On the Moon, and whether they were there at all, there has been a debate for decades. Supporters of the landing of astronauts argue that this event was a decisive argument in the space dispute between the US and the USSR, after which the basic space programs were significantly adjusted on both sides. For some, the first manned flight to the moon is a myth developed by the cunning Americans, but for most people, visiting our natural satellite is an indisputable fact.

background

The first space launch in the direction of our satellite was launched in 1959, already 15 months after the launch. For a long time, only Soviet space explorers acted in this direction. Representatives of the United States began to work in this direction only after the launches of their Ranger lunar automata, the first series of which was launched in 1964.

Until the early 70s, the question "How many people were on the moon?" did not make sense - there were no technological possibilities for this. In 1971, the Apollo program began to be seriously developed in the USA. Its successful implementation cost American taxpayers $25 billion. President Kennedy considered the successful launch of the lunar expansion a priority national task that would strengthen the space prestige of the United States and prove the economic and scientific capabilities of this state.

The implementation of the plan to land a man on the moon became possible after the launch and successful testing of the Saturn-5 launch vehicle. It was he who was used in the configuration of "Apollo 11".

First landing

About that, during the first interplanetary expedition, it is known from newspaper publications and reports, which in July 1969 circled the whole world. Names of three Americans, members of the first space crew, - N. Armstrong, M. Collins, Edwin Aldrin. Of these, Armstrong and Aldrin were the first to set foot on the soil of our satellite, while Collins remained in lunar orbit. Astronauts left on the moon commemorative signs with images of the dead space explorers, collected samples of the lunar soil, installed radar reflectors, after 21 hours they started on the take-off stage and joined the main flight unit.

Eight days later, the crew descended without incident in the Pacific Ocean, where they were picked up by a rescue team.

Further expeditions

The successful start of the pioneers of space gave rise to further expeditions on ships of the Apollo type. In total, five expeditions were sent to our natural satellite. This already gives a general idea of ​​how many people have been on the Moon and how many reserves have been expended for these flights. According to official sources, 26 people were sent to the moon, and twelve lucky people managed to directly touch

How many times people flew to the moon can be determined from the Apollo space program - a total of 7 expeditions were sent, and only one of them was unsuccessful. The ill-fated Apollo 13 had an accident at the start of its voyage, its crew was forbidden to descend to the surface of the satellite. Therefore, the answer to the question of how many times people have been to the moon contains a small catch. Apollo 13 flew to our satellite, but did not land on the surface of the moon.

twice?

Were there any people who visited our satellite several times? All the people who flew to the moon were US citizens, experienced astronaut pilots who received special training at NASA centers. Of these, there was only one astronaut who managed to visit our Moon twice. It turned out to be Y. Sernan. He first flew to the moon as part of the Apollo 10 space crew. Then he was on board artificial satellite The moon, only 15 km from its surface. The second time, as commander of the Apollo 17 spacecraft, Eugene Cernan flew to the Moon in 1972. Then, together with his partner H. Schmitt, he landed on the moon in the region of the Taurus Mountains and the Littrov crater. Cernan went to the surface of our satellite three times in total and stayed there for 23 hours.

So how many people were on the moon? A total of twelve people touched the surface of the moon, and twenty-six flew as part of space crews.

In fact, the Americans did not land on the moon, and the entire Apollo program is a hoax, conceived in order to create the image of a great state in the United States. The lecturer showed an American film that debunks the legend of the landing of astronauts on the moon. The following contradictions seemed particularly convincing.

The American flag on the moon, where there is no atmosphere, flaps as if it were being blown by air currents.

Look at the photo allegedly taken by the Apollo 11 astronauts. Armstrong and Aldrin are the same height, and the shadow of one of the astronauts is one and a half times longer than the other. Probably, they were illuminated from above by a spotlight, which is why the shadows of different lengths turned out, like from a street lamp. By the way, who took this photo? After all, both astronauts are in the frame at once.

There are many other technical inconsistencies: the image in the frame does not twitch, the size of the shadow does not match the position of the Sun, and so on. The lecturer argued that the historical footage of the astronauts' walks on the moon was made in Hollywood, and the corner light reflectors, by which the paratroopers' parameters were specified, were simply dropped from automatic probes. In 1969-1972, Americans flew to the moon 7 times. With the exception of the Apollo 13 emergency flight, 6 expeditions were successful. Each time, one cosmonaut remained in orbit, while two landed on the moon. Each stage of these flights was recorded literally every minute, detailed documentation and logbooks have been preserved. More than 380 kg of lunar rock was brought to Earth, 13,000 photographs were taken, a seismograph and other instruments were installed on the Moon, equipment, a lunar vehicle and a battery-powered self-propelled gun were tested. Moreover, the astronauts found and delivered to Earth a camera from a probe that visited the Moon two years before man. In the laboratory on this camera, the terrestrial bacteria streptococci that survived in outer space were found. This discovery turned out to be important for understanding the fundamental laws of survival and distribution of living matter in the Universe. In America, they argue whether the Americans went to the moon. In principle, nothing surprising, because in Spain, after the return of Columbus, there were also disputes about what new continents he discovered. Such disputes are inevitable new earth will not be easily accessible to everyone. But only a dozen people have walked on the moon so far. Despite the fact that in the USSR there was no live broadcast of Neil Armstrong's first walk on the Moon, our and American scientists worked closely in processing scientific results the Apollo expeditions. The USSR possessed a rich photo archive, which was compiled on the basis of the results of several flights of the Luna spacecraft, as well as samples of lunar soil. Thus, the Americans had to negotiate not only with Hollywood, but also with the USSR, competition with which could be the only argument in favor of the hoax. I must add that Hollywood at that time had not even heard of computer graphics and simply did not have the technique to fool the whole world. As for the footprint of the astronaut Konrad, then, as explained to us at the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where lunar soil samples are studied, since the lunar regolith is a very loose rock, the imprint must have remained. There is no air on the Moon, regolith does not dust there and does not scatter to the sides, as on Earth, where it immediately turns into swirling dust underfoot. And the flag behaved as it should. Although there is no and cannot be wind on the Moon, any material (wires, cables, cords) that the astronauts unrolled in low gravity, under the influence of an imbalance of forces, wriggled for several seconds and then froze. Finally, the strange static image is explained by the fact that the astronauts did not hold the camera in their hands, like terrestrial operators, but mounted it on tripods screwed to their chests. The US lunar program could not be a spectacle also because it was paid for very high price. One of the Apollo crews died during an earth training, the Apollo 13 crew returned to Earth without reaching the Moon. Yes, and NASA's $25 billion financial outlay for the Apollo program has been repeatedly reviewed by numerous audit committees. The version that the Americans did not fly to the moon is not the first fresh sensation. Now in America, an even more exotic legend is growing by leaps and bounds. It turns out (and there is documentary evidence for this), a man still visited the moon. But it was not an American man. And the Soviet one! The USSR sent cosmonauts to the Moon to service their numerous lunar rovers and instruments. But the USSR did not inform the world about these expeditions, because they were suicide cosmonauts. They were not destined to return to their Soviet homeland. American astronauts allegedly saw the skeletons of these nameless heroes on the moon. According to the explanation of specialists from the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where cosmonauts are being prepared for the flight, approximately the same changes will occur with a corpse in a spacesuit on the Moon as with an old can of canned food. There are no decay bacteria on the Moon, and therefore an astronaut, with all his will, cannot turn into a skeleton.

