Well they had better watch out for the Man On The Moon…I heard he’s a proper NIMBY! 
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@OldGreyFox, But aint they building that one on the othet side of the
moon Foxey ?? So we wont be able to see what goes on ?? Except the
satellite bit of course ??
Donkeyman! 
What would be the reason for faking the moon landings then ?
Since when would they need a reason?
That is not a problem and has already been mentioned by several people - the cold war, the reason the space race was started in the first place.
However saying that doesn’t mean they were faked.
I can see politicians thinking it a good idea but not men like Armstrong,Aldrin and Collins.
Pending the results of Artemis 1 and a crewed orbital mission, Artemis 2, slated to launch no earlier than 2024.
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Here’s a thought…How come they reckon that they can transmit voice modulation 250,000 miles…Not according to this bloke…
That is according to an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s taking about and trying to get attention by stoking up false conspiracy stories. The Voyager 2 spacecraft is just over 12 billion miles away, yet has a transmitter output of just 20 watts, which is still in contact with Earth. And yes they did have the ability to transmit radio to and from the moon in the 1960’s.
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Right Graham, let’s get down to the nitty gritties…
Where as I don’t dispute the fact that NASA can remain in contact with exploration craft many millions of miles from earth, I do cast doubt on president Nixon taking a call from the moon in the oval office…and I’ll tell you why…
All transmissions use ‘Line of sight’ or can be bounced off the Ionosphere (or satellite) and returned to earth (sky wave). Mobile phones only usually have a range of about 5 miles and use line of sight to the nearest mast. The reason we need so many masts. Bouncing signals off the Ionosphere is unreliable, think about radio Luxembourg in the sixties.
Further more, there are three ways that transmissions can be made (not counting optical devices which were not possible in 1969)
(1) A carrier wave modulated by Amplitude (AM) long distances can be achieved using am on the long and medium waves as in using the sky wave. They are unable to penetrate the Ionosphere though, the reason why they bounce back…
(2) A carrier wave modulated by frequency modulation. Good quality and reliable transmissions but mainly used on line of sight and only over short distances.
(3) Data transmission. This is the method by which reception from Voyager etc can be achieved. A series of noughts and ones are transmitted and assembled at the other end by a computer (think Morse Code) but with data transmission the computer will enhance the information. Filling in the blanks, or guessing what the picture should look like based on the very limited info.
Unfortunately, Skype was only invented in 2003 so it would have been very unlikely that the data could have been sent from the moon and understood on a landline in the oval office.
Probably a recording…or even worse…sent from the next room.
https://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2012/7/20/AA11229-Nixon-Calls-the-Moon
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the moon when they landed in the Sea of Tranquility. During their initial 21-hour foray onto the lunar surface, they received a telephone call from President Nixon. This is historic footage of that interaction. (The call was made around midnight, so some reports list the call as happening on July 21.) Nixon himself considered it the most important call he had made during his time in office, even more specifically, “the most historic phone call ever made from the White House.”
So how was the call made? How do you call the moon? Simply, the call went from the Oval Office in Washington D.C. to Houston, where it was routed into space via Mission Control, through the capsule communicator, or CapCom, astronaut Bruce McCandless II. On the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, audio of this interaction, and, in fact, audio of the entire mission was made widely available.
Footage Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ
it would be possible to beam microwave signals up from Earth and reflect them off the Moon. It was thought that at least one voice channel would be possible.
Radar reflections off the moon were received and recognized as such in 1943 during German experiments with radio measurement equipment, as reported by Dr. Ing. W. Stepp in the “Der Seewart” magazine. Stepp noted a “perturbation”, which “appeared, had a duration of several impulses, and larger impulse strength than the strongest nearby targets. It didn’t appear until about two seconds after switching on the transmitter and disappeared (pulsatingly) correspondingly later after switching it off. But the rest of the echo image appeared and disappeared at the instance of switching the transmitter on/off. The ‘perturbation’ only occurred when the antenna was aimed to the east, and it disappeared immediately upon a major change of direction, but reappeared only about two seconds after rotating back to the original direction. Apparently we had detected the rising moon behind the clouds with the equipment. I explained the gradual disappearance of the impulses by the reflecting body slowly moving out of the strongly focussed, horizontally aimed beam, as it rises above the horizon.”
It was not until the close of World War II, however, that techniques specifically intended for the purpose of bouncing radar waves off the moon to demonstrate their potential use in defense, communication, and radar astronomy were developed. The first successful attempt was carried out at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey on January 10, 1946 by a group code-named Project Diana, headed by John H. DeWitt. It was followed less than a month later, on February 6, 1946, by a second successful attempt, by a Hungarian group led by Zoltán Bay. The Communication Moon Relay project that followed led to more practical uses, including a teletype link between the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and United States Navy headquarters in Washington, D.C. In the days before communications satellites, a link free of the vagaries of ionospheric propagation was revolutionary.
The development of communication satellites in the 1960s made this technique obsolete. However radio amateurs took up EME communication as a hobby; the first amateur radio moonbounce communication took place in 1953, and amateurs worldwide still use the technique.
