XPost: alt.astronomy, alt.books.arthur-clarke

YO "D" -
Technology progress, we can now photograph man's steps on moon!

Three items of interest:

from earlier:
On 1/16/2022 D posted
" If you keep repeating the mantra "We went to the Moon" for a long
enough time, it makes it become true. Like magic, it's bewitching."

from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/the-trash-weve-left-on-the-moon/266465/

#1 From The Atlantic magazine,
"The trash We've left on the Moon"
The lunar surface is strewn with more than 100
manmade items, from bags of urine to monumental plaques.
By Megan Garber
December 19, 2012

or from http://lunarnetworks.blogspot.com/2011/09/apollo-14-at-25-cm-per-pixel.html

#2 "Inset from low altitude view of the Apollo 14 landing site,
released by NASA Sept 6 2011. ---- The paths left by astronauts
Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell in February 1971 on both
Apollo 14 moon walks are visible. ---- "

https://www.rferl.org/a/one-small-step-for-hollywood-in-russia-denying-moon-landings-may-be-matter-of-national-pride/30065499.html

#3 from a Russian conspiracy group:
"One Small Step For Hollywood? In Russia, Denying Moon Landings
May Be Matter Of National Pride

July 19, 2019 20:29 GMT
By Matthew Luxmoore

MOSCOW -- In October 2015, Russian blogger and space enthusiast Vitaly
Yegorov began crowdfunding for an ambitious project.

With help from aerospace engineers, he pledged to send a microsatellite
to the moon and bring back the clearest images to date of the places
where American astronauts landed as part of the Apollo missions, which
first set down on the lunar surface 50 years ago, on July 20, 1969.

"What do you think, have humans really been to the moon?" began a text
that Yegorov posted on the website Boomstarter. In a country where many
deny the landings ever took place, he was confident the idea would take off.

But even Yegorov, who had for years heard Russians argue that the six
Apollo moon landings were staged, was surprised by the reaction. Within
three days, he had hit his target of 800,000 rubles ($12,725 at current exchange rates) to complete preliminary tests and acquire the licenses
to go forward.

"I knew this would attract a lot of attention, but even I underestimated
the interest," he said during an interview in Moscow ahead of the
moon-landing anniversary.

Vitaly Yegorov
Vitaly Yegorov
An opinion survey conducted last May by state-backed pollster VTSiOM
found that 57 percent of Russians believe there were no lunar landings,
and that the U.S. government made a fake documentary in 1969 about the
mission. Only 24 percent of the poll's 2,000 respondents aged 18 and
over said they believed U.S. astronauts landed on the moon.

'We'll Go Check'

The Kremlin gives no official weight to such suggestions, which have
been convincingly debunked by scientists. In 2011, President Vladimir
Putin dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory on par with the notion
that the 9/11 attacks were organized by U.S. intelligence services. "You
can't falsify an event like that," he said of the moon landing.

But even members of Putin's government are prone to peddling the theory, whether in jest or not.

Last November, during a visit to satellite manufacturer Russian Space
Systems, Dmitry Rogozin, who heads the country's space agency,
Roskosmos, spoke about Russia's plans to land humans on the moon after
2030. Then he issued a dig at the United States.

"We've given ourselves the task of going there to check whether they've
been there or not," he said, smirking in response to laughter from the
room. "They say they've been. We'll check that."

When John F. Kennedy set a goal in 1961 for the United States to land a
man on the moon before the decade was through, the Soviet leadership
also took up the challenge. However, parallel efforts to achieve a
crewed landing by the U.S.S.R., which had beat the United States in
earlier space-exploration milestones, yielded a series of spectacular
crashes.

But even in the face of defeat, the Soviet leadership did not deny the
veracity of the images transmitted across the world by NASA as millions
across the world watched Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong step foot on the
moon's surface just hours after Apollo 11 landed in 1969.

"We were there at Soviet military base 32103," the Russian cosmonaut
Aleksei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, told The Guardian
recently. "I swear to God we sat there with our fingers crossed. We
hoped the guys would make it. We wanted this to happen. We knew those
who were on board and they knew us, too."

Ivan Moiseyev, the director of the Institute of Space Policy in Moscow,
says Russians only began to embrace the "lunar conspiracy" en masse
after the Soviet collapse. "During the Soviet era, no one denied it," he
says of the moon landings. "There was nothing at all written about the
lunar conspiracy."

---- For Moiseyev, Russians' willing acceptance of the conspiracy theory reflects a drop in education levels, a theory supported by the VTSiOM
survey, in which respondents with only a high-school education were most
likely to believe there was no moon landing.----

'Playing Chess With A Pigeon'

Despite the early signs of a speedy liftoff, Yegorov's crowdfunded
project has proved hard to get off the ground. He tries to keep his
donors informed on a regular basis of his efforts to move things
forward, though he now admits he'll need a lot more time.

And money, too: at least $20 million, he estimates, to complete the microsatellite and get it on a launchpad -- so the $12,000 or so he's
gathered won't quite cut it. ---

Now, he says, there's a view among space enthusiasts that members of the scientific community should not engage lunar deniers in debate, because
it'll lower the authority of astronauts and raise the authority of the conspiracy theorists.

"There's a saying: 'Don't ever play chess with a pigeon. He'll make a
mess on the board, scatter the pieces, and fly off to tell everyone he
beat you,'" he says. "That's why we don't debate them."

(The video about why the Soviets never - is quite good!)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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