There will always be non-believers...

[Dangerous-Dave]

Careful posters, this thread is starting to go where it should not.

Did I just step into a meeting of the Plymouth Brethren?

Oh well, back off to the fun astro forum...

[MikeWilson]

Interesting points, all.

I don't suppose that the technical challenges were insurmountable but point taken about 1960's technology

[sbooder]

It is worth watching the 5 episodes of Myth Busters. Here is link to part 1

[PeterM]

Sadly conspiracy theories spring from paranoia and the one thing you can't do with paranoia is counter it with with reason and evidence. C'est la vie.

[SeedyF]

40% of Americans don't even have a passport - they don't even go to Canada or Mexico so no surprise they can't believe someone would go to another planet!

Lets not even get started on how stupid the general populous would have to be to elect George Dubya

[brianb]

They needed to be able to see the earth to be able to get a message back to it. Hence the radio blackout when the orbiter went behind the moon.

Not a place to be stuck alone with 1960s technology and no view of home!

And they were dependent on ground computers ... the spacecraft computers didn't have the power to calculate the orbital manoeuvres necessary in the event of a landing being aborted, it was necessary to achieve rendevous within a short period of time as the life support expendables on the LM ascent stage were very limited in capacity.

There was a plan to place two comms satellites in lunar orbit so as to achieve continuous communications with Mission Control and to make a far side landing on Apollo 20 ... but the money was cut. There was also an ambitious programme to place a CSM in polar orbit for a month allowing very high resolution mapping of the whole lunar surface (no LM but extra consumables to support the longer mission, probably also deleting one member of the crew - the Saturn V launch vehicle limited the full Apollo CSM+LM stack to orbits close to the lunar equator) but this was dropped after Apollo 13.