How Do We Actually Know We Landed on the Moon? 

You're right. Kubrick was a perfectionist. That's why, when NASA asked him to fake the Moon landings, he insisted that they do it on location.

I think the biggest one is the Soviet Union congratulated the US on it. If the Soviets had any reason to suspect it was fake don't you think they would have called the Americans out?

“But where are the stars?” Tell me you don’t know anything about photography without telling me.

He was 39 and walked on the moon?! I’m 39 sitting here playing video games and eating Cheetos 😭

Without watching yet, the biggest contemporary evidence I know of is that none of the mission transmissions were encrypted, everyone could hear everything, and anyone with a simple directional antenna could track them in the sky all the way there and back again. So, at the very least, something went to the Moon, stayed there for a couple days, and came back.

Do you remember the time we thought the stupidity was caused by a lack of access to information? Yeah, it wasn't that.

Doesn't mention that many amateur radio operators intercepted the radio transmissions from Apollo 11 by pointing their highly directional radio antennas toward the moon.

Tell Buzz he didn't land on the moon... the stars you see next aren't celestial

In 1969, getting a clear picture on your tv set was a mission in itself.

It's kind of weird that the moon landing didn't become a US annual holiday, considering the massive achievement it was.

Kubrick's special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey were ground breaking for the time but they were still obviously animation. I don't see how NASA execs would think they could fool anyone.

Humans Landed on The Moon. 6 Times... 12 Men

The survival of the Apollo 13 astronauts to me was more unbelievable than the moon landing. How those men were able to make it back despite the odds is just amazing.

Camera film has a thing called "latitude". I was a photographer in highschool (68-70) and if you set your exposure for very bright items, you'd lose detail in the dark areas. At a basketball game, if you had black players and white players, you could not have detail in both faces without darkroom tricks. So we would "burn in" or "dodge out". For the black players, we would have a small cardboard disk on a wire and block the light to his face for part of the exposure making it look like he had a halo around his head. Burning in: e. g to show detail for a face with pale complexion with blond hair (dark on the negative) you take a piece of cardboard with a hole cutout and allow light to shine through for the face until you have detail making a halo of darkness around the face. Stars are so faint, you have to provide longer exposure at much larger apertures to get them to show up at all. If you expose to see detail on the bright surface of the moon, there's not way to get detail of the stars so the sky looks totally black!

There are photos taken by lunar orbiters from foreign countries that show the landers on the moon's surface.

I think a big part of why conspiracy takes off isn't factual but emotional. We like feeling like we have that golden story, that unique secret, that we're part of something special. And reality can seem boring sometimes. Just oh, guy meets girl, has baby, that grow ups to meet guy or girl to have baby. It's kinda boring when put like that. A nicer story is there are all these strange forces in the world all creating a web of secrets and lies, and it's not just in the books, its REAL. Biggest conspiracy indicator: consciously or unconsciously unsatisfied with the simplicity and repetition of real life. In my opinion. Solution: make real life interesting so you don't need a secret, or a story. Allow people to do extraordinary things, encourage people to pursue passions, not simply enter workforces, and slowly they will develop a desire for reality rather than fiction. Because reality will just be more exciting. I enjoyed the video a lot! I didn't actually know much about this whole debate!

I was at a meeting with the Apollo 11 Mission Commander. Someone asked him "so was it hoax"? He replied "well, they sure fooled me".

I did my own orignal research on this. I compared the original Apollo 17 16mm ascent camera film footage to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) photos. Spoiler alert - they match up precisely. Video on this is on my EEVdiscover channel.

thank you for this vid. I am 67 years of age , i sat on the edge of my seat for the entier mission . over the recent years conspiracy theorists ,i must admit have planted seeds of reluctant doubt in my mind.How ever your vid with the explanations has given my beliefs restoration. Good job !!!

