Mea culpa, I was a long time doubter. There are MANY sketchy/problematic elements to probe, with the Apollo 11 mission in particular. But I would bet you have no idea of the hours and hours of video evidence extant from the later Apollo missions. We went to the Moon, folks. Before DEI ruined everything.
This video explores and explains every single claim of the Moon deniers.
I am adding here the timestamps, in case you have a particular tin foil item you want to jump to. But I highly encourage you to view the whole thing, as it will once and for all answer all your questions, quite convincingly.
h/t Br. Bugnolo for featuring this video.
Oh, you believe in the moon? That’s adorable. 😂
If we build nuclear plant there, how do we get the power here? Fedex box?
Microwaves, in theory.
Stanley Kubrick could easily fake 11,000 hours. (joke. He was famous for harrowing long shoots)
The “real conspiracy theory” here is: Why are they pretending we haven’t been back to the Moon? Why hide decades of military space program from the civilians who pay for it?
I definitely believe we went to the moon, but this song is very funny. https://m.facebook.com/reel/1326168195516405/?referral_source=reshare_feed_unit
Thanks for sharing this! I was never aware that there were higher-quality photos, and while I’m sure that they’re concealing something about the landings, just the revelation that the widely known photos were low-resolution reproductions was enough to quiet most of my doubts. Interesting!
I was nine at the time of Apollo 11 and watched it live on my uncle’s colour TV.
Apollo 11 wasn’t in color.
The pictures from the Apollo 11 mission in flight and on the moon were not.
Most of the coverage from the ground, including launch, NASA HQ, President Nixon, studio commentators, etc, was.
Okay, boomer. (No offense.)
We’re way beyond videos like this that try to “debunk” the “conspiracy theories.” Especially when all this guy offers is convoluted excuses for embarrassing video anomalies, a “trust the experts” attitude, and the “think about how many people would have to be in on it” fallacy.
At this point the mere fact that humanity has no capacity for even short-distance manned space travel beyond a few hundred miles from Earth’s surface is enough to reveal the U.S. government’s historical moon landing claims as fanciful.
The past 50 years have seen a technological explosion in: computing, rocketry, materials, fuel, solar, astronomy, etc. etc. The past 50 years have also seen an exponential increase in world wealth and government spending. The past 50 years have also seen massive cumulative spending by NASA and other entities. 77 countries now have space programs, 16 countries have their own launch capabilities, and private companies funded by alleged genius billionaires have also now been in the space race for multiple decades. There are lots of competing entities hungry for the bragging rights of successful space travel. In spite of all this, NO country or company has been able to send a manned spaceflight more than 870 miles in the air in the past 50 years. That’s less than 1/250th of the distance allegedly traveled by the moon missions.
Use your discernment. The moon landings were the media event of the last century. That alone is a clue.
If all these competing entities with all this money and all these exponential improvements in technology have still never been able to go even 1/250th as far as a U.S. government program claimed to go more then 50 years ago, then Occam’s Razor suggests that the claimed achievements of that U.S. government program were exaggerated.
Use your discernment. It is foolish to trust known liars.
(Yes, DEI has ruined everything, but DEI wasn’t yet a big problem in the early 1970s when NASA’s ability to execute manned space travel instantly collapsed by 99%. DEI isn’t a big problem in the Russian, Chinese, or Japanese space programs, and yet none of them have any capacity to execute manned spaceflight of any significant distance either.)
Most of your claims are debunked in the video.
Mark isn’t a boomer. Not that that even matters.
The way we’ve been doing our Space Program was and has been incredibly stupid. It was far too expensive to go to the Moon the first time, and thanks to what Elon’s doing and planning on doing, things are going to be changing soon, and Space Travel is going to be as regular as airline travel before you know it.
Elon has said he wants his SpaceX Starship rocket launching up to once per hour.
People have no clue what’s coming down the pipe in Space Travel in the coming decade.
SpaceX has now been around for 23 years, twice as long as the entire Apollo program. Still hasn’t gotten anyone farther than low earth orbit, though. Not for lack of announcements, though. 😉
February 2017: “The Moon mission is planned for 2018, SpaceX says. US private rocket company SpaceX has announced that two private citizens have paid to be sent around the Moon. The mission is planned for late 2018, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said, adding that the tourists “have already paid a significant deposit.”
I believe we went to the Moon for one reason: Not one person who has claimed we haven’t has been imprisoned for saying as much.
Forget everything else. (I’ve actually studied this topic in more detail than most people would ever consider healthy or fun. The Math on how to get to the Moon from my copy of “Orbital Mechanics for Engineering Students” is about 9 pages long for the FIRST example problem! And it’s simplified Math for advanced Engineering Students with classes covering Calculus 1, 2, 3, Differential Equations and Linear Algebra behind them!)
Forget the fact that they’re starting with a statement to prove instead of a question to answer, the exact opposite of how the scientific method is done. They’re going backwards and looking for evidence to prove we didn’t go, and ignoring the evidence that discounts their position.
Forget all complete lack of evidence – Every piece of “evidence” isn’t “new.” Something new would be: Even one person on camera stating how they helped faked it. Or showing the film props. Or showing the studio it was filmed. One deathbed confession from an elderly senile whistler-blower would be interesting to see at least. Right now, on that basis there’s more evidence the US government has craft of ET origin at Area 51 in the form of Bob Lazar interviews on youtube than there’s evidence we didn’t go to the Moon.
Forget the complete lack of evidence in the form of understanding of how radiation in the van Allen Belt or other forms of radiation works, or how orbital mechanics works (Seen deniers make some statements that prove they don’t know what they’re talking about).
Forget all that…!
I want one person who denies the Moon Landing to be imprisoned for saying that. Deny the Holocaust in the wrong nation? You’ll end up in jail. Question the Sandy Hook narrative and you’ll be fined more than the GDP of most nations.
But deny we went to the Moon? Nothing. Only counter-fact are presented.
Buzz Aldrin said we never went to the moon.
There isn’t much reason to jail anyone for scepticism against a thing that is not easily independently verifiable and has no present impact on government policy. Anyone who so much as builds a drone will have red tape and the feds come down on them, so forget about even a hobbyist rocket.
The holocaust is a lot closer to home, with plenty of available documentation to question, and things to test. But more importantly… the narrative currently serves a VERY IMPORTANT role in allowing a certain group of people to justify their ongoing existence and actions.
