It all started innocently enough. On June 20, 2009 I was perusing the web in a fit of procrastination when I came across an article commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and Neil Armstrong’s historic “one small step” in 1969. I was on CNN.com, a news source that’s infamous for their determination for presenting both sides of any argument regardless of how baseless, disingenuous, or flat-out asinine any one side may be. In true CNN fashion, this article was about the claims that the Moon landings 40 years prior may or may not have been faked (far be it from CNN to take a side in this “debate”). I was relatively uninformed about this controversy at the time. For some reason I thought that claims of mock-Moon-sets on vast sound stages in the Nevada desert died a long time ago, but I guess I was wrong. So here I was reading about the possibilities that the world was bamboozled by a set of elaborate special effects put on by NASA at the order of Richard Nixon.There was only one problem with this claim that I could clearly see, and that was because, unlike conspiracy theorists and CNN anchors, I actually spent some time studying special effects and their history throughout cinema, along with basic photography and optics. In 1969, eight years before the premiere of the original Star Wars (the visual effects of which, on the original non-retouched print, look quite dated) we actually had the technology to send men to the moon, but not the capacity to realistically fake the footage they brought back. The only way to fake the massive amount of footage generated by the Apollo missions was to send a crew to the moon to film it. (I’m not talking here of the ten second clips people like to show on YouTube, I’m talking about the ten minute continuous shots of 16mm footage that conspiracy theorists conveniently forget about. )
But this CNN article was just ill researched enough to send me on a Wikipedia fueled fact finding mission which eventually landed me on BadAstronomy.com, the all things science and space blog of the best selling author Phil Plait.