NASA

I have always been fascinated with the moon landings even though they took place before I was even born.  Ever since they occured back in the 60′s there have been a small but vocal number of people saying that the entire moon landing sequence was faked.  My personal feeling on these conspiracy theorists is that they should go ask Elvis for his opinion, but still the debate raged on.  Now, forty years after the launch of Apollo 11 (the first mission that actually landed on the moon) NASA has proof that we were actually there in the form of photos from the recently launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

I doubt that these photos will satisfy any of the naysayers.  The photos are a little grainy and the resolution is not really good enough to make out fine detail, although you can see the tracks the astronauts left in the soil as they walked from the landing module to a scientific experiment site.  Personally I think the images are very cool although much less spectacular than I was hoping for.  Without the help of NASA putting arrows and markings on the photos I doubt I would be able to figure things out on my own.  If we have sattellites that can see my car in my driveway you would think that they would put something equally as powerful on this space probe.

It just so happened that a few days before the anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch I checked out Buzz Aldrin’s new biography, Magnificent Desolation.  It’s a good read.  Maybe I’ll blog about it tomorrow to give a little review.