Author Topic: Moon Landings - No Hard Science Knowledge (Read 32408 times)

Stanley N · « **Reply #190 on:** July 23, 2019, 08:34:11 PM »

Replies to all of hollingsworth's issues:

>Video footage seems clearly to show that the US flag is waving in the breeze. No amount of explanation for this from NASA has ever satisfied me.

So this was done on a soundstage? Indoors? With a fan that doesn't stir up any dust or the astronauts suits?

A single still photo may appear to have a waving flag due to the wrinkles, but someone put two pictures with the flag together, showing it's not really waving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AldrinFlag-animation.gif

>We see a supposed moon landscape, rugged moutains and hills in the background, a lunar landing module in the foreground. That exact same landscape is superimposed, feature for feature, on another photo. But in this photo there is no vehicle. We know that they couldn’t move the vehicle. So how did this happen?

Need more details to respond to this.

> No sign of a blast crater from the alleged descent of a LEM on the moon’s surface does not encourage belief, especially in light of the reported fact that the surface is covered with thick powdery dust, and we are told that the LEM engine produced at least 10,000 lbs of thrust. There should be a crater, not to mention a layer of dust over at least the bottom portion of the LEM, including the landing pads. But we see nothing

Why "should" there be a crater? Thrusters in a low-pressure environment are not constrained by pressure, and "spread out".

>In that regard, the supposed footprints of astronauts on a surface bereft of the tiniest amount of moisture. How do clear footprints survive? Try creating a clear visible footprint on a dry sandy beach.

Moon dust is more like talcuм powder. Very small particles with sharp edges, not rounded by weathering from air or water.

>How does an astronaut snap clearly framed pictures in a bulky space suit with a Hasselblad camara mounted on his chest? Even the inventor of that camera was scratching his head over that one.

In addition to what 7micro said, they took a LOT of pictures. You would expect the better ones to be more widely shown.

>Back to the LEM: Neil Armstrong almost got killed testing one in California a year before Apollo 11. Raw footage of that event is readily available, showing the craft crashing and bursting into flame. Yet we are to believe a year later that all the problems were ironed out, and that 6 successful landings occurred on the moon’s surface thereafter.

They learned a little from the mistakes.

>There is only one light source on the moon’s surface, viz. The sun. Yet many alleged photos on the moon show multiple light sources, whose shadows to off at various angles from the objects casting them. Impossible.

If there were multiple light sources, there would be multiple shadows, no?

>How can an astronaut descending to the moon’s surface from a LEM be so perfectly lit up and photographed when the his surroundings are plunged in the shadows of the very LEM he is exiting?

The moon surface is quite reflective. That's how we see it, after all.
The reflectivity is basically why things have some illumination even when not directly in the sun.

> How do astronauts survive the 250 degree heat during moon-day, and minus 250 degree cold during moon-night, in relatively flimsy suits with inadequate cooling and equally inadequate warming features?

Why do you think it was "inadequate"? Anyway, the moon orbits earth each 28 days with the same side facing earth. A moon "day" takes 28 earth days. The landing sites were chosen so the sun was low on the moon horizon. Time-on-moon was around one earth day - in that time the moon would rotate less than the earth rotates in one hour.

> What is more, how do astronauts survive on a surface being constantly bombarded by micro meteorites. The earth is protected from this bombardment, because we have an atmosphere in which they burn up before reaching the earth’s surface. No so on the moon.

Yes, there were risks. I think they had a better estimate of the risk than you do, and they did some things to reduce the risk..
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-earth/moon-meteroids.html

>How do astronauts survive passing through the Van Allen belt unscathed by dense, lethal radiation in that region? Not just once but a collective total of 12 time. Not one of them suffered from any kind of radiation sickness, much less cancer thereafter. This in light of the fact that numbers of scientists and astrophysicists have expressed grave doubt that such a positive outcome might occur. Even current NASA astonauts like Terry Virsts admit that we do not have the ability presently to pass above earth’s orbit. The Orion project, he says, will do it one day in the future, but not now.

