• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

It makes perfect sense, and it's the same reason cricket players wear white.

If you're not reflecting the light, you're absorbing it, and all of the energy being absorbed by the suit is being turned into heat. So you want to reflect as much light as possible, in as many frequencies as possible, so that you don't cook your astronauts.
They dispelled that idea years ago, didn't they? After a certain amount of minutes, the wearer is the same temperature whether wearing white or black. Thd additional heat absorbed by black outerwear is dissipated before the body temp is affected.
 
When I played cricket, the colour of the three sweaters I was wearing made very little difference to my overall temperature. 🙂
I've found that black definitely attracts mosquitos, and white does not. I don't even care if there is science behind it, he adds with a friendly nod to our moon hoaxer contingent.
 
We're all new at something. But part of being new at something is realizing that you're new, and that a topic as prominent and well-studied as the Apollo space missions might be well understood already by people around you.
Sort of like how a few years ago I knew nothing about Ro-Ro ferries or hardhat diving. But now I have a comfortable grasp of topics along with a comprehensive knowledge of maritime disasters going back almost 150 years. All because someone tried to foist a debunked conspiracy theory on this board.
 
<snip>

I can see how an honest person would gloss over what might seem an irrelevant detail in order to get to the important claim of the spacecraft's computers being allegedly too weak to fly a rendezvous. But I can't see why you wouldn't first go see if your important claim already has a readily available answer. If I type into Gemini, "How did the Apollo lunar module rendezvous in lunar orbit with such a weak computer?" I get a reasonably accurate description.

<snip>
Wait a minute, you are using Gemini AI to answer a question on Apollo, a project that was preceded by the Gemini programme?!
COINCIDENCE, I don't think so. ;)
 
As I recall, hoax believers claim one, or more, or all, of the following:
  • if they had really gone to the moon there would have been hundreds of photographs,
  • why would NASA waste time taking so many photos when they should have been 'doing science',
  • NASA's excuse that there are not many photographs is that they were busy 'doing science',
  • there is a suspiciously large amount of photos taken, given the duration of the EVA and time it takes to take a photograph,
  • the photos are too good to have been taken by a man in a spacesuit with no viewfinder,
  • photography on the moon is impossible because the radiation would have fogged the film.
Damned if you do {take photgraphs}, damned if you don't!
 
As I recall, hoax believers claim one, or more, or all, of the following:
  • if they had really gone to the moon there would have been hundreds of photographs,
  • why would NASA waste time taking so many photos when they should have been 'doing science',
  • NASA's excuse that there are not many photographs is that they were busy 'doing science',
  • there is a suspiciously large amount of photos taken, given the duration of the EVA and time it takes to take a photograph,
  • the photos are too good to have been taken by a man in a spacesuit with no viewfinder,
  • photography on the moon is impossible because the radiation would have fogged the film.
Damned if you do {take photgraphs}, damned if you don't!

At least we're not at the "Rockets wouldn't work in space because there's nothing to push against" stage. Well, not yet anyway.
 
Wait a minute, you are using Gemini AI to answer a question on Apollo, a project that was preceded by the Gemini programme?!
COINCIDENCE, I don't think so. ;)
Indeed, the humor is not lost. I'm merely illustrating how easy it is to find answers to the allegedly "hard questions" of Apollo. If people were genuinely curious or suspicious, they could get actual answers. Instead people want the questions to hang there, apparently unanswered, as a way of creating the illusion that there are actual unsolved mysteries there. Which is why I wonder why some people immediately flock to conspiracy theorists every time they turn their attention to a new topic.
 
When I played cricket, the colour of the three sweaters I was wearing made very little difference to my overall temperature. 🙂
Comparisons to Earth clothing and experienced heat load are somewhat instructive, but not entirely analogous. On Earth your experienced temperature depends on a lot of things. And the objective thermal solution is different: you have evaporative cooling, air flow, and limited radiative heat transfer between layers.

