Was the Moon Landing Faked and Other Space Race Myths Tested Against the Record

Somewhere there is a man who believes the Moon landing was staged on a soundstage, and who also believes that this same government could not keep a parking permit straight. Hold both ideas in your head at once and you have found the most generous compliment ever paid to Washington: a conspiracy of some four hundred thousand people that never leaked, never slipped and never filed a single form in the wrong office.

I like a healthy distrust of government. The Founders built the Constitution on it. But distrust is a reason to check the evidence, not a reason to skip it. So let us do what conservatives are supposed to do with a big claim, which is test it. Eight myths about the space race follow, each stated fairly, checked against the record, and given a verdict.

First, the Test

A good skeptic uses a method, and the method is the same whether the claim comes from the left, the right or the guy at the end of the bar. Here is the one I will use.

1. State the claim in a form that can be wrong. "NASA lied" is not testable. "The photographs show an impossible shadow" is.
2. Ask who could check it, and who would want to. A claim that survives the scrutiny of rivals with every motive to expose it is a strong claim.
3. Look for physical evidence that does not depend on trusting one source. Rocks, mirrors and radio signals are harder to fake than press releases.
4. Count the people who would have to keep the secret. Conspiracies get less plausible with every person added, and this one needs a crowd.

Federalist No. 1 puts the larger question this way: whether societies of men are capable of establishing good government "from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." A free people has to reason from evidence. Let us reason.

Myth 1: The Moon Landings Were Faked

The claim: NASA staged the landings on Earth to win the Cold War on the cheap.

The record: Start with the Soviets. The Soviet Union had a rocket program, a tracking network and the strongest possible motive to catch America in a lie. They had been first at nearly every milestone from Sputnik to the first human in orbit, and they badly wanted the Moon for themselves. The Soviets attempted a sample return of their own with Luna 15, which crashed on the Moon on July 21, 1969, while Apollo 11 was on the surface. A government that had lost the race would have been delighted to expose a fraud. I know of no case in which it claimed one.

Then there is the physical evidence. Three Apollo missions, 11, 14 and 15, left corner-reflector arrays on the lunar surface. Observatories on Earth have bounced laser pulses off them from 1969 on, and anyone with the right equipment and the right aim can repeat the experiment. A soundstage does not return a laser. Add the rocks: Apollo returned about 842 pounds of lunar material across six landings, which laboratories around the world have studied for decades. The samples show features that Earth rocks do not, including ages in the billions of years and the effects of long exposure to space.

Verdict: false. The evidence is mirrored, weighed and tracked by people with every reason to disprove it.

Myth 2: The Flag Waved in the Wind

The claim: the flag in the Apollo film clips ripples, and the Moon has no air.

The record: the flag was rigged on purpose. A horizontal rod ran along the top edge so the cloth would stay extended, since there was no breeze to hold it out. On Apollo 11 the telescoping rod could not be pulled all the way out, which left the flag with a slight waviness. And the flag moved when an astronaut handled the pole, because with no air to damp the motion it kept moving longer than it would on Earth. The motion in the footage happens when a hand is on the pole and stops when it is not.

Verdict: false, and in fact a fine confirmation. A waving flag in a vacuum is exactly what you would see.

Myth 3: Where Are the Stars?

The claim: the Apollo photographs show a black sky with no stars, so they must be fake.

The record: this is a camera problem, not a sky problem. The surface was brilliantly lit by direct sunlight, and the astronauts wore white suits. To photograph bright objects you use a short exposure and a small aperture, which means faint things such as stars do not register. Anyone who has tried to photograph a floodlit stadium and the night sky behind it in one frame knows this. NASA's own explanation is that stars would need exposures of minutes, which would badly overexpose the lunar surface.

Verdict: false. It is the ordinary physics of exposure.

Myth 4: The Radiation Belts Should Have Killed Them

The claim: the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth are deadly, so humans could not have passed through them.

The record: the belts are real, and they are the reason the trajectory was chosen with care. The spacecraft crossed the belts quickly and through the thinner regions, and the crews received doses that were small compared with levels known to harm people. Speed and shielding mattered, and so did the route. The honest statement of the risk is that long stays in the belts are dangerous, and a few hours of passage are not.

Verdict: false. The danger is a matter of dose and time, and the trajectory minimized both.

Myth 5: NASA Spent Millions on a Space Pen, and the Russians Used a Pencil

The claim: NASA wasted a fortune developing a pen that writes upside down, while the Soviets simply used a pencil. It is a favorite parable about government waste.

The record: it makes a good story and gets the money wrong. Paul Fisher developed the pressurized pen himself, paying for it with his own funds, and then sold it. American astronauts had used pencils before it was available, and pencils shed graphite dust and splinters that are a hazard around electronics and a fire risk in an oxygen-rich cabin. The pen was tested and then bought, and NASA's history says the Soviet Union bought it too, in 1969.