To the 40th anniversary of the flight of the American spacecraft "Apollo-11"

Yaroslav Butakov

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"Thatisonesmallstepforaman,onegiantleapfor mankind) - these words were said by Neil Armstrong when the first man stepped on the surface of the moon. This landmark event took place 40 years ago, on July 20, 1969.

1. Twice two questions

As the decades passed, many legends and speculations developed around the topic of human visitation to the moon. The most famous and sensational of them is that American astronauts did not land on the surface of the Moon, and all television reports about the landing and the Apollo program itself were a grandiose hoax. Some wisecrackers have even reworded Armstrong's phrase about "humanity's giant leap" into "humanity's giant swindle." The "irrefutable argument" in favor of the fact that people were not on the moon is already devoted to extensive literature and dozens, if not hundreds of films shot in different countries and in different languages.

Almost simultaneously with this, at the end of the 1980s, in the (then still) USSR, information was made public about the presence in the 1960s-1970s. Soviet program of manned flights to the moon. It became known that in the USSR it was also planned to first fly around the moon by astronauts, and then land on the surface of our natural satellite.

However, the leadership of the USSR, as well as the United States, saw only political meaning in landing on the moon.

After the flight of Apollo 11, it became clear that Soviet Union hopelessly lagged behind the United States in the implementation lunar program. According to the leaders of the CPSU, the flight of Soviet cosmonauts to the moon under such conditions would not have had the desired effect in the rest of the world. Therefore, the Soviet lunar program was frozen at a stage already close to manned flight, and it was officially announced that the USSR had never had such a program. That the USSR moved in an alternative way and paid main attention not to political prestige, but to scientific research of the moon with the help of automatic devices, in which our cosmonautics, indeed, has achieved great success. This is the most popular explanation for why Soviet cosmonauts never repeated the achievements of their American counterparts-competitors.

So, in the historiography (if I may say so) of the lunar problem, two differently solved questions now dominate:

1. Did the Americans land on the moon?

2. Why was the Soviet lunar program not completed?

If you look closely, then both questions are interrelated, and the very formulation of the second is, as it were, the answer to the first. Indeed, if the Soviet lunar program really existed and was already close to being realized, why can't it be assumed that the Americans were able to really bring their Apollo program to life?

Another question that follows from here. If Soviet space specialists had even the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the fact of the American landing on the moon, would the Soviet leadership, based precisely on the political goals of the lunar program, not have brought it to the end only in order to convict the Americans of the universal lie and inflict the most mortal blow to the international prestige of the United States, while simultaneously raising the authority of the USSR to an unprecedented height?

Although these two questions already contain the answer to the very first one, let's deal with everything in order. Let's start with the official version of the history of the Apollo program.

2. How a German genius took the Yankees into space

The successes of American rocket science are associated primarily with the name of the famous German designer Baron Wernher von Braun, the creator of the first combat ballistic missiles V-2 (V-2). At the end of the war, Brown, along with other German experts in the field of advanced military technology, was taken to the United States.

However, the Americans did not trust Brown to conduct serious research for a long time. While working in the Huntsville, Alabama arsenal on short-range missiles, Brown continued to design advanced launch vehicles (LV) capable of developing cosmic speed. But the contract for the creation of such a rocket and satellite was received by the US Navy.

In July 1955, US President Dwight Eisenhower publicly promised that his country would soon launch the first artificial Earth satellite (AES). However, it was easier said than done. If we have the genius of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev quite quickly created fundamentally new missile systems, then the Americans did not have home-grown masters of this level.

Several unsuccessful attempts by the Navy to launch its invariably exploding rocket prompted the Pentagon to treat the former SS Sturmbannfuehrer, who became a US citizen in 1955, more favorably.

In 1956, Wernher von Braun received a contract to develop the Jupiter-S intercontinental ICBM and satellite.

In 1957, the news of the successful launch of the Soviet satellite sounded like a bolt from the blue for the Americans. It became clear that the United States was significantly behind the USSR in terms of penetration into space. After another failure of the Navy with the launch of its launch vehicle, the main work on the creation of promising launch vehicles and satellites was concentrated in Brown's hands. This area of ​​activity was withdrawn from the Pentagon. For her, in 1958, a special structure was created - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under federal government USA.

Brown headed the John Marshall Space Center, which became NASA's Space Flight Center in 1960. Under his leadership, 2 thousand employees worked (then more), concentrated in 30 departments. All of the department heads were originally German, former employees of Brown's V-2 program. On February 1, 1958, the first successful launch of the Jupiter-S launch vehicle and the launch of the first American satellite Explorer-1 into orbit took place. But the crown of Wernher von Braun's life was his Saturn V rocket and the Apollo program.

