Why the flag flew on the moon. Was there a moon landing? Further development of lunar missions

Flight to the Moon - a giant step of humanity or a worldwide deception? Crimean scientist analyzes American flights to the Moon

According to NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency of the United States, supported by the American government, in 1969 humanity made a qualitative leap in its development: space expedition Apollo 11, during which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first earthlings to set foot on the lunar surface. According to NASA, in 1969-1972. 12 astronauts visited the moon during the six Apollo missions. Another 15 visited the lunar orbit.

Was there a flight to the moon

The first doubts about the authenticity of the lunar expeditions were expressed even during the period of their implementation by some US citizens, including those who worked at NASA, who pointed out a number of oddities around the lunar project, as well as signs of forgery in the films and photographs of the expeditions. In subsequent years, the number of arguments put forward by specialists in space technology, photography and filming, space radiation, questioning or denying the version of NASA, has increased. If in the first "post-moon" years NASA sometimes came out with answers to critics, then later such speeches were stopped. The NASA representative gave this "logical" explanation: the volume of criticism is so great that there will not be enough time to answer it. Unsurprisingly, the skeptics' arguments cited in huge amount newspaper and magazine articles, books and television broadcasts, and NASA's silence in response have led to a growing number of skeptics who view the Apollo project as a scam. So, at present, about a quarter of Americans do not believe in the reality of a man's landing on the moon. Consider some oddities that raise doubts about NASA's version.

Lunar rocket could not fly to the moon?

To implement the Apollo project in 1967, the Saturn-5 rocket was created, capable, according to NASA, of launching 135 tons of cargo into low-earth orbit. Such power is not possessed by any of the later space systems including the Shuttle, a reusable system developed in the United States in the mid-1980s and capable of placing 30 tons of payload into orbit around the Earth. Nevertheless, the active life of the "Saturns" turned out to be strikingly short and was limited to participation in the lunar program. Maybe the Saturns are much more expensive than the Shuttles? Not at all, especially if you take into account the well-established production of the former and the colossal costs of money and time for the development of the latter.

In comparable prices, launching an equal payload into space using the Shuttles turned out to be more expensive than using the Saturns.

Or maybe there is no need to launch large cargoes into space today? There is such a need, in particular, when creating space stations. And on the moon there are many interesting things, for example, the helium isotope, which is promising as a source of thermonuclear energy. But maybe the Saturn 5 is an unreliable rocket? On the contrary, if we accept the NASA version, it is extremely reliable. All of her manned launches were successful.

But the Shuttles turned out to be not so reliable, despite the fact that near-earth flights, for which they were only used, are an order of magnitude easier in technical terms than flights to the Moon and back. The disasters that occurred with the Shuttles, which claimed the lives of 14 American astronauts, forced the NASA leadership to abandon their further use. Having abandoned, for some unknown reason, the Saturns in 1973, and then the expensive and unreliable Shuttles, the United States remained, so to speak, at a broken trough. And today the Americans rent Russian Soyuz for flights to the ISS. The same ones that were created in the USSR even before the flights to the moon. NASA has not put forward any reasonable explanation for the "resignation" of its own rockets, unsurpassed in power and reliability. Skeptics give the following explanation for this oddity: in reality, "Saturn-5" was unable to launch into space even the minimum cargo required for lunar expeditions. In addition, the rocket was extremely unreliable. She could not participate in any flights to the Moon and was used only to simulate lunar launches. Therefore, after the early termination of the Apollo program, the production and use of Saturn rockets was discontinued, and the remaining three rockets were sent to museums. At the same time, in 1972, the chief designer of the unusable Saturns, von Braun, stopped working at NASA.

Was the rocket engine unusable?

The F1 rocket engine used on the Saturns had, according to NASA, a thrust of 600 tons. The most powerful rocket engine RD-180, used in our time and created back in the USSR, has a lower thrust and has the worst characteristics of thrust / weight and thrust / size compared to F1. The reliability of the F1 engine, like the Saturn-5 rocket, is the highest: not a single failure for all flights to the Moon and previous manned circumlunar and near-earth flights! It would seem that F1 should have a long life. And if it was modernized, then over the past 45 years after its creation, it would have been possible to further increase its power and reliability. However, the best rocket engine of all time, the F1, rested in Bose, along with the best rocket of all time, the Saturn.

The “skeptics” from the number of rocket specialists explain this oddity by the fact that the technical principles laid down in the design of the F1 were initially flawed, which did not allow providing the thrust necessary for flights to the Moon. By the way, the failure of the lunar engine, which was still in the design stage, was predicted by the great Sergei Korolev. The real power of F1, according to skeptics-specialists, could only be enough to tear off the unfuelled half-empty body of "Saturn" from the ground to simulate a lunar launch. The reliability of a weak F1, according to experts, was below average. This is why NASA wisely decommissioned it and never used it again after the end of the lunar epic. But what kind of engines do the Americans use today on their powerful Atlas missiles? The United States uses the RD-180 rocket engines purchased in Russia or manufactured in the United States using technology from the Soviet era received from Russia. When in the early 90s, in the ecstasy of unity with the world community on the basis of universal values, Russia laid out its scientific and technical secrets to the Americans from the times of the "closed" USSR, they were shocked: many years ago, the Russians were able to translate into reality what the American rocket scientists were unsuccessful in. fought for many years and which they refused, considering it impracticable. For the scientific and technical documentation on the RD-180 engine, the United States paid Russia 1 million in green bills - the current price of a three-room apartment in Moscow.

Lunar soil oddities

According to NASA, lunar expeditions delivered about 400 kg of lunar soil to Earth from different points of the Moon. Compared to 300 grams of regolith, a mixture of lunar dust and rubble, delivered by Soviet automatic machines, the high scientific value of the American samples was determined by the fact that they belonged to the bedrock lunar rocks. It would seem that the United States should have distributed a noticeable part of the moon rocks to the best laboratories in the world so that they could analyze and confirm: yes, this is soil from the Moon. The Americans, however, were remarkably stingy. So, scientists of the USSR were provided with 29 grams of rock, but not indigenous, but in the form of dust, which unmanned vehicles are quite capable of delivering to Earth in small quantities. At the same time, in exchange for its 300 g of regolith, the USSR gave the United States one and a half grams more. Other scientists from different countries were even less fortunate: they were given, as a rule, from half a gram to two grams of regolith, and with the condition of return. The results of studies of American samples published in the scientific press either refer to regoliths, or do not allow them to be identified as lunar, or lead to doubts. For example, geochemists from the University of Tokyo found that the lunar samples presented by NASA for a giant time stayed in the earth's atmosphere, which is almost impossible to explain in the assumption of the formation of samples under the conditions of the moon. French researchers, studying the reflective characteristics of the American and Soviet samples, concluded that only the latter has light reflection characteristics corresponding to the albedo of the lunar surface. A comedic sensation, which for some reason was not very much attacked by "free journalists", was the recent report of Dutch scientists that a sample of lunar soil, solemnly donated by the US Ambassador to the Prime Minister of Holland in 1969, turned out to be a piece of petrified earth wood. There were no donor comments. But NASA has decided to no longer provide researchers with lunar soil. The explanation is this: we should wait until more advanced research methods appear, but for now, conserve the lunar soil for future generations of scientists. Does NASA believe that future astronauts will be able to visit the moon and bring back soil samples?

So, instead of publicly inviting the world's leading laboratories to conduct a comprehensive study of hundreds of kilograms of lunar soil samples with the latest methods and publish the results widely, the study of samples is taboo. Strange, isn't it? The skeptics have the following explanation: the United States does not have genuine stones, because they have never been on the moon, and subterfuges are invented to stop further disclosures.

Where did the originals of the lunar footage disappear?

Not responding to numerous allegations of falsification, NASA nevertheless sometimes reacts to them by silently removing ridiculous pictures or their individual fragments from its sites, or even simply correcting details in photographs. So, noticed by skeptics in one of the NASA images, the distinct letter "C" on the "moon" rock, which is used to mark props in the cinematic world of America, suddenly disappeared from the picture. The photo, in which the shadows of objects intersected, which is impossible in sunlight, was simply cropped. Etc. Let us dwell only on some of the oddities associated with the "moon movie".

