The Real False Narrative around the Moon Landings and Human Space Travel

Not a Triumph of "government SCIENCE(!)" - not by a long shot - but not fake, either

I really don’t have time for this kind of nonsense, but… once I get sucked in, my inner sperg-iness kicks in and I have to do my own version of “ack-CHUALLY” because I happen to know something about the subject at hand. And I can’t stand watching more ignorance make its way out into the world and infect decent minds with its utter inanity, even if its rhetorically cute and enjoyable.

Let me start by first saying that I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much - and probably more than - most. I’ve lived several of them and I promise you my al-u-minium chapeau is at least as well-worn as yours. Matthew Louis wrote a piece for something called “Gallows Humor Mag” about the moon landing being faked and how that idea has caught on in “right-wing” blogosphere. It’s evidently caught on sufficiently that Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire felt compelled to weigh in on the subject and rail about it. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read Walsh’s piece, nor am I going to - I’m already far and above over my allotment of wasted time this week on this piece).

To Believe or Not to Believe

In my defense, the Gallows Humor piece has a great image on the article in the substack reader on my phone that doesn’t show up in this clip above, so I’m going to post it as part of my defense for why I went sort unintentionally down this hole of vacuousness in the first place.

Whatever else you can say about faked moon landings, this is a pretty catchy image

Let me also say I enjoyed Matt Louis’ piece. I had several good chuckles. I enjoyed, for instance, several of the rhetorical tricks he uses to suggest that maybe-just-maybe-the-mouthbreather-conspiracy-wingnuts have a point about the so-called “lunar landing” while simultaneously suggesting that he’s smart enough to know better…maybe. But then I made the mistake of saying something “real” in the comments…Oy.

Why Yes, I Did Want to Be an Astronaut

I was born later in the same year Neil Armstrong allegedly took his “giant leap” for Mankind, 1969. If my local New England childhood culture was dominated by the Big Bad Bruins and Bobby Orr of the early-70’s, my broader American childhood identity was filled by my school with the “can-do” positivism that came in the aftermath of NASA’s great achievement… except that it wasn’t. It was no such thing. I didn’t find that out until much later in life, however, long after I’d given up my dreams of being an astronaut.

But I think it’s an important point to admit that I took the astronaut thing A LOT more seriously than most of you did. By the middle-80s, I was doing well-enough academically that the “be an astronaut” thing didn’t seem completely nonsensical… I was an exceptional student. (Sorry - I don’t mean to sound like an asshole, but I was that good of a student. When I came in the Top 40 in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search Competition in 1987, I was the first person in state history to do so.) I had also gotten sucked up by the Star Wars and Top Gun propaganda of the 80s, so I got a Navy ROTC scholarship and went to Boston University to get an aerospace engineering degree. (Getting closer…) And from where do they select astronauts from for the space program…? (Getting closer…)

By the time I got to flight school, however, the remnants of the dream were there, but my heart had been won by the Marine Corps. Consequently, I wanted to be an attack helicopter pilot. A brief aside about Marines - there’s an adage we adhered to where I learned to be an Officer that goes: “Marine first; Officer second; MOS last.” Briefly explained, this means that we see ourselves as Marines first and foremost - soldiers from the sea, warriors willing to fight “in any clime and place” - and that takes precedence even over our identity as an Officer of said Marines. This has two aspects to it - (1) if push had come to shove, and I had not passed Officer Candidates School, or some other phase of training/qualification to become an officer, I likely would have enlisted in the Marine Corps; (2) officers will get in the trench next to their troops and shoot shoulder-to-shoulder until the last fucking bullet is gone… and then we’ll throw rocks - until they’re exhausted.¹ The final aspect to “Marine first, Officer second, MOS last” and perhaps most important thing is that it’s LAST. Your own individual desire, your preferred Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) - what you actually do for our beloved Corps - is fuck you. You’ll do what the Corps says you will, do it to the best of your abilities, and salute smartly - and say nothing bad about the Commandant.²

Anyway, notwithstanding the diminished possibility of getting into NASA as a helicopter pilot vice jet jock, I could at least still apply for the program.³ And military aviators selected for the space program still carry a lot of cachet. Once in a blue moon you might even bump into someone in an officers club who’s wearing the patch and you buy him a beer, ask for his story, and just listen - you don’t have better.

Now I say all of that by way of background to tell you that I bought the NASA bullshit as hard or harder than anyone, and a big part of the propaganda and mystique that goes with “Our Government Totally WON the SPACE RACE!” are the following sub-themes:

• NASA was a triumph of the most governmentest of science-y-ness!