3. On the way to the moon

The year 1961 was marked by a new triumph of Soviet science and technology. On April 12, Yuri Gagarin made the first flight on the Vostok spacecraft (SC). In an effort to create the appearance of covering the backlog from the USSR, on May 5, 1961, the Americans launched the Redstone-3 launch vehicle from the Mercury spacecraft along a ballistic trajectory. The first American astronaut officially considered as such, Alan Bartlett Shepard (who later went to the Moon), spent only 15 minutes in space and made a splashdown in Atlantic Ocean only 300 miles from the launch site at Cape Canaveral. The cosmic speed of his spacecraft never reached. The next quarter-hour suborbital flight of Mercury (astronaut Virgil E. Grissom) took place on July 21, 1961.

As if in mockery, on August 6-7, the second full-fledged orbital flight of the Soviet spacecraft took place. Cosmonaut German Titov on Vostok-2 spent 25 hours and 18 minutes in space, making 17 revolutions around the Earth during this time. The first normal orbital flight for the Americans turned out only on February 20, 1962 (astronaut John H. Glenn) thanks to the new, more powerful Atlas launch vehicle. The spacecraft "Mercury" made only 3 revolutions around the Earth, having spent less than five hours in orbit.

In 1961, US President John F. Kennedy proclaimed a kind of "national project" designed to put an end to the US lag behind the USSR in the space field and to overcome the inferiority complex that arose among the Americans.

He promised that the Americans would land on the moon before the Russians, and that this would happen before the end of the 1960s. From now on, any manned space flight programs in the United States (the next was the Gemini project) were subordinated to one goal - the preparation of a landing on the moon. This was the start of the Apollo project. True, Kennedy did not live to see its implementation.

Landing on the moon required the solution of two very difficult technical problems. The first is maneuvering, undocking and docking of spacecraft modules in near-Earth and near-lunar orbits. The second is the creation of a sufficiently powerful launch vehicle capable of giving the payload, consisting of a two-module spacecraft, three astronauts and life support systems (LSS), the second space velocity (11.2 km / s).

In the course of the flights of the Gemini spacecraft around the Earth, there has already been a tendency to overcome the backlog of the United States from the USSR in solving complex problems for spacecraft and man in space. Gemini 3 (crewed by V.I. Grissom and John W. Young) on ​​March 23, 1965, made the first maneuver in space using manual control. In June 1965, astronaut Edward H. White left Gemini 4 and spent 21 minutes in outer space (three months earlier, our Alexei Leonov - 10 minutes). In August 1965, the crew of Gemini 5 (L. Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad) set a new world record for the duration of an orbital flight - 191 hours. For comparison: at that time, the Soviet record for the duration of an orbital flight, set in 1963 by the pilot of Vostok-5, Valery Bykovsky, was 119 hours.

And in December 1965, the Gemini 7 crew (Frank Borman and James A. Lovell) completed 206 orbits in 330 and a half hours! During this flight, Gemini-6A (Walter M. Schirra and Thomas P. Stafford) approached at a distance of less than two meters (!), and in this position both spacecraft made several revolutions around the Earth. Finally, in March 1966, the Gemini 8 crew (Neil A. Armstrong and David R. Scott) made the first orbital docking with the unmanned Agena module.

The first spacecraft of the Apollo series were unmanned. On them, the elements of the flight to the moon were worked out in automatic mode. The first test of the new powerful Saturn-5 launch vehicle was carried out in November 1967 in a block with the Apollo-4 spacecraft. The third stage of the launch vehicle gave the module a speed of about 11 km / s and put it into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 18 thousand km, after which the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere. On "Apollo-5" in February 1968, different modes of operation of the lunar module were simulated in an unmanned satellite orbit.

"Saturn-5" is still the most powerful launch vehicle in history.

The launch weight of the launch vehicle was 3,000 tons, of which 2,000 tons was the weight of the first stage fuel. The weight of the second stage is 500 tons. Two stages took the third with a two-module spacecraft into the satellite orbit. The third stage gave the spacecraft, consisting of an orbital compartment with a sustainer engine and a lunar cabin, divided into landing and takeoff stages, the second space velocity. Saturn-5 was capable of launching a payload weighing up to 150 tons (including the weight of the third stage with full tanks) into near-Earth orbit, and 50 tons into a flight path to the Moon. At the cosmodrome, this entire structure rose to a height of 110 m.

The first manned flight under the Apollo program took place in October 1968. Apollo 7 (Walter M. Schirra - the first man to fly into space three times, Donn F. Eisele, R. Walter Cunningham) made 163 revolutions around the Earth lasting 260 hours, which exceeded the calculated one when flying to the Moon and back. On December 21, 1968, Apollo 8 (Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, for whom this was the third space flight, and William A. Anders) set off on the first manned flight to the Moon in history. In fact, at first it was planned to work out by the crew all the elements of a flight to the Moon in satellite orbit, but the lunar descent vehicle (lunar cabin) was not yet ready. Therefore, it was decided to first fly around the moon on the orbital module. Apollo 8 made 10 orbits around the moon.

According to some reports, it was this flight that became decisive in the freezing of the Soviet leadership of its own lunar program: now our lagging behind the Americans has become obvious.

The crew of Apollo 9 (James A. McDivitt, David R. Scott, Russell L. Schweikart) in March 1969 performed all the maneuvers associated with the undocking and docking of modules, the transition of astronauts from one compartment to another through a sealed joint no spacewalk. And Apollo 10 (Thomas P. Stafford and John W. Young - for both it was the third flight into space, Eugene A. Cernan) in May 1969 did all the same, but already in lunar orbit! The orbital (command) compartment made 31 revolutions around the Moon. The lunar cabin, having undocked, performed two independent revolutions around the Moon, descending to a height of 15 km above the surface of the satellite! In general, all stages of the flight to the moon were completed, except, in fact, landing on it.

4. The first people on the moon

Apollo 11 (commander - Neil Alden Armstrong, lunar module pilot - Edwin Eugene Aldrin, orbital module pilot - Michael Collins; for all three it was the second flight into space) launched from Cape Canaveral on July 16, 1969. After checking the onboard systems, during one and a half turns in near-Earth orbit, the third stage was turned on and the spacecraft entered the flight path to the Moon. This journey took about three days.