1. I watched the launch in person. 2. As an aerospace engineer, I calculated the orbital mechanics and calculated the rocket size myself. 3. Anyone could buy the radio equipment to track the progress themselves. 4. I was able to touch the rocket in the VAB. 5. I knew several of the astronautics. 6. I knew several engineers that worked the rocket motors, rocket and the capsule. 7. There are Chinese photos of the Apollo landing sites! Anything else?

I'm interested in stereo photography. When you photograph a scene, move to the side, and photograph the scene again, you can use that to create a stereograph and see the depth in the scene. I often do this with two frames from a movie when the camera moves sideways, and when this is done in a studio or sound stage the flat painted backdrop becomes completely obvious, just like you were there in the room with it. I have also done this with the Apollo pictures that they took of the distant landscape while cruising around on the LRV, and those objects are NOT on a flat painted backdrop. They extend away miles into the distance. Good luck faking that one. Edit- My gosh, so many people saying "Deserts exist on Earth, haha gotcha!" What I'm doing here is saying that the photos cannot have been taken in a sound stage. But this whole operation was your idea- you all need the sound stage because lunar photos look bizarre and unlike Earth. On Earth, you have shrubs all over the place even in a desert, and even if you clear them all out for miles, you can't hide the wind and water erosion that's all over the place. The Moon doesn't have wind and water erosion, but what it does have are a lot of craters and micrometeorite impacts that are missing from any desert on Earth. I fully believe that some of you all can't tell the difference, but remember the goal here would be to fool a well-trained, intelligent Russian geologist, and to them the differences would be obvious. And before you keep trying to @ me with some "aha, gotcha!" ask yourself this... The goal of the Moon Landings was to show up the Russians, right? But that can't be done with a simple TV broadcast. The Russians had these things called telescopes and RADAR, and they were able to see and track the Apollo missions from the ground. It's that simple. If they hadn't seen it with their own eyes, they would have called BS and publicly mocked the US. So any contrived conspiracy theory you come up with has to include the cooperation of the Russians. Also, any amateur astronomer with a telescope in the 1960's would have been able to track the modules for at least some distance, much as how amateur astronomers track satellites today. They wouldn't have the resolution to watch them all the way to the Moon, but we would be able to see that they were leaving Earth on a Moon-bound trajectory. How do you fake that one? I get the value of being skeptical, but try to spend some time disproving your own ideas for a change.

My aunt was Wehner von Braun’s secretary and my dad was a junior engineer on Apollo. The stories they told about their work are more than sufficient for me (along with the mountain of actual evidence). My dad (rest his soul) would laugh about these people after a few beers. Crackpots gonna crackpot, no matter what.

Thank you, I’m 70 year old, i saw it I believe it, sure i wondered was i wrong , the older i get the more i know I’m right, after a lifetime there’s nobody i know who thinks it happened, I’ve stopped looking for the little things, the big things prove it happened

If a drug attack keeps telling you he's straight, he's probably not. They keep telling us we made it to the moon?

I love their Mitchel and Webb sketch were a shadowy government organization are trying to work out how to fake the moon landing. They decide the cheapest option is to fly to the moon and fake it there

“Almost as if NASA has a lot of people working there who know exactly what they’re doing” I love smug sarcasm 😂

I've read so many fascinating books on everything from the Apollo Guidance Computer to 600 page books that focus solely on the pros and cons of the concept of lunar orbit rendezvous vs direct landing etc. There is just no way you could fake the moon landings and then 60 years later have people still writing books about the technical and physical challenges of the endeavour. It's not only moronic and idiotic, it's a disservice to all the truly brilliant individuals involved in the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The Soviets had teams of their best scientists, photographic experts, and so on, analyze every speck of information in an effort to debunk the Moon landings. If they had found even the tiniest discrepancy, they would have announced it to the four corners of the world.

Buzz Aldrin punching that guy is one of the things that lives in my memories rent-free.

