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Here are the answers to 10 of the most common moon-landing-denial stories, plus 2 bonus answers.

§ 1. Magic Flag.—The flag is not blowing in the wind. Its top seam is held up by a spring-loaded rod, and the wrinkles are due to it being furled in a tight tube for transport and then shaken as the astronauts hammered it into the lunar surface. There was no wind because there is no air. This is on the moon.

§ 2. Phantom Photographer.—There was no cameraman. Neil Armstrong’s first steps were captured by a TV camera mounted on the equipment bay door of the Lunar Module. Later on, one of the astronauts moved the camera to a stand—you know, like a tripod?—to cover the whole landing site. Still photos were taken by Neil Armstrong using a Hasselblad medium-format camera loaded with 70mm Ektachrome film. The camera was attached to a bracket on Armstrong’s chest pack. An additional time-lapse film was automatically shot using a 16mm data camera mounted in the LM window.

§ 3. Footprints.—The footprints hold their shape because there is no air on the moon, not because the dirt (“regolith”) is wet. The phenomenon is called “vacuum cementing,” and it works especially well on the jagged edges of lunar dust particles.

§ 4. Missing Stars.—There are no stars in the picture because the camera exposure was set for the lunar surface, the astronauts’ suits, and the equipment, all of which were in bright sunlight. The stars are very, very dim. They would not show up without much longer exposures that would have left everything else completely washed out.

§ 5. Blast Crater.—There’s no crater underneath the LM descent engine for several reasons. First, at touchdown the engine was throttled down to about 10% of its full thrust, and in the lunar gravity the LM weighed only ⅙ of its earth weight. (This is also one reason why the footpads didn’t sink into the regolith; see § 6.) Second, there’s no air on the moon to hold the engine exhaust into a tight jet. The exhaust gasses expand as soon as they clear the engine bell and spread out very quickly. Third, the regolith below the engine blew away in straight lines due to the lack of air. The low lunar gravity meant the regolith travelled a long distance before falling back to the surface. There is a crater, but it’s very shallow and difficult to see in the photos.

§ 6. LM Footpads.—The footpads didn’t sink into the regolith because they’re 3 feet in diameter and the lunar module touched down very gently. This spread the weight over a broad area. On the other hand, the astronauts’ boots (see § 7) concentrated the astronaut’s weight on a small area, so they left deeper, well-defined boot prints. The lunar surface at the Apollo 11 landing site had a thin layer of loose material with a hardened layer just beneath it. Other landing sites had more or less loose material.

§ 7. Boot Prints.—The boot prints on the lunar surface don’t match the boots in photos of the astronauts on earth because they’re not the same boots. All three crew members on Apollo flights wore full pressure suits with boots. The two men who landed and walked on the moon wore an additional garment over their suits to protect against punctures and wear and tear. This over-garment had additional visors for their helmet and overshoes for walking on the moon. The overshoes had the tread pattern seen in lunar photos.

§ 8. Backpacks.—The astronauts’ backpacks (Portable Life Support System or “PLSS”) did not need to carry enough oxygen for an 8-hour moonwalk because the PLSS was a closed system. Carbon dioxide breathed out by the astronauts went through a chemical filter that removed the carbon and recirculated the oxygen. Only a small amount of oxygen had to be added to make up for what the astronauts had burned in their bodies. There was also a smaller, emergency oxygen tank just in case.

§ 9. Van Allen Belts.—The Van Allen radiation belts do not extend to the moon so they were not a problem while the astronauts were in lunar orbit or on the surface. They did pass through the Van Allen belts on the way to and from the moon, but the transits were just over an hour each way. The short time, plus the protection built into their spacecraft, meant the Apollo astronauts received no more radiation exposure than Space Shuttle or Space Station astronauts who never got near the Van Allen belts.

§ 10. White House Phone Call.—President Nixon did not simply pick up the phone, dial Mission Control, and then ask the receptionist to put him through to the Sea of Tranquility. The call went from the White House telephone exchange via the AT&T network to the Goddard Spaceflight Center near Washington, DC. Goddard routed the signal to the Manned Spaceflight Center (now the Johnson Space Center) in Houston. From there, it went via communications satellite to the Goldstone Tracking Facility in the Mojave Dessert, Calif., which was the radio uplink between earth and the moon. It wasn’t routine, but the technology of patching telephone calls into radio networks was common in 1969 as anyone who’s called into a radio talk show knows.

And here’s a bonus of two more:

§ 11. Photos & Video.—By the time the cameras on Apollo 11 got to the moon they weren’t “normal film cameras.” The live video used a custom-made Westinghouse television camera designed for minimum size, weight and power drain. Its frame rate was only 10 frames per second to squeeze the video signal into the available radio bandwidth. (Broadcast TV at the time was 29.97 frames per second.) Still photos were shot with a Hasselblad medium-format camera that was stripped down to save weight, and rebuilt with lubricants that could work in extreme temperatures and vacuum. The film was 70mm Ektachrome that used a special base developed by Kodak. It was lighter, thinner and stronger than regular films of the time. There was also a 16mm film camera mounted inside the lunar module taking time-lapse footage of the astronauts on the surface. It was meant to collect data, not take pretty pictures, and it could be set to shoot at different frame rates.

§ 12. Vast Conspiracy.—Finally, there were something like 400,000 people around the world involved with Project Apollo. In addition, the Apollo missions were tracked by the Soviet Union, Great Britain and probably several other nations. The idea that all of these people could be involved in a conspiracy to fake the missions, a conspiracy that has been maintained for 55 years, is improbable to say the least. Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said 2 people can keep a secret if 1 is dead, but 400,000?