How would one go about proving humans have really been to outer space?

Question

Background: I am 40 years old, and in my entire life the only face to face eyewitness event that I can remember where humans actually observed an attempt to fly into outer space, the craft exploded and showered its fiery remains - including 5 dead astronauts - down over the Earth as soon as it reached the atmosphere. I have seen no other real eyewitness evidence.

As an Australian, I also live really far away from any launch or landing sites, with all of them too far to be directly observable even through a powerful telescope. I have never witnessed any space exploration endeavors in person and all I have available to me is accounts by other people that I have never met in real life and videos on the Internet or recordings and interviews on the television or radio stations.

Question: How could I go about finding proof of mankind ever reaching outer space first hand, with astronauts doing moonwalks, spacewalks, whatnot when all of it seems unreal, happening somewhere else and never directly touching the grounds of my own country, which happens to be a whole continent of the planet Earth that I live on, while only having indirect and anecdotal evidence of it? I would take a word from any of you that have been a direct eyewitness to human space exploration, but preferably ask of you for any idea how I could prove that by holding something in my own hands that could only exist if that was true, or by doing my own direct observations, be an eyewitness myself and have proof beyond reasonable doubt?

Is there any direct evidence of human space exploration that nobody on our planet could dismiss as circumstantial?

Answer 1

Yes, humans definitely have been to outer space.

The easiest proof I can think of immediately is this video of commander Chris Hadfield demonstrating wringing of a wet towel on the ISS.

Or this one — it contains more than 200 seconds long uncut shot of a̶b̶s̶e̶n̶t̶ micro-gravity. It also shows vast interiors of the ISS, which are technically challenging to simulate in a "vomit comet", due to theirs volume and structure.

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Update: it isn't impossible to see astronauts spacewalking near the ISS from the ground, given enough time, skill, and equipment. It has been done before.

However, you can still claim that the photographs could've been edited and/or made up. In this case, you'll have to repeat the observations yourself.

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Update2: I can even add the following praise of modern communication technology (and publicity of the space program). You can talk live with astronauts inhabiting the ISS! With enough perseverance, you can even ask them to provide whatever proofs you'd find satisfactory. Just have enough patience and don't forget to take your son to the chat.

Answer 2

The problem here is that your standard of proof is ridiculous. By the same token, you'd have to doubt the existence of Moscow because you've never met anyone from that city.

the only face to face eyewitness event that I can remember where humans actually observed an attempt to fly into outer space...

Then your memory must not be very good. There have been hundreds of manned launches that have been witnessed by millions of people. The Apollo and early Shuttle launches had massive audiences that were able to see the spacecraft launch, and reach an altitude of dozens of km in a few minutes. For launches to higher inclinations, the Shuttle was visible all the way up the US East Coast.

These days, a few thousand dollars will buy you a VIP visit to Baikonur where you can witness a launch yourself.

What you're saying basically is "I'd rather believe all of the millions of photos and thousands of hours of video are hoaxes and that millions of people are involved in a vast conspiracy to lie about every manned space program."

Back in the days of the Space Race, the US and USSR would not have hesitated to expose any attempt by the other to lie about sending men to space.

Answer 3

When the amount of evidence, circumstantial or direct, for a given proposition vastly outweighs evidence against that proposition, most reasonable people are willing to accept the proposition as true. This does occasionally lead to having to change your mind about a proposition when new evidence comes along; this is how the scientific method works.

In the specific case of space travel, consider this: Germany launched some big rockets during WWII, and some big rockets landed in England, and we have good circumstantial evidence that those were the same rockets, and some back-of-the-envelope calculations regarding energy from chemical reactions, volume of fuel, mass of rocket, models of aerodynamic drag, etc. all agree that, yes, a rocket using that design and that fuel can go that far.

After WWII, other countries (like the USA and USSR) then built bigger and better rockets, that could go further, and all of those seemed to perform more or less according to our models as well, and we improved our models to better align with our observations.

Eventually the USSR built Vostok 1: a pod big enough to hold Yuri Gagarin, on top of a rocket big enough to, according to our calculations, throw that pod high enough that the atmosphere is thin enough that we call it "outer space". Lots of people saw the rocket take off, and later, far away, a pod fell out of the sky and Yuri Gagarin landed, nearby, by parachute. One interesting thing here is that the USSR lied about that at the time and said he landed with the pod, so already this story is kind of fishy and you wouldn't be completely crazy to have doubts about this.

But since then, there have been over 300 crewed spaceflights, on rockets that we know quite a bit about, that clearly have taken off at point A and had parts reappear later at point B, with photographs and video of people getting into them at one end, photos and video of the beginning of the flight, and photos and video of very similar-looking people getting out of them at the other end, across more than half a century. More than 550 individuals have claimed to have flown in space; as far as I know, none have ever recanted the claim and said "it was a hoax"—and I'd ignore one or two voices out of 550 who claimed hoax anyway, given the evidence in favor.

That's a lot of circumstantial evidence.

At this point, even the most skeptical humans generally believe that the burden of proof is on those who doubt that human spaceflight happened. It seems, at this point, vastly easier to actually put people into space than to orchestrate a conspiracy of this scale.

If you want me to doubt the fact of crewed spaceflight, you have to explain to me where those rockets went, where the crew boarding them went, who the people were who exited similar-looking capsules hundreds and thousands of miles away, and most importantly, why we'd bother with such a scheme.

Most of this applies to anyone doubting the moon landings, as well. The ratio of evidence may be slightly less extreme, but there's still a wealth of evidence in favor of them. A Saturn V rocket produces about 18km/s of delta-V; where was it going if not to the moon?