The Orion spacecraft is being designed to handle a Mars mission. Much longer time.
For the moon missions, short term exposure and the shielding of the spacecraft turned out to be enough to be manageable.

>Why is the moon’s alleged horizon so black. It should be blanketed with myriads of stars and galaxies, not to mention to clear views of planets in our solar system.

You would need a longer exposure to get stars to show up in the pictures.

> How could astronauts have communicated so clearly and noiselessly with ground control, when the noise level of the propulsion engine, a few feet away, directly below them, was reported to have been totally deafening?

Reported when?

>Gus Grissom complained that they couldn’t even communicate between bldgs. on the ground of the space center. How, he wondered, could they ever do it successfully from deep space? Grissom was highly critical of the whole Apollo, program. He hung a lemon on the front of his test module just to illustrate his misgivings. He met an untimely death, as we know. Was it just an accident? His widow and family didn’t think so.

Yes, Grissom was rather critical. They were pushing things in the early Apollo program, and this probably did contribute to the fire on Apollo 1.

>At least 10 astronauts have died in their early sixties from causes ranging from heart attacks to cancer. I thought these guys were the most fit men among us. Strange

Don't know. But most if not all were test pilots. They spent a LOT of time in the air in their lives, which does increase radiation exposure. Plus whatever they got from the moon missions. That could have something to do with cancer.

>Commander James Irwin had a sudden heart attack just after he had decided, (apparently), to come clean with his own story. He contacted moon landing denier, Bill Kaysing, in 1961, and asked the former to call him at his home, because, he felt his phone line might be bugged. Kaysing did contact him and arranged for a meeting. Irwin, alas, died suddenly a few days later before ever meeting Kaysing. He was 61.

Assume Irwin intended to give his story and the 1969 landings were faked - what would Irwin have had to say about that in early August, 1961? Kennedy had announced the drive to the moon May 25, 1961, only 2.5 months earlier.

>A NASA inspector named Tom Baron compiled a 500 page report on the Apollo Project. It was highly critical of the way the project was being run. He detailed facts about employee incompetence, drunkenness, poor workmanship, carelessness, lack of proper safety, etc. Baron was called to testify before a Congressional Committee in 1966(?). A week later he was dead, along with his wife and step-daughter. They were hit in their car by a train, it is reported. No autopsy was conducted. The bodies were immediately cremated in violation of Florida law. The 500 page report went missing and has never been recovered.

Tom Baron report a report about North American Aviation (a contractor he worked at) in 1967, and then a longer report about the Apollo 1 fire (which happened in Feb 1967 and led to Congressional reviews). He was supposedly in the process of expanding one of his reports (the NAA report, apparently) when his car was hit.

As I said before, they were pushing things in the early Apollo program, and this probably did contribute to the fire on Apollo 1.

Some suspicious coincidences are bound to happen just by the sheer numbers of people involved in the Apollo project.

>An commercial airline pilot calls Bill Kaysing just about the time one of the returning landing modules set down in the ocean in 1970(?) He reports seeing a C5 cargo plane dropping what looked like an Apollo space capsule into the ocean. This was during a routine flight to Japan. The pilot did not identify himself, because he feared the loss of his job.

During the splashdowns they cleared commercial flights to a couple hundred mile radius. That seems too far to identify something dropped from a cargo plane. Commercial flights during the splashdowns did see the reentry trail.

They did drop a command module from a cargo plane for the recovery teams to practice. If the pilot genuinely saw anything, perhaps the pilot saw that.

AlligatorDicax · « **Reply #191 on:** July 24, 2019, 01:24:07 AM »

It seems that some CathInfo members posted replies while I was composing this. I confess that I haven't been able keep up with some members' unusually prolific posting rates in this topic this evening.

Quote from: hollingsworth on July 23, 2019, 04:05:05 PM

▷ How can an astronaut descending to the moon’s surface from a LEM be so perfectly lit up and photographed when the his surroundings are plunged in the shadows of the very LEM he is exiting?

