The 1969 Moon Landing Was A Complete Hoax

I'll defend my source by stating that, as a physics major, I can confirm that all the physics statements Phil Plait makes are valid. Working as a professor at a college says a lot more for your credentials than being some lay investigator. Sibrel has demonstrated time and time again he has no clue when it comes to talking about physics or astronomy related statements. If you want, I can do the mathematics to demonstrate this — but I was hoping you could do a little research on physics yourself and put this together. The reason he doesn't give ‘research' for his claims is because a basic google search will find these basic physical principles. It is true you don't have to be an astronomer to know astronomy — but this doesn't mean that Sibrel doesn't have any clue what he is talking about, and in fact he has made it clear he doesn't. Again, I am not going to further entertain this notion of missing tapes being some sort of evidence that there is a conspiracy. It's nothing more than imaginative thinking without substantial points. You can call my point about the stars poor, but while you are relying on subjective testimonies, I'm relying on a basic fact about optics that any physicist (or layman who knows even a bit about optics) would know. I still challenge you to go outside with a fast exposure setting and try to capture an image of stars on a clear night. Now onto some fun math and physics: the neutral point. It's apparent again that the propagators of this one don't understand orbits. What they did (and any first-year physics students can do this, I suggest you try it for yourself) is found the neutral gravity point by means of Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation taken alone. This makes the false assumption of course, that the motion of these two bodies does not affect the neutral point. However, the straight-line neutral point is not the simple calculation that NASA needed. They needed a Lagrangian point, which took into account the fact that the space shuttle was moving in space, and the two bodies were orbiting one another at a center of mass a few thousand miles above the Earth. The system is more complex than simple F=GMm/r^2. There is the centrifugal force to be dealt with as this is an orbiting system we are talking about. I'm sure Bart Sibrel, a lay investigator with no background in science, wouldn't understand this. As for the figure in the 1973 Britannica versus the figure from the Apollo missions — finding the zero point experimentally of gravity to within about 10% is quite a feat when we are talking astronomical distances. The figure of 1973's Britannica appears to be the second Lagrangian point, a figure closer to where the actual neutral point would be, taking into account everything else that is necessary. Again, a poor understanding of the facts can take one a long way in the wrong direction. And there are other pieces of evidence that we landed on the moon. A big one is that, in order to determine a lot of things about the moon( for instance, knowing the distance between the centers of the moon and Earth to an accuracy of 1/10,000,000,000), we bounce lasers OFF of equipment set up by Apollo 11 astronauts when they went to the moon. We've also used it to calculate the recession rate of the moon from the Earth. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and many other astronomical observatories (for instance, the McDonald Observatory in Texas) use this equipment to this very day. In sum, it's truly preposterous to think that human beings did not visit the moon. The claims made by hoaxers are based off of a poor understanding of how the natural world works. However, they make no hesitation in making outrageous claims — that the government and the entire world is pulling the wool over peoples' eyes, when the very data we retrieved (and still do) is being utilized by scientists the world around.