Thermal engineering for space is its own subspecialty of practice. The problem is usually rejecting unwanted heat. Therefore the passive elements of the solution are generally aimed at reducing absorption. A space suit contains something that generates heat: an astronaut producing 80-100 W of metabolic heat. Paradoxically the contents must remain within a narrow band of temperature in order to be safe and effective. In an Earth environment there are many ways to properly reject that heat. But inside a space suit, thermal regulation becomes difficult. Sweating is ineffective. Airflow management is problematic. Hence an active heat rejection system is employed, but as it relies upon consumables, it is limited in how long it can function. That said, central to the problem is not absorbing any more heat from the environment than is strictly necessary. Therefore space suits are highly reflective so that the only heat to manage is the internally-generated heat.

Spacecraft have similar problems. Their contents (electronics, etc.) generate heat that must be rejected, but luckily not quite as aggressively. The passive elements (outside coatings, etc.) minimize absorption. A limited amount of heat is kept around to create a shirtsleeves environment, otherwise you get the 0-10 °C of Apollo 13 just via the rejection from radiation. This is what we would expect from a typical non-blackbody object at Earth distance. The rest of the heat is radiated away via radiators on the service module. Keep in mind these are not car radiators, which are actually heat exchangers. These are pure radiative objects that are spaced so that at least one of them faces deep space and therefore has proper radiative efficiency. The space shuttle kept their radiators on the inside surface of the cargo bay doors. Water-glycol coolant circulates between the radiators and heat sources.

A notable exception is the black areas on the Apollo lunar module. These are areas that had to be kept warm for various reasons, such as needing to contain liquid water and liquid propellants at a comfortable temperature. The bulbous protrusions on either side of the ascent stage are the propellant tanks. The propellants for this engine need to stay at around room temperature. Hence they have black panels to provide some passive heat absorption. There are conductive and re-radiative paths from the outer skin to the tanks. Similarly there are black panels on the front of the cockpit. The LM lands facing away from the sun and the cabin cannot rely as heavily as the CM for heating from electronics, which are mounted on coldplates on the back. So the front panels absorb just enough re-reflected light from the lunar surface in front of the LM to keep parts of the cabin from getting too cold. The black panels on the descent stage are for similar temperature-control reasons. Sometimes you want a little bit of sunlight.

These days we make heavy use of computational radiative heat transfer (CRHT) to validate designs. The efficiency of a surface's ability to radiate heat depends on its temperature and on the amount of radiant heat falling on it. So something with as complex a shape as the Apollo lunar module will necessary have some facets facing others. Figuring out how to engineer the passive thermal properties of those surfaces is a simultaneous-solution problem with no closed form. As many of you can probably guess, we use finite-element models with adaptive refinement running on very fast computers to solve these problems. Grumman pioneered this technique when designing the lunar module: their finite-element model had a whopping 13 elements.
 
Comparisons to Earth clothing and experienced heat load are somewhat instructive, but not entirely analogous. On Earth your experienced temperature depends on a lot of things. And the objective thermal solution is different: you have evaporative cooling, air flow, and limited radiative heat transfer between layers.

Thermal engineering for space is its own subspecialty of practice. The problem is usually rejecting unwanted heat. Therefore the passive elements of the solution are generally aimed at reducing absorption. A space suit contains something that generates heat: an astronaut producing 80-100 W of metabolic heat. Paradoxically the contents must remain within a narrow band of temperature in order to be safe and effective. In an Earth environment there are many ways to properly reject that heat. But inside a space suit, thermal regulation becomes difficult. Sweating is ineffective. Airflow management is problematic. Hence an active heat rejection system is employed, but as it relies upon consumables, it is limited in how long it can function. That said, central to the problem is not absorbing any more heat from the environment than is strictly necessary. Therefore space suits are highly reflective so that the only heat to manage is the internally-generated heat.

Spacecraft have similar problems. Their contents (electronics, etc.) generate heat that must be rejected, but luckily not quite as aggressively. The passive elements (outside coatings, etc.) minimize absorption. A limited amount of heat is kept around to create a shirtsleeves environment, otherwise you get the 0-10 °C of Apollo 13 just via the rejection from radiation. This is what we would expect from a typical non-blackbody object at Earth distance. The rest of the heat is radiated away via radiators on the service module. Keep in mind these are not car radiators, which are actually heat exchangers. These are pure radiative objects that are spaced so that at least one of them faces deep space and therefore has proper radiative efficiency. The space shuttle kept their radiators on the inside surface of the cargo bay doors. Water-glycol coolant circulates between the radiators and heat sources.