It seems your posting is missing an awful lot of facts.
AM radio and the FM carrier can and does bounce off the ionosphere, hence radio hams can speak to each other over vast distances beyond line of sight- usually at night when the ionosphere and can be a nuisance as it can crosstalk with other radio waves and their harmonics.
But radio waves can and will still penetrate the atmosphere, especially above the 40MHz band and that includes all manner of propagation. Data transmission can be done in a variety of ways, such as PCM, PWM, USB, LSB etc etc. They all rely on a single carrier, all of which penetrates the atmosphere.
In the case of the early Apollo missions, they used AM on the VHF band at around the 2.2 GHz wavelength (Rx) and 2.1GHz (Tx), which was designated by NASA as S-Band radio. Therefore it was entirely possible for someone to call the Moon on the phone and have a conversation via an S-Band transceiver.
The fact that radio waves can and do penetrate the atmosphere makes radio astronomy possible. We can detect radio emissions from stellar objects from over 5 million light years away and have been for some time.
I wonder if that idiot you referenced actually knows how radio works, or do you still think its a spoof of some sort?
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The delay for Earth-Moon communications is about 1.25 second (distance is ~ 380,000 km, the speed of light is ~300,000 km/s). You’d notice this delay only in conversations: every time ground control says something, it takes 2 seconds for the astronauts to respond.
In videos of the live broadcast (search for ‘Apollo 11 live ABC’) you can hear the delay: ground control says “go for depressurization”, then you hear the echo of that coming back from the Moon, and the astronauts’ response.
Some modern presentations of the moon landing will edit out the gaps created by the communication delay to make conversation sound more natural, but if you look at the timestamped transcripts, you can verify the 2.5 second round trip delay. Note that the timestamps all refer to the time the Earth-side recording occurred, so the radio delay appears when one of the crew members (CMP, CDR, LMP in the transcript) is responding to the Capcom (CC).
Thanks Guys, give me time to digest the excellent articles you presented Omah and I’ll get back to you…
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PCM data transmission was only in it’s infancy and not possible in 1969…
Development[edit]
DSD is a method of storing a delta-sigma signal before applying a decimation process that converts the signal to a PCM signal. Delta-sigma conversion was first described by C.C. Cutler in 1954,[2] but was not named as such until a 1962 paper by Inose et al. Decimation did not initially exist and oversampled data was sent as-is. The proposal to decimate oversampled delta-sigma data before converting it into PCM audio was made by D. J. Goodman in 1969.[3]
DSD technology was later developed and commercialized by Sony and Philips, the designers of the audio CD. However, in 2005, Philips later sold its DSD tool division to Sonic Studio.[4][better source needed]
Of all the facts casting doubt on the lunar landing this is the least of them. How to you imagine a phone call from London to Birmingham got from one city to the other in the 1960s? It was bounced from tower to tower over the microwave links stacked in groups and supergroups comprising many individual calls.
Ironically some of these microwave links had to be turned off during the Apollo 13 flight because they interfered with the transmissions from the lunar lander (the lifeboat) when it was near the horizon. They used similar frequencies.
Technically putting a phone call from a president up to the space craft even then was a piece of piss, it is just another audio signal.
If you want to get technical it was before the days of multiplexing (which involves chopping a signal into small pieces and sending each piece one after another), in those days a 3Kz telephone call was stacked on top of each other using frequency multiplication/ modulation. ie one call was 0 to 3khz the next one was 3khz to 6Khz the next was 6khz to 9khz etc - those figures are wrong because there was bigger separation but illustrate the idea. No doubt data and voice communication with the space craft was dealt with in a similar way.
BTW this was a long time ago so I might have my terms wrong but the principle is right
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Unfortunately Bruce there weren’t towers every hundred miles or so all the way from the moon…
I can’t even get a signal on my mobile sometimes and the nearest tower is only two miles away…
BT has certainly gone down the nick since you left…
Oh dear! The reason for the towers is because the Earth is a globe and the radio signals travel in a straight line. However you might have noticed that the Moon is visible at night and sometimes during the day because light (like radiowaves) travels in a straight line so no towers are required to “bend” the signal round the curve of the Earth. All that is required is to point the dish at the Moon.
Why not watch “The Dish”?
That is probably because the phone aerials are tilted down to limit their range. They are designed that way.
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NASA’s subsequent investigation revealed that the No. 2 oxygen tank onboard Apollo 13 had been strong textaccidentally dropped during maintenance before the Apollo 10 mission in 1969, causing slight internal damage that didn’t show up in later inspections.
During testing in March 1970, the reinstalled tank failed to properly empty itself of oxygen. The testing team decided to solve this problem by heating the tank overnight to force the liquid oxygen to burn off. But the surge of power from the high-voltage DC system on the ground caused the automatic shut-off switches on the tank’s heater to fail, and the temperature spiked to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Though there was no external indication of the problem, the heat apparently damaged the insulation on the wires inside the tank—effectively turning the tank into a bomb waiting to explode.
A Credit to all who pulled together to bring them back.
Thanks Cinders and very interesting. I didn’t know a lot of that stuff…
By the way, does this belong to you?