The Apollo programs were useful PR against the Soviet economy and ideology, and a potential investment in US military interests. If the moon missions were debunked in the mainstream tomorrow, there’d certainly be egg on the face of the great USA, but it’d be blamed on the old long dead administrations, justified in hindsight to topple the USSR and spread capitalism and democracy, Russia would remain the evil bad guy, the military industry will still siphon taxpayer money in abundance, SpaceX will continue to be a success, and nobody will be in any trouble. America will “get over it” just like Iran/Contra, USS Liberty, 9/11, Saddam’s WMD, Covid, Epstein, etc. and all those have more relevance on our lives than the Apollo Moon missions which, legit or not, already served their purpose and ended.
Then as now, the moon landing conspiracies remain on the fringe of the general public’s interest and effect no present issues.
USSR also tracked and confirmed our Moon missions. Why wouldn’t they be the first ones to call hoax, in real time? Russia and China have also confirmed present day artifacts, down to footprints.
I believe the argument is that the Russians could see and track the rockets and modules, but they could not of course track the individual astronauts, or even know if they were on board in the first place.
Even if the Russians were suspicious, how could they prove it? If the Russians had doubts about much of the technology the US used for the astronaut’s survival, or about conditions on the moon’s surface for human beings, they could not counter any US claims without going to the moon themselves to verify things and demonstrate otherwise. Everything at that point was unexplored territory and theoretical.
Then there is the question of counterweighting the Western media’s grip on the world which was demonstrably much stronger than their own, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the communist propaganda arms were well known to ridiculously lie, and narratives as powerful as mankind overcoming the moon at their height can be a very powerful thing. Some conspiracy theorists even claim the Russians weren’t immune to overselling their own space achievements and the Americans knew it, though I don’t know much about that side of the story.
If the Russians couldn’t put up, they’d have to shut up. Then there is also the fact that as with space program coordination, there were men in the East and West trying to reduce tensions between these rival nuclear armed superpowers by working together, and sometimes that means allowing your opponent to save face in exchange for other benefits. Even Putin today downplays known NATO involvement in Ukraine and classifying direct attacks on Russia’s nuclear warning systems by Ukranian launched missiles under US supervision guided by US satellites as Ukranian “terrorism” and not direct acts of war by the US that they clearly are. To admit otherwise in public means Putin has to declare war in return, and he knows that will lead to a horrible outcome, no matter which side is left standing.
That governments worldwide will suppress the Truth and avoid controversy and antagonizing rivals for the sake of diplomacy and peace is observable routine behavior, as is the pattern of pretending to be victorious to one’s citizens while kowtowing and compromising behind the scenes to one’s opponents.
What the truth is behind Apollo is therefore not certain solely from the fact that the Russians have never publicly disputed them. What seems to be interesting, is that the Russians didn’t bother to catch-up with the US race. It was as if they simply abandoned it not too long after… even if the US made it to the moon first, why not match it, plant the Russian flag, or a bust of Lenin, or even going further and boast of building the first tent structure on the moon? Anything to set a new record? Was it as simple as Communist “DEI” overtaking them where US meritocracy didn’t, or their controlled economy hitting it’s limits, or did they know something else we didn’t?
As for the photographic evidence, unless there are better resolution images, it is not clear that we can see “footprints”, but there are certainly plenty of visible tracks by the rovers. And it would indeed be a tall order to get photos of tiny detailed footprints on a surface even of our Earth’s surface from Earth’s orbit.
As you can see, doubts may still be entertained… frustrating as that is.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a compelling argument that “Russia and China” would have called us out. That assumes that the various national leaders and nuclear powers are truly at odds with one another, desperate to embarrass each other, and that assumption may not be fully correct.
The elites of Russia, China, and the United States all enriched themselves substantially at the expense of their subjects during the space race and cold war. Neither space warfare nor nuclear warfare ever took place, but the citizens of these countries spent trillions of dollars on these threats, trillions that served to benefit the leaders.
Government leaders and “deep staters” in different countries have shared interests that are sometimes stronger than their desire to help their own people. Leaders want to stay in power, and they often use “foreign enemies” as a rationale for why their looted subjects should keep them in power.
I’ve seen some surveys/studies showing that fewer than 50% of Russian citizens believe the U.S. landed on the moon. So whether or not the leaders of Russia ever gave a big press conference denouncing the Apollo program as fake, many Russians assume it was. Belief in the moon landings is higher among Americans than among citizens of other countries.
Hey, thanks for responding, and thanks for your blog which I love!
Sorry if my post came across as too argumentative.
I’ve watched the video. I’m really only making one primary claim, which the video doesn’t debunk or dispute. I’m just agreeing with the video that “we haven’t gone back.” And I’m pointing out the actual distances–250,000 miles from Earth each way to the moon 6 times in the 1960s and 1970s, and zero space flights over 870 miles from Earth since.
The guy in the video acknowledges that this is the key question, and that it’s a weird one. Most technologies have improved massively in the past 60 years. Space travel is the exception. In spite of exponential gains in technology, global wealth, and number of public and private entities pursuing space travel, and another 50 years of funding NASA, the technology of manned space travel hasn’t just stagnated, it has massively reversed.
He then attempts to hand-wave this away in what seems to me to be a highly-motivated fashion. I assume he’s an earnest believer in the U.S. government’s claimed achievements, and this explains his breezy, confident approach, but if I was a judge in a debate, I wouldn’t be impressed by his arguments which feel to me flippant and misleading.
He first says that we shouldn’t be surprised that “the technology to go to the moon has apparently been lost”since people no longer cross the Atlantic via Concord plane or via “massive luxurious transatlantic Zeppelins,” and people no longer cross the English Channel in “huge passenger hovercrafts.” This argument almost seems silly on purpose. Those aren’t “lost technologies,” they are modes of transportation that got outcompeted by cheaper, consumer-preferred substitutes for crossing the Atlantic and the English channel. No such substitutes exist for space travel.
