Has man walked on the Moon?

Question

Is there any concrete, solid proof of this space odyssey?

Is there a way that I personally have a look a it? Let's say, with a nice telescope ?

Answer 1

Besides

• the command module

• the rocks

• a dozen of people who went there,
• 400,000 scientists and engineers,
• TV footage and photo material,
• an actual mirror we left there that we can shine a laser on

no we don't have any evidence ;-)

The artifacts of the mission have been seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and probably other satellites. They can't be seen from Earth.

Answer 2

I've spent a great deal of effort arguing about the moon landing, and done a great deal of research (the google kind, not the graduate kind) into the claims about the moon landing "hoax." The biggest struggle I've had is that I (obviously) don't possess all the knowledge from every scientist who worked on Apollo, and the person I'm arguing with will normally ask more and more detailed questions until I can't answer them, and they say something like "see? You find out it's a government cover-up if you dig deep enough."

Most of the claims I hear are technical in nature, and are easy to debunk if you can go read about the subject and then follow up with the person (and the person is willing to appeal to fact, which in many cases, is doubtful). Some of the technical claims I hear:

• We could never go to the moon, because it's impossible to send a man through the Van Allen belts
• We could never go to the moon because it would take an absurd amount of energy to keep the astronauts warm
• We could never go to the moon because they couldn't take enough oxygen.
• The president couldn't have made a phone call to Neil Armstrong on the moon.
• We couldn't have broadcast footage live from the moon.
• The flag waved in the wind when they put it on the "moon" and there's no wind on the moon.
• It would have been easier and less expensive to use a sound stage on earth, so that's what they did.

All of these are founded on a misunderstanding of some scientific discipline or the other. Most people don't know that the Van Allen belts aren't made of "radiation," but high energy charged particles. Or that the astronauts were plenty warm from being in direct sunlight the entire time, and had to keep cool.

These are supplemented with claims that the US would do anything to win the space race. Since the technical challenges are insurmountable, it follows that the landings were faked in order to win. Of course, the technical challenges aren't insurmountable -- and the evidence that the moon landings are real is overwhelming.

There's a few things that I think are very convincing evidence that the moon landings happened:

• independent astronomers the world over tracked the command module on its way to and from the moon (eg., here)
• all the Apollo missions brought back much more lunar material than has ever been found on earth (382 kg, as opposed to the 50-ish kg found as meteorites)
• the moon rocks were studied by top geologists from all over the world and there are no disputes that they are of lunar origin, and that they didn't fall through the earth's atmosphere unprotected.
• The oldest moon rocks are around 4.5 billion years old, approximately the age of the earth itself. These couldn't be found on earth due to plate tectonics happening over the course of its lifetime.
• The Soviets' Luna 16, 20, and 24 probes brought back lunar material and matched the Apollo moon rocks.
• the LRO photographed the landing sites, and SELENE mapped the geography of the landing sites and found that it matched the photos taken on the moon (which they could not if the photos were faked). (here, and here)
• the video footage of the moon landings is consistent with a low gravity environment in a vacuum, and would have been impossible to film on earth in the 60's and 70's.
• there are mountains and mountains of evidence, and yet nobody of reputable scientific background has been able to disprove that we went to the moon. Indeed, not one shred of evidence has been disproved -- all claims that I have heard about the footage and pictures are easily explained and do not contradict the evidence.