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That's a very instructive video.  I know a guy who sky dives, and I'm going to ask him if he would like to depend on a complex series of parachutes deploying automatically from a space capsule that has just gone through a fireball with four thousand degree Fahrenheit temperatures at the heat shield a few feet away from the 'chutes.  I wonder what he'll have to say about that...........


George Noory had an astronaut guest on the show last night but they somehow didn't manage to address this question of his having passed through the Van Allen belts without any radiation shielding (it's too heavy for the Apollo mission weight limits).

Also, at Fukushima, someone got the bright idea of getting NASA space suits to shield the workers from radiation, so they contacted NASA to get some suits and NASA told them all the space suits they have are entirely unable to shield the person wearing them from radiation of ANY KIND, therefore they would not be helpful at Fukushima.  

So ------- if space suits can't shield astronauts from radiation, what protected them while they walked on the surface of the moon?  

Or,,,,,,,,,,,,, did they??????????

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The "Van Allen Problem" was studied at length by NASA.  The risks were deemed acceptable, and trajectory was used to minimize exposure.  There are actually two belts of radiation, and inner and an outer belt, 600 to 3600 miles and 9000 to 12000 miles.  The radiation is not evenly distributed, there are areas with higher amounts of radiation, and other areas with nearly no radiation.  Astronauts exposure to radiation over the course of the lunar missions was nominal.