Huh? When? In the famous Apollo-11 black&white video from the Moon, as broadcast by the major U.S. t.v. networks as relayed from Earth stations, Armstrong was in the shadow of the L.E.M. as he descended its ladder and stepped/jumped down to the surface. Frustratingly so, because I was photographing it directly from a t.v. screen as it was broadcast; I'd expected clearer video.

Quote from: hollingsworth on July 23, 2019, 04:05:05 PM

▷ How does an astronaut snap clearly framed pictures in a bulky space suit with a Hasselblad camara mounted on his chest?

Easy: The Hasselblad 500-series are single-lens reflexes that form a 2¼×2¼-in. (6×6-cm.) square image, but like the 2¼×2¼ twin-lens reflexes (e.g., Rolleiflex) over which they were considered a major technical advancement, have look-down viewfinders. On the Hasselblad 500-series, the ground-glass viewfinder is just in front of the film magazine in the rear. So for active photography, it was positioned as close to an astronaut's helmet face-plate as higher equipment-priorities allowed. I think that focusing with potentially clumsy gloves was facilitated by a stalk on its focusing ring. It's not all that different from the issues that divers overcome in underwater photography, but these details are all from fallible human memory. In fact, NASA had astronauts practice various skills underwater.

As photojournalists have learned since long before Project Apollo, an index finger pointing at the subject, on a path parallel to the axis of the lens, can produce surprisingly well-framed photos. Seems to me the framing issue on Moon missions was eased by mounting a moderate wide-angle lens (i.e., not so short a focal length as to disable the reflex mirror), perhaps 50 mm. When not framed exactly as NASA wanted, but including all the intended subject, then they could quite honestly rotate & crop in postprocessing. Chemical photography is an analog technology, so no one should sweat rotation by some number of degrees that's not a multiple of 90°.

Quote from: hollingsworth on July 23, 2019, 04:05:05 PM

Even the inventor of that camera was scratching his head over that one.

I simply do not believe that claim. Please cite a verifiable printed source or on-line equivalent. The inventor and engineers of Hasselblad would've been very familiar with everything I've written in this reply.

Quote from: hollingsworth on July 23, 2019, 04:05:05 PM

▷ Why is the moon’s alleged horizon so black[?] It should be blanketed with myriads of stars and galaxies, not to mention to clear views of planets in our solar system.

Sigh. This point of attempted debunking reveals rather deep ignorance about photography, especially exposure. The Moon's daytime surface is more-or-less as bright as beach sand on a sunny day. To accurately reproduce its ash-gray color, plus provide detail in the white space-suits, the exposure had to be set way too low to reproduce the relatively feeble light from distant stellar objects, including planets other than Earth.

Especially if the color film used on the Moon was transparency (a.k.a. "slide") film, which has perhaps 1/2 the exposure-latitude of negative (a.k.a. "print") film (at least nowadays). I suspect that they followed the lead of the prestigious National Geographic in routinely using a Kodak transparency film, thus either Kodachrome^TM or Ektachrome^TM, whose A.S.A. film speeds in their commercial product lines back then were no higher than 64.

So how's 'bout you going out some night and trying to photograph a sky full of the planets and big-name stars (from Earth); when you get an image that shows "myriads" brightly enough to meet your expectations, be sure to return to CathInfo and present that image, with the exposure and other technical details (beware that claiming that it was set to "automatic" will be a summary disqualification).

Quote from: hollingsworth on July 23, 2019, 04:05:05 PM

▷ There is only one light source on the moon’s surface, viz. The sun. Yet many alleged photos on the moon show multiple light sources, whose shadows [go] off at various angles from the objects casting them. Impossible.

Fascinating. I've read that claim before, but I've never seen any such photos. Keep in mind that the L.E.M. was partially covered with a material that reflected light as well as aluminum foil. Feel free to provide URLs, but I'll warn potential respondents now: I refuse to download & watch any videos just so I can view any still images.

hollingsworth · « **Reply #192 on:** July 24, 2019, 03:14:52 PM »

Back to Terry Virts, in an attempt to cut through all the crap, I'll submit a short bio of the man:

Quote

“With more than 3,600 orbits of the Earth under his belt, astronaut Terry Virts will leave NASA on Aug. 23 (2016). Over the course of his 16-year-career at NASA, he piloted a space shuttle and commanded the International Space Station.