Of course they went, the fact Buzz smacked him, proves how angry he was being called a coward! The man, was brave, beyond brave, he walked on the Moon!

Another point about the use of multiple lights... In the photos of the moon landing, everything only has one shadow. If you have multiple lights, everything would have multiple shadows. And some will cite the slight difference in angles of shadows from different objects. Don't get the angles mixed up with multiple light sources. During the day, look at the shadow angles of some objects close to each other on Earth, like a light pole, telephone pole, and street sign. From your perspective on the ground, they all will look like they point in slightly different directions. These deviations in angles aren't caused by multiple light sources. It's perspective. Again, multiple light sources will cause multiple shadows. Not cause different angles of shadows from different objects. Light sources can't single out objects, giving them one specific shadow.

Reminds me of joke I heard comedian say years ago about his grandmother. 'My grandma believes wrestling is real but the moon landing is fake.' Lol

my favourite bit of Lunar Trivia is that Command Module Pilot Michael Collins told Neil Armstrong "If you had any balls at all, you'd go out there and say 'We've touched down on the moon, and - OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT-" then cut your mic." making him the funniest man to ever walk on the moon.

After this I watched a veteran film maker video of why the moon landing could not have been filmed and also addressing several topics such as lighting, shadows and stars. He said the technology to do such recording in a studio was none existent back in 1969 and he pretty much went and broke down the technology that was available back then and why it couldn’t have produced such footage in a studio. He later went on and showed original pictures of the footage next to a footage he altered to meet people’s argument, for example he showed what it would actually look like if the cameras where to also show stars and what you get is a super bright and fuzzy pictures with stars in the background, he also showed what would shadows truly have looked like if multiple light sources where used and more. In the end he goes and say that he can’t confirm nor deny if we truly went to the moon in 1969, because he wasn’t physically there, but that he can 100% confirmed that it was not recorded as the technology to do so and to edit just wasn’t there yet, he also explained that at this time , 60s and pre 60s, the main focus for technology growth was aimed at military and space while everything else was slowly progressing. He also goes on to break down the cameras used by the Astronauts and their specs. On his video what I found very interesting was how he was able to show footage of what it would actually have looked like when added all the things that people claimed on why it was faked, from the shadows, to the lighting and more proving how impossible it would have been to record such event in a studio back in 1969.

Thank you for this video - it's an important topic. Given how much deceptive, ignorant and otherwise damaging crap there is on the internet, any injection of sanity is to be welcomed. (Sidenote, I once had the pleasure of meeting Buzz Aldrin at a press conference about future manned space vehicles - this was a while ago, back in the 90s. Absolute legend.)

"With a little planning, all of this was overcome. It's Almost as if NASA has a lot of people working there, who Know Exactly what they're doing." You are Awesome Simon

I was given a mission patch when I was 4 years old in 1969 and couldn't understand how two guys could fly to the moon on an American Bald Eagle.

The moon landing competes with the earth is flat as the biggest conspiracies

There are all the photographs available on the March to the Moon and NASA websites. Super large RAW files, uncompressed. Plus all of the footage from various cameras from each mission. Thousands of pics and films. Many showing the complete descent to the moon's surface from over 47,000ft high to touch down. From 47,000ft above any surface, one can see hundreds of miles! All shot on analogue film with no edits. No flying bugs of any kind in any of the media. You try shining even one small torch in a desert and see how many bugs fly by continuously. The Lunar Rover footage shows 360 degrees and some shows them traversing over a mile, until the film cannister runs out. All with no movement of deep, sharp shadows, caused by one magnificent light source - the sun. No light drop-off in any of the photographs, over any of the terrain. It would be impossible to shoot those photographs in a studio or some 100 mile wide outdoor stage (again with no flying insects) Nine missions around the moon, with six landings and thousands of media files for foreign agents to ponder over. We didn't have digital recordings back then, nor CGI Chromo-key (blue or green screens) and not even Hollywood today, could shoot such enormous scenes with one gigantic light source. (Even two lights would make multiple shadows, given you could suspend such massive, powerful lighting miles above a studio set up, to create such hard shadows) Plus, all the highly detailed moon surface footage would have had to be mapped out and created perfectly - every divet, just in case oh, 40, 50 years later, the moon was photographed/filmed by modern hi-res cameras, from various other countries, including the USA's greatest rival...far easier to just go there....six times.

