The audacity of the Apollo program and the amazing engineering successes were so incredible that I am not surprised there are still skeptics lurking about. They are incorrect in their belief, but their doubt is reasonably based. Landing on the moon and returning safely only 66 years after the first powered flight and only a few years into the age of transistors and computers was to put it simply, a completely unbelievable accomplishment and without precedent in human history.
I honestly cannot think of anything since that has rivaled it in terms of sheer audacity and a leap of pure faith.
You'd think with all our technical marvels now, we'd have something that can hold its own against the missions to the moon, but I'm honestly at a loss to suggest anything here.
I agree. If you haven't yet seen it, "Failure is not an Option" is an awesome mini-documentary about mission control from the early years through the Apollo program.
Landing on the moon and returning safely only 66 years after the first powered flight and only a few years into the age of transistors and computers was to put it simply, a completely unbelievable accomplishment and without precedent in human history.
Actually, I just plotted the flight distance records from Wikipedia, starting with the Wright Flyer record of .279km in 1903, to 18000km in 1946, to John Glenn's 3 orbits (~120,000km) in 1962 and Apollo 11 distance (~800,000km) in 1969. While the spacecraft points are clearly above the exponential extrapolation of the flight records between 1910 to 1946, they are much less dramatic than the improvement from 1903 to 1915, where flight distance increased by about 4 orders of magnitude. So while the distance flown obviously was without precedent, the rate of improvement was nothing like that of the first decade of flying.
Until you start looking at evidence you can publicly verify and start analyzing what it would cost to build what people and scientists actually observed, and the downside risks of the same. Really, what would be the worst-case downside for a Saturn 1B or Saturn V first stage? (Answer: a huge, spectacular explosion in front of thousands.) If you're trying to mitigate the costs and risk of failure with a hoax, why would you send up 9 of the former and 13 of the latter? Why would you do more than 1 manned mission?
