Bennett, M

English

Nottingham Trent Institutional Repository (IRep)

An historian's approach to the moon-landings

ViewpointSpaceflight Vol 50 November 2008442ViewpointSociety members and readers of Spaceflight are invited to submit short articles providinga more personal viewpoint on current or past space events. Articles should be no longerthan 2000 words and preferably include one or more hi-resolution photographs. There isno guarantee of publication and the Editor reserves the right to edit submissions. Pleasesend article and pictures as attachments to: sf@bis-spaceflight.com and write ‘Viewpoint+ article title’ in the subject line.I am not a scientist and, although I am anhistorian, professionally I work on the latesixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ratherthan on the history of science. Nevertheless,I have lectured on late medieval astronomyand for pleasure I read extensively on the‘history’ of the space race and I am amember of BIS.It is this which leads to the way in which Ideal with the issue of the supposed hoax andI hope that this approach may prove useful toBIS members when confronted bychallenges to their knowledge of the Moonlandings.I guide students through the wayhistorical, primary source evidence and,because of my own background, to a lesserextent scientific evidence, can be used tofirstly disprove the notion of a hoax and thencategorically prove that the Moon landingsdid really happen.Obviously no one in the lecture room hasfirst hand evidence of their own, and we haveto reconstruct the process and the evidencetrail. Indeed, apart from me, there is often noone in the room who was alive in 1969.My audience mirrors the age ranges ofthose most impressed by the notion of ahoax - hoax-believers tend to be youngerpeople who were not around when the Apolloprogramme was ongoing.The lecture is framed around the groupsof evidence that are supposedly amassed bythe ‘enlightened few’ to rouse the credulous.Historian’s approachto the Moon landingsby Martyn BennettWe firstly have to deal with the fact thatthere appears to be such a lot of this‘evidence’ about. A quick internet Google for‘Moon landings hoax’ gets over a 100,000 hits,‘Moon landings faked’ renders over 200,000and ‘Moon landings fraud’ reveals about half amillion listed sites.The first point to make to students is thatthere is a great degree of replication within thisnumber of sites, leading back to just a feworiginal sites. A few of these sites do seek toexpose the hoax theorists arguments asfallacious, for instance, that of Philip Plat,author of Bad Astronomy.Moon-landing evidence and the way it isused and misused by ‘hoax theorists’ can begrouped into categories for convenience.There is a plethora of what historians termprimary sources - including oral testimony,printed and published material, non-writtenevidence (photography and film), and alsoMoon rock samples and pieces of actualspacecraft.The hoax theorists claim that within each ofthese groups there is clear evidence of fraudand a cover-up. But using historicalmethodology each of these groups of materialand the hoax-theorist case can be exposed tocritical examination.Oral evidence, for example, is veryinteresting. There is a great deal of testimonysupporting the case that Moon landings didhappen. By contrast, importantly, no one at theheart of the Apollo programme ever saidsomething along the lines of ‘let’s fake it all ina film studio’ and no contrary oral evidencethat contradicts that recorded and transcribedspeech that supports the motion that Moonlandings, being a historical event, has evercome to light.Whilst absence of evidence is notconclusively taken as evidence of absence it issuggestive. Take, for example, Bill Kaysing.Unusually he is an instance of oral evidence.People are impressed that he worked forRocketdyne so it seems, at first glance, thatfirsthand evidence from within confronts us.But Kaysing was a librarian from the late1950s until 1963 and his evidence is aboutdiscussions in contemporary journal articlesregarding the lunar surface and itstemperatures. This was evidence whichsuggested to him and others at the time that aMoon landing may prove impossible. Studentsneed to be reminded that this was before anycraft had landed on the Moon. Onceunmanned landings had been made by theUSSR and the USA, evidence about the Moonbegan to change somewhat; but this was aperiod in which Kaysing was not atRocketdyne and on which he offers nocomment.Paper or written primary source evidenceabounds. The transcripts of flightcommunications are all in published formatand thus easily accessed. There are numerousWith six percent of US citizens - roughly 12 million people - convinced that the Apollomissions of 1968-1972 did not land a single man on the Moon (at least in the way weare supposed to think it happened), the notion of a ‘Moon landings hoax’ was idealsubject matter for a section of the ‘Breaking the Code’ first-year module in NottinghamTrent University’s history degree programme. It sits alongside the ‘da Vinci Code’legacy of the ‘Blood of Christ’ and ‘Tomb of God’ nonsense or the Jack the Ripperfantasies. The web of intrigue posing as evidence woven around the idea of fakedMoon landings appeared a natural subject for the module.Viewpoint443press publications and briefing sheetsavailable, all clearly sourced and verifiable.Moreover, details of the nature oftransmissions and the receipt of transmissionby the receiving stations on Earth are allrecorded in print as well as on tape, etc.These paper and audio records neatlydovetail with the visual material. Forinstance, NASA’s film archive (a good dealof which is commercially available in DVDformat). All these sources support andenhance each