Then he claims that funding for the space program decreased at NASA, but he conveniently ignores the explosion in the number of competing countries and companies, all of which have been spending heavily for decades. He also employs the misleading government accounting metric of “% of the budget” instead of actual dollars. The Federal budget has increased massively in the past 50 years, so a smaller percentage of the budget can still represent significant spending. Rocket costs are measured in dollars, not in percentages of the budget. He’s crying poverty for NASA when in fact NASA’s budgets in inflation-adjusted dollars have actually been HIGHER every year for the past 30 years than they were in 1971 and 1972 when most of the moon landings took place. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nasa-annual-budget
Then he twists the objection about the million-fold improvements in computing power into a strawman that the primary benefit of better computers would be…that they would be lighter weight? That’s quite obviously not what skeptics are getting at. He then says, “unlike computers, rockets haven’t gotten a million times more powerful, unfortunately,” addressing another strawman.
The video is structured as a breezy debunking of common claims from skeptics. Some of it is quite interesting and successfully debunks a few standard claims from cranks. But the truth really comes down to what he acknowledges as the key question: why can no-one leave Low Earth Orbit if we supposedly know how to fly far into space? That’s the key question, not whether or not we should “believe” in old video footage or government truth-telling. The question is WHY can’t we go even 1% as far off Earth as we could 50 years ago.
Your implied take is to blame DEI, or, more broadly, a general reduction of competence. That’s a compelling and believable explanation, I agree. A semi-related take is that it’s all been kind of a budget grab…NASA’s budgets, like Pentagon budgets, may have become a slush fund for $900 toilet seats, make-work programs, funding some space manufacturing in every Congressional district, etc. That’s compelling and believable too. But it doesn’t fully explain why none of Russia, China, Japan, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson have been able to get any manned spacecraft even 900 miles off Earth’s surface in any of the decades since the epic 500,000 mile space voyages to the moon and back.
But to me, the most compelling explanation is also the simplest. If modern manned spaceflight still lacks the capacity to go 900 miles high after 50 more years of funding, technological progress, and an increasing number of entities competing, it’s seems highly unlikely that it had the capacity to travel 250,000 miles to the moon and then take off from the moon for a return 250,000 mile voyage 50 years ago.
Maybe I’ll be proven wrong soon, and the video guy’s prediction will come true and man will soon land on the moon again but with bigger and better spaceships this time. It might not be the U.S. government leading it this time given its greatly diminished space travel capabilities since the early 1970s, and the difficulty of reversing DEI-driven, bureaucracy-driven, and/or corruption-driven competency collapses. But if it’s doable, presumably someone will at least try to do it.
Anyway, I’d love any thoughts you have on this question of how to tell the difference between previously claimed capabilities that have curiously disappeared and previously claimed capabilities that were never really there.
Without going into too much detail, and just addressing the technical issues:
-Getting into orbit is most of the work. From there, getting into a lunar transfer orbit is significantly less work. The math exists, anyone can run it.
-The problem with rocketry is that, to get even a relatively small rocket capable of making that lunar transfer with a manned capsule into orbit, you need a positively ginormous rocket underneath it (or multiple trips, but that’s a different can of worms). These are EXPENSIVE, especially for one-shot wonders.
-The Saturn V is a rocket capable of making such a trip. This is provable via back-of-the-napkin math, so long as your napkin is several pages long. Nothing before or since has been.
-A shift in focus to ‘reusable’ craft and a reduction in budget made additional manned missions to the moon unviable.
-Further, unless we were going to actually set up a manned station on the moon – which would take LOTS of trips – what’s the point in going back?
-Safety standards and bloated bureaucracy in the MI complex mean the cost of making anything space-related has gone WAY up, while NASA’s budget has gone down. SpaceX has changed the equation on this.
-Not gone into in great detail: the Van Allen belts do exist and are dangerous. Going any higher than we go already is dangerous, so we don’t do it – and there’s little that we know about that’s terribly interesting before one gets to the moon. See also: the rocketry math. The higher you go, the greater the expense – especially from the initial booster stage.
Re technological development/regression: Making stuff is hard. We’ve lost a LOT of practical skills. Do you want your moonbase to be dependent on the best Indian engineering and the finest parts made by Chinese slave labor? Further, the actual space related technological developments are in computers and to a lesser extent materials science, and neither fundamentally affect the fuel-to-weight issue that’s at the heart of ‘getting stuff to the moon by rockets’.
Mind you: if the military really has functional antediluvian antigrav technology from reverse-engineering vimana, this all goes out the window. Maybe we have moonbases already.
While I’m sure you’re sincere, this feels like a lot of hand-waving to argue that yes we totally can do it according to napkin math but it’s also totally normal that the most inspiring area of technology (space travel!) is also the one we’ve regressed on by 99%.
It’s just weird. In almost no other area of technology do we see the excuse that “it’s too boring, we already learned everything 55 years ago in just 7 flights beyond a few hundred miles of altitude, no need to ever do even 1% of what we did back then.” (Arguably one reason so many people defend the stories of the old accomplishments is that they aren’t boring at all.)
Multiple U.S. Presidents and space genius Elon Musk keep insisting that we’re going back to the moon (and on to Mars) (although the timelines are always at least a decade long, suggesting we’re kinda starting from scratch rather than building on the Apollo program). If we’re going hundreds of thousands of miles to the moon and Mars soon, it would obviously make sense to travel more than a few hundred miles high at some point. But apparently we’re not able to.
No other societies are as litigious or safety-obsessed as the U.S., but you don’t see Russia or China or Japan or anyone else able to go more than a few hundred miles in the air either. Russia, China, and Japan certainly haven’t lagged 99% behind 1960s U.S. technology in any other areas, but space travel seems to be a special exception to normal patterns.
If it weren’t for the media events of 1969-1972, no-one would believe that we have the capability to fly humans thousands of miles into outer space, much less hundreds of thousands of miles, regardless of what math you can do on a napkin.
For the last 55 years and for at least the next 5, there has been no such thing as manned space flight beyond a few hundred miles high. The only debate is about whether there WAS such a thing 55 years ago when the world was a lot poorer and had far less advanced technology.
Where people come out on this debate seems to have something to do with their dispositions. Science-fiction fans “want to believe!” while anti-authoritarian types note that almost no government programs ever lead to wild successes. And there’s some correlation with age, as well, with older people more likely to believe than younger people for various reasons.
