It’s even simpler than that. The Soviet Union was the biggest US enemy at the time. They obviously would have tracked the flight from launch to landing. Why would they go along with a US conspiracy? Wouldn’t they be the first to say it was fake?
The greatest adversary of the US, literally in a cold war using space as a proxy for active fighting, with every reason to expose any lies… Were in on it.
If they believe that they’re a lost cause. They can go back to their tin foil hat.
Fortunately his conspiracy beliefs are harmless. He at least still believes vaccines are essential for children’s health, which is good as I have young nieces and nephews.
The moon landing was fake. NASA hired Stanley Kubrick to stage it, but that perfectionist bastard insisted on shooting the exterior scenes on location…
Just tell him small-minded people can’t comprehend big things and see if he even gets it. Which is true, but also a dick thing to say like that if he is smart enough to understand the slight.
Sadly, apparently bouncing a laser off the moon via the reflectors left up there by Apollo missions isn’t hard exactly, just expensive to get the right equipment to do it right.
Which is pretty crazy when you think about it, hitting a target about 1.3 lightseconds away. As in, if you could sight it, you’d be looking at where it was 1.3 seconds ago. Because it is moving at about 1km/s relative to us. And don’t read that as km/h, that’s one kilometer every second, so by the time you see it, it’s already about 1.3km from where you see it, so you need to lead it by about 2.6km to hit it but aim your sensor at the apparent image.
Though it’s so far away that it doesn’t look that hard and the angle of difference between where you aim the laser and where you pick up the return signal is less than 0.00001 degree (thus you can solve that problem by ignoring it but still, just hitting that tiny distant moving target at all is impressive).
When looking at the process, it’s actually bonkers in a totally differet direction.
Any laser shot from Earth ends up spread out an area of about 26km diameter on the lunar surface. So you need a high-power laser pulse to get any sort of concentration of photons to hit the lunar surface that are detectable there. Then the reflection gets spread out over a similar large area on reflection to Earth, so you’re trying to detect a few photons from the original laser pulse of 1017 photons (or whatever the actual number is).
So to your question about sighting - actually not necessary. But you’ve turned the laser pulse into a photon shotgun, which is equally bonkers. You’re shooting a pinpoint laser that still spreads out to the size of a large city just to hit a meter or two-sized target. Then the same thing again just to get the reflection.
My brother believes the moon landings were faked and filmed on a giant soundstage.
He cited all sorts of “evidence” including the flag flapping in the “wind”.
I asked him why, after going to all the trouble and expense of trying to convincingly fake the moon landings, would NASA install fans.
It’s even simpler than that. The Soviet Union was the biggest US enemy at the time. They obviously would have tracked the flight from launch to landing. Why would they go along with a US conspiracy? Wouldn’t they be the first to say it was fake?
“They’re in on it”
The greatest adversary of the US, literally in a cold war using space as a proxy for active fighting, with every reason to expose any lies… Were in on it.
If they believe that they’re a lost cause. They can go back to their tin foil hat.
Oh he’s absolutely lost
Fortunately his conspiracy beliefs are harmless. He at least still believes vaccines are essential for children’s health, which is good as I have young nieces and nephews.
Anybody that believes the Moon landing was fake is a lost cause. Only flat Earth is a more ridiculous thing.
The moon landing was fake. NASA hired Stanley Kubrick to stage it, but that perfectionist bastard insisted on shooting the exterior scenes on location…
Nah man, it was Quentin Tarantino. That’s why the astronauts are all barefoot.
“kubrick was such a stickler for detail though, he built the soundstage on the moon” i like using that one on them
The Van Halen radiation belts rock too hard though.
By now, I really hoped Elon Musk would be in orbit around Uranus.
jokes aside, uranus jokes help fund space science. i always kick in a ten when i see a probe to uranus asking for funds
Just tell him small-minded people can’t comprehend big things and see if he even gets it. Which is true, but also a dick thing to say like that if he is smart enough to understand the slight.
Sadly, apparently bouncing a laser off the moon via the reflectors left up there by Apollo missions isn’t hard exactly, just expensive to get the right equipment to do it right.
Which is pretty crazy when you think about it, hitting a target about 1.3 lightseconds away. As in, if you could sight it, you’d be looking at where it was 1.3 seconds ago. Because it is moving at about 1km/s relative to us. And don’t read that as km/h, that’s one kilometer every second, so by the time you see it, it’s already about 1.3km from where you see it, so you need to lead it by about 2.6km to hit it but aim your sensor at the apparent image.
Though it’s so far away that it doesn’t look that hard and the angle of difference between where you aim the laser and where you pick up the return signal is less than 0.00001 degree (thus you can solve that problem by ignoring it but still, just hitting that tiny distant moving target at all is impressive).
When looking at the process, it’s actually bonkers in a totally differet direction.
Any laser shot from Earth ends up spread out an area of about 26km diameter on the lunar surface. So you need a high-power laser pulse to get any sort of concentration of photons to hit the lunar surface that are detectable there. Then the reflection gets spread out over a similar large area on reflection to Earth, so you’re trying to detect a few photons from the original laser pulse of 1017 photons (or whatever the actual number is).
So to your question about sighting - actually not necessary. But you’ve turned the laser pulse into a photon shotgun, which is equally bonkers. You’re shooting a pinpoint laser that still spreads out to the size of a large city just to hit a meter or two-sized target. Then the same thing again just to get the reflection.
Otherwise the flag would fall flat, duh.
(\s for whoever thinks this isn’t absurd enough.)
Get him to watch The Dish