Impossible Conspiracy Theories: Faked Moon Landing

I hope this is going to be a series on conspiracy theories that opponents claim to be impossible.  I also want to make it clear that I do not actually believe any of these conspiracy theories.  The point of this series, however, is to show how they could be true.  I would like to note though, that the problem with most conspiracy theories is the number of people that would have to be involved.  The more people who know, the higher the probability of a leak.  Read this article to learn more about the correlation between number of people and probability of a leak.

We are going to begin the series with moon landing, since the theory that it was faked seems to be one of the more popular conspiracy theories.  It is also central to the Flat Earth theory, which rests on rather a lot of space exploration conspiracy theories.

I can think of only two reasons the U.S. government and/or NASA would want to fake a moon landing.  The first is that they don't have the technology to do it, but they want to show someone that they can.  Given the time period, the U.S. government might have wanted a faked moon landing to show that we could get there before Russia.  This would have involved a lot of people though, and there is a high probability the plan would have been leaked before it was even completed.  The second is that the government or NASA had discovered that going to the moon was actually impossible, regardless of technology, but they wanted people to believe that it was possible (the Flat Earth theory suggests that the government knows about an impenetrable dome around the Earth that would prevent space travel at any serious distance).  Even if it was only NASA that knew, that would be a lot of people, and it would still probably have leaked before the mission was complete.  For the sake of argument though, let's assume that only a few people knew.

The big problem with conspiracy theories is that the chance of success is inversely proportional to the number of people that know about it and the amount of time passed.  As such, it is important to minimize the number of people who know.  In the case of the moon landing, it is estimated that over 400,000 people would have had to be in on it, but I think that we could reduce that to less than 1,000, with enough resources.

So, who needs to know to pull off a fake moon landing?  It depends on what you can fake.  It turns out that during that time period, technology was sufficiently advanced to fake quite a bit, given enough resources.  There are several groups of people involved.  First, there are the planners.  Only one planner actually needs to know.  The planners are who provide the information on what needs to be faked, and they will do a much better job if they think the mission is real.  One planner needs to be in on things, because someone needs to collect information on what needs to be faked.  The official plan documents might omit or marginalize information that is not important for a real moon landing but which is essential in a fake one.

The next group of people involved are those who are going to build the equipment.  The planners will have created a list of requirements (is air tight, for instance).  The people designing and constructing the space craft, rockets, and everything else will use those requirements.  They only need to know if the crafts are going to be faked as well.  Building real space craft is expensive, but fake ones are much cheaper.  Involving all of the engineers dramatically reduces chances of success though.  Minimizing people who know is more important than price here, so the only engineers that will know are those who will build fake stuff.  We will need a little bit of fake stuff, because we are faking a moon landing here, but without the real stuff, many more people have to get involved.  The fake stuff we will need is a fake moon module and some support equipment to fake space travel and the environment of the moon.

The most obvious people involved are the astronauts.  Unfortunately, they are also the most conspicuous, and the public will be continuously watching them after the event.  They are the weakest links, so they absolutely cannot know.  This is going to be very difficult, because they are supposed to actually experience the event.  This is why we need the fake stuff.  We have to fool the people right at the center of the thing.

There is going to be a launch party watching the blast off.  It is going to include some high profile people who definitely should not know.  This is why we need the real stuff.  These people need to see a group of astronauts get into a rocket and blast off into space.  This is going to be the second hardest thing to fake.  We cannot let the astronauts get onto the rocket, because they are going to be boarding the fake one at the same time.  So we need fake astronauts, and they may even need to look an awful lot like the real ones.  If they are expendable, they could be launched in the rocket, where they will likely ultimately die.  Otherwise, we could have some means for them to leave the rocket after boarding, without being seen.  This is a complicated one without involving more engineers, and if we picked some lookalikes from the engineers that know, we could reduce the number of people that know by launching them to their certain doom (of course, we would have to lie to them, because they would probably object if they knew).  This strategy keeps the launch party safely ignorant.

Most of mission control does not need to know.  They are just communicating with the real astronauts, who think that they are really visiting the moon.  We probably want a few people there who know, in case something goes wrong.