• Going to the Moon and back was the absolute pinnacle of Science™

Doc Rocket Enters the Chat

That is a picture of one of the flags (the flag?) that flew on the moon…allegedly, taken inside the old Mission Control, portrayed in Apollo-13.

And now we come to my experiences with NASA, its history, and (actual) Science, the source and repository of Man’s objective branch of knowledge. I promise we are now to the part of this article that you are going to like as little as the mouthbreathers who can’t comprehend the technology that took us to the Moon did. This was my comment on the Gallows Humor substack linked above:

This is funny as f*ck.

I got a friend whose dad graduated with a PhD in the early 60's from a prestigious West Coast engineering program. During his hiring by Hughes Aircraft, he and a number of the other top students were courted by various of Hughes divisions, including the Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division. As the old man told it, none of the top guys were interested in doing "to the moon" work because by the early 60s, the "problem" of getting a spaceship to the moon was largely already solved. It was viewed as a "dead end" career-wise.

For background, it's worth noting that Hughes SSD built the world's first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom, in 1963 and followed the first geosynchronous weather satellite in 1966. That same year, the Surveyor program - the first unmanned soft landing on the moon - was done completely outside of NASA. Hughes had already put an unmanned probe on the moon that scooped up some rocks and then came back with them.

So the irony in all of this is that everyone screams about going to the moon as if it were the pinnacle of technology because NASA and the govt says so - but that's the real fraud. USG bought that program from Howard Hughes, while most of the top guys of the day went into radar and missile systems. Going to the moon is a relatively straightforward engineering problem - making it survivable by men is simply an ALSS problem.

My friend’s pop was a no-shit rocket scientist. I promise you, he was the real McGonagle - and had the resume and chops to back it up. He was a Chief Scientist at Hughes Aircraft in their heyday and still firing (intellectual) fastballs into his eighties. I also got the chance to get to know him personally and even work with him on some fairly technical matters professionally. But the one thing that I could never believe was when my buddy first told me that the lunar landing got barely even a reaction when it happened live on their television in June 1969.

“Come onnnnn,” I said.

“I shit you not. The Old Man turned down the chance to work in that whole program because he said it was a dead-end. When the moonwalk happened on tv, my sister can tell you, pops barely even looked up from his dinner.”

Aerospace in the LA Basin Post-WW2

Get on an airplane to California. Take the metal bird over the mountains and the smog of the Los Angeles basin, over the used car lots and the burger joints and the never-ending tan-hued sprawl of houses and businesses, over the vast shipping container fields and oil refineries of Long Beach, to the concrete bustle of LAX. Get in a car and drive and you don’t have to travel far to find evidence of southern California’s aerospace legacy. You can read it on the exit signs for the freeways, names that are synonymous with America’s aerospace heritage. Drive south on the 405 and you’ll pass El Segundo, home to Los Angeles Air Force Base and The Aerospace Corporation. You’ll pass Long Beach, Downey, and Huntington Beach, where companies used to build planes for the Air Force and DC-10s for the airlines, where North American built the Apollo command module. Turn east and you’ll reach March Air Reserve Base and its massive runway for B-52 Stratofortresses, and where the Air Force based its first bombardment wing and conducted the first tests of aerial refueling. Get on the 110 and head north to the 210 and you’ll reach the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, turn west to Burbank, once home to Lockheed’s famed Skunk Works and the place where the U-2 and the Blackbird were designed and built before being crated up and shipped out to the desert for testing. If you head to the southwest you’ll hit Santa Monica, which used to be a euphemism for Douglas Aircraft during the Second World War and later was the home of RAND, where the wizards of armageddon thought about Global Thermonuclear War and then sipped margaritas on the beach during their lunch break. Turn east and head into the Mojave desert and drive past the cactuses and the scrub and you’ll reach the Muroc dry lake and Edwards Air Force Base, home of those men Tom Wolfe called the best goddamned pilots in the world, where B-2 bombers drop smart bombs and C-17 Globemasters drop Humvees into great billowing clouds of dust from the lakebed floor and where massive Saturn F-1 engines used to roar and spew clouds of smoke from the edge of a cliff.⁴

