and think satellites are just hanging from high tech weather balloons

What? I mean the fact that you somehow extracted that from my comment tells me you're not a serious person. The orbital mechanics required to keep a satellite in orbit (or launch out of orbit and into the orbit of another heavenly body) have been understood since Newton... who had no dreams of "high tech weather balloons." What the hell does that even mean?

American Moon basically just tells me good reasons why we haven't gone back (aside from "cause fake"), while regurgitating all the talking points.

• Too expensive

• Too challenging

• People died (these top three are the weakest, which is odd that the movie would lead with them. They also aren't really arguments, so I'm not bothering with refuting them).

• Russians were really our friends the whole time? (that's a new one on me)

• Distributed manufacturing means no one had to know it was faked ...except that any one of those people/companies could have said "oh yea, our product never worked." Everything had to work to accomplish the mission, and no one has come out saying any part didn't. Not only did it have to work, but it had to integrate with other parts, and nobody's saying that didn't happen either. They said it's like 20k companies right? So that's leadership at 20k companies that have to stay quiet... let's say the big 5 (lead engineers, CEO, CFO)... that's 100k people that have to say their shit worked and integrated with the others. Possible, not likely. Also stagehands and set operators would've watched the footage and said "hey, that's exactly what we filmed!" No one's said that, and those who could are dying off pretty quickly. Nothing to lose, but we still haven't heard from them.

• The retroreflectors bit is hilarious. Yes, we know you can bounce a laser off the moon and detect it; regolith is reflective (which is why we can see the moon at all). But you have to use SOOPER sensitive equipment to see it because you're getting a small fraction of the reflection. Like headlights on a tree vs. headlights on a road sign or road reflector - the image is much brighter when it's coming off a dedicated reflector, and that's what we see when we hit the ones left on the moon. That's why in a laser lab (not that you've ever been to one, but just know this is true), they bounce lasers off expensive highly polished mirrors instead of, idk, very white plates. Because when you're taking a precise measurement, you want the strongest signal possible and not just some noise that "oh look, we can kinda see the laser." But the next part is where it gets really funny: "And even if reflectors are there, they could've been dropped there by an unmanned probe like the Soviets did."... So in 45 short minutes we've gone from "it's impossible to get to the moon" to "well, it's impossible to get men to the moon." So now the only challenge is getting back... Alright, I'm captivated.

• Well awesome... "The lunar rocks could've been brought back by unmanned probes like the Soviets did." Okay, so we can get probes back... but we definitely couldn't do it with people as a payload instead of not people. Shit so now the only logistical problems are food, oxygen, and waste management. Oh and extra fuel for weight, but that's negligible. Like I said, the moon rocks were one of my doubts, but this documentary seems to assert that the Soviets definitely brought some back, so I'm not sure how much worse it'd be (if at all) for men to bring them back instead of a robot. Lol "WHY DOES NASA NEED TO PROVE IT?" Fuck, that was already covered - the "moon hoax" theory blew up, particularly with the advent of the internet, so NASA responded. Shit they even show NASA's web page that was only created after the moon hoax conspiracy became more widespread.

• So now "we were really good at making movies look like real life, so NASA just made a good movie." Fair enough. Hell, birds might not even be real. Plato's Allegory of the Cave comes to mind. The follow up examples are retarded though and again run counter to the point - we have physical evidence that King Kong didn't climb the Empire State Building or that NYC wasn't washed away (and a complete lack of evidence of Oz), and we also have some evidence of men leaving stuff on the moon. We also have the authors of those works themselves saying that they were all works of fiction, while the only people saying the moon landing was fake are seemingly everyone who did nothing but watch and give conjecture as to how it could have been faked. The "authors of the work," so to speak, to the person, say it was real. So again, not really the "gotcha" the doc tries to make it. Up to this point in the movie (~52 minutes), I mean, even if men didn't go to the moon, but we were able to send unmanned probes and return samples and leave shit there, AND film movies that make it look like men did it and not robots... Idk, still pretty damn impressive.

• Next argument is basically the same as the previous. "NASA made a really good simulator, so they didn't have to actually go." Hilarious again is the fact that the doc concedes that we sent probes there to land and orbit the moon. So again, we can get to the moon, we can return from the moon, but we didn't send men there because we're really good at simulations or something. K yea, maybe. I didn't personally go, so I can't say for sure that we've put men on the moon. But the evidence is pretty compelling, and even if the final "men were there" part is a lie, all of the engineering feats surrounding it are still pretty amazing.