I do like your optimist’s conspiracy theory, though, compared to my pessimist’s one. Maybe we’ve been traveling far into outer space all this time to bases on the dark side of the moon, but the government has been keeping it secret from us. Think of how many people would have to be in on it! 😉
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about THE SCIENCE ™, it’s that “napkin math” are much like mathematical models. They perform convincingly well on the paper napkin, and in idealistic computer simulations, but often turn out to have no actual correspondence to reality.
That anyone has to retreat into napkin math to “prove” the Apollo missions is a farce. Like all science it needs to be repeatedly demonstrable, much like satellites and ships circumnavigating the Earth. Of course that is easier said than done… It is extraordinarily expensive for little practical gain or purpose other than to show off.
Anyway, my point is that mathematical models and the routine nonsense scientists put on chalkboards and napkins by themselves prove nothing. The engineering must be demonstrable repeatedly and verifiable in reality. And it is the demonstrations of the past called into question, which aren’t helped by the fact that “nothing before or since has been.”
I’m still 50/50 on this moon thing, but I’m leaning more towards the idea that space is designedly too hostile for living things to venture through, ever, based on dogma that the Earth is uniquely created by God for life and it’s central and unmoving position in the entire cosmos has a lot to do with it. Anywhere beyond the Earth/Moon area is probably an immediate or inevitable death sentence. Even Musk has been quoted as saying he’d likely or rather die on the trip to Mars.
I appreciate both your points, but the napkin math is provable, simply by amateur (and professional!) rocket enthusiasts. Absent an even greater deception than most of us will give credence to being possible – like a huge variation in the distances of the moon and various planets, or the void being actually full of air at a relatively normal pressure – the math does appear to work in ways that are testably true.
Re: expense isn’t the answer. Yes it is. Consider the scale of the Saturn V. It’s something close to 2x taller and 8x the volume – maybe more – of earlier & later rockets capable of putting things in LEO. This is the sheer _volume_ of fuel needed to kick something into LEO that has the fuel to also get to the Moon _and also carry one or multiple people_ – at least, to get it done in one shot. The manned moon-rocket – again because of volume – has to be built far more sturdily than smaller rockets to support the mass in gravity and under acceleration – reducing the efficiency and performance. A rocket 2x the size probably costs more than 10x as much to build – just at a guess.
Re: safety & efficiency. There’s a famous story at the famous aerospace company I work for. A fellow neglected to do his safety checks on a satellite the company was building. He didn’t ensure a bolt was properly tightened on the satellite they were building.
Because the bolt was not properly tightened, the satellite was dropped from a height of about 6′.
Because the satellite was dropped from a height of 6′, the company lost _multiple billions_ of dollars, and three years of work. And that company posted a loss for _multiple years_. All because a satellite – not a rocket, a satellite – was dropped.
Building space stuff is _expensive_, largely because of the bureaucracy attached to all the M-I complex companies. And only half of the responsibility for that bureaucracy is on the companies themselves. Have you ever had to deal with FAR and DFARS compliance? I have. It’s _not fun_. It starts with having to account for _every six minute period of work for every person_. It gets worse from there.
Re: capabilities. What capability do we NEED? Well, we need lifting capability into LEO & HEO, including orbits outside even the lunar orbit at the Lagrange points. Assuming that the _entire_ space program isn’t fraudulent from beginning to end – which is an even bigger claim than a fraudulent moon program – we have that capability.
What we don’t have is the capability to put men up there _right now_. We put men into LEO – for prestige, and because we can do scientific experiments at low-gravity and low-atmosphere conditions.
Why don’t we go higher? Van Allen belts. Van Allen belts ARE dangerous, they just aren’t impassable. It’s like going to North St. Louis – you can travel through, but you probably don’t want to hang around.
Why don’t we go beyond the Van Allen belt danger zones? Well, why? What can we do there – what do we need to do there, _with people_, that we can’t equally well do in LEO? It’s all just ‘space’ to 99% of people, anyway.
Well, what about going back to the moon? See above. Not enough money to go to the moon & develop a reusable spacecraft, particularly if some of the only things really worth doing on the moon is developing manned moon-bases.
Could there be other reasons? Yes, but this explanation is perfectly satisfactory. Are they hiding something? Oh yes, I’m sure, particularly about the moon landings. What is it? No clue. Enochian refugees? Nazi moon-bases? Hollow moon theory? Aliens/Good People/Demons? Take your best guess.
As for antigrav, I don’t believe we have it, I don’t believe we don’t either. I just recognize that if we do, the paradigm shifts dramatically.
It’s weird to see good points, that answer objections well, dismissed as hand-waving.
“Oh you can do the math, can you? If you understand rocket & orbital physics well enough, you can replicate it yourself on the back of a long napkin again & again? That’s non-reproducible hand-waving!” <- exactly what it isn't, making the comeback insane.
Hey Jeff, were you referring to any of my points there? I’d love to refine my ideas better; and I don’t want to be dismissing anybody without thinking it through.
And yeah, that thing about the back-of-the-napkin math was my point. What I was trying to convey is that the math is a model, but one that can be seen even by amateurs launching model rockets to reflect reality.
urielangeli: my comment was made to agree with your comments. I’m saying that “napkin math” – the fact it can be done (by competent people, checking each other’s work), done and repeated and used – is very much a proof of physics & orbital mechanics & space travel. The scientists & engineers who made the Apollo program happen were brilliant. Seeing their competence and work habits dismissed a “hand waving” “farce”, is odd and, to me, feels like gaslighting.
JeffO-
THE SCIENCE ™ is replete with oversupply of models and mathematical constructs with no evidence and no experimental proof for what they assert. There’s a very big movement of climate-apocalypse claims with experts, consensus and math behind it that you may have noticed. Then there is the utterly mathematical impossibility of molecules to man Evolution that is the new genesis myth of modernity, and now you’ve got me started on Geocentrism, as the fact that you are utterly unaware of the Church history on the matter is betrayed by your factually incorrect statements of the record, and so in charity, I have to address your unwitting heresy and ignorance.
The Church did condemn Galileo’s propositions as formally heretical, based on the capital-T tradition of the Church, the consistent consensus of the Church Fathers, the consistency of Jewish Tradition, and the inerrancy of Scripture and details that describe the movements or lack threreof of the Earth, moon, sun and stars with respect to each other. The full infallibility of the Papacy rode on it. Everything about it was under the jurisdiction of the Church, and NOT ONCE were ANY scientific criteria considered, only Scripture and Tradition. These condemmations have never been revoked. Not even by the Vatican II sect, who wanted to, but couldn’t, according to then-Cardinal Ratzinger, and even John Paul II’s own commission, who instead appealed to the bogus vagueries of Einstenian Relativity and it’s napkin math to accomodate both systems. And that teaching has been left to rot much like a lot of Catholic Tradition and morality in our age under the watch of modernism and apostasy.