The Old Man was a former naval aviator turned PhD with a security clearance and family history that included multiple generations of employees at Hughes Aircraft. But to hear him tell it, as a Hughes legacy family employee, once Hughes started putting satellites in geosynchronous orbit by 1963, well… if you can launch and keep a satellite floating up there above the Earth just like the Moon, the physics of launching and nudging that craft ever-so-slightly so that it gets captured by the moon’s gravity well and then drops onto the surface isn’t a quantum leap of technology - it’s not much of a leap at all. The Moon has no atmosphere; you don’t need a craft capable of making two separate atmospheric re-entries… And no atmosphere on the Moon means you don’t need a ton of fuel to take off and break free of its gravity to put yourself back into a “drop” back into Earth’s gravity well. As proof of this point, Hughes put the Surveyor unmanned probe on the moon 3 years after its satellite, to scoop up some soil samples… the only “problems” left to be solved for manned space flight from an engineering perspective are (1) the additional weight of a human being and how that affects landing and takeoff from the Moon, and (2) the aviation life support systems (ALSS) required to make the capsule “livable” against what happens to the human body in the near zero temperatures and complete vacuum of space.⁵ From his perspective as a young engineer, this was a complete “dead-end” for his new career circa mid-1960s SoCal aerospace industry. Guided missiles - and therefore radar - was where all the mega-nerds went, at least the ones smart enough to think about a long-term career, anyway.

Now, here’s the bitter pill. Remember those two bulleted sub-assumptions of the government propaganda I mentioned up above? The ones that even the conspiracy theorists seem to buy into? (Here, I saved you the scroll by the Gods of Ctrl+C)

• NASA was a triumph of the most governmentest of science-y-ness!

• Going to the Moon and back was the absolute pinnacle of Science™

Do you see how these two kinda turn to shit pretty quickly when you talk to my friend’s Old Man, a real fucking rocket scientist, about his career at Hughes? There’s an even more pragmatic consideration that people always ignore or miss about the “NASA as the pinnacle of GOVERNMENT science” idea: how is it “government” science in the first place? What makes NASA a triumph of government science? Did the engineers all go to government-only schools? Almost assuredly not. A shitton of the “government” scientists were, specifically in case of the Apollo program, and are, generally, contracted by government from very successful private companies. It’s not like “government” somehow made these guys into geniuses in a lab who then came up with all of these big-headed ideas about going to the Moon. Le Voilà!

Hughes aircraft was founded and driven by a maniacal genius, Howard Hughes, who created multiple companies across a variety of industries, including aviation. My friend’s Old Man once said, after watching Leo DiCaprio’s portrayal in The Aviator,

“A wonderful movie. Wonderful… but as good as it is, it in no way comes close to capturing the towering height of Hughes’ genius, nor the depths of his madness.”

That’s why - and how - the U.S. wound up with a space program, and a man on the moon. In the same way that Oppenheimer is why - and how - we wound up with an A-Bomb. (As I mentioned in the piece I linked above, I was interviewed by Glenn T. Seaborg for the Westinghouse STS. Seaborg was one of Oppenheimer’s section chiefs on the Manhattan Project and later (1956) got the Nobel for being part of the team that discovered plutonium. My friend’s Old Man was that kind of mind, too.)

Okay. Well, since you can always count on me to kick a guy when he’s down, I’ve got one more story to rub some final salt in the wound on your space travel dreams.

I Go to Houston and Boy, Do We Have a Problem!

Current Mission Control, which includes the International Space Station

They Can Hear You Boff In Space… It’s not the greatest title for a new-age, horror, sci-fi flick, but it is unfortunately true. They probably know if you’re trying to rub one out. Mission Control is monitoring everything about the astronauts and the ISS while those guys and gals are in space. One of the biggest dangers of any kind is, ahem, any repetitive, rhythmic vibration… at all. The ISS is basically a very long tube, with a bunch of arrays sticking off of that tube.

Here, I give you picturez.

The central tube is 356 feet (109m in EU loser-units)

That is basically a football field long cylinder and it is NOT very wide. People are not walking upright in them - they’re not walking at all, in fact. They’re floating because they’re hurtling through space around the Earth in 0g at 17,500 mph. They circle the Earth about once every 90 minutes - or 15.5 laps per day. You think your life feels like a rat race?

Any vibration, particularly if it is of a constant beat - imagine tap-tap-tapping your foot while listening to a song on your old iPod with headphones - can set up life-threatening, sympathetic vibrations downtube. I am not exaggerating the risks. They get alarms back at Mission Control for some very benign acts and have to talk to the astronauts to try to ensure whatever it is stops - now.