Virts, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, considers Columbia, Maryland, his hometown. He is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and Harvard Business School. He also was a member of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School class 98B at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and served as an experimental test pilot in the F-16 Combined Test Force there before being selected for the astronaut class of 2000.

During his time on the ground at NASA, Virts served in a variety of technical assignments, including as the lead astronaut for the T-38 training jet program, chief of the astronaut office’s robotic branch and lead astronaut for the Space Launch System rocket program.”

Below is a 55 second portion of a video link I published earlier. I am trying to spare folks like 5micro, (and maybe gatordicx) the tedium of watching anything longer than that. From a previous remark, I conclude that 5Micro doesn’t care for videos, so I purposely publish again only this excerpt. But since he does not do “science stuff,” he probably leaves that task to Stanley and others anyway. The video excerpt was made, I believe in 2015.

In it Virts, in clear, unmistakable language, states that “we” do not have space travel technology capable of launching “us” beyond earth’s lower orbit. I assume that he speaks on behalf of the entire space industry. If not, please enlighten me further.

On the other hand, if Virts is not an actor or an impostor, and reflects the cold, bare facts presently, then some further explanation is in order. Since we live in time, consisting of past, present and future, events must line up accordingly. If in 1969, at the launch of the first (successful) Apollo moon landing mission, the technology did not exist for sending a manned space vehicle beyond earth’s orbit, how can we be celebrating in 2019 events which could not have yet possibly taken place, in light of Virts’ unambiguous remarks in 2015?

Stanley N · « **Reply #193 on:** July 24, 2019, 04:17:00 PM »

Quote from: hollingsworth on July 24, 2019, 03:14:52 PM

Back to Terry Virts, in an attempt to cut through all the crap, I'll submit a short bio of the man:
...
In it Virts, in clear, unmistakable language, states that “we” do not have space travel technology capable of launching “us” beyond earth’s lower orbit. I assume that he speaks on behalf of the entire space industry. If not, please enlighten me further.

He said "right now we can only fly in earth orbit" - the US today doesn't have the operational technology to go to the moon. He did not say the US never did.

A moon trip requires a human-rated heavy-lift launch system with enough delta V to get to the moon. The only US operational, human-rated heavy-lift launch system was Saturn V. They were used. So were all the N1 (the Russian counterpart to the Saturn V). I don't think Energia had the delta V for the moon, but the two built were also used up. Even if they weren't, Energia was discontinued 30 years ago.

The closest operational thing today is the Falcon Heavy, which (at least with boosters, not sure alone) has a delta V to get beyond LEO. However, it is not human rated, and Elon Musk has shown no interest in getting it human rated. (It also has somewhat less payload capacity than Saturn V.)

hollingsworth · « **Reply #194 on:** July 24, 2019, 04:46:27 PM »

Quote

He (Virts) said "right now we can only fly in earth orbit" - the US today doesn't have the operational technology to go to the moon. He did not say the US never did.

Stanley, you are obviously a very desperate individual. Are the rest of the forum members, following this thread, going to sit back, thumbs planted firmly in mouth, and let the guy get away with such a statement? This is just an unbelievable response. Stanley, are you really insinuating that Virts spoke only of present capabilities? That he did not discount the alleged moon landings in 1969 and 70? Stanley, you're either deluded, or not a very honest person. You know exactly what he was saying, and you can go back and listen to the young female astronaut on the full version of the video, who states that she looks forward to the development of a system which will take us beyond earth's lower orbit.
My, my!

CathInfo.com

Author Topic: Moon Landings - No Hard Science Knowledge (Read 32408 times)

Stanley N

Re: Moon Landings - No Hard Science Knowledge

AlligatorDicax

Photos/Re: Moon Landings - No Hard Science Knowledge

hollingsworth

Re: Moon Landings - No Hard Science Knowledge

Stanley N

Re: Moon Landings - No Hard Science Knowledge

hollingsworth

Re: Moon Landings - No Hard Science Knowledge