The design of the Apollo required one major maneuver during the flight. The orbital module, docked with the lunar cabin with its tail section, where the sustainer engine was located, was undocked, made a 180-degree turn and docked to the lunar cabin with its nose section. After that, the spent third stage was separated from the spacecraft rebuilt in this way. The other six flights to the Moon followed the same pattern.

When approaching the Moon, the astronauts turned on the main engine of the orbital (command) module for braking and transfer to a lunar orbit. Then Armstrong and Aldrin moved to the lunar module, which was soon undocked from the orbital compartment and entered an independent orbit of the artificial satellite of the moon, choosing a landing site. On July 20, 1969, at 15:17 Eastern US time (23-17 Moscow time), the Apollo 11 lunar cabin made a soft landing on the Moon in the southwestern part of the Sea of ​​Tranquility.

Six and a half hours later, after putting on spacesuits and depressurizing the lunar compartment, Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the surface of the moon. It was then that he said his famous phrase.

Live television broadcast from the surface of the moon was carried out to hundreds of countries of the world. It was watched by 600 million people (out of a then world population of 3.5 billion) in six parts of the world, including Antarctica, as well as the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.

The USSR ignored this event.

“The lunar surface at the time of landing was brightly lit and resembled a desert on a hot day. Because the sky is black, one could imagine being on a sand-strewn sports field at night, under the spotlights. Neither stars nor planets, with the exception of the Earth, were visible, ”Armstrong described his impressions. About the same thing he said to the TV camera and shortly after reaching the surface: “Like a high-mountainous desert in the United States. Unique beauty! “Great loneliness!” echoed Aldrin, who joined Armstrong 20 minutes later.

“The ground on the surface is soft and loose,” Armstrong reported of his impressions, “I easily raise dust with the toe of my shoe. I only sink an eighth of an inch into the ground, but I can see my footprints.” “The grayish-brown soil of the Moon,” wrote the November (1969) issue of the magazine “America”, published in the USSR, “turned out to be slippery, it stuck to the soles of the astronauts. When Aldrin inserted the pole into the ground, it seemed to him that the pole entered something damp. Subsequently, these "terrestrial" comparisons began to be used by skeptics to confirm the idea that the astronauts were not on the moon.

Returning to the lunar cabin, the astronauts pumped up oxygen, took off their spacesuits and, after resting, began to prepare for takeoff. The spent landing stage was undocked, and now the lunar module consisted of one takeoff stage. The total time the astronauts spent on the Moon was 21 hours and 37 minutes, of which the astronauts spent just over two hours outside the lunar cabin.

In orbit, the lunar compartment joined the main one, piloted by Michael Collins. He was destined for the most unenviable, but also the safest role in the lunar expedition - circling in orbit, waiting for his colleagues. Moving into the orbital compartment, the astronauts battened down the transfer hatch and undocked what was left of the lunar cabin. Now the spacecraft "Apollo 11" was one main block, which headed for Earth. The return trip was shorter than the trip to the Moon and was only two and a half days - falling to Earth is easier and faster than flying away from it.

The second moon landing took place on November 19, 1969. Apollo 12 crew members Charles Peter Conrad (the third flight into space; he made four of them in total) and Alan Laverne Bean stayed on the surface of the Moon for 31 hours and a half, of which 7.5 hours outside the spacecraft for two exits. In addition to installing scientific instruments, the astronauts dismantled a number of instruments for delivery to Earth from the American automatic spacecraft (ASA) Surveyor-3, which landed on the surface of the Moon in 1967.

The Apollo 13 flight in April 1970 was unsuccessful. In flight, a serious accident occurred, there was a threat of failure of the LSS. Having forcedly canceled the landing on the Moon, the Apollo 13 crew flew around our natural satellite and returned to Earth in the same elliptical orbit. The commander of the ship, James Arthur Lovell, became the first person to fly to the moon twice (although he was never destined to visit its surface).

This seems to be the only flight to the moon that Hollywood has responded to with a feature film. Successful flights did not attract his attention.

The near-disaster with Apollo 13 made it necessary to pay increased attention to the reliability of all spacecraft onboard systems. The next flight under the lunar program took place only in 1971.

On February 5, 1971, American astronaut veteran Alan Bartlett Shepard and newcomer Edgar Dean Mitchell landed on the moon near the Fra Mauro crater. They went to the lunar surface twice (more than four hours each time), and the total time spent by the Apollo 14 module on the Moon was 33 hours and 24 minutes.

On July 30, 1971, the Apollo 15 module landed on the lunar surface with David Randolph Scott (the third flight into space) and James Benson Irwin. For the first time, astronauts used a mechanical vehicle on the Moon - the "lunar car" - a platform with an electric motor with a power of only 0.25 horsepower. The astronauts made three excursions with a total duration of 18 hours and 35 minutes and traveled 27 kilometers on the Moon. The total time spent on the moon was 66 hours 55 minutes. Before starting from the moon, the astronauts left a television camera on its surface, which worked in automatic mode. She transmitted to the screens of terrestrial television the moment of takeoff of the lunar cabin.

The Lunar Vehicle was used by members of the next two expeditions. On April 21, 1972, Apollo 16 commander John Watts Young and lunar module pilot Charles Moss Duke landed at Descartes Crater. For Young, this was the second flight to the moon, but the first landing on it (in total, Young made six flights into space). Almost three days SC spent on the Moon. During this time, three excursions were made with a total duration of 20 hours and 14 minutes.

The last people to have walked on the moon to date, December 11-14, 1972, were Eugene Andrew Cernan (for whom, like Young, this was the second flight to the moon and the first landing on it) and Harrison Hagan Schmitt. The Apollo 17 crew set a number of records: they spent 75 hours on the Moon, of which 22 hours were outside spacecraft, traveled 36 km on the surface of the night star and brought back 110 kg of lunar rock samples.

By this point, the total cost of the Apollo program had exceeded $25 billion ($135 billion in 2005 prices), prompting NASA to curtail its further implementation. Scheduled flights on Apollo 18, -19 and -20 were cancelled. Of the three remaining Saturn-5 launch vehicles, one launched the only American Skylab orbital station into orbit in 1973, and the other two became museum exhibits.