Probably everyone saw on TV the exit from the lunar module to the lunar surface of the astronaut N. Armstrong, who uttered the legendary phrase about "a small step for man and a giant step for all mankind", and drew attention to the extremely low quality of the image, which makes it difficult to see a certain figure going down a ladder. NASA explained: these images were taken on Earth from a monitor in Houston, and the poor quality because the image was broadcast from the Moon. However, magnetic tapes with high-quality images, directly filmed on the Moon, for some reason were in no hurry to show. With each new lunar expedition, the situation repeated itself: NASA did not show the originals of the lunar imagery. To bewildered questions - why don't they show high-quality footage? - NASA replied that everything has its time, a special repository is being built for the originals of invaluable video recordings, after which copies will be made from them and shown to the general public. The years passed. And 37 years later, NASA announced that the original recordings of man's first step to the lunar surface were lost, as were the records of all other lunar expeditions. The trail of seven hundred boxes containing more than 10 thousand magnetic tapes, according to NASA, was lost even before 1975. So, it turns out why high-quality video recordings were not shown - they seemed to disappear into thin air! Well, it happens. It is a pity, however, that it was the records made on the Moon and during the flights there and back that disappeared, while for some reason much less valuable earthly records of astronauts' training, their rest, stay with their family, solemn launches to the Moon and even more have been perfectly preserved. welcome back. In 2006, NASA created a special commission to search for the missing films. Since then - silence. Probably still looking. Strange, isn't it? Skeptics explain it this way: the film is dynamic, therefore it is almost impossible without computer technology to pass off the photographs taken on Earth as lunar ones. In the Apollo era, such technologies did not exist. And photographs are static, it is much more difficult to detect deception on them. This is why, skeptics say, NASA "lost" the "moon films" but retained the high quality "moon photographs." By the way, over the years that have elapsed since the lunar epic, NASA has repeatedly reported the loss of lunar soil. It looks like the moment is not far off, skeptics say, when NASA will announce that everything has been stolen, so further research on the moon rocks is impossible. Just as it is impossible to see the missing original records of people on the moon.

Why is there no independent verification?

Modern technology makes it possible to photograph objects on it from a near-earth orbit from an altitude of several hundred kilometers from the surface of the planet with a resolution of about 0.5 meters. When filming from a circumlunar orbit of the lunar surface, the absence of an atmosphere not only improves visibility, but allows a much higher resolution by reducing the orbital altitude to tens of kilometers. This makes it possible to obtain from the circumlunar probes not only a clear image of the Apollo landing modules remaining on the Moon, which have a size of about five meters, but also lunar vehicles left there by lunar expeditions and even astronauts' tracks in the lunar dust. In the past decade, several countries have successfully launched lunar probes that have repeatedly flown over NASA-declared landing areas.

Information from Сnews.ru dated May 5, 2005: “The European Space Agency ESA has unexpectedly stopped publishing images of the Moon obtained by the research probe SMART-1. The agency has previously stated that one of the most important elements of the probe's scientific program is the "inspection" of the lunar landing sites of manned Apollo, as well as other American and Soviet vehicles. This would put an end to bitter controversy and accusations of lies by NASA ....

At the same time, it is known that the apparatus continues to function actively ... The program for the search for the Apollo landing sites is not mentioned at all, despite the fact that Bernard Foing, the leading scientific specialist of the ESA research program, had directly stated this earlier ... In addition, just now it became clear that research vehicles, even from the orbit of Mars, are able to successfully find on the surface long-lost landing vehicles, the landing sites of which were known to scientists only approximately. These vehicles are much smaller in size than the fragments of the "Apollo", which should have remained on the moon, and Martian winds and sandstorms significantly complicate the task. "

During the Kagui lunar probe mission, which ended in summer 2009, the Apollo issue was vividly discussed in the Japanese media. However, hopes of finally getting an independent confirmation of the historic accomplishment of the United States did not materialize. Even the previously inaccessible bottom of the lunar crater was able to remove the "Kaguya", saw the water on the Moon and much more interesting things. However, although he flew hundreds of times over the American landing sites, for some reason he did not provide any information about what he saw.

But the Indian probe "Chandrayan" seems to be lucky

Gazeta.ru report dated 09/05/09: “Leading researcher Prakash Shaukhan reported that the probe had photographed an image of the landing site of the American Apollo 15 spacecraft. Studying the disturbance on the lunar surface, Chandrayan-1 discovered traces of Apollo-15's presence on the Moon ... True, Shauhan added that there is a camera on Chandrayan-1, the resolution of which is not enough to distinguish the tracks astronauts, having noticed that such pictures can be taken by the American LRO apparatus. "

"Perturbation on the lunar surface" looks like a tiny whitish speck in the photo from the probe and for some reason is interpreted as a lunar module landing stage. "Lunar Rover tracks" look like a thin, barely noticeable squiggle.

For many years, NASA did not respond to proposals to photograph the Apollo landing sites and thereby confirm its lunar version. And finally, 40 years later, NASA presented space images from the LRO probe of the landing sites of five Apolloes. Alas, the quality of these images was no better than that of the Indians. Therefore, skeptics, and not only them, exclaim to NASA: damn it! You have managed to transmit beautiful images from Mars, from the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But where are the normal photos from the Moon, which is hundreds of times closer to us?

The skeptics explain the oddities with the checks of the Apollo landing sites as follows. The loyal allies of the United States - Europe and Japan - did not find any traces of the Americans' presence on the moon, and did not disgrace their senior partner by exposing them. NASA's testing of itself for universal deception should not be taken seriously. And for what gingerbread the Hindus took upon themselves the sin - only God knows. It should be noted that they left a retreat for themselves, mentioning some kind of "disturbance of the lunar surface." When the lunar deception is revealed, the Indians will be able to disown themselves: they say, they misinterpreted the "indignation". Skeptics point out that reports of photographs from the Chandrayana and LRO appeared a week after the scandal in the Netherlands with the "moonstone" turned out to be a petrified piece of wood.

Decades after the US lunar triumph, American experts have come to the conclusion that flying to the moon is very dangerous, if not impossible. So, experts of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe that the quality and reliability of information on the lunar surface is outrageous and inferior even to the available data on the surface of Mars, which does not allow a lunar landing with a sufficient level of safety. But forty years ago there were even fewer such maps, nevertheless, Apollo, according to NASA, repeatedly landed without any problems. How did they manage? There is nothing to be surprised at, skeptics believe, because no one has ever landed on the moon.

Landing on the moon is still impossible?

NASA's chief of meteoroid environment said that the actual number of meteorites falling on the moon is four times the value predicted by computer models developed earlier. But these models were created on the basis of observations and measurements carried out by the Apollo crews! Why did they turn out to be so wrong? Therefore, skeptics believe that no one has carried out any observations of meteorites on the Moon for the reason that none of the people on the Moon has ever been.

Several years ago, the United States set out to return to the moon. However, problems arose. “NASA considers it necessary to carry out missions with a flyby of the Moon without landing on it and returning the landing compartment to Earth in order to study the peculiarities of entering the atmosphere at such high speeds - at present they are“ not fully understood by NASA ”(Space News, 01/31/2007). Well well! Once everything was clear and did not present any difficulties, nine expeditions returned from the moon or from a circumlunar orbit without a hitch without a hitch. And after 40 years, it became unclear how to land astronauts returning from the Moon on Earth?

“Bush's lunar program faced an unexpected obstacle: its creators forgot about the X-rays from the Sun. It was unexpectedly found out that one simply cannot move on the Moon without heavy radiation "umbrellas". ("Astronomy Aviation and Space", 01.24.07, Wed, 09.27, Moscow time). It turns out that scientists from the laboratory of lunar and interplanetary research in Arizona have found that the likelihood of cancer for astronauts on the moon is very high, moreover, being on the moon in a spacesuit with an active sun can be fatal. How so? After all, 27 Americans spent on the moon, in its vicinity, on the way to the moon and back, a total of hundreds of hours, but none of them was affected by radiation, despite the fact that powerful flashes on the Sun during lunar expeditions happened more than once. The health of some astronauts is enviable. So, 72-year-old Edwin Aldrin slapped the famous TV presenter when he invited the astronaut to swear on the Bible that he flew to the moon. They abstained from the massacre, but the other five astronauts, to whom the TV presenter addressed the same proposal, also refused to swear.

“The draft budget for 2011 prepared by the Barack Obama administration essentially closes the Constellation space program upon the return of the United States to the moon. So, George W. Bush's highly publicized program is being phased out "(" Russian newspaper"- federal issue No. 5100 (21). Here are the ones on! Instead of using the already debugged, proven, extremely reliable lunar rocket Saturn and the Apollo capsule, for some reason they spent about nine billion dollars to create a new lunar rocket Ares and a new Orion crew capsule. After which they realized that even today flights to the moon are impossible in the same way as 40 years ago?

Was there a "lunar conspiracy" between the USA and the USSR?

