According to any basic science text, as we all know, the only reason the Earth is not roasting from the Sun's heat is our atmosphere. The official NASA line is that the Moon has no atmosphere to speak of. This being the case, the surface temperature of the moon must be extremely hot, not cold as the popular myth would have it. And in fact, reference works varyingly place the daytime surface temperature between 206 and 265 degrees F.

There is no way - absolutely no way - the astronauts and the Lunar Module could have survived in such heat. NASA claims the suits were air-conditioned and also used a water-cooling system, both of which are impossible and could not function in a vacuum at 265 degrees of heat. Carrying oxygen tanks at that temperature is probably not a very good idea either!

Objects which are heated cannot be cooled off by space. In order for an object to cool it must first be removed from direct sunlight. Oh, sure, objects which are in the shade of another object will eventually cool off, but not because space is "cold". Space is not cold. Hot and cold do not exist in the near-absolute vacuum of space. Since the vacuum of space is the ultimate insulator, objects take a very long time to cool even when removed from all sources of heat.

The upshot of all this is that 265 degrees of heat in a vacuum is even worse than 265 degrees of heat on Earth, because once heat is generated there is no way to cool down in any meaningful amount of time. The water-cooled spacesuits could not have possibly worked. And oh yeah, did you know water weighs a little over 62 lbs. per cubic foot? Space and weight capacity were critical given the lift capability of the rockets used in the Apollo Space Program. No such extra water was carried by any mission whatsoever for suits or for cooling the spacecraft...look it up.

And what was the power source for the system that kept these suits cooled and kept the water circulating? And what was the power source for the system that had to keep the Lunar Module cooled as it sat there and baked in the extreme heat? Think about your electric bills in the summer and how many BTUs your air conditioners use, then think about what it must have taken to keep the LM and the individual suits cooled. How was this enormous amount of power generated?

According to Kozloski's reference work "U.S. Space Gear": "The astronauts' portable life support system, developed by Hamilton Standard, supplied oxygen and circulated it through the helmet and suit. It controlled relative humidity and held temperature to a comfortable 70 degrees F. A PLSS pump cooled water by sublimation* and recirculated it through the tubing of the liquid cooling garment."

okay, then the asterisk at "sublimation" brings us to a footnote:

"Hamilton Standard introduced a porous plate sublimator on the PLSS : Heated water would pass through the sublimator, freeze at pores of the nickel plate that was partially exposed to ambient space temperature, vaporize as heat was introduced through exchange fins, sublimate the ice film, and thereby free the vapor to be discharged."

THINK ABOUT THIS. This whole concept hinges on the assumption that it is cold enough outside to instantly freeze water on a nickel plate that is partially exposed outside the suit. But we know the moon CANNOT be freezing outside the suit, because the sun's rays are beating down on it in an atmosphereless vacuum!

And if it's really that cold on the moon, why do they need an air conditioning system in the suit in the first place??

Hoping that some light could be shed on this glaring discrepancy, we consulted the NASA "Ask A Space Scientist" web page, e-mailed them the details above and asked for an explanation. Just minutes later, they fired back this terse, nearly incoherent response, reprinted here exactly as it was received:

And there you have it. This answer came from a NASA scientist. Everyone knows damn well the astronauts were not in the shade. The pictures show they were in broad daylight - he admits this himself by fudging with "blocked from DIRECT view of the sun". It only plunges to below zero at night. (243 below zero, to be exact) And the Apollo missions were clearly conducted in broad daylight with the sun beaming directly on them as they're running, jumping, hanging out and riding their Lunar Rover around. For hours at a time. Where did this guy come up with "3 degrees above absolute zero", and what the heck does "if properly shielded from stray light" mean, anyway??!

Much has been said in other works suspicious of the Apollo program about the lack of stars in the sky in the moon pictures. This has been attempted to be explained away by saying that the camera's exposures simply did were not set to allow starlight in. 'There's really no mystery to it', the debunkers say, 'go out in your yard some night and take a bunch of pictures of trees and houses and things, but leave a lot of sky in view. You won't see any stars in 99 percent of the pictures.' Well, you know, I tried it and by golly, it's true, you can't. The stars are so indistinct as to be invisible. Problem is, it makes the moon pretty indistinct too. Just a big bright round blur with none of its surface features visible. Yet the Earth is in crystal clear focus in the sky in the Apollo pictures, even when the foreground is what is being focused on. And yet still no stars. Hmmmm.

Furthermore, light behaves differently in a vacuum. With no atmosphere to diffuse the sun's rays into light pollution, the sky should have been lit up like a Lite-Brite with a thousand points of light, far more brilliant than seen from Earth. Taking this into account, it's even harder to believe that none of the Apollo photos show any stars.

I own a high-altitude air force pilot's helmet, the closest thing to an actual space helmet one could have. I tried it on and was struck by something interesting : my breath fogged it up immediately and I couldn't see a thing. So how did the NASA space suits prevent this problem? There could not be any sort of air-blowing device, as with a car windshield defogger, because an air-exchanging system cannot work in a vacuum. Space helmets currently employ a special glass that prevents fogging, but this did not exist in the era of the Apollo missions.

With the alleged water-cooled cool temperature inside the suit and 265-degree heat outside the suit, condensation should have formed on the glass faceplate even without the astronaut's breath. (The astronauts' mouths are not covered in any way under the helmet, by the way.)

NASA claims that the space suits worn by the astronauts were pressurized at 5 psi over the ambient pressure (0 psi vacuum) on the moon's surface. Yet the gloves the astronauts wore are made of pliable material containing no devices which would aid the astronauts in the dextrous use of their fingers and hands while wearing the gloves. I have viewed these gloves myself at the Smithsonian Institute. Such gloves are impossible to use, for the wearer cannot bend the wrist or fingers to do any dextrous work whatsoever when pressurized.

There is plenty of film and television footage of astronauts using their hands and fingers normally during their time on the so-called lunar surface. The films show clearly that there is no pressure whatsoever within the gloves... which would have caused explosive decompression of the astronauts resulting in immediate death if they had really been surrounded by the vacuum of space.

So.... if they weren't in a vacuum, where were they?

This one's been floating around out there for while amongst NASA-doubters. We all know about the famous footprints of Neil Armstrong on the moon, and there plenty more left by the various Apollo crewmen. Problem is, in order for soil to retain a footprint, there must be moisture. A significant amount of it, in fact. Yet NASA insists there is no moisture on the moon, except for a few pockets of recently-discovered ice shaded in edges of craters. The idea of moisture in the moon soil that Armstrong trod upon is impossible, given what we know about the intense daytime heat well beyond the boiling point of water. And yet, there the footprints are. Maybe these photographs weren't really taken on the moon....

Walk on the beach sometime in the hottest, dryest sand you can find. Your footprints will barely be distinct. Only in the moister sand approaching the water do your footprints hold an exact impression. Even in the finest, most particulate sand you can find.

And speaking of that fine dust-like sand on the moon's surface, ever wonder why, in a low-gravity environment, huge clouds of it aren't kicked up with every step the astronauts take? Remember the famous film footage of astronauts taking advantage of the extremely low gravity to take giant bouncing jumps many feet in the air? If the gravity is low enough to allow them to do this, it's low enough to bring up clouds of this dust each time they hit the ground, clouds that should take a long, long time to settle.

But believe it or not, dear reader, all of this is beside the point. Here's the capper: The Van Allen Belt, also known as the Van Allen Shields. It's a zone of high-intensity radiation that surrounds the Earth, beginning at altitudes of about 1000 kilometers. We didn't know much about The Van Allen Belt in the days of the manned Apollo missions. We didn't know for sure what it was comprised of, what its effects were, or just how intense the radiation got the further one goes from Earth.

With what we now know about the Van Allen Belt, and looking back at the primitive (some would say nonexistent) shielding used on those early Apollo landings, one realizes that it is a physical impossibility for the crew to have survived! In such an intense sea of radiation for such a duration and with such pitifully weak shielding, they should have perished instantly and the onboard instruments should have gone haywire, sending them hurtling out of control. There were also a number of solar flares (about 15 per day) in their direction during the times when they were en route to the moon....factor in this additional deadly radiation and one begins to realize that something is very, very wrong here.

NASA's own press releases and statements are wildly contradictory. One states that astronauts must be warned well in advance of solar flares so they can take cover, yet another actually tells the truth and admits "High energy protons travel at the speed of light so there is no time to get under cover." Any amount of radiation over 0.5 rems a year is considered dangerous, anything remotely approaching 100 rems a year would be fatal. And yet the astronauts were exposed to 100-500 rems a DAY while in space and on the moon. And this just from solar radiation alone, not even including the deadly radiation bombardment from the Van Allen Belt.

How did these flimsy little rockets, modules, and space suits protect these men from more deadly radiation than a nuclear power plant's shielding could withstand? Nuclear power plants shield their fuel rods with many feet of concrete and lead layers under the water, for just a few dinky little fissions. Think about that and then think about the nonstop Proton bombardment of the Van Allen Belt and the solar radiation. Look at the space suits and look at the LM. Could this really have happened?