Questions on the NASA Moon mission

(I was asked how I "knew" - even though I had been working at NASA for 24 years - that we had indeed landed on the Moon)

I have lived through the consequences of the landing, innumerable meetings on what was done and why, what we need to do next, understanding how many people were involved in this enterprise, understanding the technology that was used etc. Much of what we do on Mars is based on what we learned going to the moon. It would be a more gigantic feat to perpetrate such a hoax than to actually do it.

Look, I don't doubt that the government is quite capable of making up or hiding stuff, but you'd be giving it WAY too much credit on this one! This is on the same level as claiming that the holocaust never happened or that the earth is really flat.

I won't continue this discussion, and I am sorry I felt compelled to butt in, but, given that this has been my life... I found it hard to resist.

What is interesting to me is to understand what people have to gain in believing that the landing was a hoax. If you want to reinforce your mistrust for the gov... there is plenty of stuff you can rely on, but this isn't an example - fortunately -

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(Do we know everything that happened on the moon mission?)

By now I am pretty sure we do, but you do bring up a good point. What are the motivations for hiding the truth?

One really has to make a distinction between government motivations and NASA's. The gov thinks in terms of National status etc. It's pretty much agreed that the gov's reason for going to the moon was to prove that we were technologically "superior", hence, admittedly, there would have been a strong motive to succeed at all costs. Fortunately the "cost" was really to pour in more money than the Russians could, rather than anything "devious".

NASA is an organization of scientists and engineers who really want to explore space. Their motivations to hide stuff are to cover mistakes and save reputations and careers, but they are also competitive scientist and any mistake by a colleague would eventually be revealed. The shuttle disasters and other errors (like the probe that missed Mars) show this very clearly.

Their careers are founded on doing science, publishing, collaborating with other scientists in industry and academia. Even in science sometimes people publish a paper with phony results... but it usually involves a small lab and it is eventually revealed. NASA is fully immersed in a science and technology culture even if a fraction of us (most are contractors) are gov employees.