Somewhere else nearby, we will need lots of people who know.  The engineers who know will have built a second moon landing module that looks nearly exactly like the real one.  The real astronauts will have a separate launch party, because they need to think everything is real.  They will get into the rocket, and then a bunch of things have to happen.  For launch, the capsule has to be mounted on equipment to produce the expected acceleration of lift off.  This does not have to be perfect, but the process needs to be smooth.  Mounting the capsule on a large centrifuge would work.

Once the astronauts are in the capsule and think that they have lifted off, the big thing is keeping the pictures on the windows right, so it looks like they are going through space.  Some projectors mounted to the outside, with the right projection media on the windows might be able to manage that one.  Simulating zero gravity is going to be hard though.  Supposedly an extremely strong alternating magnetic field can achieve this effect, though at extreme expense.  To my knowledge, the only reported experiments on this effect with living things was done on frogs, but I believe they did survive.  So, simulating zero G is possible, though extremely expensive.  Alternatively, they could have lined the space suits with ferrous materials, which would have dramatically reduced the energy requirements.

The landing would have been pretty simple, but the moon environment would have been a huge amount of work.  Enough distance would have had to be created to allow an astronaut to walk around a bit, just in case.  It would have to be created either in a large building or underground, and the ceiling and walls would have to show images of what space would look like from the moon (something no one would have seen before, so it would have to be a guess).  Simulating low gravity in such a large area would be much harder than simulating it in a small space capsule.  Since the astronaut could be guaranteed to be wearing a space suit though, the ferrous metal lining with a large electromagnet would be more viable.  Low gravity simulated this way would feel wrong, but for someone who has never experienced the real thing, it would probably not be noticeable.  Faking the rest of the trip would be easy from there.

Everything else just comes down to faking pictures.  Eventually most faked pictures are figured out, but NASA had the funding to hire the best, and it is not like we have anything similar to compare.  Most of the usual means for detecting faked pictures or videos rely on existing things to compare against.

What it comes down to is that all of the technology to fake a moon landing existed.  There were two possible motives (though one is incredibly unlikely).  NASA was provided with huge amounts of funding at the time, so even cost would not have been much a problem.  In other words, the fake moon landing theory is possible.

The problem with the theory is not whether it was possible or not.  There are so many minor problems that make it incredibly unlikely.  First, the minimum number of conspirators required to pull it off in the time given is still far too large.  According to the article mentioned in the introduction, even 1,000 people would probably not be able to keep it quite for more than a decade.  Just the number of engineers required for such an elaborate hoax would be at least half that, and much more if you expected it to take less than a decade or two of work.  Add in probably one or two hundred people involved in construction of the larger parts, and all of the various experts on things like film manipulation, disguise (for the fake astronauts and the fake dignitaries), and other minor but essential details, and you have right around 1,000.  There would have just been too many people involved to keep it quiet for this long.  Unless, of course, most of them were killed afterwards to keep them quiet, but then we have to wonder why he have not heard anything about almost 1,000 people going missing who all happened to work for or near NASA...

The second problem is scale.  The scale and detail of the moon landing is huge.  There is far more information than is necessary to convince even experts that we actually sent someone to the moon.  A fake could probably have been done at half the price, by eliminating most of the unimportant details, and people would have been equally well convinced.  Anyone so out of touch with those they are trying to fool almost certainly would have screwed up somewhere, and yet no one has been able to produce conclusive evidence of such a mistake.

The third problem is that neither of the motivations really make much sense to spend so much effort and money on a hoax.  If the Earth really is flat with a giant dome, you don't need to fake sending a man to the moon to convince people otherwise, especially since they already believed otherwise.  Sending a machine to explore the moon would have been equally effective and much easier and cheaper to fake.  For only slightly more money than faking a simple landing and a small group of additional people in on the hoax, you could fake an entire moon colony.  Likewise, if the U.S. did not have the technology and was worried that Russia would get there first, a much cheaper fake could have been done, or a much more elaborate fake (the colony thing again) could have been done for only a bit more money and involvement.

In short, while there may have been sufficient resources, motivation, and technology to fake the moon landing, the odds of it are incredibly small.  The motivation is questionable, the execution does not fit any of the motivations, and the chance of successfully concealing the hoax for this long is almost nothing.  So, it is not impossible, but it is improbable in the extreme.