Posted by George Brennan on July 31, 2019, 4:44 pm, in reply to "Loopier by the day..."
You are not alone, at least not on this matter.On the other hand you are what I would abusively call a Remainiac, which means that neither of us has a single kindred spirit on this board. Never mind.
I never enter into technical arguments because life is too short and real expertise too rare. However any one at all may enter political and psychological arguments. 25 years ago I heckled a meeting with the obvious argument put by Phil Plait below. The answer at that time was that the Kremlin had its own complex motives for suppressing the truth. Now it seems the answers are technical and arcane. The Russians were not able to find the truth before it was discovered by a few gifted amateurs in the West
from Wikipedia:
"Hoax theory debunker Phil Plait says in his book Bad Astronomy, that the Soviets – with their own competing Moon program, an extensive intelligence network and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data – would have 'cried foul' if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing,[60] especially since their own program had failed. Proving a hoax would have been a huge propaganda win for the Soviets.
Conspiracist Bart Sibrel responded, incorrectly asserting that, "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep space craft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly canceled."[61]
In fact, the Soviets had been sending uncrewed spacecraft to the Moon since 1959,[62] and "during 1962, deep space tracking facilities were introduced at IP-15 in Ussuriisk and IP-16 in Evpatoria (Crimean Peninsula), while Saturn communication stations were added to IP-3, 4 and 14,"[63] the latter having a 100 million km range.[64] The Soviet Union tracked the Apollo missions at the Space Transmissions Corps, which was "fully equipped with the latest intelligence-gathering and surveillance equipment."[65] Vasily Mishin, in an interview for the article "The Moon Programme That Faltered," describes how the Soviet Moon program dwindled after the Apollo landings.[66]
Also, there was nothing "abrupt" about the Apollo cancellations, which were made for cost-cutting reasons. These were announced in January and September 1970,[67] two full years before the "late 1972" claimed by Sibrel.[68] (S