In message , Henry Spencer
writes
In article ,
Jonathan Silverlight wrote:
Reading Ray Villard's article "Did NASA fake the Moon landing?" in the
July "Astronomy" I was interested to read that although the experiments
were turned off in the 1970s for budgetary reasons (I understand they
were also simply not returning useful data), the transmitters are still
working and still being used...

I think somebody has goofed. The ALSEP laser retroreflectors are still
in use -- they are non-electronic -- but as far as I know, nobody has
heard from the transmitters since they were turned off along with the
experiments on 30 Sept 1977.

Great. The moon-hoax proponents will love an article that makes
mistakes. Doing a bit of searching, I found he makes more mistakes, like
saying solar activity was at minimum when it was near maximum, and even
getting the number of missions wrong.
Not that it matters. The TV documentary I saw a few weeks ago said a
fairly high proportion of people in a poll believed the missions were
faked, but according to Villard only 5% of a Gallup poll in 1999 said it
was. (The number may have gone up since, of course). That may be the
percentage estimated to be intoxicated at any given time, but IIRC it's
also the number in a poll who will answer "yes" to _any_ question.