• Van Allen belts - flew through the thinner parts (i.e. not at the equator) at very high speed. NASA calculated the exposure as something like 12 rads/hour, which is well below the lethal dose (as the doc mentions). Radiation like that is hard on electronics too - SEUs are bad. But we run satellites through there all the time, and again, the doc even posits that the Soviets and Americans had been sending unmanned probes to the moon and back, so somehow the Van Allen belts had been largely mitigated in those missions. Which is to say, a bit of radiation protection and limiting exposure is all it really takes. Not nearly as big a concern as it's always made out to be; I'm a little surprised the doc even references it as evidence against. As to why that Orion video makes dramatic mention of the Van Allen belts as "a problem we need to solve"... I mean, that's true. It's dramatic effect to keep people interested - the problem has been solved. We have probes that basically live in the things; if radiation hardening weren't a thing, they would've gone incommunicado long ago. And I mean, if you're into SHTF type shit, you can go buy some rad hard microelectronics if you're afraid of nukes dropping (though if one drops that close it'll take more than that to survive). So yea, just like you wouldn't want to stand in an X-ray for hours on end, it would be bad to live in the Van Allen belts. But running through them at 25Mm/hour behind a few layers of metal walls... not as bad. The doc takes a bunch of statements out of context ("Van Allen himself said they were deadly!" Yea man, so are X-rays.) as arguments against, which is always a bad sign when trying to make a compelling case (and the doc is increasingly doing while contradicting itself).

• Holy shit the LEM thing. The construction arguments are silly so I'll skip them; just look at any module out in space today and you could make the same claims. But then "See? Here's what a probe landing looks like on Mars." So A) we can get a probe to land on Mars, and B) Mars has 2-3 times the gravity, which means much more thrust required, and it means an atmosphere to settle the dust much more quickly rather than launching it into oblivion due to lack of anything to stop the inertia. This is another self-contradictory part because they said they used the scale moon model to simulate orbiting and landing, but the scale model clearly didn't have any dust, which you can see the LEM's engine blowing away in the descent video. And as to why the dust didn't settle on the landing pads, that Russian dude in the interview is wrong - it's because the dust doesn't hang around because there's no atmosphere and very little gravity. The lack of atmosphere means there's no pressure differential after the engine shut off to pull dust/air back in to where the engine had been firing. I don't understand why you'd expect dust in the pads if the engine shut down before landing... the dust isn't hanging around 10 meters above the surface, and as noted there's no atmosphere and very little gravity to resettle the dust anywhere near where it had been blown away. The leaf blower analogy is pretty terrible not only because a leaf blower is an air pump using the atmosphere its in to create thrust (so wouldn't work at all on the moon, even if electric), but it's being used in an entirely different environment with entirely different physics. It's such a non-sequitur that it's just a disingenuous comparison... but I've been getting a lot of that in the past 1.5 hours of this doc. Also Armstrong's comment about the surface being "very fine grained" doesn't contradict the "no crater problem." Even if the layer is 6" deep, spreading that out in a what, 10m radius or more (however far out the thrust jet was redirected)... you wouldn't be able to perceive it. Underneath is luna firma, and even the Mars rover didn't blast a crater into, uh... martia firma? The "no crater problem" isn't a problem, and the evidence they show of the dust being blown away while landing contradicts the claim. "Oh but there are still small rocks there!" yes... yes some of the rocks wouldn't have been blown away. Just like the leaf blower left some larger particles behind; I often find that the leaves move, but the sticks stay around. So the overall argument here is: because my leaf blower has a thrust limit, the lunar landing isn't real. I'm saying it a lot... not very compelling. I'll give it 10-20 more minutes.

Oh wait look at this picture. So, previous pics had some dust around the underside of the footpads, but in this one you can actually see the thrust lines in the dust extending radially outward from the center of the craft. In an environment with no atmosphere, the only thing that could have caused that is thrust from the engine's exhaust gas (like "state of matter" gas, not "gasoline" gas). Or it's just a very convenient shot with the way the spread the dust on the set, idk. In any case, the documentary is shooting itself in the foot with this photo claiming it's evidence that the engine didn't even fire.

• As to the LEM take off, it looks like the engine fires enough to reach escape velocity with the initial burst and coasts from there. Idk how long the engines were supposed to have fired, but they clearly aren't accelerating after the initial push/burst, so that explains the lack of noise in the cabin. In fact this video shows the ENTIRE CONTEXT (recurring theme) which shows a flame on the initial burst, then when the LEM reaches altitude, it kicks the engines on full thrust which can be seen in the video and heard on the audio. Seems like very convenient footage for the doc to have left out. Patience thinning.

• Now the Grumman specs problem and the missing tapes - yea, this is where my doubts lie and aren't well mitigated by any evidence. I mean, then again, I've worked government, and that excuse is plausible. There's a record retention schedule for everything. Of course these tapes and data should've been exempted IMO, but again... I've worked in government. It's not implausible... even in the private sector. I helped design a diagnostic product that is still in use today, and I guarantee you the company doesn't still have my lab notebook or anything much beyond like... the specs of the current iteration of the product.

So yea, it does raise doubt, but on the whole the documentary to this point has pushed me more to believing than not. Bad faith arguments, poor analogies, misleading videos without context... I thought I would end at "okay we've been there, but maybe men haven't been there," but after the LEM part, particularly in the context of the claims with the rest of the video, I'm starting to think men went there.

Good exercise, thanks! Maybe I'll check the last half another time. Maybe they were saving the best for last.

• K fine one more - the audio delay thing. Where was the recording pulled from? If from the spacecraft, the receipt-to-acknowledgement delay would be minimal from Houston to the astronauts (which is all they show). However, if you're recording from Houston's side, there would be a significant delay. Simple as; there were tape recorders on both ends (this is well-documented). The delay would be dependent on which recording you listened to. Say it with me this time: The documentary seems to deliberately omit this very important context.