Supporters of the lunar version of NASA ask the skeptics a "crown" question: if the lunar epic is a grandiose hoax of the United States, then why was it not exposed by the USSR, which participated in the lunar race of the last century and was in the lead in it, and, moreover, was in a state of " cold war"With the USA?
And why are some of the glorious Soviet cosmonauts defending the NASA version if he is deceitful?

Skeptics answer: there was a conspiracy between the leadership of the USSR and the leadership of the United States. Without a guarantee of non-disclosure on the part of the USSR, the United States simply could not go to the scam. The USSR "sold" the Moon to the USA. According to skeptics, a number of events, including strange ones, are connected with this collusion.

1) 1967-69 - the beginning of the policy of detente. In 1972, President Nixon, who arrived in Moscow, signed or planned to sign 12 agreements between the United States and the USSR, extremely beneficial for the Soviet Union.

2) The agreements on missile defense and strategic weapons have removed a considerable part of the burden of the arms race from the USSR.

3) The embargo on Soviet oil and gas supplies to Western Europe was lifted, currency flowed into the USSR.

4) The supply of large volumes of American coarse grains to the USSR began at prices below world prices, which allowed the USSR to significantly increase the production of meat and dairy products and caused discontent in the United States itself, as it led to an increase in food prices.

5) At the expense of the United States, chemical plants were built in exchange for their finished products. The USSR received modern enterprises without investing a dime.

6) Refusal of the USSR in 1970 from the prepared manned flyby of the Moon on the Proton rocket with the Soyuz spacecraft.

Skeptics explain this refusal by the fact that if the fly-over took place, the USSR would have to answer the question: did the Soviet cosmonauts see the American landing sites on the moon? The USSR could not have limited itself to the silence stipulated by the collusion. He would have to either get out of the conspiracy, or take the path of outright lies, confirming the American version.

7) In 1970, a Soviet ship fished out in the Atlantic an empty mock-up of the Apollo capsule descending to Earth. There is a photo of the model on the Internet, taken by a Hungarian journalist. The USSR quietly handed over the model of the capsule to the United States, which, according to skeptics, serves as direct confirmation of the existence of collusion.

8) In 1974, contrary to the objections of specialists and leaders of the space industry, the leadership of the USSR curtailed the Soviet lunar program and the development of the H1 lunar rocket. The explanation is the same as in paragraph 6): as a result of the collusion, flights to the moon for the USSR were, in fact, ordered.

9) In 1975, flights to the Moon and Soviet automatic stations... Since then, neither the USSR nor today's Russia have approached the moon.

Skeptics conclude: Russia, as the successor to the USSR, is fulfilling its obligations under the "lunar conspiracy" of the late 1960s.

10) In 1975, the Treaty of Helsinki was signed, which affirmed the inviolability of borders in Europe after the war. He removed all possible claims to the USSR regarding the "occupation" of Western Ukraine, Bessarabia, East Prussia, the Baltic states.

The first and only joint orbital flight Soyuz-Apollo, which took place in the same 1975, was needed by the United States, in the opinion of skeptics, as an indirect confirmation from the USSR of the US space victory.

Some skeptics suggest that the United States had serious compromising evidence against the Soviet leadership, which contributed to the collusion. If we accept this assumption, then, in my opinion, something connecting the dissolute daughter of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Galina Brezhneva, a lover of diamonds, wine, men and a "beautiful life", with American intelligence could serve as such compromising evidence. Such a connection could have been the result of a provocation. American intelligence services... The publication of incriminating evidence threatened the USSR with an unprecedented international scandal. Before his threat, taking into account the proposals of the United States, which were also beneficial for the USSR, including the policy of detente, the leadership of the USSR agreed to a conspiracy.

As for the protection of the NASA version by some Soviet cosmonauts, the skeptics suggest considering the following:

1) The astronauts confine themselves to the statement that "the Americans were on the moon", but do not try to refute the specific arguments of the skeptics. By the way, in view of the obviousness of the forgery of "lunar film materials", in particular, American flags fluttering in the lunar wind on the moon devoid of atmosphere, the astronauts are forced to admit that these materials were "filmed" on Earth.

2) Astronauts are military people. They have sworn to keep the state secrets known to them. And the collusion between the USSR and the United States is so far guarded as the greatest secret by both the United States and Russia.

3) Astronauts are also people, there are selfish individuals among them, not all of them could resist the temptation to support NASA's lies, not without benefit. One of the former cosmonauts, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, who has been to the United States many times and has made friends with American astronauts, is now the deputy director of a large bank and one of the richest people Russia, even expressed his admiration for the oligarch Abramovich, who managed to make a multi-billion dollar fortune out of thin air.

4) There are cautious skeptics among Russian cosmonauts who do not exaggerate their skepticism for the reason set out in paragraph 2.

Coming out of the "lunar" apparatus in 1969, the commander Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong said the historic phrase: "This is a small step for man, but a giant leap for mankind." When the euphoria subsided, the first skeptics appeared. And after a while, even the Americans themselves started talking about the fact that the materials confirming the fact of a man's landing on the moon were falsified.

The exploration of space by humanity is just beginning. Only 56 years have passed since the launch of the first artificial satellite... At the dawn of astronautics, it seemed that very little remained before flights to the nearest planets.

The great powers of the world competed behind the scenes for the right to be the pioneers of space. As you know, the palm in this area belonged to the Soviet Union, which first launched in open space person.

After the start of Yuri Gagarin, the world community recognized the unconditional leadership of the USSR. But the main competitor - the United States of America - did not share the stormy enthusiasm for the next giant leap in progress. And if the phrase "Catch up and overtake America!" Was common in the USSR, then NASA members faced the task of restoring the undermined national prestige, ahead of Soviet Union in the space race.

Three weeks after the flight of the first American astronaut into space, John F. Kennedy solemnly promised America that in less than ten years the Americans would land on the moon.

Indeed, on July 21, 1969, the first American astronaut set foot on the lunar surface. For Americans, this event was no less significant than the discovery of America or the proclamation of independence.

Pictures of the discoverers of the moon under the Stars and Stripes have spread around the globe, and later - film shots that capture historical moment... It was with them that the dispute about the lunar program, which has not yet subsided, began.

Photo materials provided by NASA have alerted professional photographers. In some photographs, the shadows of objects for some reason fall in completely different directions (which is impossible in sunlight), and their density is different. There are black, gray, almost transparent shadows. But in a vacuum, the contrast between light and shadow is very sharp.

Further, in the panoramic image of the lunar surface, light sources are clearly visible, which simply could not be on the moon. It is they who are "to blame" for the wrong arrangement of the shadows. When the image is enlarged, it is clearly seen that two of them are surrounded by a shining halo, which is possible only in the atmosphere, due to the scattering of rays.

But that's not all. For some reason, not a single star is visible in photographs from the lunar surface. Only the Earth. And the astronauts themselves in their memoirs emphasize that they have not seen either stars or planets.

Quite strange, especially when you consider that Soviet cosmonauts describe a whole sea of ​​sparkling stars ... Another famous shot - the imprint of a footprint on the lunar surface - did not cause any complaints from photographers. But experts from other industries joined the discussion.

Metallurgist Yu. I. Mukhin, who has repeatedly dealt with all kinds of soil samples, is absolutely sure that the imprint on the lunar soil would look completely different. There is no water on the moon, and absolutely dry fine suspension could not perfectly follow all the contours of the grooved sole of the boot.

A clear print, at best, could remain in the center (like the prints of the tracks of Soviet lunar rovers), but in the photo we see clear relief lines everywhere. Such a trail could only remain on wet sand.

The same shot caused bewilderment among physicists. With the help of simple calculations, they found out that the weight of an American astronaut in full gear on the lunar surface was as much as ... 27 kg. Using the formulas included in the program high school(Soviet, - in American schools programs are completely different), they were able to calculate the pressure of "the soles of the astronaut's shoes on the ground. It turned out to be ridiculously low: less than 0.1 kgf / cm2, which is clearly not enough to leave a mark on the Moon ...

Let's turn to the film showing the American landing on the moon. There are many things that are incomprehensible in it: both the frivolity of the astronauts and the predominance of game episodes. At the same time, the really important and dramatic scenes are missing. For example, for some reason, the moment of docking is not reflected anywhere.

In order for Armstrong and Aldrin to be able to move into the cockpit of the descent module, on the way to the Moon, they had to undock the main Apollo block from the third stage of Saturn, turn it 180 ° and again dock to the lunar cabin so that the upper hatch of the main block combined with the upper hatch of the lunar cabin. Neither the scene of the transition of the astronauts to the lunar block nor their return is shown. And what got into the chronicle looks very unconvincing.

Observant people are always and everywhere. And it could not remain unnoticed that in the airless space the American flag for some reason flutters cheerfully in the wind. Opponents tried to explain this effect by the vibrations of the entire structure, but this explanation was rejected by the counter argument: elastic vibrations propagate in both directions from the zero point, and the panel deviates only in one direction.