Whether you like it or not, Jeff, you are dogmatically bound by the infallible teachings of councils to adhere to the Consensus of the Fathers, otherwise you have to say cheers to Protestantism and join your Lutheran bretheren at the English pub, because the Fathers were in 100% unanimous consensus on maintaining Geocentrism, doing so in the face of the Greek pagans who poo-pooed the idea of the Incarnation leaving the heavenly abode of the gods to visit the central anus of the cosmos, the Earth, and the Fathers didn’t bother to argue using the Pythagorean’s or Egyptian’s alternative heliocentric models that existed then to put the Earth in the same rotating heavens of the gods, because that was contrary descriptions of the Earth and cosmos in Sacred Scripture, and if the Fathers were found to be 100% error over geocentrism and having interpreted it from Scripture, then they could be questioned over EVERY ARTICLE OF CATHOLIC FAITH AND DOGMA, AND CHRISTIANITY AS A WHOLE WOULD BE UNCERTAIN, THE PAPAL OFFICE ITSELF DEMOLISHED, AND PROTESTANTISM TRIUMPHANT, AND TRADITION UTTERLY UNRELIABLE, and this is what St. Robert Bellarmine argued, what the Church realized, and why Galileo was condemned, and the declarations issued Ubi et Orbi under the Power of the Keys of St. Peter, and why Galileo himself later in life recanted and condemned those who wished to use him to overthrow the authority of the Church, and he died faithful to Her, and why the enemies of the Church uphold the demonstrably refuted and condemned doctrine of Heliocentrism over the Papacy.
Now next, you make the classic error of reification when it comes to napkin math, which as we can observe by itself doesnt prove anything until it is put into practice. But the moon conspiracies aren’t so much concerned with the physics of the rockets but the ability of man’s ability to engineer and pull off the napkin math in practice. As uriel details with satellites, a lot can go wrong. Unexpected problems can occur, logistical complications are everywhere, and the fact is that you are heavily underestimating the miraculous and dangerous odds the American astronauts were up against that are far more complex than the simplified math on the napkin which assumes ideal conditions like math in abstraction tends to. Reality is not on the back of a napkin. The Novus Ordo Mass also literally had some napkin design put into it. How’d that work out in practice? Yeah, I know, that’s not math, but it is the result of what you’re likely to get with that level of engineering overconfidence.
You made a false equivalence to architecture, which anyone can verify that a building exists and whose construction principles continue to demonstrably work producing varieties of them. Then you commit the fallacy of using as proof that which you have to yet prove by appealing to the number of Apollo missions, whose entire program is that which is called into question as far as it concerns human beings setting foot on the moon, not the physics of the rockets themselves. No doubt amateurs can build model rockets and send them off on correct trajectories. Let’s see how confident they are getting in one they built themselves for the journey.
The strongest source of gravity does not alone determine the center of a complex system. Only in the imaginary vacuum math on the back of a napkin that only considers the Earth and Sun and nothing else will the relationship work, where the center would still not be the Sun, but technically the center of mass between the Earth and Sun, which would be closest to the Sun, being the largest mass in the napkin system. But the universe in reality is not just the Sun and Earth, it is trillions of other things, interacting with one another, and all these would produce a Center of Mass, around which they’d all go, and in which the Earth would be held immobile, and it certainly couldn’t happen by chance if you are a math guy.
But Napkin math also demonstrates grocentrism, and everyone from Newton to Einstein to Mach, non-Catholics all, knew it. But the real death knell of heliocentrism were the experiments in reality using interferometers that could detect a 24 hour rotation, but not a 30 km/sec velocity speed around the Sun. The latter was what heliocentrism needs to be true. Geocentrism only needs the former, exolained as the measurement of the universe against a fixed Earth. Relativity was then created on a napkin to explain this away. Which is where all other kinds of imaginary things such as black holes, time dilation, magical mass and length contractions and hysterical mathematical artifacts come from; pure fiction invented to protect modern doctrine’s napkin victory over the Church on the Galileo affair.
This is why napkin math is a lousy argument. You keep it around until you blow your nose on it and toss it away. But don’t hold up your nose at Geocentrism, if you are Catholic, you ARE bound by it, because of the consequence of what it defends. You can no longer claim invincible ignorance over it Jeff. It may not be an article of faith that your salvation relies on as necessary for belief any more than that you need to be informed about every negative definition of the Trinity or be a scholar of canon law, but if you are out there declaring heliocentrism as a fact, then you are in opposition to the Church, and as the Popes declared, you incur upon yourself the wrath of Saints Peter and Paul.
Consider where you stand.
As for the Apollo missions, believe whatever you want, I don’t care. I’m personally neither here nor there on it.
Jeff: Agreed in principle to all. Someone who has never questioned the Moon landings is probably indoctrinated; but the arguments (not reasons) for the impossibility of the moon landings are, in my estimation, mostly due to ‘technological illiteracy’, with the strongest being that the supposed photos appeared uniformly to be staged, the general untrustworthiness of the US government, and the odd conduct of NA, BA, & MC at the press conference after 11.
The oddness of the press conference remains, the untrustworthiness of the US is a constant, but the fact that the much-touted fake looking photos were extremely low quality reproductions of much more realistic originals appears in my estimation to let the air out of the only non-spurious reasons for doubting the moon landings occurred.
Rather than the arguments about “why couldn’t we go there again!!!1!” I actually find the Great Deception arguments more convincing – e.g. flat earth, etc, arguments which attempt to throw doubt on the entire cosmological-model-narrative. We know they’re lying about something, and it’s likely to be that, among other things – like the generally accepted historical narratives.
Your comment sounds like highly-motivated reasoning. It seems like you don’t want to deeply consider the main issue, the weird anomaly that space travel technology has regressed considerably since 1972, while most other technologies have advanced considerably since 1972. You seem to want to explain the anomaly AWAY rather than to deeply engage with the question.