The wildest claim Kaysing made has to be that the most famous people in the country went to Las Vegas and caused a big scene, and no one recognized them.

I still say the best evidence for us having landed on the moon is that the Soviet union didn't dispute it.

Kaysing did for bullsh*t what Stonehenge did for rocks.

on the point of no stars in the photographs/footage taken on the moon, take a picture of the night sky with your phone and tell me how many stars you see, even with 2020s technology

"Im not gonna believe nasa because I don't think there's enough hard evidence" ... "Anyway I'm gonna believe this one guy who has no hard evidence whatsoever"

I worked with Boeing engineers while I was in the army, I met a gentleman who, as a brand new engineer, worked on the camera and transmission equipment to get the pictures from the moon to earth. They had completed the work and were in the “tweaking” phase when in Dec 68 the president made the following statement: “I can’t wait to see the ‘Red, White and Blue’ flying over the moon!” At which point the project lead freaked out because suddenly the specifications changed from black & white to color with less than 6 months to complete the engineering changes!! His comment was “yea, we all just moved into our offices and we worked around the clock, smoked several thousand cigarettes, drank thousands of gallons of coffee and are pbj sandwiches or catered food. Wives and girlfriends collected dirty laundry and delivered clean clothes. He paused for a moment, smiled and capped the story with “it wasn’t all ‘nose to the grindstone’, my first daughter was born in Jan 70…do the math.” We all laughed with him.

Look, Russia, China, Japan, and many other countries used telescope and watched the orbit, and LEM left the moons orbit and returned.

The US was not the only country involved, many others tracked the missions, Australia relayed radio signals to.

As I was born on the day Armstrong stepped onto the moon, I've always quipped: "That's one small step for man....but one giant push from my Mum!!" 🤣👍

Flat earthers space deniers and moon landing deniers all do the exact same thing. They ask for pictures, you show them pictures. They say they’re fake, then ask again for pictures.

They are the same people who believe in invisible friend without hesitation 😂

My favourite comeback to conspiracy theorists who say, "man never walked on the moon"'. Is no in fact they did not, they bounced, skipped and hopped.

A lot of people tend to forget that each Apollo mission was broadcast live for hours on end....uninterrupted with no cuts. Not just Apollo 11 either every mission up till 17.

One more proof. Some friends and I, working on a college graduate project, built a receiver and dish antenna and listened to Apollo 17 all the way back from the moon. We had to adjust the frequency as it it moved closer because of the Doppler Effect. This can’t be faked because the object has to be far away and moving fast.

The simplest answer to the question is that, by now, it would have cost 2 DOZEN TIMES AS MUCH to keep it secret than it did to just go to the moon. AND THE COSTS WOULD STILL BE MOUNTING UP. Look, this country went to the moon. It is the simplest and by far the cheapest explanation for events.

Mhm, yes, who to believe? A giant group of scientists, engineers, pilots, some of the brightest minds of the century or a cab driver? Yes, the cab driver it is 🤦🏻‍♂️

It's so ridiculous and has caused a lot of distress for buzz aldrin despite the fact he should basically have been able to chill on his laurels bc he basically did the most amazing thing anyone ever did

13:00 - While the F1s performed flawlessly, the inboard J2 Engine of Apollo 13 did fail during launch. The spacecraft was still able to achieve orbit. As related in the movie, "well, I guess we've had our glitch for this flight"

Correction: Ed White died in Apollo 1, not Ed While. That fire caused massive changes which prevented future fires. No human had put any object into orbit until Sputnik in 1957. So, no one would know how easy or hard it would be to get to the moon in the '50s.

