You probably realise I’m a bit of a space nut. Could it be the cheesy pictures of me in mission control at the Johnson Space Center?
Or the fact that I dropped everything to see Buzz Aldrin speaking in London a couple of weeks ago?
Or perhaps the fact that my most prized possession is a commemorative edition of The Times from the Apollo 11 landings (and I believe the first ever edition printed in colour)?
Well whatever gave it away, I don’t care. I’m coming clean. I am mental about space. And I always have been. Ever since watching the first ever shuttle launch in the classroom when I was 9, right through to watching night after night to see the most recent shuttle launch.
And I get frustrated when my friends don’t share my excitement and wonder at the possibility of leaving the Earth. Not to mention the odd one or two people I encounter who still actually believe that we didn’t go to the moon! WTF!
The Apollo missions were an incredible achievement, I recently heard that there’s 10 times more computing power and 100 times more RAM in the chip on my credit card than there was in the Lunar Module! I have no idea if that’s true or not, but still, it’s pretty cool, right? Right?
And now it’s been 40 years since we landed on the moon, and I haven’t quite achieved my childhood ambition of becoming an astronaut. But instead, I’ve done what I can to excite people about the Apollo missions. I’ve rebuilt the 3D lunar lander from the 5K app competition into a special Apollo 11 commemorative edition!
Now with levels, one for each Apollo mission! With crew listings!
And actual quotes from each mission!
I have some more plans to make it a little slicker, and would like to add a high score table, but I had a bit of a tight deadline. Tomorrow at 8.17pm UTC. Exactly 40 years since Buzz and Neil landed.
So perhaps, as you’re enjoying the memories, you can now experience what it was like for Armstrong and Aldrin for yourself*. Play MoonLander3D here.
*Any similarities between this game and what it was actually like in the Lunar Module, are entirely coincidental. 
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I draw the line when I feel I’m expected to share someones beliefs without question; Because then I know it’s emotionally charged dogma I’m rejecting and not fact.
I much into hoax theories for the same reason….
sorry, *not* much into…
For the record, I’m a Flash developer too, and (I think) I am in the same camp as John here. And I think both camps are the believer and the sceptic: both believe they have the ‘moral high ground’, but in fact it is simply a matter of perspective. One believes that the manned landings did happen, the other believes they did not; one disbelieves the hoax theories, the other disbelieves the official story.
I for one do think it’s an incredible achievement that we went to the moon; this is not what I’m debating. I think that all the unmanned missions did happen, as did all the other space endeavours by NASA, which could explain all the artifacts ‘left behind’ and all the hard scientific data gathered which were supposed to have been collected by the manned missions. Just that the manned lunar landings have just enough irregularities to point to a hoax, albeit a very carefully crafted and concealed one. I’m not much on conspiracy theories either, and I don’t purport to know exactly what happened.
But consider, if NASA did go to the moon as they have said, why are there so many irregularities in the photographic evidence? Why has no other nation ever mounted a manned exploration to the moon? Why have we never gone back? There are so many pieces that do not fit. I would rather be ignorant of the anomalous data and believe as many do that this was an incredible achievement in human history. But as an amateur scientist and a programmer, I cannot ignore irregularities in accumulated data simply because I want it to be so, that I my mind is simply faulty logic.
Whether you believe or do not believe this achievement took place, I encourage you to examine all the information surrounding these events, without the weight of rhetoric from either side of the fence.
Seb, your game is really cool BTW, I enjoyed playing it. Reminds me of a similar simulator program I had on the C-64, back in the day
“Why has no other nation ever mounted a manned exploration to the moon?”
Because its made of chesse you thick f***
Great game seb, still love the original.
“Because its made of chesse you thick f***”
You see this is what amazes me; How supposedly rational moonies can be more spiteful than christians when you question their beliefs.
As Seb has pointed out there are plenty of holes in the arguments FOR a hoax. If there are glaring inconsistencies in the photographic evidence then those of us who swallowed the official story are being asked to believe that a hoax of such huge proportions (involving thousands of individuals, none of whom have come forward in the 40 years since to provide any evidence) was perpetrated by some of the most intelligent people on the planet – but then they went and filmed the thing in a windy aircraft hanger so the flag was flapping – or some other equally dumb mistake was made.
If there are inconsistencies in the evidence then yes, by all means, question them, but denying the whole existence of such a historic event because of them? That, to me, is faulty logic.
