50th anniversary of moon landing

[Mick_J]

Did they or didn't they 


Fight, fight, fight

[Andre]

They missed the moon by a long shot and landed on mars

[Bob]

I'm not convinced they went, Capricorn One

[KiwiCol]

It can be very easily established one way or the other by using a high power telescope & looking at the said landing sites for the items said to have been left behind.
Hell, even Froudys set up could just about do it, so I'm sure there currently exists the hardware to perform such a task. Why has no one done it in 50 years?

[Will14]

Not something that I think too much about, but, if the Yanks had walked on the Moon 50 years ago i'm pretty sure that they would have been back there on foot since to either carryout more research or just to gloat 

[Tony Nitrous]

There have been 6 manned moon landing and numerous unmanned ones.

What's the point in going back?

Why spend a shit load of money to go to a barren rock.

It was initially done for research but mostly as a US willy waving exercise to try and out do the Russians.  Not much to gain by blowing a huge budget to go back.

Future space exploration needs to look for a planet that can sustain life and the moon was never going to be it.

Resources spent on space exploration would be a lot better spent of managing the planet we are on.

[Hooli]

I believe the theory is build & launch the rockets to other planets from the Moon. It's much easier to launch there with the lower gravity and they can slingshot past earth for extra free power.

[Mister Fishfinger]

It can be very easily established one way or the other by using a high power telescope & looking at the said landing sites for the items said to have been left behind.
Hell, even Froudys set up could just about do it, so I'm sure there currently exists the hardware to perform such a task. Why has no one done it in 50 years?

There aren't any telescopes powerful enough to see small objects like lunar landers and rovers from Earth. They are 240,000 miles from here and the Earth's atmosphere is in the way - no technology exists that could do that.

You could use a space telescope to get round the atmosphere problem. The most powerful one we have is Hubble, so I did a bit of Googling and apparently you could point it at the moon - but if you did, the smallest detail it could see would be 328 feet across. That's way bigger than anything we left behind so we're not going to see it that way.

There is plenty of evidence for the landings though. The Apollo 11 mission planted laser reflectors which are still used to accurately measure the distance from Earth to moon. There have also been other missions over the years. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter orbits the moon at a height of 31 miles and that has taken photos that show the flags and the rovers. Its cameras can see details down to a resolution of 1.6 feet (sorry for the Imperial measurements, I'm getting this off an America site).

Anyway I will leave you with this delightful video showing what Buzz Aldrin thinks of moon landing conspiracy theorists:

G_YM9cCtwz4

[Hooli]

It'd have been more difficult to fake the landings than do them. They'd have had to signal from the moon somehow anyway to fool the Russian tracking etc, do you really think the Russians wouldn't have shouted if they'd thought it was fake at the time?

[GSXKING]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYEjz6mrR-g