Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[EHocking]

The TV in our lounge (shared with another company on the other side of the barracks) had rabbit ears. Chicago was just on the limit of reception. We had the same grainy pictures but overlaid with a layer of electronic snow. I didn't know what the landing looked like for years after.

If you’d only been wearing those rabbit ears yourself, you might have noticed the whoosh bird overhead

 

[JayUtah]

he is merely taking a scientific stance towards it - devil's advocate, if you like.

A devil's advocate still has to have reliable facts and sound logic, otherwise it's just a waste of time. The point of devil's advocacy is to use good rebuttals to identify weak parts of an argument. An argument that can withstand stupid rebuttals doesn't need to be especially strong.

About seven minutes into your video, you hear Allen talk about how bad a lot of the Apollo photography is: sunstrikes, poor framing, poor focus, poor exposure. I don't disagree. These are all problems that we would expect from someone trying to use that type of camera on the Moon. Side-to-side framing is easy, up-and-down framing is hard. Zone focusing isn't entirely accurate. The Ektachrome E-3 emulsion is notoriously sensitive to exposure settings. Allen just dismisses that. He's not interested in it, even though it's what you expect from authentic lunar surface photography.

Allen wants to concentrate on what he thinks are the few good shots. For some reason known only to him, they're "too good." Therefore he just up and claims they have to be shot on Earth. Ironically he shows us the famous Man on the Moon photograph of Aldrin, which is actually poorly framed. The top of Aldrin's backpack is cut off, but we simply crop it these days and add some black above his head to make it look good in publication. It's this "doctored to look good" version that Allen waves in front of the camera.

Can't you see how this is just post hoc reasoning? There's absolutely no science involved; he just wishes his conclusions into being. On the other hand, I took an actual Apollo camera and shot some identical film under those same conditions. Unlike the Apollo astronauts, I had little time to practice. Some of my shots were poorly framed. Some of my shots were poorly focused. Some of my shots were overexposed. And I even managed to sunstrike the roll, even though my magazine had a dark slide. But a few of the shots came out nicely. I still have all that original film.

Which of us did actual science?

Later, Allen makes the ridiculous comparative claim that all the hoax claimants make. Computer A is much less powerful than Computer B, therefore Computer A cannot possibly have worked. How is that any sort of logic? The question is not whether A meets some ad hoc standard, but whether Computer A is demonstrably capable of performing the tasks assigned to it. We don't even have to reach to science to see through this one. That's just a basic failure of logic.

Around 17 minutes into the film, Allen claims expertise in photography. (But strangely he never seems to have tested his claims using actual cameras.) Then he just says he doubts that we've been told the truth. Do you see how there's a vast amount of the argument missing? No actual reasons stated for his disbelief. How is that in any way scientific? It's just some guy saying, "Nuh-uh!" All through the video, all you get from Allen is his wildly inconsistent personal incredulity. This then is countered by his betters, who can explain all the things Allen is supposedly befuddled over. Allen's betters put their claims to the test. Allen doesn't. How is that any sort of science?

Without evidence, Allen claims the famous Aldrin photo was taken with a spotlight. That is, he can't show evidence of the actual light he claims is there. He merely infers that one was used because he can't otherwise explain why the lighting appears a certain way. He says it must have been a "whopping" 12K Arri spotlight. Does he test that theory? No, not at all. I did, with a whopping 12K spotlight. And I get very different results from what Allen thinks. The Apollo photograph doesn't show any of the distance falloff you get from a single "brute." Arguments from ignorance are not science. They're the arguments that science was invented to combat. Allen claims to be an experienced photographer, but seems to know nothing about indirect lighting or spill.

Allen claims photographic film cannot survive the vacuum of space. That's why Kodak invented the ESTAR polyester film base for that purpose, which was used extensively in U.S. CORONA spy satellites at the time and in the U-2. Thinbase ESTAR will hold onto the emulsion quite nicely. Allen could have found this out by a single phone call to NASA or Kodak. But in 30 years he never made the call. He just kept crying hoax.

And then he waves his hands vaguely about "radiation." Not a single number, not a single experiment. He just announces that the film wouldn't have survived. A little digging would have found the company in Hollywood that modified the Hasselblad longroll magazine for thermal and radiation protection. The company doesn't exist anymore, but the specs they worked to do. As do the magazines themselves.

Allen is befuddled at why Artemis I would need to send the Orion capsule into the Van Allen belts to test its shielding if they had already solved this problem for Apollo. Well, yes, they solved it for Apollo using the Apollo capsule. The Orion capsule is (gasp!) a different spaceship. It uses different materials and a different construction method. Maybe NASA is smart, and thinks it would be a good idea to validate the new shielding layup in flight test. Allen wants to pretend NASA is only just now figuring out the basic problems of going to the Moon, ignoring the far more parsimonious answer.