The next discrepancy occurred with the movement of astronauts. They move in short and rather awkward jumps, while simple calculations show that with a decrease in gravity, both the length and height of the stride quadruple. By the way, it was with these conditions in mind that the astronauts were prepared to move by jumping: it is easier to control the process.

But in the film, for some reason, they demonstrate the opposite: both the step width and the height of the jumps are much less than on Earth. Were you afraid? But falling on the moon is not that dangerous. And shooting the "moon" jumps would serve as an excellent proof of the film's authenticity: in those days on Earth it was impossible to shoot such a thing.

The Americans chose a different way to prove that they are indeed on the moon. In front of the camera, they conducted a small experiment. The astronaut took a hammer in one hand, a bird's feather in the other, and at the same time released it.

As you know, in a vacuum, both objects touch the ground at the same time. And so it happened. The desire for clarity played a cruel joke with the falsifiers: they did not take into account that the footage allows not only to make sure that objects fall in an airless space, but also to calculate the acceleration free fall... Which physicists did not fail to do.

Free fall acceleration was 4.1 m / s2. And on the Moon, this value should be 1.6 m / s2. This means that the shooting took place anywhere, but not on the moon! By the way, observing the "behavior" of various objects gives physicists many reasons for doubts. A stone accidentally dropped by one of the astronauts falls with an acceleration of 6.6 m / s2.

And at the moment of takeoff, judging by the trajectory of stones flying out from under the nozzle, the acceleration of gravity rises to an unthinkable value: 320 m / s2. Could it be that the American conquerors of space were brought into the Sun by mistake?

Further, during landing, the jet stream, beating from the nozzle, was supposed to scatter dust within a radius of hundreds of meters. During the "lunar landing" of the Soviet modules, it soared high above the surface; settling several kilometers from the ship. But in the film, astronauts walk on pristine soil, the state of which suggests that the laws of physics do not work on the Moon.

But that's not all. Unlike theorists, practitioners are interested in more “material” issues. First of all, it was about the equipment of the lunar expedition. It is not worth dwelling in detail on minor curiosities (for some reason, there was no place for a propulsion engine on the Apollo diagram presented by NASA), but the space suits of the astronauts, the design of the spacecraft, and the lunar car caused bewilderment among specialists.

According to American experts, in order to protect the ship from radiation during the flight to the Moon, its walls had to be multi-layered, and one of the layers should consist of 80 cm of lead. And in the 1960s, NASA ships had a shell of aluminum foil only a few millimeters thick. Astronauts in such conditions were supposed to receive a lethal dose of radiation and die, as the monkeys sent into space before died.

For some reason, this did not happen ... Perhaps, the main protection was in spacesuits? But no additional reinforcement was made. Moreover, according to experts, the Americans in the film are dressed in costumes that are completely unsuitable for lunar conditions.

Even with the current level of development space technologies in their volume it is impossible to fit a supply of oxygen for four hours, a radio station, a life support system, a thermoregulation system and much more that, according to legend, the conquerors of the moon had.

The fuel consumption during the first flight was so great that Armstrong and Aldrin landed the device on the surface with literally the last drops of fuel. But the much heavier (more than four times) Apollo 17 landed on the moon with exactly the same fuel supply without any problems.

In addition to direct inconsistencies (in addition to those already listed, there are others mentioned in the book of the famous scientist and inventor Rene "NASA deceived America"), there are also indirect ones. First of all, the Americans' achievement was not questioned just because they had at their disposal a Saturn-5 launch vehicle, the technical characteristics of which were high enough to support a lunar expedition.

But all the other components of the project were not up to the task. A manned lunar landing in 1969 was still impossible: the technology had not reached the required level. In addition, much of NASA's accumulated experience so far has consisted of disasters and setbacks.

Even if we assume that a miracle happened and the expedition was successful, it is completely unclear why the project was not continued. After all, the leading institutions of Europe and Japan, representatives of astrobusiness, and various corporations offered to finance flights to the moon. NASA purposefully rejects all "lunar" projects, citing either lack of time or lack of interest in the problem.

In response to the arguments in favor of falsifying the results of the expedition, it was planned to publish a book. She never saw the light. Like all the scientific materials that the expedition was supposed to bring.

Not a single gram of the lunar soil brought by Apollo 11 fell into the hands of foreign scientists. Not a single truly complete report has been published in serious journals. Officials in the United States refuse to provide voters with information about the lunar project, which has spent about four billion dollars.

Supporters of the hypothesis that the Americans never visited the moon suggest that all the film footage and photographs of astronauts on the lunar surface were taken in a specially equipped film studio.

Flights to the Earth's satellite were made by unmanned vehicles after all the material had been filmed. This version finds more and more confirmation. Sometimes the most unexpected. In Aldrin's memoirs, there is a description of a party for the privileged, at which the audience watched a film about Fred Hayes's stay on the moon.

Hayes did all sorts of steps, then tried to stand on the step of the lunar rover, but the step crumbled as soon as he stepped on it. All would be fine, but Hayes was a member of the infamous Apollo 13 expedition. So he certainly hadn't been to the moon.

The time is approaching when the truth about the first American landing on the moon will be known to everyone. Both Europe and Japan are already thinking about the development of lunar minerals. According to forecasts, the first lunar bases will appear in 10-15 years. Until then, it remains to rely on attentiveness and common sense.

49 years ago, on July 21, 1969, one of the greatest events in the history of mankind. On this day, American astronaut Neil Armstrong took the first step to the lunar surface. And his phrase about this event became winged:

True, there are serious doubts that this huge leap took place on the lunar surface, and not among the Hollywood sets created by the great master of American cinema, Mr. Stanley Kubrick.

The idea that man has never been to the moon is called the lunar conspiracy theory. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union was the main and only competitor of the United States in the space race, the theory was born in the United States. Moreover, the USSR had no doubt that American astronauts had indeed landed on the moon.

"Lunar conspiracy"

The founding father of this conspiracy theory can be called Bill Keyzing. In 1974 he wrote the book We Never Fought the Moon. In it, he convincingly argued that the lunar expeditions of the Americans were a falsification.

The author finds many "blunders" in the footage of the landing of astronauts. These are multidirectional shadows from objects, and the absence of stars in the sky, and the small size of the Earth. But the most striking evidence was considered to be the waving American flag in the airless space of the lunar atmosphere. Bill also believes that NASA technologies from the late 60s of the last century did not allow reaching the Moon.

Following Keysing, other supporters of the theory of falsification appeared. In particular, some of them argued that the astronauts could not fly in alive, on the way they would have been killed by solar radiation.

The Soviet Union did not doubt

On the other hand, the fact that in the USSR no one doubted the landing of American astronauts speaks volumes. After all, a fierce battle for space was going on between the Soviet Union and the United States. At the slightest doubt about the reliability of the Americans' flight to the moon, the Soviet media would have raised a real storm.

The fact is that we closely watched the American space program... The flight was monitored by ground services, communications between the crew and the Earth were intercepted. It was impossible to falsify communication sessions while staying on Earth. More precisely, it is possible, but such a hoax would be more complicated than a real flight.

The well-known Soviet cosmonauts Leonov and Grechko did not doubt the reliability of the presence of the Americans on the moon. But they do not exclude that for a better illustration of the event, part of the material was filmed on Earth. And traces in the photographs, allegedly testifying to falsification, were left during the retouching and editing of the material.

Almost all of the arguments in favor of the hoax had an explanation. Even the waving flag can be explained. After installation, the vibrations in the vacuum did not die down for a long time, therefore, the vibrational movements of the panel, touched during installation, did not interfere with the air, so they lasted a long time.

Unmanned spacecraft sent to the Moon, and not only American ones, subsequently managed to find and photograph the American landing sites. There were found clear traces of the presence of an earthly landing, leaving no doubt that people on the moon still visited.

The so-called 1969 American Moon Landing was a huge fake! Or, in Russian, a grandiose deception! Western politicians have this rule: "if you cannot win in a fair competition, achieve victory by deception or meanness!"

Surprisingly, not only American astronauts, but also Soviet astronauts made an effort to deceive the entire world community, who stated that "Only absolutely ignorant people can seriously believe that the Americans were not on the Moon!"... This, in particular, is the opinion of the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, when many citizens of the USSR, who carefully studied all the materials on the "American lunar epic", found obvious mistakes and inconsistencies in it.

And only now, after almost half a century has passed, it becomes clear that all this information entered by historians in various encyclopedias is in fact disinformation!

