OK, that looks mighty convincing but how would you know that there were people there 40 years ago, as opposed to a robotic landing?

Just pulling you leg but that of course is going to be the next thing for the conspiracy crowd.

Actually, I happen to own an original printing of Moon Shot by Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton and Neil Armstrong. Sadly, it is not on the shelf that I thought it was but I will look for it this weekend. In any case, what is telling about that pic is not the feet of the lander but rather the fact that they found West Crater.

Had NASA faked the thing, there is pretty much no way that that would have shown up in the pic. Sure, the story could have been embellished for extra drama but then the feature would not have been there. Basically, it is not really a crater as such but rather it is a boulder strewn field.

One is left wondering why NASA would send any hardware to some place where they knew that not even a probe could land. In point of fact, if it is so hard to see that it is just now possible to image the place, then there is no way that NASA could have known that it was there.

From the book, Armstrong recounts that they arrived at the chosen landing spot with something like 3 minutes of reserve fuel, which they used to go looking for a better place to touch down. If memory serves, the mission orders were such that if the reserve fuel dropped below 30 seconds, they were to drop the base of the lander and return to orbit. So the existence of that feature is telling that we at least got close to it.

You feel that you have to wonder?