The Life aSupport Systems (LSS) people have designed all kinds of crazy devices to try to allow the astronauts to “work out” - i.e. engage in some form of resistance/strength training - in order to slow the inevitable, ineluctable loss of muscle mass that occurs from being away from Earth’s 1g, even for short periods of time.

Just 6 months in space has serious detrimental effects on a human being. A year in space is a lifetime sentence, even after you return. They’ve got a device that’s a kind of combination deadlift machine in these amazing astro-bushings to dampen any movement, same thing for the treadmill. Most of the astronauts later in life continue to suffer the health aftereffects of their time in space. It’s destructive of the eyes. They’re not entirely certain why, but sufficient time in zero g produces some kind of serious macular degeneration. All of the astronauts in the program are followed for the rest of their lives to track and measure the deleteriou healths effects of even 6 mos to a year in zero g.

Air Force Colonel Michael Scott Hopkins

Mike Hopkins played Safety for the Fighting Illini of Illinois. He’s about what you would expect an astronaut to be: handsome, charming, intelligent, well-spoken, likable, humble, and funny. When I took this photo in November 2012, I teased him about being of equal ranks - at the time he was an Air Force O-6 (Colonel) and I was a Marine Corps O-4 (Major). He handled that joke pretty well.

On Expedition 37/38 to the ISS, from September 25, 2013, though March 10, 2014, Mike Hopkins spent a total of 166 days in space. Seven years later, between November 15, 2020, and May 2, 2021, as a member of SpaceX Crew 1 on Expedition 64/65, Mike Hopkins spent another 167 days in space. That puts him at a month shy of a year. By contrast, U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Konenko have both spent single trips of more than a year in space - 371 days for Rubio and 437 for Konenko. Konenko has over 800 cumulative days in space, coming up on three years… and I hope for his own health he never spends another day in space.

This is where I part company with John Carter and many other great folks, who like myself, grew up reading and watching wonderful tales of sci-fi derring do, of man tripping among the stars, the next frontier in Man’s never-ending quest to explore… blah blah blah. Unless someone figures out how to control gravity or insta-blip to another identical Earth of something very close to 1g, life among the stars is not what you think it is. There is literally NOTHING there for us - or any life at all.

We are the highest evolved creatures of this wonderful, lush Mother Earth. All that we could possibly want or crave is right here - and all of the problems that need to be solved will not be won by going elsewhere into space. I dream too of that kind of freedom, but that is not real. That is pure escapist fantasy. Man is not meant for the merciless void of space. It is not even remotely hospitable to us, nor habitable by us. Elon is jerking himself off with talk of living on Mars, too.

One final thought to wrap this back up with the “Man didn’t walk on the Moon” conspiracy theory. One of the chief “arguments” by the it-was-all-faked crowd is usually a variation on the question “how did we lose the technology to go to the Moon” after 1969. IOW, if we actually did it and can do it, why come we no go back since?!

Let me explain this simply: it’s not that we can’t, it’s that we won’t. We no longer have the will to bear the risk of the very real consequences that come with sending people to the Moon and back - people dying in fiery capsule accidents (Apollo 1), near death or loss en route (Apollo 13), space shuttles blowing up on launch (Challenger), and the final kiss of death - shuttles disintegrating into pieces on reentry, Columbia. This piece is too long already, but let me strongly suggest that Columbia’s break-up on re-entry in 2003 was a massive blow to NASA, the scars of which ended any will there was for manned space flight to the Moon. Putting Man on the Moon is entirely possible, but the truth is that people who know what it takes to do so, also know that it is fucking pointless. That’s why we haven’t gone back.⁶

1. Lest this seem like hyperbole, I would encourage anyone to read this short Wikipedia article on the Battle for Hill 488. There is a book-length treatment out there that I’ve read, but I don’t recall the name or author at the moment.

2. An infantryman gets the 03- series, with the last two numbers conveying the particularly sub-specialty within the infantry that one might fill: an enlisted basic rifleman is an 0311, officer is 0302, machine-gunner is 0331, mortarman 0341, etc. As a Whiskey Cobra pilot, I was a 7565 because the 7500 series covers aviation related specialties.

3. I did not apply.

4. “Blue skies on the West Coast: a history of the aerospace industry in Southern California,” available here: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/938/1

5. Some of you may be old enough to remember movies that involve a plot element of the USG shooting monkeys up into space in rockets. That was true and done to test out the ALSS capabilities of the capsules. My guess is at least a few capsules had to be cleaned with pressurized air to remove the simian remnants.

6. But we definitely did go there once -it just isn’t the “pinnacle feat” of government science you you’ve been led to believe it is.