It’s deeply weird that in 1972 we instantly lost the ability to travel through space and no-one has ever been able to go even 1% as far as we allegedly went then. This in spite of 16 highly motivated countries developing space launch capabilities, NASA spending more money in inflation-adjusted dollars in EACH of the past 30 years than it did in 1971 and 1972 when it landed men on the moon 4 times, and genius billionaire businessmen funding ambitious space companies for the past several decades. Meanwhile, almost every other technology has progressed significantly over the past 55 years. Even military technology, which is subject to a lot of the same cost pressures and waste and bureaucracy as space technology, has moved significantly forward since the 1970s, not backwards.
The guy in the video acknowledges that this is a crazy state of affairs. Our host Mark acknowledges that there is something rotten in Denmark, and he cites DEI as shorthand for all the various dynamics making agencies like NASA wildly less effective than they once were. You too acknowledge the bureaucracy and high costs.
But…like most space enthusiasts, especially those whose identity is a little wrapped up in their space knowledge, you make defensive arguments to explain AWAY the anomaly of massively NEGATIVE progress in space travel technology. “Large rockets are too expensive,” “we already know everything there is to know about space travel,” etc.
We don’t see those arguments with other technologies. The whole nature of technological progress is increasing efficiency, going further, and learning more. But people who want to believe we landed on the moon find themselves making weird arguments that there’s nothing more to learn about Space, even as NASA sucks up more money each year than it did in the 1970s while landing men on the moon!
The ironic thing is that the same moon landing enthusiasts arguing there’s nothing more to learn and it’s “totally normal” that we can’t travel even 1% as far as we used to are often super enthusiastic about NASA, about Elon Musk, about SpaceX, about every President announcing a return to the moon and on to Mars, etc.
Is NASA super exciting or is it a big failure? People who claim to be “blown away” by SpaceX’s “progress” seem to be implicitly admitting that the far more impressive moon landings aren’t real enough to be a relevant benchmark.
If it’s too expensive and too boring to ever leave low earth orbit, then why do we keep announcing and funding programs to go back to the Moon and Mars? And if leaving low earth orbit IS doable and desirable, then why can’t anyone do it?
People only make the “it’s a safety thing” argument when they are trying to defend the old government and media claims as real. Is Elon Musk obsessed with safety? Demonstrably not. The death toll from Teslas is considerable. As are the number of SpaceX explosions. Are the Chinese obsessed with safety? That would be news to Chinese laborers exposed to hazardous and toxic conditions. But the moon landing defenders would have us believe that the professional killers of the military industrial complexes in 16 nations are too squemish to risk radiation exposure for a single astronaut?
I am willing to bet that humans will NOT fly even 5,000 miles off earth (only 2% of the way to the moon) at any point in the next 15 years either. And as the years pass, the intellectually honest will either have to discount the old claims a bit more or admit that modern space programs are terrible at technological progress.
If this issue wasn’t so *charged* for people, involving so many thoughts and emotions including: patriotism, nostalgia, establishmentarianism, belief in news media, belief in government competence, belief in government honesty, nerd pride, careerism, space enthusiasm, science worship, and more, people wouldn’t feel so much resistance to this piece of logic: “If it can’t be done, it probably didn’t happen.”
But as Mark Twain allegedly said, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
urielangeli: I said this way way up top, but – The most Ockham-reasonable explanation for why “we didn’t go there again” is, they took the program secret – as well as shrinking it, delaying and stretching it out.
Going to the Moon on 1960s/70s technology was like winning the high jump in the Olympics. Sure you could do it again. And stay in training year after year after year, to keep doing it Olympics after Olympics. BUT YOU DON’T.
Why not? Because it becomes a curse. It’s an artificial extreme of development, effort and specialization. You have other things to do, closer to home. You need to finish school, start a family, help with your relative’s cancer treatment, etc. You move on.
Yet space and the Moon have overwhelming military advantages, to whichever country occupies them ahead of the others. The idea that the U.S. military of the 1960s, 70s, 80s or 90s would simply give up them is absurd.
They went “Great – we won the Olympic high jump – at heavy expense. It’s wonderful but can we do things closer to Earth now? More useful militarily? therefore more secret?” Like many iterations of military satellite programs. Or the Shuttle program which, despite being NASA & sometimes doing civilian & public stuff, in fact did a great many military, classified ops we have no idea about.
Yet, as the cost of heavy launches & other tech has indeed declined slowly decade by decade, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the U.S. military did already go back to the Moon. Perhaps as soon as the 80s, that is, cloaked secretively in the high costs of Reagan’s Star Wars program, but certainly by the 2000s or 2010s.
I don’t know it, I’m speculating, but – on the other hand – the line of argument “We clearly never went back! Which must mean we never did go to begin with!” is retarded on so many fronts.
No. What we did was, cut back. We shrank NASA’s bloated budget down to size. We re-assigned what was left of NASA to various planetary probes, plus the Space Shuttle. And then spent on many costly military-space programs, most of it classified i.e. kept UNKNOWABLE to we peasants.
Meanwhile, the cost of Moon launches has finally dropped enough that public or civilian-related Moon launches are, in the 2020s, finally within reach again.
Johnno: Pope St. John Paul II specifically said the Church of Galileo’s time had been very much in error about Galileo & geocentrism, and apologized.
To quote his 1992 speech, “…the different branches of knowledge call for different methods. Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the Sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of the Sacred Scripture. Let us recall the celebrated saying attributed to Baronius: “Spiritui Sancto mentem fuisse nos docere quomodo ad coelum eatur non quomodo coelum gradiatur.” In fact the Bible does not concern itself with the details of the physical world, the understanding of which is the competence of human experience and reasoning. There exist two realms of knowledge, one which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its own power. To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy.”
Remember: If you downgrade science, you downgrade miracles. Because science is part of how the Church screens for approved miracles. That is, part of the Church’s process to distinguish events that (while perhaps improbable and thus appearing miraculous) are explainable from nature, from events that are undeniable violations of nature. Further tests then show whether the violations come from God or demons (by God’s permission), and so forth.
Praying for you! God bless you.
Charlie. Charlie. Please.
Firstly, accusing someone of motivated reasoning at the beginning of your argument is called “poisoning the well”, and it’s gauche. If you want to accuse somebody of intellectual blindness and dishonesty, do it after you’ve blown up their arguments; then it’s a “rhetorical flourish”, and a coup de gras.