Allen claims the lunar samples were just lunar meteorites collected from Antarctica. He notes that Wernher von Braun went to Antarctica sometime before Apollo 11. Allen wants to say that was to collect the meteorites. If you were going to fake the Moon rocks that way, why would you send your main celebrity engineer and a NASA PR team to do it? Wouldn't it be better to, you know, do a secret mission secretly? Why would von Braun necessarily have been the one to collect the rocks? Finally, Allen fails to mention that the reason we know that some meteorites in Antarctica are from the Moon is that someone later noticed that they resembled the Apollo samples, and that's when we first started picking them up. This happened in 1979, not 1969. Allen has to turn the timeline topsy turvy for his farfetched story to work.

No, Marcus Allen wasn't being a dispassionate scientist. He wasn't taking a measured, well-considered scientific approach. He wasn't being an honest devil's advocate. He was lying. He was ignoring pertinent facts. He was making stuff up. He was trying to sell magazines to an audience that was expecting lurid tales of coverup and fakery. He gave his paying audience what he knew they wanted to hear.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Not to detract from the the achievements of Armstrong & Aldrin and the third guy who stayed inside the capsule, and of course, it is undeniably factual it all happened. However, I have a query: when the two astronauts clambered back into the capsule, via some kind of step ladder (..?), how did the capsule manage to take off again, and in the right direction? It's pointed out that there is more computer technology in one's smart phone than in the entire banks of computers at NASA at the time.

If you're genuinely interested, this NASA presentation explains the basic orbital mechanics and various steps involved in the LM achieving rendezvous with the CSM.


The computing power argument isn't valid. The Apollo mission guidance computers weren't running graphics intensive games, they were performing calculations that people had been performing with pencil and paper since Newton, just much faster and more reliably. The Apollo Guidance Computer, or AGC, was designed to perform a very specific task and did it very well. In fact, it was so good that it was later installed in a modified F-8 Crusader fighter jet to serve as the first fly-by-wire system, where the pilot was essentially making control inputs to tell the AGC what he wanted the plane to do, but the AGC was doing the actual flying.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Allen is befuddled at why Artemis I would need to send the Orion capsule into the Van Allen belts to test its shielding if they had already solved this problem for Apollo. Well, yes, they solved it for Apollo using the Apollo capsule. The Orion capsule is (gasp!) a different spaceship. It uses different materials and a different construction method. Maybe NASA is smart, and thinks it would be a good idea to validate the new shielding layup in flight test. Allen wants to pretend NASA is only just now figuring out the basic problems of going to the Moon, ignoring the far more parsimonious answer.

I've likened it to asking why the new Airbus needs to be flight tested when they already "solved" all that with the Boeing 707.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Again, the argument, 'it would have been easier to actually do it than fake it', is a weak one, not dissimilar and on a par with the exhortation: 'Trust me'. The NASA scientists in 1969 hardly had crystal balls whereby they had no idea men walking on the moon hadn't happened again some 55 years later, in their scramble to be first. Okay, so the remit of Artemis II was to circumvent the moon and film its dark side. But why not send a couple of guys to hop off on the way? OK, so the moon is not habitable, but even so...57 years...

The same reason they didn't send a couple of guys to "hop off" with Apollo 8.

The entirety of the Mercury and Gemini programs were geared toward making Apollo possible. And there were numerous unmanned and manned flights that had to happen before Apollo 11 to assure that it could land, and return, successfully. Artemis is no different. It's an entire program that has to be done in steps. Heck, the proposed landers haven't even made unmanned test flights yet.

 

[Foster Zygote]

The Soviets sent unmanned probes to the moon and received photographs sent back by radio, before Apollo. So, however primitive you reckon Soviet science was, they definitely could, and demonstrably did, pick up radio signals coming from the moon in the 1960s. So I reject your handwave that they were incapable, or couldn't be bothered, to snoop on their superpower rival and see that it really was sending back radio signals from the moon.

Yeah, the idea that radio was an esoteric technology beyond Soviet science is pretty funny. They certainly had tracking radar.

 

[Foster Zygote]

They've photographed "skylights" that indicate lava tubes run below the regolith. These could be used as impromptu housing for future lunar colonies. This would be a huge saving for future attempts at colonization.

Per adra, ad astra.

Also, the "57 years" argument is hardly supported by history. I think it was 77 years between the first and second circumnavigations of the globe, and they were using standard sailing vessels of the day, not cutting edge, ultra expensive technology.

 

[JayUtah]

Again, the argument, 'it would have been easier to actually do it than fake it', is a weak one, not dissimilar and on a par with the exhortation: 'Trust me'.

NASA is not asking you to trust them. NASA has made all the relevant information and evidence available. And those who want to test it, can and have. Marcus Allen is the one telling you trust him. He's an expert (so he says), and he says he doesn't believe the evidence. But all his attempts to tell you what's wrong with the evidence boil down to naive, untutored expectations that he wouldn't demonstrate.

Okay, so the remit of Artemis II was to circumvent the moon and film its dark side.

Circumnavigate, not circumvent. They went to the far side, not to the dark side. The Moon has no permanently dark side.

But why not send a couple of guys to hop off on the way?

Because we're not to that point yet in the program.

 

[JayUtah]

Yeah, the idea that radio was an esoteric technology beyond Soviet science is pretty funny.

We intercepted the photos sent back by Luna 9. Turns out they were being transmitted in fax format.