"Apollo-11" ("Apollo-11") - a manned spacecraft of the Apollo series, during the flight of which on July 16-24, 1969, for the first time in history, the inhabitants of the Earth landed on the surface of another celestial body- The moon.

On July 20, 1969, at 20:17:39 UTC, Crew Commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Edwin Aldrin landed the spacecraft's lunar module in the southwest region of the Sea of ​​Tranquility. They remained on the lunar surface for 21 hours 36 minutes and 21 seconds. All this time, command module pilot Michael Collins was waiting for them in circumlunar orbit. Astronauts made one exit to the lunar surface, which lasted 2 hours 31 minutes 40 seconds. The first person to set foot on the moon was Neil Armstrong. This happened on July 21 at 02:56:15 UTC. Aldrin joined him 15 minutes later.

The astronauts planted a US flag at the landing site, placed a set of scientific instruments and collected 21.55 kg of lunar soil samples, which were delivered to Earth. After the flight, the crew members and lunar rock samples went through strict quarantine, which did not reveal any lunar microorganisms.

Successful completion of the Apollo 11 flight program signified the achievement of the national goal set by the President of the United States John F. Kennedy in May 1961 - by the end of the decade to land on the moon, and marked the victory of the United States in the lunar race with the USSR "..

Surprisingly, John F. Kennedy, the President of the United States, who approved the program of "landing a man on the moon until 1970," was publicly shot in front of a multimillion-dollar crowd of Americans back in 1963. And what is even more amazing, the entire archive of the film, on which the landing of American astronauts on the moon was rigged in July 1969, subsequently disappeared from NASA's storage! It was allegedly stolen!

The Russians have a very good saying about this: "do not count your chickens before they are hatched!" Its literal meaning is this: on peasant farms, not all chickens born in summer survive until autumn. Someone will be carried away by birds of prey, and the weak simply will not survive. Therefore, they say that it is necessary to count chickens in the fall, when it is clear how many of them survived. The allegorical meaning of this proverb is this: you need to judge something by the end results. Premature joy at the first result, especially if it was obtained dishonestly, can then be replaced by bitter disappointment!

Absolutely in the context of this Russian proverb, today it turns out that the Americans still do not have a reliable and powerful rocket engine that could propel their American spacecraft to the Moon and return it back to Earth.

Below is the story of a Soviet and Russian scientist about leadership Russian science and the space industry for rocket engines.

The creator of the world's best liquid-propellant rocket engines, Academician Boris Katorgin, explains why the Americans still cannot repeat our achievements in this area, and how to keep the Soviet head start in the future.

On June 21, 2012, the Global Energy Prize winners were awarded at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. An authoritative commission of industry experts from different countries selected three applications out of 639 submitted and named the laureates of the award of the year, which is traditionally called the “Nobel Prize for Power Engineers”. As a result, 33 million premium rubles were divided this year famous inventor from the UK, Professor Rodney John Allam and two of our outstanding scientists - Academicians of the Russian Academy of Sciences Boris Katorgin and Valery Kostyuk.

All three are related to the creation of cryogenic technology, the study of the properties of cryogenic products and their application in various power plants. Academician Boris Katorgin was awarded "For the development of highly efficient liquid-propellant rocket engines on cryogenic fuels, which provide reliable operation of space systems with high energy parameters for the peaceful use of space." With the direct participation of Katorgin, who devoted more than fifty years to the OKB-456 enterprise, now known as NPO Energomash, liquid-propellant rocket engines (LRE) were created, the performance of which is still considered the best in the world. Katorgin himself was engaged in the development of schemes for organizing the working process in engines, mixture formation of fuel components and elimination of pulsation in the combustion chamber. Also known are his fundamental work on nuclear rocket engines (NRE) with a high specific impulse and developments in the field of creating powerful continuous chemical lasers.

In the most difficult times for Russian science-intensive organizations, from 1991 to 2009, Boris Katorgin headed NPO Energomash, combining the positions of General Director and General Designer, and managed not only to keep the company, but also to create a number of new engines. The absence of an internal order for engines forced Katorgin to look for a customer in the external market. One of the new engines was the RD-180, developed in 1995 specifically for participation in a tender organized by the American corporation Lockheed Martin, which selected a liquid-propellant engine for the Atlas launch vehicle being upgraded at that time. As a result, NPO Energomash signed an agreement for the supply of 101 engines and by the beginning of 2012 had already delivered more than 60 rocket engines to the United States, 35 of which were successfully used on Atlas for the launch of satellites for various purposes.

Before the award of the award, the Expert talked with academician Boris Katorgin about the state and prospects of the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines and found out why engines based on developments of forty years ago are still considered innovative, and the RD-180 could not be recreated at American factories.

Boris Ivanovich, what exactly is your merit in the creation of domestic liquid-propellant jet engines, which are now considered the best in the world?

To explain this to a layman, you probably need a special skill. For liquid-propellant rocket engines, I developed combustion chambers, gas generators; generally supervised the creation of the engines themselves for peaceful development outer space... (In the combustion chambers, the fuel and oxidizer are mixed and burned, and a volume of hot gases is formed, which, then ejected through the nozzles, create the actual jet thrust; gas generators also burn the fuel mixture, but already for the operation of turbo pumps, which pump fuel and oxidizer under enormous pressure into the same combustion chamber. - "Expert")

You are talking about peaceful space exploration, although it is obvious that all engines with thrust from several tens to 800 tons, which were created at NPO Energomash, were intended primarily for military needs.

We didn't have to drop one atomic bomb, we did not deliver a single nuclear charge on our missiles to the target, and thank God. All military developments went into peaceful space. We can be proud of the enormous contribution of our rocket and space technology to the development of human civilization. Thanks to astronautics, entire technological clusters were born: space navigation, telecommunications, satellite television, and sensing systems.

The engine for the R-9 intercontinental ballistic missile, on which you worked, then formed the basis of almost all of our manned program.

Back in the late 1950s, I carried out computational and experimental work to improve the mixture formation in the combustion chambers of the RD-111 engine, which was intended for that very rocket. The results of the work are still used in the modified RD-107 and RD-108 engines for the same Soyuz rocket; about two thousand space flights were performed on them, including all manned programs.

Two years ago, I interviewed your colleague, Global Energy Laureate Academician Alexander Leontyev. In a conversation about specialists closed to the general public, which Leontyev himself once was, he mentioned Vitaly Ievlev, who also did a lot for our space industry.

Many academics who worked for the defense industry were classified - this is a fact. Now a lot has been declassified - this is also a fact. I know Alexander Ivanovich very well: he worked on the creation of calculation methods and methods for cooling the combustion chambers of various rocket engines. Solving this technological problem was not easy, especially when we began to squeeze out the chemical energy of the fuel mixture as much as possible to obtain the maximum specific impulse, increasing, among other measures, the pressure in the combustion chambers to 250 atmospheres.

Let's take our most powerful engine - RD-170. Fuel consumption with an oxidizing agent - kerosene with liquid oxygen flowing through the engine - 2.5 tons per second. Heat flows in it reach 50 megawatts per square meter is a huge energy. The temperature in the combustion chamber is 3.5 thousand degrees Celsius!

It was necessary to come up with a special cooling for the combustion chamber so that it could work calculated and withstand the thermal head. Alexander Ivanovich did just that, and, I must say, he did an excellent job. Vitaly Mikhailovich Ievlev - Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor technical sciences, the professor, unfortunately, died quite early, - was a scientist of the broadest profile, possessed an encyclopedic erudition. Like Leontiev, he worked a lot on the methodology for calculating high-stress thermal structures. Their work somewhere intersected, somewhere they were integrated, and as a result, an excellent method was obtained by which it is possible to calculate the heat intensity of any combustion chambers; now, perhaps, using it, any student can do it. In addition, Vitaly Mikhailovich took an active part in the development of nuclear, plasma rocket engines. Here our interests intersected in the years when Energomash was doing the same.

In our conversation with Leontyev, we touched upon the sale of the RD-180 energomashevsky engines in the USA, and Alexander Ivanovich said that in many ways this engine is the result of developments that were made just during the creation of the RD-170, and in a sense, its half ... Is this really the result of the backscaling?

Any engine in a new dimension is, of course, a new apparatus. RD-180 with a thrust of 400 tons is actually half the size of the RD-170 with a thrust of 800 tons.

The RD-191, designed for our new Angara rocket, has a thrust of 200 tons. What do these engines have in common? All of them have one turbo pump, but the RD-170 has four combustion chambers, the "American" RD-180 has two, and the RD-191 has one. Each engine needs its own turbo pump unit - after all, if the four-chamber RD-170 consumes about 2.5 tons of fuel per second, for which a turbo pump with a capacity of 180 thousand kilowatts was developed, which is more than two times higher than, for example, the reactor power of the atomic icebreaker "Arktika" , then the two-chamber RD-180 - only half, 1.2 tons. In the development of turbo pumps for the RD-180 and RD-191, I participated directly and at the same time led the creation of these engines as a whole.

