Free Who Built the Moon? by Christopher Knight, Alan Butler Page B

responsible for the evolution of humans from ape to technologist, then what better way would there be of setting up an alarm system to confirm our intellectual ‘arrival’.
    At the time that Clarke and Kubrick’s film was first capturing the imagination of a generation, no human had yet reached the Moon. But the following year, with less than six months to go to the late President Kennedy’s deadline, Commander Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the Moon on July 20 th 1969 with his famous but slightly misdelivered line:
    ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’
    At this point we must mention that there are some people who seriously believe that NASA faked the Moon landings on a film set just like the one used by Stanley Kubrick. The evidence they produce looks reasonable at a casual glance; assuming you know nothing at all about photography or the facts relating to lunar conditions. These ideas suddenly leaped into the public imagination on February 15 th 2001 when Fox television in the USA broadcast a programme called
Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?
The thrust of the show was that NASA technology in the 1960s was simply too primitive to have taken men to the Moon, and because they were so close to President Kennedy’s politically important deadline they fabricated the entire mission in a movie studio.
    To them the fraud was obvious. They point out that shots of the astronauts on the lunar surface show a completely black sky without any stars. Had this proved too difficult for the set constructors to fake they ask? The answer is actually very simple. As any proficient photographer knows, it is difficult to capture something extremely bright and something else extremely dim in the same shot. This means that for the stars to be visible, the lunar surface and the astronauts would have been burned out into a white blaze; the emulsion on a piece of film does not have enough dynamic range to capture both ends of the brightness scale simultaneously.
    Amongst the other pieces of ‘evidence’ was the issue of the flapping flag. The NASA set designers were apparently so dumb that they allowed a stiff breeze to waft through the studio causing the flag that the astronauts planted to wave about. As the Moon has no atmosphere this is said to prove that it was filmed on Earth.
    The fact is, the flag waved about so much precisely because there was no atmosphere. When astronauts planted the flagpole they rotated it back and forth to ensure that it penetrated the lunar surface causing the flag to wobble from side to side on its supporting frame. On Earth the presence of an atmosphere quickly dampens this motion as the surrounding air absorbs the energy from the moving flag, whereas in an airless environment the flag has nothing to dampen its motion. It could therefore keep going for many hours before the energy finally dissipated.
    So anyone who has seriously looked into the case for and against the actuality of the Moon landings cannot fail to reject every one of the strands of evidence put forward by the conspiracy theorists. We do believe that conspiracies happen, because people will conspire together for all kinds of reasons – but the Apollo 11 mission was certainly not one of them.
    We can be certain that twelve astronauts walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 and that they brought back 842 pounds of the Moon in the form of rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and fine dust from six different exploration sites.
    The last human being to walk on the Moon was Eugene Cernan in December 1972 and the information gathered over those three years, and later by Russian unmanned craft, has greatly increased our knowledge of the Moon. But it has also posed as many questions as it has answered.
    It was expected that the samples of Moon rock would prove one of the existing theories about the Earth–Moon system. If the rock from the samples had been substantially different from rocks on Earth,