 

[Axxman300]

I don't think you could call Marcus Allen 'under-educated'; he is merely taking a scientific stance towards it - devil's advocate, if you like. He is taking the null hypothesis "didn't happen", then seeking evidence that he was wrong. It's as good a way as any to get to the truth, especially in the geopolitical environment of the Cold War 'Space Race', with Kennedy promising the USA would be first to put a man on the moon 'by the end of the decade'. So yes, the aim was 'by hook or by crook' to beat the Soviets, so it is perfectly reasonable to suspect they cut corners to do it by 1969. And it hasn't been done again since 1972.

The short answer is NASA is a public agency, and no corners were cut. We lost three astronauts in the Apollo-1 fire, and that slowed everything down even more. And Allen was never interested in the truth, only justifying his intellectual failure. As for not returning to the moon after 1972, they killed the Apollo budget as lesser men took power in congress. NASA looked to the shuttle program, and found success there. We've place two telescopes in space, and a few ROVs on Mars. We even landed on an asteroid, took a soil sample, and returned it to earth. All these things are harder than going to the moon, as witnessed with the Artimis II mission (which we made look easy).

Allen's arguments fall apart with the basic realities of our achievements. We landed men on the moon seven times. No one was calling it fake at the time because all the equipment and astronauts were right there to see, touch, and interview.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Circumnavigate, not circumvent. They went to the far side, not to the dark side. The Moon has no permanently dark side.

There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it's all dark.

 

[JayUtah]

As for not returning to the moon after 1972, they killed the Apollo budget as lesser men took power in congress. NASA looked to the shuttle program, and found success there.

NASA didn't really fight it. Privately, Apollo 13 had scared a lot of people because of what might have happened. Nixon had never liked Apollo and didn't fight to keep it. Moving on to the shuttle was the political solution that appealed to everyone. Killing the Saturn V outright was a necessary adjunct to that. The shuttle was considered a huge risk. No one would have bid on it if it would have to compete with the very successful Saturn launch vehicle family. NASA had to commit to the shuttle and only the shuttle.

There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it's all dark.

Surprisingly dark, yes. When we expose for both Earth and Moon, the Moon looks dingy and dark. If you want a good comparison, the average geometric albedo of the lunar surface is roughly equivalent to an aged asphalt roadway on Earth. The best approximation to the color of the lunar surface is right under foot.

 

[Foster Zygote]

I've been asking conspiracy theorists a question for a long time now.

I first point out that there has been an overwhelming scientific consensus among literally millions of engineers and physicists, the world over, for over half a century, that Apollo was real. Then I ask them whether they think they've all been fully committed to maintaining the hoax all this time, or whether they think they're all just that stupid compared to a bunch of guys whose education on the subject comes from YouTube videos by hoax nuts.

I've yet to get an answer.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it's all dark.

Lunar regolith can be dark in place and light in other places.

 

[JayUtah]

Lunar regolith can be dark in place and light in other places.

Mare basalt is around 7% geometric albedo. That's roughly equivalent in reflectivity (although not color) to freshly-poured asphalt. Highlands anorthosite is 10-12%. As stated, that's about the same as asphalt that's been around for a few years. By comparison, Earth's average albedo is around 30%. The various color effects some have seen have fairly nuanced causes.

This surprises people because the Apollo photography generally shows a very bright surface. That's mostly due to camera exposure settings, but also by the fact that the E-3 emulsion has a narrow dynamic range. It was chosen for its grain and the ability to do some darkroom tricks to correct photographer errors.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Lunar regolith can be dark in place and light in other places.

My kingdom for some Pink Floyd fans!

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

@Jay: You forgot about the spots were the alien landing craft set down to transfer the alien construction teams to the surface so they can build the mind control beamers.

 

[Helen]

NASA? That's what we should rely on? Wake up, NASA is SATAN! Why do you think they say t-minus?

Is what I have been told by someone on the internet.

 

[Vixen]

Mare basalt is around 7% geometric albedo. That's roughly equivalent in reflectivity (although not color) to freshly-poured asphalt. Highlands anorthosite is 10-12%. As stated, that's about the same as asphalt that's been around for a few years. By comparison, Earth's average albedo is around 30%. The various color effects some have seen have fairly nuanced causes.

This surprises people because the Apollo photography generally shows a very bright surface. That's mostly due to camera exposure settings, but also by the fact that the E-3 emulsion has a narrow dynamic range. It was chosen for its grain and the ability to do some darkroom tricks to correct photographer errors.

The moon's surface is actually very bright so simply taking a camera designed for earthly parameters - depth of field, focal point, contrast, etc., - is going to be extremely tricky on the moon, especially with thick gloves, limited head movement, resulting in limited field of vision - seems rather optimistic in 1969. Who remembers compact cameras? Awful! Absolutely awful. At least with single lens reflex (SLR) photography, one had some control over the quality but then ... problems with film...developing...keeping slides and negatives in good condition. It's not hard to see why Allen was curious about the Apollo photography. Hardly makes him a scoundrel.

 

[Mojo]

The moon's surface is actually very bright...

No, it isn't.