Foreword

It is now over forty years since man first set foot on the Moon. Many of us, including myself, experienced that extraordinary moment as news that filled the papers and magazines and gave us an unforgettable, sleepless night spent gazing at the ghostly pictures that were coming into our homes from space through the glow of the television screen.

Today, however, for a growing number of people that memorable event is literally history: blurred, distant, known only through second-hand stories and often reported tiredly and superficially by mainstream media. And if going to the Moon is already an incredible, mythical and unreal feat, the idea that we did it in the 1960s – and then stopped – is, for many, understandably hard to accept.

This book is for those who seek to understand what really happened and want answers to their doubts, fueled often by the claims of attention seekers who are trying to make a quick buck or are eager to cut down the greatness of other people and appease their feelings of inadequacy by rabidly alleging that it was all a hoax.

To hardcore hoax believers, those who are impervious to any argument and think that they have it all figured out, I offer only my pity. They are unable to enjoy this amazing adventure, which is one of the few peaceful endeavors for which the twentieth century stands the chance of being remembered as something more than a heartbreaking series of wars, devastations and genocides.

However, this book is not just a pedantic refutation of a bunch of eccentric claims. It's a celebration of a moment in time that can never be equaled or repeated. Yes, there will be other destinations, other missions, other landing on distant worlds, but the Moon landing of July 1969 will be forever mankind's first contact with another world. It will always be the first time that humanity proved, albeit for a brief moment, that it was capable of crawling out of its fragile cradle.

What an incredible privilege it is to be alive in that unique, minuscule slice of history in which all this happened. To be able to say thanks and shake the hand of those who accomplished a voyage that for countless centuries was merely a dream beyond the power of even the mightiest king, emperor or pharaoh. To walk on the Moon. This book is my small homage to the courage and ingenuity of all those who contributed to turning that dream into reality. In peace, for all mankind.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank all the people who patiently read and checked the drafts of this book and debugged them as they grew online. I am especially indebted to Hammer, Trystero, Papageno, Tukler and Luigi for their tireless fact-checking and proofreading. Any surviving mistakes are solely mine.

I am also grateful to Eric Jones of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and to all the members of the Project Apollo online forum for helping me through the maze of acronyms and jargon and technical minutiae and for unerringly answering the bizarre questions of a fellow space geek. Last but not least, I'd also like to acknowledge Nicola Colotti's encouragement and brilliant diplomacy in securing me an amazing interview with Buzz Aldrin.

This book is dedicated to my parents, who woke me up when I was six years old so that I could watch the Apollo 11 Moon landing live on TV in groggy amazement (it was nighttime in Europe), and to my aunt Iris, who in the early 1970s gave me a copy of Peter Ryan's enthralling account of the first Apollo missions, The Invasion of the Moon 1957-70. I never recovered from this double bite of the space bug. That dog-eared paperback is still here with me as I write these words. Its pages are fading, but the passion they have fed for all these years certainly is not.

Free distribution

You may freely copy and distribute the digital edition of this book, provided that you don't alter it, pass it off as yours or print it for sale. I didn't write this book to become rich and famous, but to allow as many people as possible to get the facts they need to counter the arguments of conspiracy theorists. Just don't mess with my rights.

However, writing a technical book takes time and hard work; buying manuals and DVDs and documents takes money. So if you like what you read and you feel like lending me a hand on this project, you're welcome to point out errors or unclear language, help me with research, buy me space reference books from my Amazon.com wish list or donate the equivalent of a genuine Italian pizza and a good beer via my Paypal account as an incentive for me to keep on writing. The details are on the MoonHoaxDebunked.com website.

Internet addresses shortened with Tinyurl

Most of the Internet addresses of the online sources referenced in this book are given in the short, more human-readable form offered by Tinyurl.com. This makes them easier to type for those who are reading the printed edition of this book.

Comments, corrections and updates

This book is a work in progress. Apollo's science and documentation are still being studied today and the new Moon probes are providing updates and new opportunities for cross-checking that deserve to be included as they become available.

Also, conspiracy theorists concoct new “evidence” and claims all the time, so you might find that a specific claim hasn't yet been debunked specifically in this book. You might also find a mistake or a typo. If so, let me know by e-mail at paolo.attivissimo@gmail.com, so that the next edition of this book will be updated and corrected.

Additional photographs, videos and documents

Some of the technical explanations given in these pages become clearer with the aid of high-resolution photographs and samples of footage from the Apollo TV broadcasts and 16-mm color films. Therefore, a downloadable set of scanned photos and digitized videos is available as a supplement to this book. Details on how to download this material are available at www.moonhoaxdebunked.com.

In memoriam

This book wishes to honor those who paid the highest price in order to reach and extend the new frontier, sometimes in secret and often without being remembered even as a footnote of history. Let's not ever forget that anyone who denies the Moon landings is sullying the memory of these people, of their families and of everyone who worked hard for the exploration of space.

Michael J. Adams
Michael P. Anderson
Charles A. Bassett II
Valentin Bondarenko
David M. Brown
Roger Chaffee
Kalpana Chawla
Laurel B. Clark
Georgi Dobrovolski
Theodore C. Freeman
Edward G. Givens, Jr.
Virgil "Gus" Grissom
Rick D. Husband
Gregory Jarvis
Vladimir Komarov
Robert H. Lawrence, Jr.
Christa McAuliffe
William C. McCool
Ronald McNair
Ellison Onizuka
Viktor Patsayev
Ilan Ramon
Judith Resnick
Francis "Dick" Scobee
Elliot McKay See, Jr.
Michael J. Smith
Vladislav Volkov
Ed White
Clifton C. Williams, Jr.

Ad astra per aspera.