Re:Oh come on now, you can't possibly be serious!! (Score 1)

Considering the low resolution television images that came back, it would have been very easy to fake it.

I hope this was meant as a joke. It was not even possible to do digital music synthesis in real time back then. The moon landing would NOT have been easy to fake, and for quite a few reasons:

• An estimated 6 million people watched that rocket lift off live from the Cape. The damn thing was visible with the naked eye for miles around. Something big sure got launched.
• We're talking HISTORY here. This was during the height of the Cold War, and nobody was going to let the US take credit for something it didn't do. That mission was tracked by every country that could afford an optical or radio telescope. The spacecraft was tracked both optically and electronically by friend and foe from the time it left the launch pad until the capsule splashed down. SOMETHING went to the moon, landed, and returned.
• Some of you might not be aware of this, but the earth is round. The moon can only be seen from one side of the earth at a time. NASA had tracking stations in several countries around the world that received the data and relayed it back to the States. You've got to either fake an incoming signal from the moon, or thousands of people would have to be in on it. Thousands of other current and future NASA employees (including me) would have had to be in on it as well, and NO secret can be kept by that many people for such a long time.
• In 1969, we used punched cards and paper tape for computer input, and "mainframe" computers had memory measured in KB and not MB. You got typical memory cycle times of one or two microseconds. The IBM mainframe I worked with at the time had three memory partitions, a 100K partition, a 200K partition, and a 300K partition. This was the Triangle Universities Computation Center (TUCC) in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and was shared by three universities. This was typical cream of the crop high tech for the day. NASA didn't have much better. You couldn't fake a moon landing using hardware like that. It would be easier to do it than to fake it.
• Finally, a retroreflector was left on the moon by the Apollo 11 crew, and it is being used to this day. It is possible, using a telescope and laser that most major university physics departments can afford, to get very precise measurements of the distance from the earth to the moon by bouncing a laser beam off of this reflector. Some of this work has been used to help verify some of Einstein's theories. You can find out about this by spending a bit of time with Google.

I can't, for the life of me, understand why this "controversy" is still going strong. I suspect that the type of person who believes that the landing was a fake is the type who learned his physics from Star Trek, "Put us into a synchronous orbit over the pole, Mr. Data..."