Verdict: mostly false, and it teaches a useful conservative lesson. The invention came from a private citizen betting his own money, which is the model people on our side usually praise.

I will add, because honesty requires it, that government waste is real and enormous, and a good deal of this blog is about it. We do not need a legend about pens to make the case.

Myth 6: NASA Gave Us Tang and Velcro

The claim: the space program invented Velcro, Tang and a dozen household products, so it paid for itself.

The record: this is a myth that flatters our side of the argument, so we should be especially careful with it. Velcro was invented by a Swiss engineer, George de Mestral, in the 1940s, long before the Moon program. Tang was a General Foods product, developed in 1957, before John Glenn drank it in orbit in 1962. NASA used both, and that is where the confusion began. The real technologies that grew from the effort are more modest and more interesting, and they are better described by engineers than by slogans.

Verdict: false as stated. The program did advance things such as miniaturized electronics and materials science, but the household-name examples are borrowed credit.

This matters because exaggerated benefits are the mirror image of exaggerated waste. A program should be defended on its goals and its results, and not on a list of products it did not invent.

Myth 7: The Government Built the Saturn V, Start to Finish

The claim, in two flavors: either a single government agency built the Moon rocket, or a handful of German engineers did.

The record: the Saturn V was assembled by a large industrial effort. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, under Wernher von Braun, managed the rocket's development, and he led a team that included many engineers who had come from Germany after the war. But the stages were built by American contractors: Boeing the first stage, North American Aviation the second, Douglas the third, with IBM supplying the instrument unit and Rocketdyne the engines. NASA's histories put the Apollo workforce at about 400,000 people at its peak, in industry, NASA and universities.

That is a point worth pressing. The program was run by a government agency but depended on private companies bidding against one another, under contracts with defined deliverables. The result was a machine more complex than any before it, built on time. It is a better model of "government and industry together" than most that have followed, mainly because the goal was clear and the scoreboard was public.

Verdict: both flavors are false. The rocket was a national industrial achievement, directed by a government agency and built by firms across the country.

Myth 8: Apollo Was Money Thrown Into the Sky

The claim: the program spent a fortune on a flag and a rock while people at home went without.

The record: here the answer needs two parts, because there is a fair point and a false one.

The false part is the geography. The money did not go to the Moon. It went to payrolls and factories and universities in Alabama, Florida, Texas, California, Louisiana and many other places, and it paid for the training of a large number of engineers and technicians. Dollars spent on a rocket are spent on Earth.

The fair part is the opportunity cost. A dollar spent on Apollo could not be spent on something else, and a taxpayer is entitled to ask whether the goal was worth it. The right place to ask is the appropriations process, which is exactly where the question was asked: Congress voted every year under Article I, section 9, clause 7, which says no money leaves the Treasury "but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." For President Kennedy's case for the goal, see We Choose to Go to the Moon Read Closely as a Speech About Doing Hard Things.

Verdict: mostly false. It was a fair thing to debate and a hard thing to call wasteful when the money employed Americans and the goal was achieved.

Why These Myths Last

A myth outlives its refutation when it flatters the believer. The faked-landing story tells you that you are smarter than everyone who watched. The pen story tells you that bureaucrats are fools, and sometimes they are. The Velcro story tells you that spending pays for itself, and sometimes it does not.

The cure is the boring one. Ask who could check, who would want to, and what physical evidence exists. Then add the Founders' contribution to the method. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51 that men are not angels, and that is exactly why a free society needs open competition between rivals. The Soviets were rivals, American universities were rivals, and the press was a rival of the government. The Moon landing was verified by the people with the greatest interest in disproving it. That is how a free society knows things.

It is also a reason to want government to do more of its work in daylight. The Apollo missions were televised, and the data was open, which is why the myths have had so little to feed on. For the story told in order, see Apollo 11 From Liftoff to Splashdown in Dated Steps With the Words Spoken. For the way the Cold War story itself has been corrected by archives, see Textbook Cold War Tales the Soviet Archives Quietly Overturned, and for a similar exercise on another subject, Seven Myths About Veterans That Shape Bad Policy, and the Facts.

The case in brief

1. The Moon landings were real: the retroreflectors left by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 still return laser light, and about 842 pounds of lunar samples have been studied by labs around the world.
2. The Soviet Union had every motive to expose a hoax and, so far as I know, never claimed one, which is a strong kind of confirmation.
3. The flag, the missing stars and the radiation belts all have ordinary explanations in rigging, exposure settings and dose-over-time.
4. The pen and the Tang stories are myths on both sides of the budget argument, and a careful conservative should reject legends that flatter his own case as firmly as those that insult it.
5. The best defense of the space program is its clear goal, its open data and its appropriation by law, not a list of inventions it did not make.

What you can do: pick one claim you have heard about the space program, write down who could check it and what physical evidence exists, and then look it up before you pass it on.