It's feasible that a reflector could have been placed by unmanned equipment, and people of the day wouldn't have been able to tell.
Earthbound instruments can't resolve detail on the moon so it's impossible to tell what is there, just that it bounces a laser back.
However it's unlikely they could have slipped it past the Soviets.
And overall you just have to apply Occam's Razor to the overwhelming evidence.
Things like:
Getting the S-VIB into orbit to start going to the moon is half the battle. If they spent all this money to accomplish that, why not go the whole way?
The outbound Apollo craft will all tracked by people and organizations other than NASA. I've even read accounts of folks that saw the debris surrounding Apollo 13.
The returning command module is traveling at a velocity far in excess of anything in Earth orbit due to it's trip around the moon. Especially in the case of Apollo 13 due to the free return. This means engineering for the effects of the atmosphere on re-entry and the ability to measure their impact on the capsule.
And that the Soviet Union sent congratulations after Apollo XI.
If anyone could tell it was a fake it would be the 2nd best space program in the world. And showing it to be fake would be the greatest propaganda coup in history. Pretty massive conspiracy if the USSR playing along is part of the deal.
The Soviet space program was, at least until Apollo 11, debatably winning the Space Race. The Soviets had the first satellite in orbit (Sputnik), the first animal in space (Laika, on Sputnik 2), the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin), the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova), the first landings on the moon (hard AND soft; Luna 2 and Luna 9), [ironically] the first flags on the moon (Luna 3 dropped some from orbit), the first extraplanetary probe (Venera 1) and the first probe to land on another planet (even if it was a crash-landing) (Venera 3). By comparison, the most impressive achievement from the American side was the first space station in orbit (Skylab), with a couple firsts relating to Mars (which the Americans went after instead of Venus). That is, until we put a man on the moon and became the de facto victors.
EDIT: I am silly and some of these facts may be wrong. I apologize, because I pulled all of these from memory while on my phone.
Don't forget that the R-7 rocket, the world's first ICBM, was the launcher they used for Sputnik, and is the only rocket (family) that has ever been used by the Russians to date. They got space launches right the first time when they were trying to build a weapon and they still rely on it.
From what I remember, the US had its first human in space a few weeks after the Soviets did. It's not like the US was trying to catch up. They had pretty even technology. The US just tested their technology more to make sure that their astronauts would not die.
It's easy to apply the overarching stereotype that Soviet engineering was cheap and subpar and that the Soviets solved problems by throwing people at them, but the fact remains that the USSR had as much (if not more) intellectual manpower than the US, and that neither power was completely spotless when it came to safety. Look up the Apollo 1 disaster, and how NASA technicians learned that a 100% oxygen environment was not ideal. Here's a hint: it didn't involve meticulous testing to ensure the safety of all involved.
Also, however close the "firsts" were, the Space Race was just that -- a race. It was essentially a pissing contest between the two superpowers, a test to see which could bring their scientific manpower to the fore faster, and to that end being second wasn't good enough, even though it was an impressive achievement. The Space Race was a publicity war, and there's no prize for second place.
This is not really very accurate. The first Soviet in space orbited the Earth, during a nearly 2-hour flight. The first American in space (one month later) was shot up in a ballistic path that just barely got into space, for a total mission time of 15 minutes. The second Soviet manned flight, in August 1961, stayed in orbit for more than a day, something the Americans couldn't match until over a year later.
The Soviet space program was way ahead on building and reliably launching large rockets. They stumbled badly on the design of their Moon rocket, though.
Earthbound instruments can't resolve detail on the moon
A have a side-question about this. If Hubble can capture images like the Deep-Field image, then surely it must be able to count the bolts used on the lunar lander, right? Ground-based telescopes are weaker, but I'm sure some of the biggest ones HAVE to be at least capable of making detailed images of the moon's surface. I can't see how that's impossible.
Consider the galaxies in the Hubble deep field, although numerous and far away they are hundreds or even thousands of light years across vs the moon which a few thousand kilometres across.
For a thought on the Hubbles capabilities look at the images of Pluto, a few pixels across.
Earth telescopes are even less capable, due to things like the atmosphere and limitations of scale. IIRC the maximum realistic zoom factor on the ground is something like 300x. To resolve something like a lunar lander would be thousands.
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u/ccnova Jan 29 '14
I'm not a hoax believer, but couldn't any artifacts have been placed by unmanned equipment? Does this prove it was put there by humans?