Ask HN: Why so many Americans believe the man moon landing was fake?

He's the son of a politician who acquired power by pushing a fringe but appealing version of a series of events. The difference between the way he talked about it vs the news I read was revealing: it appealed to paranoia thinking but in a very inviting way. It actually fostered interest, a feeling you're in-group, and a us-vs-them mentality.

I think that's the culture he grew up in; where you can uphold an illogical opinion loudly, seeking a debate just for the sake of being at the center. There is no such thing as bad press they say.

And it worked! For a whole 3 weeks we only talked about the moon landings. We reviewed the Apollo transcripts, moon rocks, papers, telescope images of rovers tracks, catadioptric devices. He had an answer for everything!

In the end I had enough, said let's agree to disagree, that he was a clown but a friendly one.

It sort of worked for him IMHO. I'm hearing he has transitioned to sales; where you go see someone who has a very different opinion than you about who belongs their own money.

I'm positive he'll be just fine.

I suspect what you are seeing is that a very small number of people have been given a very big megaphone, making them look like a much bigger group than they actually are. Plus you will always have a group of people who will say outrageous things "for the lulz" without actually believing any of it.

First, you talk about ‘other people’, and not yourself, or the person you are asking, who are the only people that anything can be known about.

And then you talk about knowledge of a single unique event that you didn’t experience.

And then you insert a predicate nominative that would reverse a prior belief, “fake”.

Wow, so much to unravel there. First get comfortable asking the first-person active voice question of yourself, with the same level of skepticism you have of the third-person passive pluperfect predicate nominative. I think you’ll be amazed at how confident you are about things you know nothing about.

Signed, - former NASA engineer.

P.S. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Nobody thought much about how we got there with Apollo, just how to get back with Orion (we didn’t). We had to do some tests on the moon dust, but they sent ‘simulant’ instead, and for good reasons. Apparently it’s harder to get back there than we thought it would be.

I say “blind” because I also inherently distrust government, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to argue if a government official declares that the sky is blue. The people who legitimately believe the moon landings were faked typically seem to do so because they believe that everything the government says is false. It’s an article of faith for them as much as it would be for someone with blind trust.

With these kind of "conspiracy theories" some people like to engage in the thought experiment, essentially thinking through what would have to be true for the conspiracy theory to hold. They adopt a position about it to engage in debate, sometimes as an intellectual exercise (even if a low brow one) and sometimes just to troll. I've got caught by such people before, that are really just being outrageous because they want attention, but at the end of the day they don't really believe it. Flat earth is the other classic example of this.

Conspiracy theories are also the ultimate strawman, and it serves a lot of interests to promote the belief that lots of people believe in absurd conspiracy theories, and that those who disagree with anything mainstream almost certainly do so because they are stupid enough to believe in some outrageous conspiracy theory.

Ironically, the idea that lots of people believe in conspiracy theories is in a sense a conspiracy theory in itself.

"Plandemic" types are anti-government, so they like the idea that the pandemic is to control them.

I'll also note, NASA has absolutely been caught releasing fake/edited pictures/videos. That does not mean that moon landing was fake. Sometimes it's just convenient to take something from a training exercise, edit it, and release it as part of some promotional content.

I'm sure there are many factors, but I believe that a key one is the American belief in individualism. We celebrate the ability of geniuses who saw past the prevailing ideas and became great. We think America rewards hard work and talent, and that if you're not successful, either you're dumb, lazy, or somebody is holding you back.

And of course you, yourself, must not be dumb or lazy. So it must be the third thing.

It's easy to find that dark, oppressive force if you go looking -- via confirmation bias, cherry picking, and other tactics. And everybody else is either dumb or complicit if they don't see it.

The moon landing hoax is a great meme to believe in. It doesn't actually cost you anything to be wrong -- it's not like Buzz Aldrin is going to punch you in the face (as long as you're carefully separated by the Internet). You can live your whole life believing it without it actually mattering. The worst that can happen is that people get aggravated by your fanaticism -- you can't change your mind and won't change the subject. But that just tells you who your friends are.

Believing in a conspiracy theory makes you feel powerful. Americans in particular seem to crave that need to feel powerful, that they're in on the secret and thus better than everybody else.

Couple that with the particular time of the moon landing -- Vietnam, Nixon, the CIA and FBI doing a ton of genuinely awful stuff, etc -- and distrusting the government is easy. We've never really gotten over that.

It's unclear to me just how much of moon-landing denial is real and how much is just trolling. Trolling and conspiracy theories are two sides of the same coin. People want to feel powerful by knowing a "secret". The secret of trolling is that it's not hard to violate the social contract that allows us to live civilly with one another. That gives you power over other people, as long as you're at sufficient distance to avoid repercussions and sufficiently safe that you don't care what strangers think of you.

Anyway, that's a lot of words and only barely scratches the surface. But perhaps it gives a hint.

Beware of polls showing a small percentage of people believe something. Anything under 10% is subject to the Lizardman's Constant[0]; i.e., there are enough pranksters, people who misheard the question, et cetera, to form a measurable part of the population.

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

Or was the belief of faking it common before that?

1. The Van Allen belts are filled with lethal, impenetrable radiation. An attempt to "clear them out" using a bomb (called Starfish Prime) only made it worse. In 2021, there's still no fix for this nor a launch module that can carry the shielding that would protect people.

2. The computer technology required to plan and command a space module simply didn't exist at the time. Too much math is required too fast for realtime control, especially given the delays caused by the distance.

3. Werner von Braun, the primary proponent of the moon launch, did not believe that the moon could be reached directly because the necessary rocket would be too heavy to take off. There's no fuel that could do it and get there. From the beginning, he proposed a "build a base nearby" approach, not a direct moon landing. When that was rejected, he quit the program.

4. Video and photo evidence is highly suspect and contains many anomalies which, with contemporary computer-aided evaluation, can be shown to contain lighting and reflections which could not originate on the surface of the moon unless ancillary lighting was carried there, which NASA says it was not.

5. NASA has been historically obtuse on contemporary answers to many of these questions. If the landing took place, the answers should be public and obvious.

6. In 2021, there is no battery or air conditioning technology which would work for the times and temperatures required on the moon. Since it doesn't exist today, it probably didn't exist then.

7. Any developed technology gets easier and cheaper. Moon landings have not only not gotten cheaper, they've never been "repeated." No other country has made an attempt to send humans. Being as old as it is, space tech should be mature, cheap, and easy and it's not.

8. It's enormously difficult to send people even into Low Earth Orbit, as evidenced by the problems with contemporary private attempts and even with the ISS. There is no evidence other than the moon landing to show that people could leave earth's orbit and return to land safely.

The most widespread contemporary viewpoint among moon deniers is that the project was originally intended to succeed but, when that was proven to be impossible (first by the Soviets), a PR plan based on movies and photos was delivered instead. It's not unreasonable given the era and general beliefs at the time. A moon PR program delivered many national benefits and changed the way we view tech, both of which are good things.

Many moon deniers hope that some of these issues will come to light specifically so that real space exploration can move forward and free man from a sci-fi fantasy of the 50's.[0]

[0] https://www.aulis.com/

Life's a lot better when you don't know everything because it leaves room for new information. I certainly don't know everything, but I often get cast aside as a nutter for not immediately agreeing with common assumptions.

Imagine showing a deep fake to someone from just 20 years ago? They'd believe it. It's not hard to imagine that some secretive area of military science is 20-50 years ahead of what civilians know about.