The liquidation of the Apollo program and the cancellation of some other ambitious projects (in particular, a manned flight to Mars) were a disappointment for Wernher von Braun, who became NASA's deputy director of space flight planning in 1970, and may have hastened his death. Brown retired from NASA in 1972 and died five years later.

Having initially stimulated the start of the lunar programs of the USA and the USSR, the Cold War then directed the development of space technologies into the narrow channel of the arms race.

For the United States, the Space Shuttle program of reusable use became a priority, for the USSR - long-term orbital stations. It seemed that the world was heading irresistibly toward "star wars" in near-Earth space. The era of cosmic romance and the conquest of spaces was fading into the past...

5. Where does the doubt come from?

After several years, doubts began to be expressed: did the Americans really land on the moon? Now there is already a fairly large layer of literature and a rich film library proving that the Apollo program was a grandiose hoax. At the same time, there are two points of view among skeptics. According to one, the Apollo program did not carry out any space flights at all. The astronauts remained on Earth all the time, and the “moon shots” were filmed in a special secret laboratory created by NASA specialists somewhere in the desert. More moderate skeptics recognize the possibility of real flybys of the moon by the Americans, but the landing moments themselves are considered fake and film editing.

Adherents of this sensational hypothesis have developed a detailed argument. The strongest argument, in their opinion, is that in the footage of the landing of astronauts on the moon, the lunar surface does not look like (again, in their understanding) it should look like. So, they believe that stars should be visible in the pictures, since there is no atmosphere on the moon. They also pay attention to the fact that in some pictures, supposedly, the position of the shadows indicates a very close, within a few meters, location of the light source. They also note an excessively close and, as it were, cropped horizon line.

The next group of arguments is related to the "wrong" behavior of material bodies. So, the US flag set by the astronauts waved as if under gusts of wind, while there was a vacuum on the Moon. Pay attention to the strange movement of astronauts in spacesuits. They argue that under conditions of gravity six times less than the earth's astronauts had to move huge (almost a dozen meters) jumps. And they assure that the strange gait of the astronauts just imitated in the conditions gravity"jumping" movement on the moon with the help of ... spring mechanisms in spacesuits.

They suggest that almost all the astronauts who flew, according to the official version, to the Moon subsequently refused to talk about their flights, give interviews, or write memoirs. Many went crazy, died mysterious deaths, and so on. For skeptics, this is proof that the astronauts experienced terrible stress associated with the need to hide some terrible secret.

It is curious that for ufologists, the strange behavior of many astronauts of the “lunar detachment” serves to prove something completely different, namely, that on the Moon they allegedly made contact with an extraterrestrial civilization!

Finally, the last group of arguments is based on the thesis that the technologies of the late 1960s and early 1970s did not allow three people to make a manned flight to the Moon and return to Earth. They point to the insufficient power of the then launch vehicles, and most importantly (an irresistible argument in our time!) - to the imperfection of computers! And here the skeptics contradict themselves. Thus, they are forced to admit that in those days there were no opportunities for computer-graphic simulation of the course of the lunar expedition!

Supporters of the authenticity of the landings of man on the moon have an equally detailed system of counterarguments. In addition to pointing out the internal contradictions of the skeptical theory, as well as the fact that its arguments can be used to prove several mutually exclusive points of view at once, which is logically considered an automatic refutation of all of them, they provide a physical explanation for the noted "oddities".

The first is the lunar sky, where no stars are visible. Try looking up at a clear sky at night from the bright light of a street lamp. Can you see even one star? But they are there: as soon as you move into the shadow of the lantern, the stars will show through. Looking at the lunar world in the brightest (in a vacuum!) light of the Sun through powerful light filters, both the astronauts and the "eye" of the television camera, of course, could only capture the brightest objects - the lunar surface, the lunar cabin and people in space suits.

The moon is almost four times smaller than the Earth, so the curvature of the surface there is greater, and the horizon line is closer than we are used to. The effect of proximity is enhanced by the absence of air - objects on the horizon of the Moon are visible as clearly as those located near the observer.

Fluctuations of the foil flag occurred, of course, not under the influence of the wind, but according to the principle of a pendulum - the shaft was stuck with force into the lunar soil. In the future, he received more impulses for oscillations from the steps of the astronauts. The seismograph installed by them immediately caught the ground shaking caused by the movement of people. These oscillations, like any others, had a wave nature and were accordingly transmitted to the flag.

When we see astronauts in space suits on TV screens, we are always amazed at their clumsiness in such a bulky design. And on the Moon, despite a sixfold lower gravity, they would not be able to fly with all their desire, which for some reason was expected of them. They tried to move by jumping, but then they found that the earth step (in spacesuits) is also acceptable on the Moon. On the screens, Armstrong easily lifted a heavy (on Earth) toolbox and said with childish delight: “This is where you can throw any thing far!” However, skeptics claim that the scene was feigned, and that the box from which the astronauts then took out scientific equipment was ... empty at that moment.

The hoax would have to be too grandiose and long-term, and more than one thousand scientists would have to devote more than one thousand scientists to the secret!

It is unlikely that even a totalitarian state is capable of exercising such strict control over such a mass of people and preventing information leakage. The crew members of Apollo 11 installed a laser reflector on the Moon, which was then used for laser ranging from the Earth and determining the exact distance to the Moon. Was the location session also fabricated? Or were the reflector and other devices that transmitted signals to Earth until the 1980s all installed by machines?

The astronauts of all six expeditions that landed (according to the official version) on the Moon brought back to Earth a total of 380 kg of samples of lunar rocks and moon dust(for comparison: Soviet and American AKA - only 330 grams, which proves a much higher efficiency of manned flights compared to AKA for the study of celestial bodies). Were they all collected on Earth, and then passed off as lunar ones? Even those whose age is 4.6 billion years, what has no recognized analogues on Earth? However, skeptics say (and they are partly right) that there are no reliable methods for accurately determining the age of such ancient rocks. And all these centners of lunar soil were allegedly brought to Earth by machine guns. Then why is their weight three orders of magnitude higher than that brought by all other AKAs combined? And if they are terrestrial, then why is their composition identical to the lunar soil delivered by automata to Earth or analyzed by our Lunokhods on the Moon itself?