Why has no other country gotten into the moon? Why have we never gotten back? There’s too many questions to believe this without any skepticism

I had heard that Stanley Kubrick was hired to fake the moon landings. But he insisted on such realism that they ended up having to go to the moon to shoot the footage anyway 😀

Slight correction... All in all, *nine* Apollo missions *visited* the moon. Three of them did not land - two because they didn't plan to, and one because of an in-flight emergency.

A more likely conspiracy is that humans have been back to the moon more times than the general public knows.

The Soviets didn’t question the validity, if anyone wanted to discredit the USA claims that they landed on the moon then it was in their best interests!

I used to work in a candy factory and the molds used for juju, gummies, and jellybean centers are trays of starch that is stamped with a negative mold. The way the starch holds the shape is what makes this possible. Furthermore, when you step in a pile of starch it leaves a better impression than moist soil and it's very dry so I've never doubted the authenticity of the foot prints

The dust is a really interesting tidbit that I’d never heard of before. In addition, the amount of inventions that were discovered and developed as a result of the Apollo missions just adds more credibility to the efforts put in by countless Americans to make this possible. The next time you need to use an emergency blanket, you can thank the Apollo program for keeping you warm

Thanks for summarizing all this in one short video. It helps to hit the pause key to actually absorb all this information. Well done!

Why would you want to absolutely convince those who do not want to be convinced? Forget it. At this stage of our evolution, those who want to lag behind will get what they deserve. The rest of us will keep moving forward.

I loved that episode of mythbusters as a kid, they busted many of these claims. The footprints, flag, how easy the astronauts moved and shadows

The laser reflector is still there but I suppose that could have been placed by a very precise remote vehicle. But mostly, the fact that our enemies of the time weren't able to discredit it would be the deciding factor.

Einstein said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe”. I wouldn't look for the conspiracy theories to stop anytime soon.

It was Ed White dude not Ed ‘While’.

As someone who has watched your channel for years, progress from thousands to millions of subscribers, knowing 75% of every story you tell....... I always love to watch your content because i always learn a few more tidbits of info about the subject that i didnt know. You may not hear it enough but we love you and what you do, keep doing it!

Stanley Kubrick was such a stickler, that he agreed to fake the landing on one condition: It had to be filmed on location.

As to the F-1 first stage engine there was a failure that occurred during the ascent phase of Apollo 13. The central engine of the 1st stage failed during the later part of the ascent to orbit . This is featured in the movie "Apollo 13". NASA's response was to simply let the remaining 4 engines operate long enough to achieve the necessary altitude to fire the second stage. They had already planned for this. Actually, over the entire Apollo program the powerful F-1 engine was very reliable. Ironically, during the Apollo 13 ascent phase when the F-1's central engine quit firing Lovell said "well, I guess we've had our glitch for this mission".

Every country in the world with competent military-grade radar could have tracked the progress of any translunar object of that size at least as far as the point that it left orbit and began heading to the moon-and none of them ever once disputed any of these flights. If you've gotten that far in the "fake", you might as well finish the job.

our scientists regularly measure the distance of the moon using mirrors placed on the moon, they had to be carefully placed by humans and couldn’t just be dropped. plus china and russia taking pictures of the landing sites with orbiters

This is wonderful! And it reminds me of that NBA player who said the Earth was flat.. and then when corrected, everyone in the group said that the round earthers had got to him😂 so I guess the moon landers got to you?😂

These type of conspiracy theories really gives the government way too much credit. Maybe South Park has a point and the moon landing conspiracy theories are a government conspiracy to make themselves feel more powerful.