other.Students can see and hear transmissionsand consult the written record simultaneously.The oral and text evidence again works intandem with the physical evidence, survivingand displayed Moon suits, rock samples, andso on which can be seen in film being referredto orally and visually and be seen first hand onEarth in university and museum collections.The mutually supportive nature of oral andvisual evidence brings students to thephotographic evidence, some of the most usedand captivating material that supposedly showthe landings as a hoax.The authors of Dark Moon saw this as themost valuable opener for the book.Numerous explanations of the photographs(and to an equal extent this would be true ofthe moving images, but they are less overtlyused to this end) are given to demonstratethe ‘hoax’.For instance, the shadows are ‘shown’ tobe divergent because photographs supposedlyshow evidence of back lighting and otherartificial lighting effects, whereas there was noartificial lighting used on the Moon surface.It is also suggested that images aresuspiciously perfect despite being taken on theMoon with cameras wrapped in insulatedcovers operated by non-professionalphotographers using chest-mounted cameraswith top-mounted view finders.At first glance this looks tempting.However, here the audience is exploited moreunscrupulously than anywhere. Hoax theoristsbuild on general lack of familiarity/unfamiliaritywith photography, lighting effects, the albedoeffect of Moon’s surface luminosity, and so on.The first issue to be recognised is the hoaxtheorists’ evidence base is very limited. Theirpoint about these being excellent photographsis soon negated by the fact that the ones theyuse are invariably ones in the public domain,the survivors of an editing process. Thatprocess excluded all the images which showedthe difficulties of changing focal length andaperture in clumsy gloves, but which can beaccessed by a researcher.The photographic issues lead on to theprinciple rules followed by a historian whenlooking at evidence - context. If context isignored, presumptions are made on limitedknowledge supported by misconstruction, thelatter sometimes deliberate.So, when sceptics raise the issue of theapparent lack of visible blast marks under thelunar module (they often talk as if there wasonly Apollo 11), or raise the point about therebeing no visible stars in the photographs thatinclude shots of space; they ignore othermaterial that would provide solutions to theseapparent problems.Both these points are raised as startlingrevelations. Yet by using the aural, visual andtextual evidence it becomes clear that thesethings were issues raised even by theastronauts themselves.Armstrong and Aldrin referred back to thelack of stars in the photographs and, on thesurface of the Moon, the lack of blast marksare mentioned by them.Apart from the fact that both apparentanomalies are easily explicable - by the shutterspeed of the camera in the case of the stars,and the effective downward pressure of theengine blast along with the micro-structure ofthe lunar surface and lack of atmosphere onthe Moon which limited the movement ofsurface particles caught up in engine blast.It would have been foolish in the extreme ofthe astronauts to draw observers’ attention tothese supposed failings of a studiophotographed fake Moon landing on tape, intranscription evidence and in debriefings.Inconsistencies in hoax theorist approachand argument lead the student intodiscussion presentation of the evidence aswell as interpretation. The context is reallyimportant because it impinges on theengineering aspects of the hoax theorists’case.There is not enough of what historianscall ‘historiography’ and background reading;simply put, the hoax theorists simply do notknow enough.This is important to inculcate intostudents who will, towards the end of theirdegrees, write an original piece of historicalresearch.Hoax theorists argue that failures inAmerican technology meant that a Moonlanding in 1969 by the USA acting alone wasimpossible. The authors of Dark Mooncomplicate matters by suggesting that theUS and USSR together could have staged alanding.This apparent conjunction is at the pointwhere the book goes into complete fantasymode, from previously having been justcompletely wrong. Here the age-range of thestudent becomes critical for, as I said at theoutset, they fall into the same age categoryas many of those who question the truth ofthe Moon landings.Every aspect of the hoax theorists’arguments can be critically assessed using ahistorian’s methodology, and the lecture -which has to contain a brief history of theMoon race and the technologicaldevelopments of space hardware on bothsides of the iron curtain - concludes with aproposal for how students can approach theMoon landings using methods that will avoidthe pitfalls encountered and offered by thosegenerating ‘hoax theories’, from eithergenuine sceptical approaches or the malign.Students can then opt to continuestudying the Moon landings and their valueas a means of using historian’s methodologyfor their coursework. Using these techniquesof evidential scrutiny every element of thehoax theorists’ case can be exposed aswrong, irrational, mischievous or evenmalign.The true picture of what happened in theApollo and related programmes is enhancedby the reading of the memoirs of thoseinvolved, the broad range of scientific andengineering histories of the Apollo missionsand, of course, the still emerging historiescoming from post-USSR Russia.The Apollo 14 lunarmodule pictured on thesurface of the Moon inFebruary 1971.NASA

Historian's approach to the moon landings

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Nottingham Trent Institutional Repository (IRep)