It is also noteworthy that skeptics concentrate their efforts mainly on refuting the authenticity of the first landing of a man on the moon. Whereas, in order to confirm their theory, they need to separately refute the authenticity of each of the six officially occurring landings. What they don't do

As for the imperfection of the then technologies, the “deadly” of this argument reflects the inferiority of the consciousness of modern civilized humanity, which has put itself in a fatal dependence on computers.

Just at the turn of the 1960-1970s. civilization began to drastically change the paradigm of its development. The attitude to conquer space was replaced by the attitude to the production and use of information, moreover, for utilitarian, consumer purposes. This caused a surge in the development of computer technology, but at the same time put an end to the external expansion of mankind. Along the way, in the same years, the general attitude towards scientific progress began to change - from enthusiastic it first became restrained, and then negative began to prevail. This shift public sentiment well reflected (and perhaps, to a certain extent, shaped) Hollywood cinema, one of the textbook images of which was a scientist whose experiments and discoveries become a terrible threat to people's safety.

Most modern people, brought up in the categories of linear progress, it is difficult to imagine that 40-50 years ago our civilization was in some respects higher (I would even say - loftier) than now, more idealistic. Including in the field of technologies related to penetration into extraterrestrial space. This was facilitated by the competition of alternative socio-economic systems. The virus of self-satisfied all-consuming consumerism has not yet completely killed the romance and heroism of struggle and expansion.

Therefore, all references to the impossibility for the Americans to build a lunar spacecraft in the 1960s are simply untenable. In those years, the United States really overtook the USSR in many areas. space research. So, another triumph of the overseas power was the AKA Voyager program. In 1977 to distant planets solar system Two devices of this series were launched. The first flew near Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, the second explored all four giant planets. Thousands of stunning images were transmitted to Earth, which bypassed the pages of all popular science publications. The result was sensational scientific discoveries, in particular, dozens of new satellites of the outer planets, the rings of Jupiter and Neptune, etc. Is this also a hoax?! By the way, communication with both ASCs, which are now at a distance of 90 astronomical units (14.85 billion km) from the Earth and are already exploring interstellar space, is still maintained.

So there is no reason to deny the ability of the civilization of the second half of the last century, including the United States, to make a series of manned flights to the moon. Moreover, a similar program was carried out in the USSR.

Its presence and the degree of its development serve as the most important proof of the authenticity of the event that took place 40 years ago.

6. Why did our astronauts never go to the moon?

One of the answers to the question posed is that the Soviet leadership, unlike the American one, did not concentrate its main efforts on this direction. The development of cosmonautics in the USSR after the successful launches of satellites and the first manned flights became "multi-vector". The functions of satellite systems were expanded, spacecraft for near-Earth flights were improved, ASCs were launched to Venus and Mars. It seemed that the first successes in themselves created a fairly solid and long-term backlog of Soviet leadership in this area.

The second reason is that our specialists failed to solve many technical problems that arose during the implementation of the lunar program. Thus, Soviet designers were unable to create a sufficiently powerful launch vehicle, an analogue of Saturn-5. The prototype of such a missile is the RN N-1 (on the picture)- suffered a series of disasters. After that, work on it, in connection with the already completed flights of Americans to the moon, was curtailed.

The third reason was that, paradoxically, it was in the USSR, unlike the United States, that there was real competition between the options for lunar programs between the joint design bureaus (OKB). The political leadership of the USSR was faced with the need to choose a priority project, and due to its scientific and technical incompetence, it could not always make a good choice. Parallel support of two or more programs led to the dispersion of human and financial resources.

In other words, in the USSR, unlike the USA, the lunar program was not unified.

It consisted of various, often multifunctional projects that never merged into one. The programs for flying around the moon, landing on the moon, and creating a heavy launch vehicle were implemented largely separately.

Finally, the leadership of the USSR considered the landing of a man on the moon exclusively in a political context. For some reason, the lag behind the United States in the implementation of a manned flight to the moon was for some reason assessed by him as a worse admission of defeat than an “excuse” that the USSR did not have a lunar program at all. Few people believed in the latter even then, and the absence of a hint of at least trying to repeat the achievement of the Americans was perceived both in our society and throughout the world as a sign of a hopeless lag behind the United States in the field of space technology.

The project LK-1 ("Lunar ship-1"), which provided for a flight around the moon with one astronaut on board the spacecraft, was signed by the head of OKB-52 Vladimir Nikolaevich Chelomey on August 3, 1964. It was guided by the UR500K launch vehicle developed in the same design bureau (a prototype of the subsequent Proton launch vehicle, successfully tested for the first time on July 16, 1965). But in December 1965, the Politburo decides to concentrate all practical work according to the lunar program in OKB-1 Sergey Korolev. There were presented two projects.

The L-1 project provided for a crew of two to fly around the moon. Another (L-3), signed by Korolev back in December 1964, is a flight to the Moon of a crew of two people, with one astronaut landing on the surface of the Moon. Initially, the term for its implementation was appointed by Korolev for 1967-1968.

In 1966, the Chief Designer dies unexpectedly during an unsuccessful operation. Vasily Pavlovich Mishin becomes the head of OKB-1. The history of the leadership and scientific and technical support of Soviet cosmonautics, the role of individuals in this is a special topic, its analysis would take us too far.

The first successful launch of the Proton-L-1 complex was carried out from Baikonur on March 10, 1967. A model of the module was launched into the orbit of the satellite, which received the official designation "Cosmos-146". By this time, the Americans had already conducted the first Apollo test in automatic mode for almost a year.

On March 2, 1968, the prototype L-1 under the official name "Zond-4" flew around the Moon, but the descent in the earth's atmosphere was unsuccessful. The subsequent two launch attempts were unsuccessful due to failures in the operation of the launch vehicle engines. Only on September 15, 1968, L-1 was launched on the flight path to the Moon under the name "Zond-5". However, the descent took place in an unplanned area. The atmospheric descent systems also failed Zond-6 upon its return in November 1968. Recall that already in October 1968, the Americans switched from automatic to manned flights under the Apollo program. And in December of the same year, the first triumphant flyby of the moon was made by Apollo 8.

