I'm sure if they set up a moon landing hoax, they did a far better job than you are giving them credit for.
Really, "the lander is too small"?! This is a huge team of highly qualified, expert engineers that can launch a rocket off of this planet. How can you possibly expect them to make a mistake like that in a trivial moon landing hoax? They are not going to do something that stupid unless it is what actually happened.
Yes, the lander was small. They aren't going to build a Hummer and launch it into space. Think of submarines; this stuff is not about luxury. (Though a private space yacht would be quite interesting).
Besides that, the reason why it is difficult to land stuff on Mars is because it is a very big planet (not a small moon) and the missions are being pumped out in much greater quantity. Mars has a much bigger gravitational pull and there is no landing pad, so they need a lot of really crazy mechanisms to slow it down. (The Phoenix lander and Mars Science Laboratory will do this quite smoothly).
That, and these are robots. Think about how annoying it can be to synchronize a wireless mouse. Now, consider a robot from another planet that is likely to frequently disappear due to all manner of problems (hardware failures and dust storms, for example). The failure rate is indeed a bit lower when there are humans on the other end, but it is also a lot more expensive to do that. (And nobody in their right mind is going to land humans on Mars for quite some time).
They've definitely come a long way, too. It looks like Spirit and Opportunity may actually live through this dust storm, and they have now outlasted the Viking 2 lander. Quite impressive :)
Really, "the lander is too small"?! This is a huge team of highly qualified, expert engineers that can launch a rocket off of this planet. How can you possibly expect them to make a mistake like that in a trivial moon landing hoax? They are not going to do something that stupid unless it is what actually happened.
Yes, the lander was small. They aren't going to build a Hummer and launch it into space. Think of submarines; this stuff is not about luxury. (Though a private space yacht would be quite interesting).
Besides that, the reason why it is difficult to land stuff on Mars is because it is a very big planet (not a small moon) and the missions are being pumped out in much greater quantity. Mars has a much bigger gravitational pull and there is no landing pad, so they need a lot of really crazy mechanisms to slow it down. (The Phoenix lander and Mars Science Laboratory will do this quite smoothly).
That, and these are robots. Think about how annoying it can be to synchronize a wireless mouse. Now, consider a robot from another planet that is likely to frequently disappear due to all manner of problems (hardware failures and dust storms, for example). The failure rate is indeed a bit lower when there are humans on the other end, but it is also a lot more expensive to do that. (And nobody in their right mind is going to land humans on Mars for quite some time).
They've definitely come a long way, too. It looks like Spirit and Opportunity may actually live through this dust storm, and they have now outlasted the Viking 2 lander. Quite impressive :)