(For the record, the List Of Things I Care About includes: Christ & His Church, my Family, Philosophy, Music, the War of Northern Aggression, Tolkien, Game Design, and Bunnies. The Moon Landings appears nowhere on this list. I Don’t Care.)
To address the body of your post: “Technology advances” is a narrative, not an argument. There is no monolith called Technology. There are many technologies; each, a tool fitted for one or several purposes. Neither does any technology improve ad infinitum; instead, there are “developing” and “mature” technologies. “Developing” technologies improve. “Mature” technologies do not see substantial improvement, having reached their maximum effective efficiency and potential.
There are mature technologies that date back to prehistory – e.g. the bone awl. There are mature technologies that have been around for hundreds of years – e.g. the codex. And there are mature technologies that are relatively recent – e.g. the word processor. Mature technologies rarely go away, they only lose market share.
I could go on about theoretical (engineering) vs practical (construction / manufacturing) expertise & institutional knowledge but I won’t.
You want me to accept you’re right about the effects of technological advancement on space travel? Fine. Name ONE technology released since the Saturn V that affects the intrinsic difficulty of putting a man on the moon. Go ahead.
“But – but – we’ve only gone 1% of the way back since then!” Fine. Name ONE activity that we can do in HEO (besides “going there”) that cannot be done equally well in LEO. Go ahead.
I’m listening.
As for the “safety thing” and the bureaucracy – you obviously have no experience working with OSH or any modern safety standards. Neither, I would guess, do you have any experience of FAR or DFARS compliance, nor government procurement or oversight in general. It’s not about safety, it’s not about quality, it’s not about outcomes – it’s about CYA, money, and the propagation of the bureaucracy.
What I’ve heard from you aren’t arguments, they’re vibes and narratives. If you’re right, you’re right for the wrong reasons. I’d take a hard look at your own position and the reasons before projecting all over the room again.
Jeff: yes. I suspect myself that the US and others have had antigrav tech for several decades and NASA is a stalking horse rather than a serious program. But who knows? Absence of evidence is the problem.
Johnno – Wait till you find out how buildings are built.
Architects & builders constantly use “napkin math” i.e. reproducible calculations of load, weight, strength, angles etc. that they doodle in odd moments, using their education in known, inexorable laws of math & physics, to create things ordinary people find unbelievable.
Hope I didn’t just wreck buildings, for you.
“The engineering must be demonstrable repeatedly and verifiable in reality.” – Exactly what the 17 Apollo missions were. Apollo 1 was destroyed by a fire, but they got to Earth orbit the next 16 times, Moon orbit 12 times, and Moon landing 6 times.
Earth “central and unmoving position in the entire cosmos” – sorry but geocentrism is NOT Catholic dogma, was NEVER Catholic dogma and never can be; only a temporary position that the Church later revised or discarded as science progressed.
The Church loves science, including modern theories like heliocentrism & relativity, because there are no miracles without science first discerning how natural laws work and the Church then being able to discern which events are truly miraculous, i.e. rare GENUINE violations of natural laws.
In other words, if (correctly done) science doesn’t work, then neither do miracles & sorry but you actually just threw out Catholic dogma. Cheers!
Earth “central and unmoving position in the entire cosmos” – There is plenty of evidence that a modified Tychonic model works just as well as a Copernican. And Relativity has been showing cracks for years, most notably the 2022 Nobel going to proof of Spooky Action at a Distance/Superluminal travel.
Mark, that’s interesting.
Yet my point stands: NO analysis or description or theory of the workings of Nature, of any tendency, geocentric heliocentric immovable movable whatever, can be, should be, or was ever validly, a part or essential implication of Catholic dogma – “truths revealed by God, which the magisterium of the Church declared as binding” for salvation.
So, anyone who thinks Catholic dogma implies or requires geocentrism, might think twice or dial it back a little. It doesn’t.
Side note – Oddly enough, relativity saves geocentrism.
Relativity – even Galilean & Newtonian relativity, never mind Einsteinian – says that all speeds & directions of movement are knowable *only* in relation to some designated point of observation. Whose own speed & direction are unknowable except in relation to some other designated point of observation, who speed & direction are unknowable except in relation to some other designated point, and so on forever, in an endless circular cloud of references.
In other words: If we simply declare and agree that the center of the Earth is the center of the Universe, then, it is.
But the math is easier if the designated “center” is the strongest source of gravity in your practical reference frame – maybe the Earth, or maybe the Sun, the Sagittarius-A* black hole, etc.
The Concorde argument was painfully stupid. And using “as a percentage of the federal budget” is a liar’s way of denying massive budget increases without actually denying them.
This kid also promoted Jeff Bezos’ chicks-in-space fake. He promoted it so hard that Bezos gave him an on-camera tour of the facilities for the channel.
That’s all I needed to see of the “Everyday Astronaut”.
@Mike, I shouldn’t have said “Okay, boomer.” I meant it to be funny, but it’s hardly a good way to encourage open discussion, and I take your point that it isn’t even appropriate to Mark!
Charlie…what a humble and lovely soul you are.
Charlie: You were fine. Humor is fine. Some people are weird about it.
That we were there I think has been proven, or will be proven shortly, with lunar orbit photography. Am I right? What I don’t understand was that post return press conference with Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. They do look dejected and uncomfortable.
The press conference was spooky. But yes, the remnants left behind can still be seen, with resolution down to the footprints. There are also laser reflectors confirmed and in use by third parties.
Not really… Nobody doubts whether or not we’ve sent and shot things into space and the moon’s surface.
The conspiracy is about whether or not men themselves have actually gone to the moon and returned back… against miraculous odds, with irreproducable experimental 60’s technology, and did it all on the first try!
Not the first try. Apollo 8 and 10 went all the way to the Moon, but did not land. The famous “Earthrise” photo was taken by Apollo 8.
As urielangeli explained above, even putting satellites in space can be a very complicated and daunting thing, where the slightest screw-up can be disastrous, and even SpaceX has their occasional accidents.
All these Apollo missions, 8, 10 and 11, are miraculous achievements in their own right, successfully making their runs and returning without encountering anything far unexpected nor the loss of the lives or harm to their astronauts.