In January 1969, the RN started to feel down again at the start. Only in August 1969 did the successful unmanned flight of Zonda-7 take place with a return to Earth in a given area. By this time, the Americans had already visited the moon ...

In October 1970, the Zonda-8 flight took place. Almost all technical problems have been solved. The next two devices of this series were already prepared for manned flights, but ... the program was ordered to be curtailed.

The L-3 project, intended for landing on the moon, had significant differences from the American one. The flight principle was the same. However, more powerful engine LK did not require the division of the cockpit into landing and takeoff stages. Another difference was that the astronaut's transition between LOK and LK had to be carried out through outer space. This was due to the fact that by that time, domestic cosmonautics had not yet solved the technical problems associated with the hermetic docking of two spacecraft. The first successful experience of this kind was made by ours only in 1971 when launching the Soyuz-11 spacecraft to the Salyut-1 orbital station. And already in March 1969, the Americans on Apollo 9 performed the first hermetic docking and undocking in history and the transition from one space module to another without a spacewalk. The need to create a lock chamber in the Soviet LOK and the presence of a pilot in a spacesuit there sharply limited the useful volume and payload of the entire lunar complex. Therefore, only two people were planned for the expedition, and not three, as with the Americans.

Tests of individual elements of the flight to the moon were initially carried out within the framework of the Soyuz and Cosmos projects. On September 30, 1967, the first docking of the Kosmos-186 and -187 unmanned vehicles in orbit was performed. In January 1969, Vladimir Shatalov on the Soyuz-4, Boris Volynov, Alexei Eliseev and Yevgeny Khrunov on the Soyuz-5 made the first docking of manned vehicles and the transition from one to another through outer space. The development of undocking, braking, acceleration and docking of the LK in near-Earth orbit continued even after the decision to cancel the manned flight was made in the early 1970s.

The main obstacle to the lunar project was the difficulty in creating the H-1 launch vehicle.

Her preliminary design was signed by Korolev back in 1962, and the Chief Designer made a note on the sketch: “We dreamed about this back in 1956-57.” With the creation of a heavy launch vehicle, hopes were associated not only with a flight to the Moon, but also with long-distance interplanetary flights.

The design of the H-1 launch vehicle was a five-stage (!) initial weight of 2750 tons. According to the project, the first three stages were supposed to bring a load with a total weight of 96 tons to the flight path to the Moon, which included, in addition to the lunar ship, two stages for maneuvering near the Moon, descending to its surface, lifting from it and flying away to Earth. The weight of the lunar ship itself, which consisted of the orbital compartment and the lunar cabin, did not exceed 16 tons.

The N-1 rocket, the first test of which took place in January 1969 (after the first flyby of the Moon by the Americans), was plagued from beginning to end by fatal failures caused by engine failure. Not a single launch of the H-1 was successful. After the catastrophe during the fourth launch in November 1972, further work on the H-1 was stopped, although the causes of the accidents were identified and completely subject to elimination.

Back in 1966, Chelomey proposed an alternative project for a lunar expedition based on the creation of the UR700 launch vehicle (a further development of the UR500, that is, the Proton, which was never carried out). The flight pattern for this program resembled the original American project (which they later abandoned). It provided for a single-module lunar ship, without division into orbital and takeoff and landing compartments, with two astronauts on board. However, OKB-52 gave the green light only to the theoretical development of this project.

If it were not for the hasty political decision of the Soviet leadership, it can be argued that, despite all the technical problems, our cosmonauts could quite realistically have carried out the first flight around the moon in 1970-1971, and the first landing on the moon in 1973-1974. .

But at this time, after the successful flights of the Americans, the leaders of the CPSU cooled off towards the lunar program. This indicates a drastic change in their mentality. Is it possible to imagine that if the United States managed to get ahead of us in the development of the first satellite or the launch of the first cosmonaut, the Soviet space program would have been curtailed at an early stage? Of course not! In the late 50s - early 60s. this would be impossible!

But in the 70s, the leaders of the CPSU had other priorities. The need to pay special attention to the military component served only as a pretext for curtailing the lunar program (especially since the beginning of the 70s is characterized by a détente of international tension). From now on, the prestige of Soviet cosmonautics was based only on constantly updated records of flight duration. In 1974, as a result of corporate intrigues, Mishin was fired from the post of head of OKB-1. He was replaced by Valentin Glushko, who not only stopped all work on the H-1, even theoretical ones, but also ordered the destruction of copies of this launch vehicle ready for testing.

The question posed in the title of this section is quite appropriate to supplement with another one: why weren't our astronauts on Mars? More precisely, near Mars.

The fact is that the H-1 project was calculated as a multi-purpose one. This launch vehicle (which was planned only as the first in a family of heavy carriers) was developed in the future not only for a lunar ship, but also for a “heavy interplanetary ship” (TMK). This project provided for the launch of spacecraft into a heliocentric orbit, which made it possible to fly several thousand kilometers from Mars and return to Earth.

The development of the LSS of such a ship was carried out on Earth. Volunteer testers Manovtsev, Ulybyshev and Bozhko in 1967-1968. spent a whole year in a sealed chamber with an autonomous LSS. Similar experiments of much shorter duration began in the United States only in 1970. Subsequently, the many months spent by a number of Soviet crews on the Salyuts formed suspicions that the leadership of the USSR was preparing to carry out the "Martian program". Alas, it was only speculation. Such a program did not exist in reality. Work on the TMK was terminated at the same time as work on the H-1.

In principle, a manned flight around Mars with a return to Earth would have been quite realistic for the USSR already in the early to mid-1980s.

Of course, provided that all elements of the lunar program suitable for use in flight to Mars continued to develop and work on them did not stop in the 70s. The morale of such a flight would be comparable to the landing of the Americans on the moon, if not more. Alas, the later Soviet leadership once again missed a historic chance for a great country...

7. Is there a future for lunar expeditions?

This requires, first of all, a radical change in the mentality of modern civilization. Despite the occasional promises by the leaders of the United States or the leaders of our cosmonautics to organize a manned flight to Mars, it is clear that they are no longer perceived by society with such enthusiasm as 40-50 years ago the promises of the first flights into space and to the moon. George W. Bush announced the goal of returning Americans to the moon by 2020 and the subsequent flight to Mars. By that time, several presidents will already be replaced, and Bush, in case of non-fulfillment of his "destiny", as they say, bribes will be smooth.

