Tayler O’Brien
Mr. Eigner
English 103
11/11/14
The Moon Landing
Throughout NASA’s history people have started questioning if Apollo 11 actually landed on the moon or not. There are plenty of people that seem to believe that the United States’ moon landing has been fake and everything that we thought we saw was a big fake. In fact up to 20% of all Americans believe that Neil Armstrong’s famous quote carries no weight (Fox, Paragraph 2). “One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind” These people believe that the United States government just did it so we could get a one up on the Russians in The Cold War. Some conspiracy theorists have even begun creating lists of reasons how they “proved” it was faked. Some of these claims that it was faked is that in the pictures there are not stars and they clam that the American flag that was placed on the moon was waving and they used wires to move there was little gravity and unexplained objects in the astronauts’ helmet and the angles of the shadows on the moon. Well these twenty percent of Americans are dead wrong, people there are that know real it was. These people that know that the moon landing was real have come out with multiple reasons why the conspiracy theorists are wrong. Plus we have these men that went to the moon who have these stories that they know so well it would be impossible to rule them out. The Stars
One of the bigger reasons that these people believe that the moon landing was faked was that in all of the pictures there were no stars in the background. This is one of “reasons” why it’s faked in Josh Fox’s “10 Reasons the Moon Landings Could Be a Hoax” he states that “The argument here is that NASA would have found it impossible to map out the exact locations of all stars for the hoax without being rumbled, and therefore left them out” (Fox, paragraph16). However, it can be easily solved why the stars are not there. They are not there because it was daytime on the moon when the pictures were shot. It is basically trying to photograph stars at midnight with a simple camera pre-set for a sunny day, it ends up finding nothing but the moon because the camera does not approach the dynamic range needed to capture faint starlight in a sunlit scene (Villard, paragraph27).

Picture of moon was found on Josh Fox’s “10 Reasons the Moon Landings Could Be a Hoax”
The Flag Many of these conspiracy theorists believe that one of the major tell tale signs that proves that the moon landing was faked is that when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted it, it was waving. This is one of “reasons” why it’s faked in stated in Josh Fox’s writing its states that “The obvious problem here is that there’s no air in the moons atmosphere, and therefore no wind to cause the flag to blow” (Fox, paragraph 4).

This photo was found on Josh Fox’s “10 Reasons the Moon Landings Could Be a Hoax”
However, Fox actually disproves himself because right after he stated that he also wrote “NASA claimed that the flag was stored in a thin tube and the rippled effect was cause by it being unfurled before planted. Other explanations involve the ripples caused by the reaction force of the astronauts toughing the aluminum pole the flag was attached to” (Fox, paragraph 4). Either of these explanations from NASA fit the bill when one thinks about it. It is just like when you fold a t-shirt and put it in a full drawer it gets creases. As for the poll being very non- sturdy, there is no soil on the moon it is a rock. So its like trying to break a boulder with a pickaxe it might get suck, but it would be easy to take it out of the boulder because there is nothing grabbing it to keep it there. The Wires Another one of the reasons that the conspiracy theorists believe that the moon landing was faked because they believe that they used wires to create the illusion that the astronauts had less gravity. Fox believes that if one takes the moon landing footage and increase the speed