It would have been impossible, based on the camera shots to have been taken on earth using the technology of the time. Parallel shadowing couldn't be faked until the 90s using computer technology.

To try similar lighting on a studio set physically would require lots of laser lighting, closely packed - and given the number of lasers in existence and their cost ( I.e. not enough and at a cost exceeding the entire Apollo project).

Non divergent shadows mean the footage in 1969 could only have been shot on the moon in natural light

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

They went round the Moon and returned to Earth in the Lunar Module having abandoned the Mother Ship. If it was all a fake, why would they bother to have a Lunar Module, or was that part of the conspiracy?If so, I guess the whole near disaster was fake? Not sure why they would do that, would that make them look better than the Russians or the opposite?! It really is completely nuts to give credence to these moon landing conspiracies.

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. [Orwell]

Not me, unlike the conspiracy brigade, I'm referring to an expert. I wouldn't call them skeptics, as skeptics respond to evidence. When in doubt, I read what experts in a field have to say.

[Link]

Popular Mechanics is a reasonable source.

Edited by jamiemartin721 (30 Oct 2017 1.40pm)

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

The next step is a very big one. The moon is ridiculously close (at 250,000 or so miles) - Apollo 11 was in flight for 8 days.

The next feasible step would be Mars - Which would take about five years to get to.

Both NASA and the Soviet effectively wasted money on man space flights, realistically, when most of the important discoveries are produced by unmanned missions.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

Sales tax-based revenue is incredibly regressive. Lower income families spend almost every penny they earn, whereas higher income families don't. So the tax rates paid by the wealthy will be a fraction of the tax rate paid by the poor.

It's one of the reasons why tax cuts don't stimulate the economy and/or "trickle down". If you give a tax cut to a person who spends every penny they earn, they will feed that extra cash directly back into the economy by spending it or using it to pay down debt (which increases that person's spending power over time). If you give a tax cut to a person who already has more money than they can spend, they just toss it on the pile of unspent money they already have.

It has been shown over various efforts at this over the years - particularly since the 1980s - that a dollar of tax cuts adds about 30 cents to the economy, because 70 cents just gets banked. Conversely, a dollar of stimulus adds about a dollar-forty to the economy, because it gets injected into the economy at the bottom and percolates up generating more value as it goes.

The grand age of the US middle class was in the 1950s. At that time, the top rate of tax was 85%. That money was spent on infrastructure, amongst other things - building roads and bridges that benefitted communities and business - and it generated wealth for a brad cross-section of the population. And the rich did very nicely too, thankyouverymuch.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

Everyone hates that the tax code is so complicated, but it's necessary to have a series of tax methods because if you pick just one - say, income - then people will quickly figure a way around it.

In the US, we have a hated thing called "Alternative Minimum Tax" which is a crude catch-all that is there to make sure that people don't engineer a whole raft of deductions from "income" and cut their tax bill to below what the IRS thinks is right. I got hit with it once, not because I made a lot of money, but because I paid two years' of property taxes on my home in the same income tax year. That was too large a deduction from income so...boom! AMT. It hurt.

Trump has famously declined to release his tax returns, but one year did "leak", being 2005, in which Trump paid about 36.5 million in taxes on 153 million of income. That's a tax rate of 24%, which is reasonable or robbery depending on your views on taxes.

BUT, what the return showed was that this number was made up almost entirely of AMT, because his computed tax liability was only 5.3 million, or 3.5%. I don't care who you are, paying 3.5% on 153 million of income is wrong. I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear that Trump's tax reform includes eliminating AMT.

AMT is a nightmare, but without it those with money to spend on tax accountants etc. can avoid (not evade) paying taxes, leaving an incrementally larger tax burden on everyone else.

One last comment on using a single tax source: Texas is one of only two states that does not charge a state income tax - that you pay in addition to Federal income tax but which amount is deductible from your income for Federal tax purposes. Putting the entire tax burden on property owners is a nightmare, because the state decides what is the taxable value of your property. So, basically, they make up a number that you have to pay every year, year after year, until you die. Most other states use a combination of income tax and property tax, which is why I shall be leaving Texas the moment I retire.

Example: the property tax rate in the city of Houston (because there are local property taxes as well as state taxes) is 2.5%. That's what you have to pay every year on the value of your home. So if your house is worth 200,000, that's 5,000, or 416/month.

But what if there's a boom in house prices? Next year the state can say your house is now worth 220,000, so your tax bill has gone up 10% even though your income may not have matched that acceleration. So you just got a little poorer. And then next year, the same. And each year after that until you can no longer afford to live in a house that you may have long paid off. It's insidious.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.