In our time, space research and the conquest of world spaces have decisively shifted from priorities to the periphery of public interest in literally all countries of the world.

This is clearly visible in specific gravity messages of this kind in the general media stream. If in Soviet times almost every citizen of the USSR knew whether our cosmonauts were now in orbit and who exactly, now only a small minority knows for sure whether they are in orbit. this moment astronauts aboard the International Space Station. However, most probably do not even know what it is.

Meanwhile, the effectiveness of manned flights for scientific research was proved by the same Apollo expeditions. For three days of stay on the moon, two astronauts managed to do volumes scientific work, which exceeded by orders of magnitude those that both of our lunar rovers carried out in 15 months! The Apollo program was essential to scientific and technological progress. Many of her achievements were then used in a variety of projects. Testing the latest equipment in the conditions of deep space flights is a completely unique opportunity, fraught with a sharp leap forward in all scientific and technical fields. The multibillion-dollar costs of the Apollo program eventually paid off and made a profit thanks to the introduction of new technologies.

However, despite the projects of long-term manned stations on the Moon that appear from time to time, the governments of the leading powers of the world, either individually or together, are in no hurry to fork out for such programs. The point here is not only in stinginess, but also in the lack of ambition. Extraterrestrial spaces have ceased to excite and attract people. Mankind clearly needs additional incentives to activate the cosmic vector of its development.

Special for the Centenary

On July 20, 1969, a man stepped on another celestial body for the first time. Along with the first manned flight into space, this event is one of the key events in the entire history of the world. Human intellect, will and curiosity helped usher in a new space age.

by the most famous people, who visited the moon, of course, were those who first landed on it. They were Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin. But the crew members of Apollo 11 are not the only ones who have been on our satellite. In total, 12 astronauts have visited the surface of the Moon during six landings.

Apollo 11, July 20, 1969

Neil Armstrong; Edwin Aldrin

Six hours after landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong - the first man on the moon - said his famous phrase: "That`s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" (This is one small step for a man, but a huge step for mankind) .Aldrin and Neil were on the surface of the moon for 2.5 hours. And if Armstrong was the first person to set foot on another celestial body, then Aldrin became the first person to urinate on another celestial body. Of course, in a special tank in a spacesuit.

Astronaut Edwin Aldrin on the lunar surface July 20, 1969 | NASA

Apollo 12, November 19, 1969

Charles Conrad; Alan Bean

After the successful first landing of a man on the moon, a second flight soon followed. After exiting the lunar module, Charles Conrad took a 3-hour, 39-minute walk on the moon, during which he collected lunar soil samples and performed an experiment with the solar wind. Alan Bean spent 2 hours and 58 minutes on the surface of the moon. His task was to place a television camera on the surface in order to transmit a color image from the moon to Earth. However, during the installation, the camera lens was directed towards the Sun for several seconds, because of which it failed, so earthlings had to be content with photographs of the lunar surface.

Apollo 14, February 5, 1971

Alan Shepard; Edgar Mitchell

On the first day on the moon, Shepard was out of the ship for 4 hours and 49 minutes, setting up scientific equipment and collecting rocks from the surface. On their second day on the Moon, Mitchell and Shepard traveled to nearby Cone Crater and planted scientific instruments on the Moon's surface. Their exit lasted 4 hours and 35 minutes.

Apollo 15, July 31, 1971

David Scott; James Irwin

The Apollo 15 mission involved staying on the lunar surface for 3 days. For the first time, astronauts slept in the lunar module without space suits, and traveled across the surface in a specially designed lunar rover. Not surprisingly, the time spent by David Scott and James on the surface of the Earth's satellite is more than 18 and a half hours. The total distance that the astronauts traveled on the Lunomobile is 27.76 km, and the maximum travel speed reached 13 km/h.

Apollo 16, April 20, 1972

Charles Duke; John Young

The astronauts spent a total of 20 hours and 15 minutes outside the lunar module. In this mission, a record was set for the mass of scientific instruments delivered to the Moon - as much as 563 kg. Charles and John stayed on our satellite for 3 days, and the result of their work was travel to the Stone and Smokey mountains, the North Ray crater, as well as collecting samples of lunar soil.

Apollo 17, December 11, 1972

Eugene Cernan; Harrison Schmitt

Apollo 17 is the last flight to the moon to date, during which the landing of people on the surface was carried out. The crew set two records at once: the maximum number of soil samples brought to Earth - 110.5 kg, and the longest time on the surface of the Moon - 22 hours 3 minutes.

Editorial opinion:

One often hears that the moon landing was faked by the Americans in order to force the USSR to spend huge sums on the space program and, ultimately, ruin it. Sometimes it seems that people who shout that the Apollo 11 mission was filmed in Hollywood sets simply forget or do not know about the existence of five more lunar landings, the veracity of which is beyond doubt. It is my deep conviction that such events and achievements have no political or national boundaries. They are for all mankind, for our future... We need to stop supporting stupid arguments and move together towards new discoveries and worlds that await man in outer space.

Illustration: depositphotos.com

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In order to fly to the moon, you need to overcome the gravity of the Earth and break out of its orbit.

We say that an airplane has "landed" when it lands on the ground. When spacecraft lands on the moon, this word is no longer suitable. The Soviet spacecraft Luna-9, which touched the surface of the Moon in 1966, was the first to land on the moon.

And the first people in lunar orbit were the astronauts who were on board the American spacecraft Apollo 8 in 1968. On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were the first earthlings to walk on the moon.

When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, he said the words that have become famous: "This is a small step for man, but a huge one for all mankind."

Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the surface of another cosmic body. July 24, 1969 spaceship Apollo took the astronauts to the Moon and then took them back to Earth.

What is the Apollo program?

The space exploration program of the United States of America was named "Apollo" (or "Apollo") after the ancient Greek god Apollo. The Apollo program included manned flights to the moon. Apparatus "Apollo" -! 1 landed on the moon in 1972, and astronauts took their first lunar steps on the surface of our closest space neighbor.