By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
ANYONE who remembers the “historic Apollo mission landings on the Moon” 57 years ago should be asking this question: Why aren’t the Artemis crew landing on the Moon again with the massive advances in technology between then and now?
The official Artemis story is that the four astronauts will test the systems of the Orion spacecraft, complete a flyby of the moon, and conduct other tests to support future Artemis missions to establish the first human base on the surface of the moon. They say landing on the moon again is not a necessary objective at this stage.
Perhaps we are being a tad naive, but we do know various people have questioned the veracity of the Apollo mission, which involved an astonishing six trips to the Moon between July 20, 1969 and December 1972, with a total of 12 astronauts walking on the Moon.
A quite devastating critique of the Apollo Mission was published by the late Dave McGowan, a Los Angeles writer, whose 14-part series titled Wagging the Moondoggie in 2009 raised a whole range of “problems” with the Apollo mission.
These included the fact that “moon rocks” i.e. lunar meteorites meteorite samples gathered from Antarctica by NASA are virtually indistinguishable from NASA’s collection of “Moon rocks” and that the “Moon rocks” donated to the Dutch national museum turned out to be petrified wood.
And then there are the questionable European Space Agency photos taken by its unmanned SMART-1 probe in 2003 and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, whose cameras have reportedly imaged the Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 landing sites. Some of these photos appear to show tracks made in the lunar surface by the Apollo missions including a left-over lunar module.
McGowan even questioned the lunar probe itself with a high-resolution photograph revealing some curious and very rough engineering such as the randomly riveted plates of metal on the exterior and an exterior “that looks like a tubular aluminum framework covered with Mylar and old Christmas wrapping paper”.
There are, of course, the hyper-sceptics who don’t even believe space travel is real or that humans live on a globe. Yes, we can question the Apollo missions, as many have, but that does not make space travel as a whole some colossal conspiracy, a fantasy designed to mislead or distract the masses on a global scale.
We should keep in mind that in 1966, McGowan’s deep scepticism aside, the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft achieved the first controlled soft landing on the lunar surface, followed later that year by Luna 10, the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the Moon. Then in December 1968, Apollo 8 became the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon – exactly what the Artemis mission is doing 57 years later.
Another bit of context to remember is that the first rocket fired into lower space was a V2 rocket, that the Americans captured from the defeated Germans after World War 2. The rocket was taken to White Sands, New Mexico, and launched on October 21st, 1946, with a movie camera attached that produced the first photographs of earth from 60-miles-high (120km) space.
President John F. Kennedy’s national goal for the 1960s of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” announced on May 25, 1961, was accomplished on the Apollo 11 mission, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Apollo Lunar Module (LM) on July 20, 1969.
This happened while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command and service module (CSM), and all three apparently landed safely on Earth in the Pacific Ocean on July 24 and right there is another problem – only four days lapsed from the landing until the return to Earth?.
We are told that the Artemis launch rocket is the biggest, fastest, most powerful and advanced launch rocked ever built and its mission to around the Moon and back is 10 days, yet it only took four days for Apollo 11 to land and then return to Earth? It’s just another of so many questions around the Apollo mission.
Artemis launched in spectacular fashion last Wednesday (US EST) and is due for the Moon orbit this Monday. It will take Artemis five days to enter lunar orbit from the translunar injection burn to take it out of Earth’s orbit, and four days to return from the lunar sphere of influence to Earth re-entry.
Approximately 650 million people worldwide watched this first landing on television.[2] Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last, Apollo 17, in December 1972. In these six spaceflights, twelve people walked on the Moon.