It’s incredibly easy to come up with conspiracy theories around the US space program (or pretty much anything else, for that matter) for instance Apollo 13 was clearly a publicity stunt to re-ignite the public’s waning interest in the space program. for 2 years I had to put up with a science teacher who claimed that the moon landings were fake because the depth of dust on the moon was so much less than what was expected by NASA (hence the length of the legs on the Eagle Lander) that it PROVED the universe was a great deal younger than cosmologists claimed. This PROVED that the earth was only however many thousand years old that christians claim it to be. So claiming to be a scientist is no guarantee of objectivity… or even common-sense.
The argument will rage on… until the chinese get there and find the footprints… which will have been put there by automated robots or something…
I personally have never ascribed to the more outlandish hoax scenarios. And yes, it is possible to pull off such a stunt, because in fact you only need a few hundred people involved at most: the telemetry people at the Australian radio observatory receiving the signal coming from the capsule in near earth orbit broadcasting the pretaped video, and of course the camera crew that shot the whole thing in a studio beforehand. A lot of top secret government projects nowadays employ far more people, and we don’t have a clue what they’re doing either. You don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain that one away.
One possible scenario could be:
1) Kennedy gets the nation committed to going to the moon because he’s told by his aides that it be possible, only insufficient feasibility studies have been made up to that point.
2) The Russians, who we know after the fact had several deaths of unnamed astronauts in space disasters in their attempts to beat the Americans, which were then covered up (there’s a really decent article in Penthouse about this some time ago), so it’s entirely feasible that they never went because they found it too hazardous for manned missions. And there were several now ‘unfindable’ NASA feasibility studies warning of radiation hazards from both the Van Allen belt and interplanetary space (one of which I now own a copy).
3) Only problem is that now both nations are committed to this one-upmanship. Russia is planning on actually going, but it must first design a spacecraft able to withstand the radiation problem. The US, having a lot of setbacks with launch vehicles blowing up on the pad (a problem the Russians have by now solved), know that they’re not going to beat the Russians, so they decide, in a bold move, to fake it.
4) And the rest is history. The Russians, realizing that they lost, mothball their manned lunar program because it’s too risky and their efforts are better spent keeping up in the nuclear arms race. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that the US and the Russians actually colluded in keeping the secret of the hoax. Maybe the Russians were also taken in initially (we are talking about a top secret project, after all), until it was much too late to denounce the whole thing without actually going themselves, which would have been hugely anticlimactic and a losing media battle, and they had better things to spend their time on with the cold war and the arms race in full swing.
The fact that no nation, amongst all the spacefaring nations, has gone back, does point to some kind of overall collusion in the accepted historical record, if for no other reason than, if the risks of interplanetary travel that forced the US to hoax its manned missions are real, why risk looking incompetent by needing 10x the technology just to do what the US did over 40 years ago? If the hoax is real, going back is a no-win scenario, but if it’s not, if it’s that easy (or I should say possible), we should already be there at least ten years ago. Greed is a powerful motivator: I anticipated corporations with huge mining operations and zero-g manufacturing plants by now, but none of that has come anywhere close to reality, almost like the whole human space exploration endeavour has been aborted somewhere between Apollo 11 and the Challenger disaster.
I used to be a huge space affictionado as a teen, and in my 20′s participated in every space advocacy organization there is, so I’m not some random NASA hating nut. But at some point I realized that we should be so much farther ahead than we are, and that’s when I began to wonder why not. The fallout from this hoax, and how it necessitates holding back manned space exploration, is the only plausible explanation IMO. If that belief tramples some sacred cows, well so be it.
Sorry to be so long-winded, but to refute accepted facts with careful and thoughtful deliberation takes a lot more space than a 30-second sound bite or a troll-based remark.
A great game. This should be put in arcades!
I’m not going to waste space on Seb’s blog arguing every point here. But i have to say that this:
“The fact that no nation, amongst all the spacefaring nations, has gone back, does point to some kind of overall collusion in the accepted historical record”
makes no sense. Whatever level of technology anyone else uses to get to the moon has no bearing on the validity of the Apollo moon landings. You’d have to try and fail with the same technology as the Apollo projects used to provide some evidence to back up the hoax.
The scale of the Apollo projects itself is more of an argument for the hoax than anything else. Even getting a few hundred people in the right place at the right time is hard enough, without keeping them quiet for so long afterwards when there’s so much to gain from coming forward.