Only in a complete vacuum does dry dirt hit the ground after being thrown up by the lander wheels at the same time leaving not even any dust. On earth the air clings onto dust so it hangs in the air. You cannot replicate that effect even today because we still cannot achieve a complete vacuum equal to that of space. That's why a brick and a feather when dropped from an equal height hit the ground at the same time on the moon. On earth I'll go out on a limb here and say that the brick just might win that race. Young people had deductive reasoning googled right out of them.

I was a young kid at the time, and the world was absolutely buzzing. Everything was better. The weather broadcasts television politics. In fact, everything, I did see the moon landing live if it was a hoax. I will eat my breakfast.

Hearing Simon say "cheese sandwiches..." in an amused, yet conspiratorial tone is epic.

I followed the whole of the space race with bated breath. Kept a scrap book with newspaper clippings. Built the Gemini and Aoollo models. Listened to the touchdown live, courtesy of my science teacher. Apart from all that, the clincher for me is that if it had been fake, the Soviets would have known, and they would have shouted loud.

Here the fact, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were absolute studs. And the only thing NASA had to consider faking was the press conference because of the giant balls on those three.

I always love when they come up with these elaborate schemes as to how things were faked... when it would have been much easier to just do the thing they were allegedly faking.

Another bit everyone misses about the footage of the Apollo landings: back in the day, whenever they started transmitting, the major networks would just start carrying it, sometimes over an hour at a stretch, and we'd sit there watching it, two guys in spacesuits bounding about on the lunar surface. It might have been theoretically possible to fake some shorts with late 60's - early 70's technology, there's no way they could've done it for an hour or more, without any edits, film scratches, etc., which would've given up the whole gig. The nutjobs today only deal with the snippets, not the big long stretches of really not a lot happening. Why fake that in the first place?

It's me again; the dad with the 11 year old son who loves outer space. My son was debunking the conspiracy theory along with you. He's 11 and he gets it. He asked me, "dad, are people really that stupid?" I said, "yes, yes they are." Also, he really liked that someone got punched in the face by an 'old man'.

The Soviets monitored the radio transmissions from the Apollo crafts, which could be easily trinagulatet to prove that they really came from space, and never doubted the moon landing until decades later (by then being Russia). As for Kubrick, he was a very individualist and often subversive artist. The government would never have trusted him to keep a secret like this.

Duration in belts 3.5 hours on outbound trip. Duration in belts 2.5 hours on return trip. Radiation exposure 0.6 Sv per hour average across the belts. Total Radiation exposure 3.6 Sv from belts alone (does not account for radiation in outer space nor on the lunar surface).

In April 2021 the ISRO Chandrayaan-2 orbiter captured an image of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle descent stage. The orbiter's image of the Apollo landing site was released to the public in a presentation on September 3, 2021. Apollo missions were tracked by independent parties at the time, including a group at Kettering Grammar School who monitored radio transmissions of Apollo 17 in 1972. The question is a nonstarter for anyone with the will to think and research for themself.

Simple, the USSR never stated it was fake

They placed a reflector on the Moon. You can bounce a laser off of it. Case closed.

We cannot make a self driving car yet, we could not have landed on the moon.

What made Sibrel think that a man from his era, war fighter pilot vet, and the fact that he had the cojones to be strapped to a rocket was going to sit still as he was called a coward and liar? I just looked up the vid and its satisfying to watch.

I'm sure the Russians would have tracked the spacecraft and be the first to shout out if they didn't get there.

First off, it was Ed White, not Ed While. Armstrong’s actual statement was “One small step for man” not “One small step for a man”.

NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon. But first they are sending a mannequin and will take radiation measurements. Then they will land on the dark side of the moon. Unfortunately the planned manned missions have been delayed.

If we did not go, Russia would have called us out, they were watching closely, and they have not been the friendliest of friends.

"I don't trust what they tell me, but I'll believe this random guy who made a video on Facebook."

You can’t see stars from space…. We are literally in space…

The retroreflectors that are on the moon.... That's how you know it happened.