Granted, tests were first conducted using animals several times, managing to orbit the moon and return home (and it was not that some men didn’t die at some point of this long historic making-of there) but it was humanity that first stepped on the moon, and naturally you can’t train the dog or chimps to come back on their own from the moon’s surface. So it’d have to be done by man, and 11 did do it on the first try, without any serious hitches, which is very very remarkable.
I do like the video above, it is good at explaining a lot of things with simple but slick visuals. And I encourage others to watch it. I still have to finish some earlier parts… and a follow-up video would be good as there are many other objections not addressed.
But it disappoints in two areas, though not by fault of the creator. The photographic evidence is not convincing of human being’s footprints taken from orbit, which is to be expected considering the distance they were taken from. But the other are the Saturn V plans. Yes, there are simplified “blueprints” available explaining the Saturn V conceptually, much like a car manual, but as the video itself admits, nobody can just view the actual detailed schematics used to build the thing without the proper clearances without which they cannot be built. They are understandably of military secrecy, but without them nobody can independently verify them or prove anything as they’d be bound to secrecy, so this doesn’t help the case; further complicated by the fact that with the march of time, it is practically harder to reproduce the more primitive, but complex parts used to build it. It also doesn’t help that some sceptics have made comparisons from those same available blueprints to recreated museum pieces and photographs of the actual modules and concluded that sizes don’t match up and pieces are entirely missing, which makes sense as those are only intended to be illustrative…
But if the top billion dollar agencies of the world can’t afford or even be capable to build it, then why the secrecy? Are the Islamic Terrorists going to build the Saturn V in their caves and crash it into the American flag on the moon? I know the joke that the Intelligence agencies even kept lemon invisible ink classified out of habit, but nobody is going to build something the scale of the Saturn V rocket to attack the homeland in the age of ICBMs, and we have drones and reusable rockets now. I also don’t buy that it is impossible to build many of these components again. A lot of civilian outfits coordinating worldwide would enthusiastically find enough to volunteer to hand weld and stitch fabricated retro tech from scratch over several years if given the schematics and even improve them, and we now even have 3D printers. And I bet they’d do it even if there is no practical return except for contributing to the achievement itself, and maybe a plaque bearing their names to be left on the moon.
The strawman used is comparing the Moon missions to older practical aircrafts and vehicles we don’t bother using today for practical reasons. But we do know how to build them if we wanted to. We know how they work. We know they did work. They are not top secret classified plans. Everything is open and patented. Maybe we can’t see everything that goes into the latest generation fighter jets, but we don’t doubt their existence. And unlike the older crafts we can achieve our ends with better economic or more comfortably safe solutions with plenty of options. There is still no alternative rival or replacement for the Saturn V or other way of going to the moon. There are lots of nice concepts being pitched now, but that is all they are at this stage.
Yes, you can blame the lack of public interest to pursue it, but since when has what the public thinks or wants really, and I mean reeeaaalllyyy… stopped the government from doing what it wants and spending on even stupider things at public ire? It is far simpler to believe that there is simply no practical purpose to return to the moon, but there is some practical return for some people to encourage illegal immigration at great public expense.
But that gets us away from the real question – has man with his own two feet stepped on the moon, or at least did it back in the 60’s?
Personally speaking, I’d be much happier if he did, and I love the idea that he did, but there are some legitimate questions that I’ve had the misfortune of becoming exposed to, though I’m not married to the conspiracy theory so much that I don’t want to see it debunked. I’ve casually looked at some of the conspiracy content, and probably talked more about it here than I have anywhere, to anyone else. So I guess that much like the general public, the moon landings or lack thereof do have little impact on my life. Although I do look forward to low orbit civilian space flight as a potential possibility in my lifetime. Getting to look down on Earth and arrive anywhere on it in under an hour would be something. Though I think your age range for the journey would be a deciding factor.
“against miraculous odds” – That is indeed the point. It was an achievement so huge, people living in our degenerated world of 2025 no longer want to think about it or accept that it happened.
Actually, there were people even back then when it happened who were sceptical. Those same questions back then as now still linger.
Well if we see footprints wouldn’t that end the dispute.
I believe that would.
Though I think there is a seperate contingent that believes the Apolllo 11 was faked, but latter missions were real.
How can they prove that the footprints on the moon are authentic with all the Hollywood tricks and a legion of lies the government has told us that we’ve discovered in the last five years?
Like you, Mark, I had become a skeptic.
I watched the video featured on Br Bugnolo’s site and found it very compelling. Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, explained everything clearly, convincingly and without condescension.
Best mainstream movie for skeptics of the lunar landings: Capricorn One, 1977. Peter Hyams wrote the script for this in 1972, before the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17. He had been involved in broadcasting the Apollo missions for CBS. Notably, NASA apparently was very cooperative and lent various leftover vehicles from the Apollo program.
Best mainstream movie for supporters of the lunar landings: Apollo 13, 1995 – even though no lunar landing took place on this mission. Pope Paul VI featured in this movie, albeit via a video recording.
Best non-US movie for skeptics and supporters alike: The Dish, 2000. The first clear TV pictures from the moon were received not in the US, but in Australia, first by a dish one sixth the size of the others in the network, at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canberra, then by the six times larger Parkes radio telescope in a remote part of Australia, modified a few weeks before with NASA’s assistance to enable TV reception.
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/science-environment/2019/07/honeysuckle-creek-the-little-known-heroes-of-the-moon-walk-broadcast/
The TV signals were then distributed worldwide via the INTELSAT geostationary satellite system satellites. Those received in Europe were “triple hopped” via two satellites over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, as the Atlantic Ocean satellite had suffered an anomaly. Having already travelled about 380,000 kilometers (236,000 miles) from the moon to the Honeysuckle Creek ground station and the Parkes radio telescope, the TV signals to Europe were then sent a further 215,000 kilometers (134,000 miles) via satellites.
More information on the signal routing to Europe here (because it was the most complex):
https://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/europe_and_uk.html
There is a recurring theme through the later Apollo programme, which the last two movies captured well – namely that many, many things did NOT go according to primary plans, but there was enough forward planning and preparation, redundancy in the systems and networks and plenty of rapidly targeted and deployed expertise and good will – and, of course God-given graces – to enable their successes or at least safe returns.
Apollo 13 has one of the very best soundtracks ever written. Also, a fantastic film.
Mind you, less fantastic if you have reason to doubt the narrative of the moon landings.