As the last human being to date to set foot on the Moon, Chicago's own Eugene Cernan upon his departure from Planet Earth's natural satellite (or companion planet if you prefer) said this:
As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come...I'd like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. As we leave the Moon at Taurus- Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. "Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17."
Once I finally stepped on the Moon, no matter what was to come of the next three days - or the rest of my life - nobody could take those steps from me. People ask how long will they be there, and I say forever, however long forever is, like my daughter’s initials that I scribbled in the sand [TDC for Tracy Dawn Cernan]. *
And at some point, Cernan also said this:
I didn't go to the Moon... not to go home.
Meaning of course that he didn't intend to be stranded in space. That ellipsis in the quote represents a pause Cernan made in his statement. As perhaps the most eloquent of American astronauts of his generation, one could assume that pause was made for dramatic effect. Not so says moon landing denier Jarrah White:
He said it as if he had to pause to remember,.. It was as if he was trying to admit (that he didn't actually go to the moon) right there, and had to make a clarifying statement to basically recover himself.
Yet another piece of "evidence" that people who claim that the U.S. space program, or at least the part where we landed on the Moon, was a hoax.
According to a fact checking post, a...
...2019 poll, conducted by YouGov, found that 29 percent of respondents 50 years old or younger expressed some belief that the U.S. government “faked the 1969 Apollo moon landing,” with eight percent answering “definitely true” and 21 percent answering “probably true.” Among respondents over the age of 50, only one percent answered “definitely true” and nine percent answered “probably true,” according to the poll.
What to make of that is hard to tell, probably much has to do with the general distrust of government that seems to be running rampant these days. I have nothing to back this up, but I think much of it also has to do with the public's distrust of science.
Given all that, I have to say it may be surprising the number of doubters is so low.
Obviously, Jarrah White is grasping at straws in his assessment of Cernan's remark, but some of the "evidence" not based on pure conjecture presented by Moon landing deniers is worth taking a look at if only to debunk it, which for the most part is pretty easy.
One remark I heard, doubts the possibility of getting to the moon because it would be physically impossible for a spacecraft to carry all the fuel necessary to travel to the moon and back. This proposition assumes that a spacecraft has to burn its engines continuously as it makes its way through space, much like an aircraft in flight.
Just a little knowledge of basic physics puts that theory to rest. Issac Newton's first law of motion states:
An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
Unlike an aircraft which in flight needs to overcome the constant forces of gravity and wind resistance, in the vacuum of outer space, a spacecraft has no such forces acting upon it. So, after two major engine burns, the first to get it off the ground and the second to leave Earth's orbit and head it in the right direction, the spaceship as Newton understood almost 400 years ago, is in the free and clear, continuing in constant motion without the help of its engines, until it encounters an "unbalanced force" like heaven forbid, bumping into something, which is very unlikely in outer space. Newton's second law of motion would deal with the amount of damage that would cause.
It's only when the spacecraft approaches its destination and needs to slow down when it needs to use its engines again, this time for a retro burn to enable it, if it's going to the Moon, to enter the Moon's orbit, then subsequent burns to get the landing craft into position to set itself safely down on the lunar surface.
In short, Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century figured out all the physics necessary to get to the Moon and back including the most difficult and dangerous part, re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Of course, it would take another three centuries for chemistry and engineering to catch up in order to build the rockets and power their engines.
That's not to say that landing human beings on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth was a small accomplishment. It is in fact to this day one of the greatest technological undertakings of humankind.
But still very doable.
So why all the doubt?
I may be completely out on a limb here, but I think much of it has to do with the idea that we don't much like scientists these days either, especially when they tell us things we don't want to hear.
Remember the pandemic and how so many Americans refused the advice of epidemiologists to wear masks and to socially distance themselves? Small wonder the death rate in this country was the highest of any country in the world. Same with the scores of anti-vaxxers whose misguided efforts to ignore scientific research have resulted in the re-introduction of diseases into our country that were thought to have been irradicated years ago.
Then of course there's the environment.
I was introduced to the phenomenon known as the "Greenhouse Effect" when I was in high school back in the seventies. It's no accident that at the time, the Soviet Union was conducting its own foray into space, most notably sending probes to study our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus. That planet whose average temperature is around 800 degrees Fahrenheit, with an atmospheric pressure about 92 times that of Earth's at sea level, is the poster child for what happens when the Greenhouse Effect runs amok. The conditions the Soviet spacecraft that entered the Venetian atmosphere encountered, some of them successfully landing on that planet's surface, meant they survived intact for only a few minutes, which was enough time to send back invaluable information on the brutal conditions of that planet.
In a nutshell, the Greenhouse Effect takes place when Carbon Dioxide and other gasses in the atmosphere allow energy from the Sun's visible light to reach the surface of a planet, but prevent much of the energy reflected off the surface as infrared radiation from escaping the atmosphere. The Earth's climate is a delicate balance and these naturally occurring gasses are responsible for having kept the planet temperate for tens of thousands of years. But the introduction of excessive amounts of these gasses through human activity has increased the greenhouse effect resulting in a significantly measurable rise in the Earth's temperature over the past several decades.
While most scientists dispute that Earth may at some point become another Venus, the writing is on the wall that we're in for a very unpleasant future, climate-wise if we don't address our frontal assault on the environment, and fast.
Naturally, we have a president who claims that climate change is a hoax, despite scads of scientific evidence to the contrary.
Given this, I have to remark that it's more than a little satisfying that this same president who claims to know more about science than the scientists, didn't seek their advice when he decided to paint the bottom of the reflecting pool that spans the distance between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial on the west end of the National Mall in Washington DC. In no time after the paint job was completed and the pool re-filled with water, rather than being the same hue as the blue of the American flag as the POTUS intended, the pool turned a lovely shade of green, resembling the Chicago River on St. Patrick's Day. The unexpected color shift was the result of the rapid growth of algae caused by the excessive retention of heat due to you guessed it, the dark color of the blue paint. Algae it turns out, at least the species currently in the Reflecting Pool, love the heat.
And yes, it was all predictable according to the scientists.
In a recent article in The Atlantic titled "Science Has a Name for What’s Plaguing the Reflecting Pool" staff writer Matt Viser begins with this:
The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has become the country’s most high-profile science experiment, with workers battling against nature. After a week of combat, they have essentially killed off one type of algae infesting the pool, only to create the conditions for a new type to take over. And Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed “Skinny Dead Mouse” by scientists, is now flourishing, according to testing that was run at the request of The Atlantic.
In the words of Greg Boyer, professor emeritus of biochemistry at the State University of New York, who inspected a sample of water from the pool provided by Viser, (who likely risked arrest in obtaining the sample):
If I was going to design a facility to grow algae, I would probably design a facility that had a lot of surface area and was very shallow, so you have sunlight down to the bottom. And put a lot of nutrients in it. And that’s pretty much what the Reflecting Pool is. It’s just a perfect facility for growing algae.
One would hope this President learns his lesson that it's better to listen to people who know what they're doing rather than people who are merely telling him what he wants to hear.
Otherwise, things could get really out of hand.
Thank goodness everything is going so well with his little war in Iran.
*One quote I once erroneously attributed to Cernan was this:
We set out to explore the Moon and instead discovered the Earth.
That profoundly beautiful remark belongs to Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders who took what would perhaps become the most significant photograph ever made, "Earthrise" as seen from the perspective of the Moon.
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