first question from JFK's memo to LBJ:

"Do we have a chance to defeat the Soviets by setting up a laboratory in the space, by taking a turn of the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and by come back with a man. Is there another space program that promises spectacular results for which we could win? "

To win. Kennedy wanted to know how to defeat the Soviets – how to win in space.

This memo had been written a month before Kennedy's dramatic speech "Go to the Moon". The Moon race he launched would last until, almost 100 months later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

The race would shape the US and Soviet space programs in a subtle and dramatic way.

Apollo 8 was the first American mission on the Moon: The Apollo capsule and the service module, with Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell, flew to the moon on Christmas Eve on the eve of 1968, but without a lunar module. The lunar modules ran behind, and none were ready for the flight.

Apollo 8 represented a furious reorganization of NASA's flight schedule to compensate for the lack of a lunar module. The idea was simple: bring Americans quickly to the moon, even if they were not ready to land sure the moon. Let's launch the "lasso on the moon" before the Soviets.

By the time the mission was conceived and the program was rebuilt to accommodate another type of Apollo 8 in the late summer of 1968, NASA officials feared that the Russians would take on the same type of Mission: place the cosmonauts in a capsule and send that they gravitate around the moon, without landing. Then the Soviets would have gone to the moon first.

Apollo 8 was designed to confuse that, and he did it.

At the beginning of December 1968, in fact, the rivalry remained strong enough for Time magazine made a cover on it. "Race for the Moon" was the title, and the cover was an illustration of an American astronaut and a Soviet cosmonaut, in a space suit, jumping to the surface of the Moon.

Seven months later, when Apollo 11, with Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on board, orbited the Moon on July 19, 1969, a Soviet spacecraft met them. It was Luna 15 and it had been launched a few days before Apollo 11. Its goal: land on the moon, pick up rocks and earth from the moon, then return to a landing in the Soviet Union before Collins, Aldrin and Armstrong . could come back with their own moon rocks.

If that had happened, the Soviets would have at least claimed that they had first brought the rocks of the Moon back to Earth (and that they did not need people to do it).

So leave aside for a moment the sheer ridiculousness of a landing conspiracy on the moon that has no escape. More than 410,000 Americans worked on Apollo for 20,000 companies. Was their work wrong? Were they all in the plot? And then, also, all their family members – over a million people – none of whom murmured a conspiracy word?

What about journalists? Hundreds of journalists covering the space, writing stories not only dramatic moments, but also all the local companies producing space technologies, from California to Delaware.

Also set aside the thousands of hours of audio recordings – between the probe and mission control; in mission control, where dozens of controllers spoke to each other; in the spaceship itself, where there were separate recordings of astronauts who were just chatting in space. There were 2,502 hours of Apollo spaceflight, more than 100 days. It is an amazing undertaking, not only to write all this conversation, but also to encourage people to play it with authenticity, urgency and emotion. You can now listen to all this online, and it would take you several years to do it.

For those who believe that the missions were wrong, anything that can, in one way or another, can be dismissed. A puzzling shadow in an image of the moon, a quirk in a single moment of audio recording, reveals that all this was a vast fabrication. (With thanks and direct reports, the Associated Press this week has reviewed and refuted the most popular sources of conspiracy theories.)

Forget all that.

If the United States had simulated the landing of the Moon, a group would not have participated in the plot: the Soviets.

The Soviet Union would have revealed any fraud in the blink of an eye, not only without hesitation, but with joy and satisfaction.

In fact, the Russians did exactly the opposite. The Soviet Union was one of the few places on Earth (with China and North Korea) where ordinary people could not witness the landing of Apollo 11 and the march of the Moon in real time. It was quite real for the Russians not to let their people see it.

That's all the proof you need. If the lunar landings had been falsified, or even exaggerated, the Soviets would have told the world. They looked. Until the end, they had their own ambitions to be first on the Moon, in the only way they could gather at that time.

And it's kind of proof that the conspirators can not squirm.

But another thing is true about landings on the moon: you will never convince anyone who wants to believe that it is wrong to believe it. There is nothing in particular that you can say, no particular moment or piece of evidence that you can produce, that would push someone like that to enlighten and say, "Oh! You are right! We went to the moon.

Anyone who wants to live in a world where we have not been to the moon should be happy there. It is a pinched and bizarre place, a place that defies not only the laws of physics, but also the laws of ordinary human relations.

I prefer to live in the real world, the one we went to the Moon, because the work needed to bring American astronauts to the Moon and back was amazing. It was done by ordinary people here on Earth, people who were called to do something that they did not know they could do, and then did it, who seized the opportunity by pursuing a remarkable goal.

It's not just the real world, of course. It's the best of America.

We went to the moon and, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of this first landing, it is good to ban forever the silly story that we did not have and to also appreciate what the success itself demands and what she says about the people who were able to do it. he.


A giant leap, by Charles Fishman

Charles Fishman, who wrote for Quick business since its inception, has spent the last four years researching and writing A giant leap, his New York Times Bestseller book on how it took 400,000 people, 20,000 businesses and a federal government to bring 27 people to the moon. (You can order it here.)

For each of the next 50 days, we'll be releasing a new story from Fishman – a story you've probably never heard before – about the first effort to reach the moon that illuminates both the historic effort and the ongoing effort. New publications will be posted here daily and will be distributed via Fast Company ยปs social media. (Follow us at # 50DaysToTheMoon).

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