The combustion chamber, then, is the same on all these engines, only their number is different?

Yes, and this is our main achievement. In one such chamber with a diameter of only 380 millimeters, a little more than 0.6 tons of fuel per second is burned. Without exaggeration, this camera is a unique high-heat-stress equipment with special belts to protect against powerful heat fluxes. Protection is carried out not only due to external cooling of the chamber walls, but also due to an ingenious method of "lining" a fuel film on them, which evaporates and cools the wall.

On the basis of this outstanding camera, which has no equal in the world, we manufacture our best engines: RD-170 and RD-171 for Energia and Zenit, RD-180 for the American Atlas and RD-191 for the new Russian missile "Angara".

- "Angara" was supposed to replace "Proton-M" a few years ago, but the creators of the rocket faced serious problems, the first flight tests were repeatedly postponed, and the project seems to continue to stall.

There were indeed problems. A decision has now been made to launch the rocket in 2013. The peculiarity of the "Angara" is that, on the basis of its universal rocket modules, it is possible to create a whole family of launch vehicles with a payload capacity of 2.5 to 25 tons to launch cargo into low-earth orbit on the basis of the RD-191 universal oxygen-kerosene engine. Angara-1 has one engine, Angara-3 - three with a total thrust of 600 tons, Angara-5 will have 1000 tons of thrust, that is, it will be able to put more cargo into orbit than Proton. In addition, instead of the very toxic heptyl, which is burned in the Proton engines, we use environmentally friendly fuel, after which only water and carbon dioxide are left behind.

How did it happen that the same RD-170, which was created back in the mid-1970s, still remains, in fact, an innovative product, and its technologies are used as the basis for new rocket engines?

A similar story happened with an aircraft created after World War II by Vladimir Mikhailovich Myasishchev (a long-range strategic bomber of the M series, developed by the Moscow OKB-23 of the 1950s - "Expert"). In many respects, the plane was thirty years ahead of its time, and the elements of its construction were then borrowed by other aircraft manufacturers. So it is here: in the RD-170 there are a lot of new elements, materials, design solutions. According to my estimates, they will not become obsolete for several more decades. This is primarily due to the founder of NPO Energomash and its general designer Valentin Petrovich Glushko and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vitaly Petrovich Radovsky, who headed the company after Glushko's death. (Note that the world's best energy and operational characteristics of the RD-170 are largely due to Katorgin's solution to the problem of suppressing high-frequency combustion instability by developing antipulsation baffles in the same combustion chamber. - "Expert".) And the first-stage RD-253 engine for carrier rocket "Proton"? Introduced back in 1965, it is so perfect that it has never been surpassed by anyone! This is how Glushko taught to design - at the limit of the possible and always above the world average.

It is also important to remember another thing: the country has invested in its technological future. How was it in the Soviet Union? The Ministry of General Machine Building, which, in particular, was in charge of space and rockets, spent 22 percent of its huge budget on R&D alone - in all areas, including propulsion. Today, research funding is much less, and that says a lot.

Doesn't the achievement of some perfect qualities by these liquid-propellant rocket engines, and this happened half a century ago, that a rocket engine with a chemical energy source is in a sense outdating itself: the main discoveries have been made in new generations of rocket engines, now we are talking more about the so-called supporting innovations?

Certainly not. Liquid-propellant rocket engines are in demand and will be in demand for a very long time, because no other technology is able to more reliably and economically lift a load from Earth and put it into low-Earth orbit. They are environmentally friendly, especially those that run on liquid oxygen and kerosene. But for flights to stars and other galaxies, liquid-propellant rocket engines, of course, are completely unsuitable. The mass of the entire metagalaxy is 10 to 56 degrees of grams. In order to accelerate on a liquid-propellant rocket engine to at least a quarter of the speed of light, an absolutely incredible amount of fuel is required - 10 to 3200 grams, so even thinking about it is stupid. The liquid-propellant rocket engine has its own niche - sustainer engines. On liquid engines, you can accelerate the carrier to the second cosmic speed, fly to Mars, and that's it.

The next stage - nuclear rocket engines?

Certainly. Whether we will live to see some stages is unknown, but much has been done to develop the NRM already in Soviet time... Now, under the leadership of the Keldysh Center, headed by Academician Anatoly Sazonovich Koroteev, the so-called transport and energy module is being developed. The designers came to the conclusion that it is possible to create less stressful than it was in the USSR, nuclear reactor gas-cooled, which will operate both as a power plant and as a source of energy for plasma engines when traveling in space. Such a reactor is currently being designed at the NIKIET named after N. A. Dollezhal under the leadership of Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Dragunov. The Kaliningrad design bureau "Fakel" also participates in the project, where electric propulsion engines are being created. As in Soviet times, it will not do without the Voronezh Design Bureau of Chemical Automatics, where gas turbines and compressors will be manufactured in order to drive a coolant - a gas mixture in a closed loop.

In the meantime, are we going to the rocket engine?

Of course, we also clearly see the prospects for the further development of these engines. There are tactical, long-term tasks, there is no limit here: the introduction of new, more heat-resistant coatings, new composite materials, a decrease in the mass of engines, an increase in their reliability, and a simplification of the control scheme. A number of elements can be introduced to better control the wear of parts and other processes occurring in the engine. There are strategic tasks: for example, the development of liquefied methane and acetylene as fuel together with ammonia or three-component fuel. NPO Energomash is developing a three-component engine. Such a liquid-propellant rocket engine could be used as an engine for both the first and second stages. At the first stage, it uses well-developed components: oxygen, liquid kerosene, and if you add about five percent more hydrogen, then the specific impulse will significantly increase - one of the main energy characteristics of the engine, which means that more payload can be sent into space. At the first stage, all the kerosene is produced with the addition of hydrogen, and at the second, the same engine switches from running on three-component fuel to a two-component one - hydrogen and oxygen.

We have already created an experimental engine, albeit of a small dimension and a thrust of only about 7 tons, carried out 44 tests, made full-scale mixing elements in the nozzles, in the gas generator, in the combustion chamber and found out that you can first work on three components, and then smoothly switch to two. Everything is working out, a high combustion efficiency is achieved, but to go further, we need a larger sample, we need to modify the stands in order to launch the components that we are going to use in a real engine into the combustion chamber: liquid hydrogen and oxygen, as well as kerosene. I think this is a very promising direction and a big step forward. And I hope to have time to do something during my lifetime.

- Why the Americans, having received the right to reproduce the RD-180, have not been able to make it for many years?

Americans are very pragmatic. In the 1990s, at the very beginning of their work with us, they realized that in the energy field we were far ahead of them and we had to adopt these technologies from us. For example, our RD-170 engine in one start, due to a higher specific impulse, could take out a payload two tons more than their most powerful F-1, which meant at that time $ 20 million in winnings. They announced a competition for a 400-ton engine for their Atlases, which was won by our RD-180. Then the Americans thought that they would start working with us, and in four years they would take our technologies and reproduce them themselves. I told them right away: you will spend more than a billion dollars and ten years. Four years have passed, and they say: yes, six years are needed. More years have passed, they say: no, we need another eight years. Seventeen years have passed, and they have not reproduced a single engine!

They now need billions of dollars for bench equipment alone. At Energomash we have stands where the same RD-170 engine can be tested in a pressure chamber, the jet power of which reaches 27 million kilowatts.

I heard right - 27 gigawatts? This is more than the installed capacity of all Rosatom NPPs.

Twenty-seven gigawatts is the power of the jet, which develops relative to a short time... During tests on the stand, the energy of the jet is first extinguished in a special pool, then in a dispersion pipe 16 meters in diameter and 100 meters high. It takes a lot of money to build a test bench like this one that can house an engine that generates such power. The Americans have now given up on this and are taking the finished product. As a result, we are not selling raw materials, but a product with a huge added value, in which highly intellectual labor is invested. Unfortunately, in Russia this is a rare example of high-tech sales abroad in such a large volume. But this proves that with the correct formulation of the question, we are capable of a lot.

Boris Ivanovich, what should be done in order not to lose the head start gained by the Soviet rocket engine building? Probably, apart from the lack of funding for R&D, another problem is also very painful - personnel?

To stay on the world market, you have to go forward all the time, create new products. Apparently, until the end of us was pressed down and the thunder struck. But the state needs to realize that without new developments it will find itself on the margins of the world market, and today, in this transition period while we have not yet matured to normal capitalism, it must first of all invest in the new - the state. Then you can transfer development for the release of the series private company on terms favorable to both the state and business ...

