So NO Russians ever walked on the moon? None? (page 3)

roybatty

Yes, all those hundreds (if not thousands) of people who worked on the Apollo missions have been lying to us all this time.

Landing a man on the moon and then safely returning him - what an incredible engineering feat!

Early Soviet Lunik probes were carried by adapted SS7a ICBMs. However there’s a world of difference between carrying relatively small unmanned probes and satellites versus carrying both orbiter and lander together with at least two astronauts and their accoutrements. The Soviets attempted to tackle this problem in stages:

The L1 program was intended to carry two cosmonauts on a single loop around the Moon. Because of repeated equipment failures, no L1 mission ever flew with a crew. Unmanned L-1 spacecraft traveled to the Moon five times from 1968 through 1970 as Zonds 4 through 8. Zond 5, 7 & 8 flew around the moon, returned and were recovered. Zonds 4 & 6 crashed upon reentry.

The launch vehicle for the Zond series was the Proton. (UR-500) The Proton in its various forms has since proven to be among the most reliable launch vehicles in operation, with a reliability rating of about 98 percent.

The L3 program included both an orbiter capable of carrying 2 cosmonauts and a lander capable of landing one of them on the lunar surface. This program continued well after the success of Apollo 11 in July of 1969 with the prototype lander being successfully tested in Earth orbit, without a crew, three times during the years 1970 and 1971 under the name Cosmos. However L3 was completely dependant on the concurrent development of a super-heavy launch vehicle comparable to the Saturn 5.

The OKB-1 design bureau led by Sergei Korolev had been working on such a vehicle since the early 1960’s. Later designated as ‘N1" this vehicle had originally been intended for a variety of military and scientific tasks. However the N1 gradually evolved into a project with the primary mission of manned lunar expedition.

The N1's four separate and utterly catastrophic failures between February 21, 1969 and November 23, 1972 doomed the L3 program and with it, the Soviet effort to land a man on the moon The Energia vehicle exceeded both the payload capacity and technical performance of the Saturn V, but it came roughly 20 years too late.

DanTheMan

Nope Dave, no Ruskies on the moon, I don't know where ya got that one from...

Dan, feeling-a-little-smarter-than-Dave-for-once class

stillajwexelder

Buzz ALDRIN IS A born again Christian and would not lie

All the astronauts and all their familes and all the ground staff would have had to have been in on the hoax - the conspiracy theory is just so silly and one of the more ridiculous ones at that

FlyingHighNow

I noticed when the iron curtain fell and there was Glastnost, that the Soviet Union turned out to be a great big, crumbling mess. They were not as advanced as they had wanted us to think they were. Most people were impoverished. Their doctors were equivilent to American Paramedics. They didn't have the money to go to the moon I'm sure.

Really, what did the USA spending billions on those moon expeditions do for anyone?

Robert K Stock

The real reason the US landed men on the Moon and the Soviets didn't was that our German Nazi scientists were better then their German Nazi scientists.

seattleniceguy

I found this interesting quote on Wikipedia:

According to a 1999 Gallup poll, about 6 percent of the population of the U.S. has doubts that the Apollo astronauts walked on the moon.
"Although, if taken literally, 6 percent translates into millions of individuals," Gallup said of this, "it is not unusual to find about that many people in the typical poll agreeing with almost any question that is asked of them -- so the best interpretation is that this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread."
Nearly all interested scientists, technicians, and space enthusiasts have rejected the claim, considering it to be baseless.

One of the real problems with attempting to prove that the moon landings were real is that one wonders exactly what proof would suffice. For example, if we took close-up images of the moon and showed the landing sites and rovers, would this be convincing? Or would a hoax-proponent simply say that these photos were themselves part of the hoax? Thus, part of the problem with conspiracy theories is that they can easily become non-falsifiable stories, which means it doesn't matter what proof is shown, the believer will continue in belief.

In actual fact, the Japanese SELENE mission (http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?MCode=SELENE) will map the surface of the moon in high enough resolution that we should be able to see the landing sites and rovers that were left there. Personally, I'm pretty excited to see the images. But I'm confident that the conspiracy will live on. In fact, even when it becomes possible to go to the moon personally and see the original landers and rovers in a moon-based museum, there will probably still be people who say that we didn't land there in 1969.

As a quick note to the poster who questioned NASA's competence, I just want to note that the rocket technology for getting to the moon was in many ways simpler and better than the space shuttle. The shuttle was designed to be something that it could not reliably be, at least not with current technology. But the Apollo rockets were simple - giant, but simple - rockets with the payload on top. Also, as in all long-distance missions, course corrections were made on the way to the moon using current telemetry data, so it wasn't a matter of getting everything right on the first burn.

Getting to the moon was a challenge, for sure, but it was certainly within the technical capabilities of a group of intelligent people with government-sized resources.

Also, I just have to say that NASA has been doing a bang-up job on a lot of missions. Notably, the recent Mars missions have been stunning successes. The Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, currently on its way to the red planet, will provide surface imagery with resolution better than you see on Google maps right now. There are some seriously talented people at NASA, and even though the failures make the headline news, they have been quietly pressing on with some amazing stuff.

SNG

City Fan

The BBC has just shown a 'docu-drama' called Space Race which was all about the battle between the US and the Soviets to get to the moon first. The DVD is out at the end of November and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in how the US did it.

One reason the US won was that a Soviet test rocket blew up on the launchpad killing many of the technical staff and department heads involved in the Soviet space programme. This fact was withheld from the public for decades.

skinnyboy

I first doubted it as a kid, obsessed with space and sci fi, i watched the movie Capricorn-1, where a mission to mars was faked but on the return of the capsule it blew up, so they had to kill the astronauts, but they got away. Shattered my illusion we went to the moon! I mean theres some big telescopes on earth, just point it to Tranquility Base, and voila, instant proof. Regardless of the CT's saying that the pictures would be doctored, do them all at different sites around the earth, and by different teams. Just another example of people beleiving what they think to be true, regardless of the facts. You don't know its a hoax unless you privy to the secret, to you and me its real which would explain why the thousands of people involved in the Moon Landings all swear blind they did it, not to hard to see why eh!

upside/down

...and I say the Earth is FLAT...at least where I live.

I got out my level and PROVED it was flat.

u/d

So NO Russians ever walked on the moon? None?