Revisiting Moon landing
Even as I rarely take route of the Facebook to vent my feelings on any issue, I spent good time to have a closer look at the activities going on this most popular social networking platform. It has been a useful as well as entertaining tool for me to acquire knowledge and understand the people who post their ideologies and viewpoints fearlessly on the site.
Last week, I came across an amazing video clip showing ‘incredible images arriving from Mars’. The clip was posted by someone from Birmingham, United Kingdom, not in my friend list. It was mind blowing to have a glimpse of Mars in the moving images, which is about 300 million miles from the earth. The caption of the video clip mentioned that it takes 7 months to reach the planet travelling at a speed of 24600 mph!
As I shared the video clip on my FB wall, one of my friends responded with a ‘conspiracy theory’ and labeled the Mars footage fake. Let me share what he exactly wrote: “There isn’t a single reason to believe the authenticity of video clip. NASA has already befooled the world long back claiming that Neil Armstrong have had put steps on moon and that’s till date unauthenticated.”
During our childhood days, we used to get fascinated to listen to the stories of the first ever moon landing by astronaut Neil Armstrong. We never imagined that even after more than 50 years of the event, there would be people who still insist that it never happened and call it hoax perpetrated by the US government. For decades, the conspiracists’ claim has been making rounds at regular intervals that it was all a Hollywood-like cinematic production shot on Earth.
Even as i came across such theories, i didn’t evinced any interest till some time back i read a post on Facebook justifying that the moon landing by Neil Armstrong was faked by NASA. Let me reproduce the post which claimed that “in the photos from the Moon, the American flag looks like it’s flapping in the wind. That would be impossible because there’s no air up on the Moon.”
The statement seemed logical to support the claim. In absence of air how come flag can flap? These raised doubts in my mind too and somewhat got convinced that Moon landing was faked. I did some reading on the subject challenging the authenticity of the Moon landing but didn’t find any clarification about the claim. Instead I came across some other aspects put forth by conspiracists justifying their claim of fake Moon landing. Though there were clarifications, yet they didn’t seem convincing. For example, the Associated Press in its report had listed the most common claims and the counters to them. While listing facts to the claim which genuinely questioned the flapping of American flag on the surface of Moon in absence of air, the report quoting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA’s) former chief historian, Roger Launius, stated that instead of letting the American flag droop, the NASA had decided to use a right-angled rod to keep the flag spread out. According to the report, Armstrong and Aldrin bent the rod a bit by accident, which made it look like the flag was in motion. The astronauts were worried the flagpole would fall down after they had twisted it into the ground, so they snapped the photos quickly, capturing the flag as it was still in motion.
Without digging further into the claims and counter claims, I took the issue out of my mind. The issue was too big for a commoner like me to peep into it. Precisely, it was none of my subject to do a fact check of claims and counter claims.
However, after a gap of few years, a friend of mine based in Bengaluru gifted me an amazing book, ‘85 Years of Great Writing’. The book published by the TIME INC. HOME ENTERTAINMENT was published to celebrate 85th anniversary of the TIME Magazine. The book gathers a selection of the finest articles from TIME’s archives since its founding in 1923. World leaders from Churchill to Gandhi to John F Kennedy, momentous events like Watergate and 9/11 attacks, wars, scientific breakthroughs, artistic achievements, etc. – all are chronicled in the book with the vividness, flair and authority that have distinguished TIME writing. The book has, precisely, drama, human interest, history, entertainment and classic stories from TIME’s most brilliant writers. It is a delightful read.
The book contains an article “A Giant Leap for Mankind’ published in the TIME magazine on July 25, 1969 authored by Leon Jaroff. It has covered even minutest details of the Moon landing by Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969. The very first sight of the article immediately took me back to the controversies around the Moon landing since decades. With a curious mind, I keenly went through the article and found logical answers to the queries which were calling the Moon landing by Neil Armstrong as fake and were equating it with Hollywood drama.
For example, let’s come back to the flag hosting episode on the Moon. In absence of air, how come the photograph was showing the American flag flapping on the Moon? This is the most common question asked by those who have vowed not to believe that Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon and reject the event as fake.
The article “A Giant Leap for Mankind’ which was published just five days after the historic Moon landing event and the queries were yet to be raised about the authenticity of the event has mentioned about the flag hosting episode on the Moon. It says: “Armstrong moved the still-operating camera to its panorama position on a tripod aimed at the lunar module. During the next two hours, the astronauts went busily about their appointed tasks, moving in and out of the camera’s view. They planted a 3-ft. by 5-ft. American flag, stiffened with thin wire so that it would appear to be flying in the vacuum of the moon.”
Let me share a few more excerpts from the article published in the book. The TIME article reports that “In addition to the flag, the astronauts left behind a number of mementos from the earth. There was a one-and-a-half inch silicon disk bearing statements (reduced in size 200 times) by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and words of good will from leaders of 72 different countries. The disk also bore a message from Pope Paul VI quoting from Eighth Psalm, a hymn to the Creator…”
The author concludes by stating: “It was a moment that would surely survive long after the criticism that has accompanied every step of the space program is forgotten – understandable as that criticism may be in view of the pressing problems back on earth.”
Meanwhile, there are other queries which are purely scientific in nature and stand answered by NASA and astronomers time and again, cannot be commented by a layman. For example, one of the conspiracy theories claimed that the lunar module didn’t leave a crater from the rocket blast that slowed its descent when it descended onto the Moon’s surface. To this query, astronomer Emily Drabek-Maunder, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London, has said that the astronauts didn’t require a large blast to slow down because the Moon’s gravity is about one-sixth that of the Earth’s.
Lastly let me share a lesser known fact which I came across while peeping into the journey of man to Moon. Since humans had never been to the moon before, NASA scientists couldn’t be sure that some deadly space-borne plague hadn’t hitched a ride on the astronauts. As soon as their re-entry capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, the Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin were subjected to a period of quarantine. They were immediately shifted to a mobile quarantine facility inside which they were transported to NASA Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Johnson Space Center where they had access to a larger quarantine facility until their release on August 10, 1969.
It’s interesting to learn from various media reports that President Richard Nixon’s staff had prepared a statement to be read in the event the worst happened and organized a priest to commit their souls to the deep, much like a burial at sea.
In succinct, I think, the article “A Giant Leap for Mankind’ published in TIME Magazine just after 5 days of the first ever Moon landing by Neil Armstrong and reproduced in “TIME INCs. ‘85 Years of Great Writing’ doesn’t support those who claim it as fake. The facts from the archives have been reproduced despite understanding the fact that conspiracy theories around the subject won’t end.
(The views are of the author & not the institution he works for)
