Confirmation from the Chinese lunar program...
The stubbornness of Moon-landing denial today runs into an insurmountable obstacle, represented not by NASA's historical archives but by the technological achievements of the nation that is the main geopolitical and economic rival of the United States: the People's Republic of China! With the launch of the ambitious Chang'e lunar exploration program, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) did not merely send human-made hardware back to the surface of our satellite, but unintentionally, gave the whole world the most ruthless, independent and definitive scientific validation of the entire Apollo Program. When conspiracy theorists claim that 1960s technology was inadequate for such a journey, they ignore a fundamental detail: the laws of orbital mechanics, of vacuum physics and of thermodynamics are immutable. To land the Chang'e 3 and 4 probes and the rovers Yutu and Yutu 2 gently on the lunar regolith, Chinese engineers had to apply the very same engineering solutions and the same ballistic principles that had been pioneered and tested by NASA half a century earlier. There are no magic shortcuts for landing on the Moon. The Chinese probes flew a translunar transfer trajectory, fired their engines against their direction of motion to brake and be captured by the satellite's gravity and, finally, performed a powered controlled descent. Just like the American Lunar Module, the Chang'e landers used variable-thrust engines (throttleable engines) to slow their fall through the vacuum, relying on radar altimeters to measure their distance from the ground. In the last meters of the descent, the Chinese probes performed a hovering phase (hovering) to pick a boulder-free area, before shutting down the engine a few meters before contact to keep the exhaust gases from bouncing dangerously back against the belly of the spacecraft. Step by step, the telemetry sequence of the Chinese success is an engineering carbon copy of the landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, proof that the spaceflight manual written in 1969 was geometrically and physically perfect.
But the most devastating confirmation for the denialist scaffolding came when the Chinese landers opened their "eyes" and began transmitting to Earth very high-resolution digital photos and videos. If the landscapes photographed by the Apollo Hasselblads had really been the product of a film set lit by spotlights on Earth, the Chinese images should have shown a radically different environment. On the contrary, the panoramic cameras of the Chang'e probes captured the identical alien reality documented by the Americans. The sky above the Chinese rovers Yutu and Yutu-2 is a deep inky black even in full lunar daylight, confirming the absence of an atmosphere capable of producing the Rayleigh scattering that colors our sky on Earth blue. The horizon looks unnaturally curved, sharp and very close, without the atmospheric haze that on Earth softens distances, reproducing the same deceptive lack of aerial perspective that disoriented the American astronauts and still today those who look at the Apollo photos. The shadows cast by the Chinese probes' solar panels are pitch black, sharp and with crisp edges, exactly like those of the men who walked there, because in the lunar vacuum there is no air capable of scattering light and softening contrast.
The mechanical and thermal interactions with the hostile environment have also confirmed NASA's old manuals line by line. The metal treads of the Chinese rovers left on the lunar surface perfect tracks, sharp and compacted, identical to the famous print of Aldrin's boot, confirming that lunar regolith is made of microscopic jagged glassy shards that interlock mechanically under pressure even with no moisture at all. Thermally, the digital thermometers of the Chinese landers recorded slow, but frightening temperature swings, going from +10/15°C in the lunar morning to over +120°C during the fourteen days of uninterrupted sunlight, and down to minus 180 degrees Celsius during the freezing lunar night. To survive this thermodynamic hell, Chinese aerospace engineers had to adopt gold reflective coatings, radiators and night-time hibernation systems powered by radioisotope units, fully validating the incredible thermal insulation work done with Mylar, Kapton and the water cooling systems built into the LM, the A7L spacesuits and the Apollo service modules. All with the huge advantage that these studies had already been carried out by NASA in the 1960s and '70s, so no costly reconnaissance missions were needed...
Lunar panorama of Sinus Iridum taken by the small Yutu rover. The Chang'e 3 lander can be seen in the background. Photo courtesy of CNSA
On January 3, 2019, the Chinese robotic lunar probe Chang'e 4 landed gently on the far side of the Moon, sending spectacular images from the surface. In this photo we see it imaged by the small Yutu 2 rover, deployed right after landing. Apart from the now familiar look of the probe, covered with the classic gold MLI blanket very similar to the one on the Apollo LM, it is obvious how identical the lunar surface is to the photos taken by the human crews in the 1970s, once again condemning the falsehoods of the Moon-hoax theses. Note the black, starless sky, how close the lunar horizon is and how quickly it blurs the farther away you look. Photo courtesy of CNSA.
Ultimately, the Chang'e program is, all in all, another heavy blow to the Moon hoax theory. The Chinese space agency, despite operating in a context of fierce technological rivalry, has never raised the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the American missions. On the contrary, it used the geological and orbital data collected by NASA as the starting point for its own missions, confirming their complete validity through the success of its own lunar missions. Supposing that today's communist China, with rovers on the far side of the Moon and able to bring back to Earth its own regolith samples, is faking its own visual and telemetry data just to protect an old propaganda lie of the United States government is a logical stretch bordering on the ridiculous. The razor-sharp images of the Chinese rovers ploughing through gray dust under an eternally black sky are not only a well-deserved triumph for Beijing, but the greatest, most unassailable scientific tribute to the historical truth of the Apollo Program and, as always, with all due respect to the deniers...
