[Locke]

Originally Posted by Tacopuck

I thinks its perfectly understandable that people were skeptical of the moon landings being real when they look at it from a technological standpoint, when their own baseline of technology is what is available today. What i think gets lost on alot of people is how much more risk was tolerated back then. All of the astronauts of the Apollo program where absolute cowboys.

They literally landed on the moon using manual controls, experienced many faults and errors from the craft they had to manually intervene to correct in the heat of landing. This is why Neil Armstrong was selected as the guy to first land on the moon. He experienced multiple occasions during the training program and Gemini where the spacecraft or test rig experienced a failure and he had to fix to get home safely.
When piloting Gemini 8, the craft experienced a stuck thruster that caused the craft to rotate at extreme speeds. He was able to perform an emergency de-orbit burn and get the craft back to ground. During testing of the Lunar module on earth it experienced a failure where he had to eject seconds before the rig exploded.

Lets also not forget that Apollo 10, the mission that brought the LM close to the moon surface but not land, was intentionally under fueled as NASA feared that Cernan and Stafford would just go for the landing if they had a normal fuel load.

The astronauts then were a different breed when compared to today's.

It is also understandable why people point to why we never went back. In order to get to the moon, the US directed nearly 10% of its total GDP to the project which is absolutely crazy to think about.

Yeah...these days they need that for guns.