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Comment by newfonewhodis | Hacker News Reader

> I have been skeptical of the moon landing ever happening

I'm curious - what caused you to question it ever happening?

They right way to look at any conspiracy is to assess how many people would be required to pull off the fakery. In the case of the moon landing, it would have to be thousands of people, this very unlikely. A soccer or hockey game on the other hand really only requires two people: the goalie and someone paying the goalie. I’m not suggesting that hockey or soccer are rigged however, it is merely an example.

Isn’t Katyn hard counterproof against that strategy?

You know about Katyn.

Reference:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

The amount of people necessary to fool people believing something happened that didn't isn't necessarily (much) greater than the amount it would take to pull it off.

For argument's sake, imagine that everyone at NASA was working to fake the landing instead of landing. With a unified purpose, it would be enough. The theater would be grand enough. The political pressure to accept would be grand enough.

Any group working toward a goal is a conspiracy. NASA actually working to go to the Moon was a conspiracy.

The fake Gulf of Tonkin Incident that was accepted for decades is proof that big lies are possible. Extrapolating to an "unbelievably large" amount of people that it would take to pull of the hypothetical of a Fake Moon Landing conspiracy isn't an actual argument against. It just means that you'd be willing to quote whatever number would be minimally "unbelievably large".

> With a unified purpose, it would be enough. The theater would be grand enough. The political pressure to accept would be grand enough.

I suppose they could pull it off if everyone truly bought in, but I don't believe for one second that that many people committed to science and engineering would be as committed and diligent as they would need to be to keeping the lie intact at the time, and I certainly don't believe the commitment to the lie would sustain over time. This goes double given the lack of popular support for doing it.

Further, I am not sure even if everyone at NASA that would have to know it was fake was working with automaton-like commitment to their task that we could fool the USSR with a fake landing given they'd have every incentive coupled with the technological means to prove it was fake.

Arguing the personnel politics of the hypothetically fake Moon landing addresses a different argument than the one that I and the OP were addressing. Whether or not I agree with your assessment.

In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe.

To illustrate, do you think that US alphabet agencies haven't uncovered critical top secret and massively damaging information about the USSR / Russia since WWII? And vice versa? Perhaps uncovering such information on a constant basis?

Why don't these agencies ever publicly reveal it? Virtually ever?

The public's concept of government is not the same as that of leadership.

> Arguing the personnel politics of the hypothetically fake Moon landing addresses a different argument than the one that I and the OP were addressing.

You assert "imagine that everyone at NASA was working to fake the landing instead of landing. With a unified purpose, it would be enough".

I assert "I do not believe that to be the case when thinking about the real people that would be asked to do this in a real-world setting". That's setting aside the physical evidence (i.e., Russia observing the moon lander) entirely. I don't see that as changing arguments, I see it as an extension of your assertion.

> In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe.

It is not a large assumption to say the Space Race was competitive (and certainly at times outwardly antagonistic), though the politics certainly weren't simply black and white.

The moon landing required too much physical evidence, too many whole human beings, and had too many observers to be plausibly fakeable in my view. I'll leave it there vs. getting into a debate on alphabet agency secret-keeping. Occam's Razor isn't perfect, but it's most clearly not on the "fakeable moon landing" side.

The probability of a single whistleblower emerging increases (at least) linearly with the number of people involved. This problem doesn’t exist at all when working toward a real objective.

Boxing has long been considered the easiest sport to fix; only needs one person in on it.

Tens of thousands of people saw the launches in person. As one of the astronauts said "Where do you think we went?"

Not as a moon-landing-denier, but as someone with an interest in epistemology: claiming thousands of people witnessing launches is not indicative of a moon landing, just a launch.

By staking the existence of the entirety of Apollo missions to something that is logically proof of a small part, the validity of the larger claim is diminished to someone who is not already invested the validity.

Don't interrupt grand nationalist narratives and proofs with logic. Especially when the proofs are in the form of cowboy quips from its heroes. You won't win.

If you're able to get a 50-story stack into orbit, the rest of the trip is not that difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon

This records 165 attempts including non-crewed missions of all types, like flyby of impactor. Of 165, 87 had some form of failure. 40 at launch, 32 at spacecraft and 5 partial failures. 32/(165 - 40) is .25, so about 3/4 of the time a moon mission launched, it succeeded. This indicates to me that "the rest of the trip is not that difficult" mischaracterizes the difficulty.

  > $x("//tr/td[7]").length
  165
  > $x("//*[contains(normalize-space(text()), 'failure')]").length
  87
  > $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Partial failure']").length
  5
  > $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Launch failure']").length
  40
  > $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Spacecraft failure']").length
  32

Not much of a stretch to believe the country responsible for MKULTRA would fund a huge and fake propaganda piece against the USSR.

That said, it would have been pretty silly to waste as much money as we did in the rocket program if the goal was to fake it all along. Plus, the Soviets weren’t exactly knocking on the moon’s door.

For anyone with Apple TV+, For All Mankind is a great series predicated on the idea that the Soviet N1 rocket was successful.

I've ultimately become disappointed with For All Mankind. It has its moments of greatness but literally two thirds of it is anti-exploratory, anti-science angst bullshit. I guess it's a a lot cheaper to film that stuff.

I guess I haven't seen that at all. Certainly "For All Mankind" is presumably intended ironically as it very deliberately plays up the Cold War vibe but that seems understandable given the premise of the series. Of course, we can't really know what would have happened in this scenario but I wouldn't expect a great atmosphere of cooperation between the superpowers.

Not OP, but apparently in the movie Interstellar a school teacher is convinced that the moon landings were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union. I've spoken to an amateur Apollo historian/buff and I am convinced we landed on the moon in the 1960s.

The Soviet Union was actually so wealthy, in the early 1960s, to make these bankruptcy-based conspiracies look really silly. I mean, the West perceived it as a threat largely because their economic system appeared superior for a pretty long time. It wasn't until the late '70s that the Soviets really started to sputter.

Americans really don't appreciate the Soviet Union at the height of its power.

Americans themselves benefited greatly from it as our government felt it needed to do more to compete against socialism. Granted, much of that was undone/tapered off after the threat was gone, but it’s an interesting piece of history.

Extraordinary claims, etc.

Of course, there is extraordinary evidence for this one.

The insane amount of conspiracy theories surrounding the landing.

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