Skeptacular!

HOW TO FIND THE APOLLO LANDING SITES

By James L Chen

Springer, Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series 2014

The Apollo mission has always appealed to me as one of humanity's greatest achievements. Over the course of one decade, NASA scientists and engineers made an extraordinary number of major technological breakthroughs (many of which have found uses in our day-to-day terrestrial lives), that culminated in the unprecedented feat of transporting humans all the way to the Moon and back. By the mid-1970s, when I was at primary school, it was quite natural to presume that progress would continue at this rate. Alas, progress did not continue as I had hoped. But the failure of the future to resemble my dreams has not diminished my respect for the Apollo mission, its wonderful scientists and engineers, and the courageous explorers who volunteered to ride a firework all the way to the Moon on the basis of their trust in science.

I think this is why, among all conspiracy theories, I find the “Moon landing hoaxers” the most disagreeable. Not only do they harbour such misanthropic distrust in people that they accuse everyone at NASA of being a liar, but worse, some of them are so anti-science as to claim that humanity could not have actually gone to the Moon.

One fact that the conspiracy theorists are required to explain is that the debris from the Apollo missions is still sitting on the lunar surface and has been photographed by satellites from a number of countries, including not-necessarily-USA-friendly nations such as Russia and China. To hold onto the conspiracy one needs to believe that all these nations are also “in on the hoax”.

As I was browsing my local library, the book How to Find the Apollo Landing Sites caught my eye. I wondered if it was something that could be shown to your local neighbourhood Moon-landing-denier.

The book is written by a retired Engineer and passionate home astronomer. It has the quaint style of the enthusiastic amateur. But unfortunately, this book is not the panacea to Moon-landing-deniers that we might hope. Very early in the text the author informs us that one cannot actually see with home telescopes evidence on the Moon of the Apollo missions: “Despite the sophistication and technology that is possessed by today's backyard astronomer, the reader is reminded that although the Apollo landing sites can be identified, there is no hope to see the remaining Apollo relics left on the Moon. The smallest object that can be seen from an earthbound telescope is a crater the size of the Rose Bowl or Wembley Stadium.”

Instead, the book is a guide to viewing the major features on the lunar surface at the general locations chosen as the landing sites of the Apollo project. The phrase “landing site” is used in this sense in the title of the book and its contents.

The core of the book is a sequence of 20-page chapters, one for each of the Apollo missions. Discussed are the astronauts, any technical complications in the launch or flight, the rationale for the chosen landing site, and some detail of the experiments performed and equipment used on the mission. Photos taken by the astronauts are included, as well as images of the debris around each landing site subsequently taken by a Lunar satellite

Some later chapters include discussion of the ranger (satellites that took photos of the lunar surface while in orbit around the Moon, before being crash-landed on the surface) and surveyor (un-manned lunar landers that took photos from the surface) missions.

Finally, the author ends with a chapter on future missions. Like many of us, he is disappointed that human exploration of space has not progressed as fast or as far as we dreamed in the 1970s. But he is not deterred. He writes with excitement about future missions to the Moon and Mars.