And that's what is amazing! In this story of Academician Boris Katorgin, the creator of the world's best rocket engines, there is not a word about the fact that "the Americans did not fly to the moon"! However, he does not need to shout about it. Suffice it to say and prove that today only Russia has an RD-170 rocket engine with a thrust of 800 tons, created in 1987-1988, the characteristics of which alone can ensure the flight of a spacecraft to the Moon and back. Americans do not have such an engine today!

Worse, they cannot even establish the production of the Soviet RD-180 engine, which is twice as weak in power, the license for the manufacture of which Russia has kindly sold them ...

But what about the American rocket Saturn-5, the launch of which was observed in July 1969 by millions of people who followed the "lunar program"? - perhaps someone will say now.

Yes, there was such a rocket. And she even took off from the cosmodrome! Only her task was not to fly to the moon, but only to show everyone that the takeoff had taken place. And this should have been recorded by television cameras, as well as the eyes of all kinds of witnesses. Then the Saturn 5 rocket fell into the Atlantic Ocean. Its first stage, its warhead, and the descent module, in which there were no astronauts, also fell there ...

As for the Saturn 5 rocket engines ...

For a "fake flight", the rocket did not need to have any outstanding rocket engines with especially high power! It was quite possible to get by with those engines that the Americans were able to develop by that time!

The launch of the "lunar rocket" Saturn-5, as you know, took place on July 16, 1969. On July 20 and 21, American astronauts were allegedly able to walk on the Moon and even hoist an American flag on it, and on July 24, 1969, on the ninth day of the expedition, they returned very vigorous in a descent capsule to Earth.

The courage of the US astronauts immediately caught the eye of all specialists. She could not but cause at least bewilderment. Well, how is that ?! It can not be!..

Here is the testimony of Russian professionals from the cosmonaut search and rescue group. The picture after landing looks like this: "The approximate state of the cosmonaut is as if a person ran a thirty-kilometer cross-country race, and then rode a carousel for a few more hours. Coordination is impaired, the vestibular apparatus is impaired. mandatory a mobile hospital is deployed. Immediately upon landing, we check the state of the cosmonauts' cardiac system, pressure, pulse, and the amount of oxygen in the blood. The astronauts are being transported lying down. "

In other words, if the cosmonauts have been in near-earth orbit for at least a few days, then in the first hours after their return they are in a state of extreme fatigue and are practically unable to move independently. A stretcher and a hospital bed - that's their lot for the coming days.

This is how real cosmonauts come back from shaved:

And this is how the Americans returned, who had allegedly been on the moon and had been in zero gravity for almost 9 days. They themselves famously got out of the descent capsule, and already without spacesuits!

And just 50 minutes later, Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins are energetically participating in a rally dedicated to their return to Earth! (And after all, they had the quality then! In 9 days it should have turned out 5 kg of shit and 10 liters of urine for each, at least! So quickly they had time to wash themselves ?!)

Let's return, however, to the engines of the Saturn-5 rocket.

In 2013, the news spread all over the world: “At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, parts of the F-1 liquid-propellant rocket engine, which fell together with the spent first stage of the S-IC-506 Saturn V launch vehicle, which was launched on July 16, 1969, was discovered and raised! 1 tore the launch vehicle and Apollo 11 spacecraft with a crew of astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins from launch pad 39A on their historic flight. two F-1 engines recovered from ~ 3 miles In addition to the engines, parts of the first stage structure were recovered that had collapsed after being hit by the water.

The first stage of the S-IC separated after 150 seconds from the start of the F-1 engines, reported the launch vehicle and spacecraft a speed of 2.756 km / s, and lifted the bundle to an altitude of 68 kilometers. After separation, the first stage moved along a ballistic trajectory, rising at its apogee to an altitude of about 109 kilometers, and falling at a distance of about 560 kilometers from the launch site in the Atlantic Ocean.

Coordinates of the fall site of S-IC-506 in the Atlantic Ocean: 30 ° 13 "North latitude and 74 ° 2" West longitude ".

How the Saturn-5 rocket engines were lifted:

It is argued that fragments of this liquid-propellant engine were lifted from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and for some reason the United States does not see any sense in producing it further, and therefore they prefer to buy Russian-made rocket engines, the RD-180, for their needs!

A model of the F-1 engine, on which the Saturn-5 "lunar rocket" allegedly flew.

Here is our famous Russian engine that Russia is selling today to American rocket manufacturers. Don't you find anything strange in this ?!

It remains for me to tell you about one more find that was made in the Atlantic Ocean back in 1970. Then the Russian fishermen discovered the Apollo descent capsule drifting into the sea without the cosmonauts inside. Naturally, the find was reported to Moscow, and there they decided to transfer it to the American side.

Translation of the article into Russian:

Russia says Apollo capsule has been found and will be returned a

MOSCOW (UPI) - The Soviets have pulled out of the ocean a US space capsule, which they describe as part of the Apollo lunar mission, and are set to return it to US officials this weekend, state news agency TASS said.

Checking this information with the American embassy staff showed that the Soviets had at least two weeks to study this space equipment, and American officials knew about it, but the decision to return it right now came as a surprise.

One US embassy official said officials on Friday inspected the facility and were unable to confirm if it was an Apollo component. But he added that "from their message I got the impression that this one-piece piece of equipment", not a fragment of it.

The Soviets have stated bluntly that they intend to load the capsule aboard the American icebreaker Southwind, which sailed for three days in the Barents Sea port of Murmansk on Saturday. Subsequently, US officials said they had asked Washington for permission to transfer.

A three-paragraph TASS statement on Friday afternoon gave rise to the first suspicions that the Russians had some kind of American spacecraft.

"An experimental space capsule launched under the Apollo program and found in the Bay of Biscay by Soviet fishermen will be handed over to US representatives,"- it says.

"The US icebreaker" Southwind "will come to Murmansk on Saturday to pick up the capsule."

Prior to TASS's announcement, the embassy announced that Southwind would enter Murmansk and stay there Saturday through Monday to provide the crew with an opportunity for "rest and entertainment." It described the prospects for the goodwill of the visit and nothing else.

When asked about the TASS report, an embassy spokesman said the Soviets had made this decision without notice. officials USA.

"" Southwind "goes to Murmansk for the stated reasons - rest and entertainment, and I think you can be quite sure that the ship's captain does not know anything about it",- he said. ...

Of course, the Americans did not admit that the descent capsule found by the Soviet fishermen was from the same "lunar rocket" that took off on July 14, 1969 and was supposedly sent to the Earth's satellite. NASA, as if nothing had happened, said the Russians had discovered an "experimental space capsule."

At the same time in the book "We've never been to the moon"(Cornville, Az .: Desert Publications, 1981, at p. 75) B. Kaysing says: “During one of my talk shows, the pilot of a scheduled plane called and said that he saw the Apollo capsule being dropped from a large plane around the time the astronauts were supposed to“ return ”from the moon. Seven Japanese passengers also observed this incident ... ".

Here is this book, which deals with a completely different Apollo descent capsule, which was dropped from an airplane by parachute to simulate the return of astronauts to Earth:

And one more stroke to continue this theme, which further exposes the American deception:

"This old photograph shows the Bulgarian cosmonaut G. Ivanov and the Soviet cosmonaut N. Rukavishnikov, discussing the scheme of the Soyuz descent vehicle entering the dense layers of the atmosphere. The capsule enters the dense layers of the atmosphere at a speed many times higher than the speed of sound. the air flow turns into heat and the temperature in the hottest place (at the bottom of the apparatus) reaches several thousand degrees! "

American Patrick Murray"Blew up" the world media with an incredible sensation - he published an interview with the now deceased director Stanley Kubrick recorded 15 years ago.

“I have committed a huge fraud against the American public. Featuring the United States government and NASA. The moon landing was faked, all landings were fake, and I was the person who filmed it, ”Stanley Kubrick claims in the video. To the interviewer's clarifying question, the director repeats once again: yes, the American landing on the moon is a fake, which he personally fabricated.

According to Kubrick, this hoax was carried out on the instructions of the President of the United States. Richard Nixon... For participation in the project, the director received a large amount of money.

Patrick Murray explained why the interview appeared only 15 years after the death of Stanley Kubrick. According to him, this was the requirement of a non-disclosure agreement, which he signed during the recording of the interview.

The loud sensation, however, was quickly exposed - the interview itself with Kubrick, whose role was actually played by the actor, turned out to be a hoax.