A notable exception is the black areas on the Apollo lunar module. These are areas that had to be kept warm for various reasons, such as needing to contain liquid water and liquid propellants at a comfortable temperature. The bulbous protrusions on either side of the ascent stage are the propellant tanks. The propellants for this engine need to stay at around room temperature. Hence they have black panels to provide some passive heat absorption. There are conductive and re-radiative paths from the outer skin to the tanks. Similarly there are black panels on the front of the cockpit. The LM lands facing away from the sun and the cabin cannot rely as heavily as the CM for heating from electronics, which are mounted on coldplates on the back. So the front panels absorb just enough re-reflected light from the lunar surface in front of the LM to keep parts of the cabin from getting too cold. The black panels on the descent stage are for similar temperature-control reasons. Sometimes you want a little bit of sunlight.

These days we make heavy use of computational radiative heat transfer (CRHT) to validate designs. The efficiency of a surface's ability to radiate heat depends on its temperature and on the amount of radiant heat falling on it. So something with as complex a shape as the Apollo lunar module will necessary have some facets facing others. Figuring out how to engineer the passive thermal properties of those surfaces is a simultaneous-solution problem with no closed form. As many of you can probably guess, we use finite-element models with adaptive refinement running on very fast computers to solve these problems. Grumman pioneered this technique when designing the lunar module: their finite-element model had a whopping 13 elements.
I just have to say, despite the thread starters comically wrong notions about the subject, this thread has delivered up a lot of quality ultra-nerdy details about the Apollo program that I'd otherwise never know anything about, from the nitty gritty details of the cameras and photography, to how to to deal with the unique problems of heat management in space...
 
I just have to say, despite the thread starters comically wrong notions about the subject, this thread has delivered up a lot of quality ultra-nerdy details about the Apollo program that I'd otherwise never know anything about, from the nitty gritty details of the cameras and photography, to how to to deal with the unique problems of heat management in space...
Apollo was one of the most extensively, meticulously, and publicly documented public projects there ever has been. No matter what level of detail you want or are able to examine, the detail is there. It remains within people's living memory. The artifacts remain for us to examine.

It makes it even more comical when ignorant blokes come along, peddle their own provably ignorant incredulity to you, and insist it can't have been real—then ask you for money. Contrary to what lazy people say, Apollo very much does not say, "Just trust us, bro." Want to inspect the cameras we used? Okay, here's one. Want to see the raw photos? Okay, here they are. Want to check out the spaceships? Here they are. How do you know they're not just movie props? Here are thousands upon thousands of drawings, schematics, and procedures from the National Archives that describe how they work. Oh, and the arch-rivals were spying on them the whole time.

In contrast you have sideshow barkers like Allen and Percy telling you, "We're professional photographers. Even though what we're handwaving about is challenged by practically all other experienced photographers—with physical demonstrations of just how wrong we are—we insist it still proves Apollo was fake. We're not going to actually prove it, of course. But we'll draw some pretty lines on pictures and wax poetical about what we naively imagine should have happened instead—and charge you money for it." That's the real, "Just trust us, bro."
 
As I recall, hoax believers claim one, or more, or all, of the following:
  • if they had really gone to the moon there would have been hundreds of photographs,
  • why would NASA waste time taking so many photos when they should have been 'doing science',
  • NASA's excuse that there are not many photographs is that they were busy 'doing science',
  • there is a suspiciously large amount of photos taken, given the duration of the EVA and time it takes to take a photograph,
  • the photos are too good to have been taken by a man in a spacesuit with no viewfinder,
  • photography on the moon is impossible because the radiation would have fogged the film.
Damned if you do {take photgraphs}, damned if you don't!
There are(n't) too manough photographs.
 

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom