Square image with a dark background, with an illustration of a multi-stage rocket depicted horizontally in the center. Above the rocket, white text reads, "the moon landing was staged?" Below the rocket, more white text reads "yeah that's how all orbital rockets fucking work dude"
Even SSTO has the single stage. To orbit.
Me, coming to the comments about to ask "what about SSTO?"
Thanks to OP for reminding me to check my staging
Bring Jeb back alive
Jeb's just operating a unscheduled manned solar orbital satellite.
They'll be fine
It's just a little jaunt to Ike to grab a Kerbal for a contract. How hard could it be?
Kraken decided my Jeb gets a little interstellar travel as a treat, so he is traveling at incredible speed in a straight line directly away from such ideas as "back" or "alive"
This guy kerbals
I looked into this a long time ago, it would've been more expensive to fake it than it was to just do it.
We would've needed to somehow convince Russia to lie on our behalf. We would've needed to convince the dictatorship of australia to also lie on our behalf.
The rooskies came out and said we beat them to it, and the aussies claimed they recived the camera feed and the audio feed from space and then echoed it to their TV network
That Mitchell and Webb sketch where they discuss faking the moonlanding to save money, and the only real savings was on catering....
The dictatorship of Australia?
Shhh. We don't talk about that anymore.
I too feel like I'm missing context on a joke here.
This was before the fateful Whitlam dismissal by the monarchy / potentially the CIA.
Yes, exactly. In general the whole notion and everything they claim is fucking idiotic from start to finish. Outright lies, misunderstandings, misrepresented partial truths, etc.
Those two friends of mine aren't "gunpowder inventors" as we Finns tend to express it, ie. they're… well, calling them stupid would be a bit too harsh, but they're definitely not smart. I'm not surprised in the least that they fell down that rabbit hole, but fuck does it get tiring.
Right? It was the Cold fucking War, why would the Czar of Russia or whoever was in charge work with the US on the US' propaganda against Russia?
Plus you still need to launch a bunch of massive Saturn V rockets since so many people saw them launch. Unless they paid off everyone who said they were there? Building a moon rocket that doesn't go to the moon isn't that much cheaper than building one that does.
Landing on the moon was such a huge PR event. Everything that could be controlled was controlled.
What if a backup TV broadcast was created in case of broadcast equipment failure?
Ya, Russians are noobs tbh.
Objectively silly statement given the entire history of the space race.
Yeah they were kicking our teeth in for a while there.
I still prescribe to the theory that we tried to fake the moon landing, but Stanley Kubrick being a perfectionist kept insisting they shoot on location prompting us to do it for real anyway.
How many times are people going to post this nonsense?
Kubrick notoriously hated filming on location.
He of course did have NASA send astronauts to the moon to shoot background and reference pictures, he was a perfectionist, after all, but the official landing was filmed in Shepperton, England.
Also, no one's going to believe this unless you tell them about the practically unique Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 lens NASA gave him as payment, which allowed him to shoot the candlelit scenes in Barry Lyndon.
The moon landing wasn't staged, the launch was...
The lander did have a stage separation though, It left the landing gear and motor on the moon, and the accent stage took it back into lunar orbit.
Also, wouldn't leaving the command module in lunar orbit before landing count as staging..?
I had two middle aged coworkers the other day talking about how it was staged. I should have showed them both this today. But I didn't want to engage lol.
Yeah it'd be a waste of your time and energy.
I had two friends recently suddenly drop into the conspiracist nutball rabbit hole, and I really don't have much enthusiasm to see them anymore. Last time I saw them they grilled me on the moon landings, and absolutely nothing I said meant anything to them. If I hesitated even for a second when answering one of their "accusations" they took it as proof that I'm the one who doesn't know what they're talking about – couldn't be that I was trying to think of a way of explaining something to people who clearly aren't familiar with the subject at all beyond whatever idiotic conspiracy garbage they've consumed.
The ability of god damn morons to gaslight the intelligent... ahh.... I am sadly familiar with it.
@dactylotheca @agentshags I can't believe people still think we didn't land on the moon It's amazing because of the evidence that shows we did and somebody Evans that shows we didn't is pretty outlandish
You could also have staging in model rocketry. The largest we ever had was a 3-stage running on G-size engines. The "Red, White, and Clusterfuck". If all three stages ignited and properly, you got a solid boom outta her. The frame outlived several nosecones from the friction they had to endure.
That sounds, intense.
Blue blistering bell-bottomed balderdash, you blabber-mouthed vegetarian pithecanthropus!
The Atlas rocket was single stage to orbit.
But yeah, every Gemini and Apollo rocket was staged, as was the space shuttle.
It was partially staged. The main benefit of staging is dropping dry mass during the burn, and the Atlas I dropped engines
Good luck making a single stage to lunar surface rocket.
I just need more struts.
Oh yeah uh... what about SSTOs huh? I bet we'll have some sick aerospike powered vehicles any day now!
spoiler
RIP Rocketdyne XRS-220
single stage to orbit
SSTO enthusiasts in shambles
You mean single stage to orbit fans?
Honestly I'm surprised at the amount of people making SSTO jokes in the comments without knowing what that initialism stands for
is this the fucking N1 rocket?
Damn bro, the US fucking died with this post.
Nuh uh. They snuck the astronauts into the Star Trek sets at night and used the transporters obviously. They knew the props wouldn't have been convincing enough…
Sorry, I can't hear you over the roar of the engines inside my SSTO. 
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