atheists and "conspiracy" theories

[Cyberman]

First of all, there is actually a lot of evidence to prove that the moon landing was faked. Just look at so much of the photos and you can see it was staged. Plus, if we were there and technology is so much better now, why haven't we been back?

I'm sitting here hoping that you were joking when you wrote this. There is exactly as much evidence that the Moon landings were faked as there is for creationism, and it's just as credible. Apart from those laser reflectors, consider that the Apollo program returned nearly 400 kg of material in the form of rock and dust samples, all of which has to be accounted for. This resource goes into the whole hoax conspiracy in incredible detail:

http://www.clavius.org/

Check out their forum (and their new one) as well to see how well the Hoax Believers defend their case. Hint: it's painful.

As to why haven't we been back to the Moon: I wrote a whole article on exactly this point over at the Connecticut Valley Atheists (CVA) forum many moons (!) ago. However, since that site went tits-up recently, I'll have to try and recreate it from memory.

We have been back, many times. Since Apollo 11, NASA has sent manned capsules to the Moon a further six times. It is true that America was the first nation to set a man down on the lunar surface, although Russia actually beat the US to the punch ten years year earlier when their Luna-1 probe performed a fly-by in January 1959, beating America's Pioneer 4 by two months. Later that year, Russia's Luna-2 became the first man-made object to reach (ok, crash into) the lunar surface. However, as we all know, Neil Armstrong was indeed the first human to step out onto the Moon's surface; a record which still stands to this day.

In the years since Apollo 17's landing in 1972, there have been seventeen missions to the Moon by five different national space agencies including NASA, with more planned for the immediate future. These missions, though not manned, have run the full gamut from simple fly-bys, orbiters and photo-reconnaisance to landers, rovers and sample return missions. Even the Apollo mission is still going on; those famous laser reflectors are monitored daily as part of the Apollo project.

As you correctly observed, the technology has improved greatly over the past decades. That is precisely why NASA and other spage agencies have chosen to go the robot probe route over manned spaceflight since:

* it's bloody dangerous, as evidenced by Apollo 1's never leaving the launchpad and Apollo 13's almost never making it back;

* it's reletively cheaper. A robot probe can be made as small and as light as the equipment it has to carry for the mission it's designed to carry out, without having to worry about life support and the concomitant fuel increase for all that unnecessary extra mass;

* it's easier to sell to the public at large, as well as to the relevant funding authorities. While Apollo did provide a short-term boost to national morale during a particularly troubled period, eventually in the public eyes it became an expensive way of sending people a quarter of a million miles to play golf - regardless of how much actual science was also achieved and valuable data returned;

* robot probes can gather more data, more quickly and more reliably, as well as in more extreme environments, than a team of even the most brilliant scientists over a long period cooped up in a tin can.

So don't let me hear the words "Moon" and "hoax" in the same sentence again, unless it's to point and laugh. Ok?