“troll-based remark”
sorry if you took it that way, i just don’t buy the hoax, it’s nothing personal. My website address is linked from my name here, so feel free to contact me directly and we can carry on the discussion away from Seb’s blog if you like.
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Dear Seb,
I know you must be tired of this moon walking debate but I think it is extremely important that everyone get it right. It seems many people cannot make a call on this issue because of our lying government. I say “our” lying government because, even though I am a Yank, we actually have the same government (but that is another story). To be brief, there is absolutely no way any human being has come anywhere near the moon… in 1969 or in any other year.
Step back and take a look at the virtually endless amount of evidence against the moon landing. Remember the first rule of science, that is, you cannot prove anything absolutely true but you can prove it absolutely false. There is one site I would like to recommend to you that is nice because it has a great deal of the Apollo evidence in one place. WARNING, it is extensive! It took me several hours just to breeze over the Jack White photographic evidence. The piece of evidence that finally serves to convince is different for everyone because there is so much evidence from which to choose. For me, I think it was the severity of radiation reported by an experimental shuttle flight at only 400 miles out (they are usually orbiting at 200 miles out).
From an intuitive point of view, recall that the LEM was said to have blasted from the moon then re-docked with the orbiting command capsule speeding at mach 4. Think about the kind of computing power needed for that kind of docking. Did you really think they pulled it off with a computer smaller than a calculator? Regarding the lunar reflectors, it turns out that you can bounce a laser off the moon without them.
Here is the link I recommended: Aulis.com
The white rabbit says to feed your head but don’t feed it junk.
& How is the manual ?? You should have done one.
Thanks to Seb for your great game, I loved it. I remember that I enjoyed the 2D game 20 years ago. I really surprised to see the 3D found on last Saturday and addicted to it since then. I kept screenshot of every record I made and have it saved on Facebook started from 3828 scored on Saturday, reaching 4637 yesterday.. and booked 5027 score an hour ago. That is such a great record (well at least for me, lol lol).
I shared your game to my Facebook and many friends tried it.
This the screenshot when I made the 5027 score.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5597821&l=acda312a40&id=547310886
Again, thanks to Seb for your great game, I like it sooooo much.
haha that’s great Abah! V glad you enjoy it
Unfortunately I can’t see the images as they’re not public.
… the game is really great!, the 3d environement just impressing beautiful! … and fast to drive through, impressive. THANX aeon
Very cool and really enjoyed reading the little history of the game. Thanx Mike
The Apollo 15 Crew according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_15 was
Commander: David R. Scott
LM Pilot: James B. Irwin
CM Pilot: Alfred M. Worden
Gordon, Schmitt and Brand were the backup crew
Great game, Seb! More fun than the 2D version that I spent all my quarters on in the 80′s!
As to the moon landing hoax theories, I’d like to hear the conspiracist’s explanation as to how all the highly directional parabolic antennas aimed directly at the moon were able to pick up conversations from the astronauts who were supposedly in low earth orbit (according to them) or in a movie studio in Hollywood!
Hi MoonSkeptic
I must admit to being convinced to some of the moon hoax theories flying around the 90s, and for a time, I’m ashamed to say, I was even starting to become convinced by them. But in recent years I’ve looked into this more and the more I’ve discovered about the missions, the more outlandish the claims by the conspiracy theorists become.
So I ask you, are you an expert in radiation? Because I’m not. But even the man who discovered the Van Allen belt (Dr James Van Allen) claims that passing through the belt wouldn’t cause any adverse reaction. So I have to concede to him.
And, as every little niggle gets explained away, the hoax theorists find another niggle, only to get debunked again.
So instead of tearing the arguments apart, why not concentrate on the positive evidence? There are reflectors placed on the moon during Apollo 11 that have been used to measure the distance from the earth accurate to a millimeter for 40 years. The missions were tracked independently by both the British and the Russians, who in particular would have delighted in discovering such a scam. And what about the recent images from NASA with the LRO clearly showing the Apollo landing sites? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/07/17/apollo-landing-sites-imaged-by-lro/ And there’ll be more better quality photos coming from the probe soon.
I expect the hoax theorists will say NASA are continuing to doctor evidence.
But for the reasons I have outlined, and many, many more, we can indeed know that they went to the moon. The only other possibility is ludicrous and unworkable amongst an international scientific community.
Which is too bad really, because the moon hoax conspiracy would be such a nice story.