This is not the first time that Stanley Kubrick's involvement in what has come to be known as the "lunar conspiracy" has been raised.

In 2002 came out on screens documentary"The Dark Side of the Moon", which included an interview with Stanley Kubrick's widow Christianoy... In it, she argued that her husband, at the initiative of US President Richard Nixon, inspired by Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, took part in the filming of the American astronauts landing on the moon, which were held in a specially built pavilion on Earth.

In reality, The Dark Side of the Moon was a well-choreographed hoax, as its creators frankly admitted in the credits.

"We've never been to the moon"

Despite the exposure of such pseudo-sensations, the theory of the "lunar conspiracy" is still alive and has thousands of supporters in different countries the world.

July 21, 1969 astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon and uttered the historic phrase: "This is one small step for man, but a giant leap for all mankind."

The television broadcast of the first landing of a man on the lunar surface was conducted in dozens of countries, but it did not convince some of them. From the very first day, skeptics began to appear, convinced that there was no landing on the moon, and that everything that was demonstrated to the public was a grandiose hoax.

On December 18, 1969, The New York Times published a short note about the annual meeting of the members of the comic Society for the Memory of the Man Who Will Never Fly, held in a bar in Chicago. In it, one of the representatives of NASA allegedly showed other drunken members of the society photos and videos of ground-based training activities of astronauts, showing a striking external resemblance to footage from the Moon.

In 1970, the first books were published in which doubts were expressed that earthlings had really visited the moon.

In 1975, an American writer Bill Kaysing released the book "We've Never Been on the Moon", which became a tabletop for all supporters of the "lunar conspiracy" theory. Kaysing argued that all flights to the moon are a well-conceived hoax of the US government.

Bill Kaysing articulated the main arguments of the lunar conspiracy theorists:

1. Level technological development NASA did not allow a man to be sent to the moon;
2. The absence of stars in photographs from the lunar surface;
3. The astronauts' film was supposed to melt from the midday temperature on the Moon;
4. Various optical anomalies in photographs;
5. Waving flag in vacuum;
6. A flat surface instead of craters that should have formed as a result of the landing of lunar modules from their engines.

Why is the flag flying?

Supporters of the version that the Americans have never been to the Moon point to numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in the materials of NASA's lunar program.

The arguments of conspiracy theorists and their opponents are collected in dozens of books, and it would be extremely rash to cite all of them. For example, you can make out the incident with the American flag on the moon.

The photographs and video footage of the installation on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew of the US flag show “ripples” on the surface of the canvas. Supporters of the "lunar conspiracy" believe that this ripple arose from a gust of wind, which is impossible in an airless space on the surface of the moon.

Opponents object: the movement of the flag was not caused by the wind, but by damping vibrations that arose when the flag was installed. The flag was fixed on the flagpole and on a horizontal telescopic bar, pressed against the flagpole during transportation. The astronauts were unable to extend the telescopic tube of the horizontal bar to its full length. Because of this, ripples remained on the cloth, which created the illusion of a flag waving in the wind.

Likewise, virtually every conspiracy theory argument is refuted.

Was the USSR's silence bought for a bribe?

The Soviet Union occupies a special place in the "lunar conspiracy". A logical question arises: if there was no landing on the moon, then why did the Soviet Union, which could not be unaware of this, remained silent?

There are several versions of this among the adherents of the theory. According to the first, Soviet specialists were unable to immediately recognize the clever forgery. Another version assumes that the USSR agreed not to expose the Americans in exchange for some economic preferences. According to the third theory, the Soviet Union itself participated in the "lunar conspiracy" - the leadership of the USSR agreed to keep silent about the tricks of the Americans in order to hide their unsuccessful flights to the Moon, during one of which, according to the "conspirators", the first cosmonaut of the Earth died Yuri Gagarin.

According to the supporters of the lunar conspiracy theory, US President Richard Nixon ordered an operation to simulate an astronaut flight to the moon after it became clear that technology did not allow for a real manned flight to the Earth's satellite. For the United States, it was a matter of principle to win the "moon race" against the USSR, and for this they were ready to do anything.

In an atmosphere of the strictest secrecy, the best masters of Hollywood were allegedly involved in the operation, including Stanley Kubrick, who allegedly filmed all the necessary scenes in a specially built pavilion.

Arguments and Facts

In 2009, to mark the 40th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon, NASA decided to finally bury the "lunar conspiracy."

The automatic interplanetary station LRO performed a special task - it took pictures of the landing areas of the lunar modules of the terrestrial expeditions. The first ever detailed photographs of the lunar modules themselves, the landing sites, elements of equipment left by the expeditions on the surface, and even the traces of the earthlings themselves from the cart and the rover were transferred to Earth. Five of the six landings of American lunar expeditions were captured.

The traces of the Americans' stay on the moon, independently of each other, in recent years with the help of their automatic spacecraft were recorded by specialists from India, China and Japan.

The supporters of the "lunar conspiracy", however, do not give up. Not very trusting all this evidence, they claim that an unmanned vehicle sent to an Earth satellite could have left traces on the moon.

How Hollywood played into the hands of skeptics

In 1977, the American feature film Capricorn 1, based on the theory of the "lunar conspiracy", was released. According to its plot, the administration of the US President sends a supposedly manned spacecraft to Mars, although in reality the crew remains on Earth and reports from a specially built pavilion. At the end of the mission, the astronauts must appear before the admiring Americans, but upon returning to Earth, the spacecraft burns up in the dense layers of the atmosphere. After that, the secret services are trying to get rid of the astronauts, officially declared dead, as unwanted bystanders.

The film "Capricorn-1" significantly increased the number of skeptics who believe that such a scenario could well be applied to the lunar program, especially since the authors in the plot used references to the real history of the Apollo program. For example, at the beginning of the film, the US Vice President mentions that $ 24 billion has been spent on the Capricorn program. That is how much was actually spent on the Apollo program. The film says that the US President was absent at the launch of Capricorn due to urgent matters - the real head of the United States, Richard Nixon, was absent at the launch of Apollo 11 for a similar reason.

Soviet cosmonauts: Americans were on the moon, but filmed something in the pavilion

Interestingly, the Soviet cosmonauts and designers, theoretically most interested in exposing the "lunar conspiracy", never expressed doubts that the Americans actually landed on the moon.

Constructor Boris Chertok, one of the companions Sergei Korolev, wrote in his memoirs: "In the United States, three years after the astronauts landed on the moon, a book came out, which stated that there was no flight to the moon ... The author and publisher made good money on deliberate lies."

Constructor spaceships Konstantin Feoktistov, who himself flew into space as part of the Voskhod-1 crew, wrote that Soviet tracking stations received signals from American astronauts from the moon. According to Feoktistov, "to arrange such a hoax is probably no less difficult than a real expedition."

Cosmonauts Alexey Leonov and Georgy Grechko who took part in Soviet program manned flight to the moon, confidently declared: yes, the Americans were on the moon. At the same time, they agreed that some of the footage of the landings was taken in the pavilion. There is no crime in this - the staged shots were only supposed to visually demonstrate to the public how everything really happened. A similar technique was used when highlighting the achievements of Soviet cosmonautics.

Astronomically expensive moon

It does not seem plausible to argue that the United States did not have the technical ability to get astronauts to the moon. All now declassified documents indicate that both the United States and the USSR had such a technical capability. However, in the Soviet Union, having lost the "moon race", they preferred to curtail further work, stating that a manned flight to an Earth satellite was not planned.

Another question that is being asked by the supporters of the "lunar conspiracy" is that if the Americans really visited the moon, then why did they curtail further research?

The answer to this question is rather trivial: it's all about money.

Having lost almost all the main prizes of the first stage of the "space race", the United States threw incredible funds for the implementation of a manned flight to the moon. In the end, this allowed them to win.

But when the euphoria subsided, it became clear that the "lunar prestige" is placing a heavy burden on the American economy. As a result, it was decided to curtail the Apollo program - as it was thought then, in order to return to the Moon in a few years with a more extensive and cheaper research program.

Conspiracy Theory 2.0

Permanent construction programs lunar bases were developed both in the USA and in the USSR. All of them were interesting from a scientific point of view, but required a truly astronomical investment. The question of the industrial development of the Moon remains a matter for the distant future.

As a result, for more than 45 years, none of the earthlings has been flying to the moon. And this was the reason for many supporters of the "lunar conspiracy" to become adherents of its, so to speak, modernized version.

According to her, American astronauts were indeed on the moon, but found there traces of the presence of an alien civilization, which it was decided to keep in the strictest confidence. That is why flights to the moon were officially terminated, and a cover operation was launched in the media, part of which was the misinformation about the staging of the Apollo program.

But this is already a topic for a separate story.