Well, Steve, it's abundantly clear you haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. If I were you I wouldn't have used my last name either.

One of the most well-known design features of the lunar rover was the independently driven and steerable wheels. Each wheel had its own electric motor and the front and rear wheels steer independently.

It only took me about a minute on Google to find diagrams, explanatory text, and even engineering drawings of the drive assemblies. How much research did you do? You say the "1950s technology doesn't compute," when discussing the drive assembly. But I don't see any of your computations. I'm a professional engineer -- show me the numbers.

I fail to see why you assume the LRV would have been built like a passenger car.

I don't understand why you believe spinning wheels are proof of a hoax. In lunar gravity any vehicle will catch more "air", keeping the wheels out of contact with the ground for longer. Of course they'll spin. Further, with less gravity there is much less friction for the wheels. Yet the vehicle retains its full inertia, since that is a product of mass while friction is a product of weight. And you're looking at the so-called Grand Prix footage, which was a stress test for the rover. For actual travel it was driven more conservatively.

The mirror on the HST took a week to fix because it was not one of the components designed to be serviced on-orbit. Passenger vehicle assembly lines are optimized for mass production. None of those processes is relevant to the LRV deployment. The Apollo LRV operations manual is available online from NASA and shows how the vehicle was deployed and readied for use. There is even film footage of the astronauts actually doing it. Did you consult any of these sources?

Moving on to drogue parachutes. The drogue was not deployed until a substantial amount of the re-entry velocity was lost through aerodynamic resistance with the vehicle itself. The Apollo command module was designed using lifting-body principles. The drogue is deployed where the air is still very thin and doesn't pose as great a resistance as lower down. At those altitudes, with a properly reefed parachute, the resistance is appropriate for braking and does not inevitably cause the 'chute to rip loose or become torn to shreds.

At the time of Apollo, NASA had about ten years worth of experience in parachute-assisted braking from orbit. Will you please compute for me the drag on a drogue parachute with a 5 square meter aspect at an altitude of 30,000 meters at a speed of 1,000 meters per second? You say it would have been ripped to shreds, but I want to know if you know how to compute the actual force of drag so that you would know that.

As for spy satellites, yes the moon is too far away. Telescopes -- including those aboard spy satellites -- work according to the principle of angular resolution. If you hold a penny at arm's length you can block out your view of a truck a mile away. The penny is much smaller than the truck, but it's closer and so it appears larger and with more detail. And although you can see a penny at arm's length, you couldn't see that penny if it were a mile away. Spy satellites have such remarkable resolution from Earth orbit because they are only 150 miles or so from their subjects. The moon is still 250,000 miles away from Earth orbit and objects farther away are more difficult for artificial optics to resolve, just as they are for biological optics. That is a basic principle of optical physics. Did you study that before giving your opinion?

Since we know spy satellites are deployed from the space shuttle cargo bay, we know that their primary mirrors cannot be more than about 2.5 meters in diameter. Computing the theoretical Dawes limit for such a mirror in the visible spectrum at lunar distances gives us an angular resolution that would require something to be about 80-90 meters wide on the lunar surface in order to be visible. That assumes a theoretically perfect mirror. Clearly a 10 cm rover track will not be visible, nor the 2 m rover itself.

As for putting satellites in lunar orbit, there have been small ones placed there. But not spy satellites. It takes our biggest launch vehicles to put those satellites into orbit merely around Earth. We currently don't have the means to send one to the moon. And incidentally, that satellite wouldn't be able to see anything on earth smaller than a football stadium for the reasons outlined above.

None of your statements has the least bearing in fact, and is given in almost complete ignorance of widely available information. I agree that people need to do more critical thinking. But your statements are not the answer. You simply have no idea what you're talking about, and yet you have the temerity to call the rest of us gullible. Many of us, in fact, did NOT sleep through science class.

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