I don't see how a blip in the sky proves NASA's honesty in all matters mentioned. What does looking at a blip float by in the sky tell us about the moon missions, sustained space travel, the technologies NASA has claimed to have invented, whether NASA is a fraudulent entity, or whether their video portrayal of earth and space are untainted?
I'm sorry but this is not a "blip."
It tells us quite a lot in fact, it tells us whether or not "sustained space travel" (aka orbiting) is possible because the only way to find the blip is by predicting when and where it will show up in the sky based on its orbital information. If it was not in orbit it would not show up in the right place in the sky to amateur observers all over the world.
The mirrors were deliberately left in an attempt to prove to the world that NASA really did go to the moon. NASA works directly with professional astronomers to build the high power military-grade lasers necessary for the moon-bounce.
How dare they try to prove that they really went to the moon lol. So now the story is that the observatories aren't "evil conspirators," it's just that the laser is bouncing off the moon without any help? Why do they have to aim it precisely at the landing site then to get it to work? Honestly Tom, I think you were better off asserting that anyone claiming to have bounced a laser off the moon is lying. If moon bounces are real (yet not being aided by retroreflectors), then that puts the moon much farther away and makes it much larger than FE predicts (based on the >2 second time for the light bounce to occur). But there are other amateurs who have listened to radio signals coming from moon during apollo missions and even picked up the voice transmissions. No longer can you claim that other governments who claimed to have picked up Apollo's signals were just in on the FE conspiracy and lying to the public:
"On December 10, 1972 we picked up our first signals on S-band. The main carrier was 45 dB over noise and the voice subcarrier was 25 dB over noise. Apollo 17 passed. over the lunar disc between 1722 and 1819.10 local time (2222-2319 UT), and we measured a total Doppler frequency shift of 43 kHz. The next day the lunar module landed on the Moon and at 1518 local time we picked up main carrier and telemetry from the surface of the moon some 80 minutes after touchdown. Unfortunately the astronauts soon changed to low power which prevented us from getting voice signals because of the too low signal-to-noise ratio. The lunar module transmitted on 2282.5 MHz, but we decided to shift back to the frequency of the command module in lunar orbit, i.e. 2287.5 MHz. The lone astronaut Evans was not very talkative except when he just appeared in front of the Moon or just before he disappeared behind it. At such times he changed to high power and on December 11 we could pick up our first voice signals from the Moon. At 1722.00 local time (2222 UT) Ron Evans said: "'Standby three zero" and at l722.30, i.e. 30 seconds later, we abruptly lost the signal as the spacecraft swung, around the edge of the Moon.
The following day, December12, we concentrated on the command module and received strong voice signals on several occasions (Here [10 kB, mp3][
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/sounds/AP17SB.mp3] you can hear Ron Evans say: "The barber pole it is grey", referring to a barber pole-shaped control panel indicator). We also had an opportunity to test different FM detectors. To our great surprise slope detection worked amazingly well. When using this mode the receiver is slightly detuned so that the FM signal is placed on one of the slopes of the a selectivity curve of the receiver. In this way FM is converted to AM which is heard in the loudspeaker. When using slope detection the R-390 was operated with 16 kHz bandwidth to avoid resetting the main tuning too often because of Doppler shift.
On December 14, 1972 I left Gainesville for Sweden. At Kennedy Airport I watched the astronauts leave the moon on a little pay-TV which you could find on many seats in the air terminal. So-the Apollo program was all over. "
-Sven Grahn
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/Apollo17/APOLLO17.htmHe also tracked the radio signals of the Russian lander Luna 20 here:
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/luna20/LUNA20.htm