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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

steenkh said:
Well, at this point in history, we hear about FBI investigating where no crime has been committed all the time, as long as it's about political opponents of the president, and no investigations when it's about political loyalists.
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[edited to add I didn't see Jay Utah's post, but I'm keeping mine as is]


We're talking about the 1970s and 1980s. The FBI was nobody's b*tch back then. The US will refer to the Trump era the same way we do the Confederacy.

The fact is any FBI field office can investigate anything it wants to up to a point. They are independent of Washington D.C., and it's why they're successful. Right now D.C. has a tighter grip on the Bureau which makes it a great time to be a criminal.

But in this case NASA has an inspector general, and the most feared entity within the US Government is not the FBI, it's the GAO, General Accounting Office. Nobody at NASA wants to be the subject of their inspector general, and the last thing NASA needs is the GAO showing up. What people don't understand is there are fates worse than death for government employees, and those inspector generals and the GAO can end careers, and erase entire departments by eliminating funding. All the FBI can do is arrest people, and in this case the federal prosecutor would probably drop the charges since they'd be destroyed in court.

To the point, the missing data has been explained already, multiple times. Tapes were reused because NASA was on a budget, a reoccurring theme throughout US government history in the 1960s and 1970s where other vital audio and video recordings were lost because the medium was recorded over. This is only mysterious to people like our friend who needs everything to be a conspiracy.
 
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Axxman300 said:
To the point, the missing data has been explained already, multiple times. Tapes were reused because NASA was on a budget, a reoccurring theme throughout US government history...
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Budget was not really an issue. It was mostly a supply-chain problem. Memorex didn't have the capacity to supply a volume of compatible tapes at any price.
 
Vixen said:
Well, OK, it was one of the NASA apologists, Amy Teitel*, of several, who put forth the 'they went via the poles' explanation
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I'll bet Amy Shira Teitel didn't actually say that. Please post a link to the video in which you think she did.

Vixen said:
To explain away the very real and serious dangers of GCR, she seems to have referred to a comment by Dr. James Van Allen himself, who wrote in 1958 that 'any human exposed to even 10 roentgens per diem would only have an even chance of survival'. He then suggests future manned spacecrafts take off via 'the radiation-free zone over the poles'. Which of course Apollo did not do but which the 'debunkers' like to er, suggest they did
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Again, please link to any "debunker" who suggests any such thing.

Vixen said:
Van Allen stated that the 'maximum radiation level as of 1958' in entering the radiation belts is equivalent to between 10 and 100 roentgens per hour.
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In the very hottest section of the inner belts near the magnetic equator. Elsewhere in the belts, the flux and ETA particle energies are orders magnitude lower.

Vixen said:
Your exact same diagram, as used by the 'debunkers', shows a thick black line, implying this is the route the Apollo 11 travelled but there is zero confirmation it travelled this 'safe route' at all.
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Even if it were true that there was zero confirmation, what reason is there to think they didn't actually take such a route? (ETA, by which I mean: a route inclined to the magnetic equator, not "via the poles") What obstacle is there to their actually having done so?

Vixen said:
The aim of your hypothetical diagram is to 'show' Apollo missed the most dangerous inner belt (as is thought) but this is completely fabricated PR. NASA itself has never confirmed it. In fact, if anything, its records shows the spacecraft travelled right through the inner belt.

But not to worry, it went through 'very rapidly' so no worries, there, is the back up argument. :rolleyes:
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The spacecraft *did* go through the belts rapidly, because of how the TLI burn worked: they generated all of the speed they needed towards the moon while still in low earth orbit, then gradually lost speed as they climbed towards the moon. They did this mainly because it is efficient to do it this way, using something known as the "Oberth effect". Getting the astronauts through the radiation belts as quickly as possible was a useful side effect of something it made sense for them to do, anyway.
 
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Vixen said:
A more pressing difficulty is how you get a non-Geopositioned satellite (i.e., one whose orbit matches the speed of that of the relevant planet) to be in the right place at the right time.

You first.
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The radio signals Apollo sent back from the moon were received at one of 3 large ground stations, in the US, Spain or Australia depending on the earth's rotation.

Which planet do you propose is the "relevant planet" for your "geopositioned" satellite and where did you get the term geopositioned from anyway?
 
Vixen said:
Well, OK, it was one of the NASA apologists, Amy Teitel*, of several, who put forth the 'they went via the poles' explanation.
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Could you provide a citation, please? She's pretty knowledgeable about space exploration, so it's hard to imagine her saying something like "via the pole" when referring to the TLI trajectory.
Vixen said:
To explain away the very real and serious dangers of GCR, she seems to have referred to a comment by Dr. James Van Allen himself, who wrote in 1958 that 'any human exposed to even 10 roentgens per diem would only have an even chance of survival'. He then suggests future manned spacecrafts take off via 'the radiation-free zone over the poles'. Which of course Apollo did not do but which the 'debunkers' like to er, suggest they did
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Do you just skip over what everyone else writes, or do you simply ignore when you're errors are pointed out?

GCR has nothing to do with the VARB. The more you keep making such basic errors like that, the more you expose the ignorance you're trying to mask. You sound like someone referring to "re-jetting the carburetor" and "adjusting the points" on a 2025 Toyota Camry because you think it will make you seem knowledgeable about cars.

Can you provide a citation for that Van Allen quote*. I'm curious to know why someone with a doctorate in physics would refer to roengens when discussing the VARB, because roengens are an outdated measure of ionization of air. I can see someone like a conspiracy theorist getting that wrong in an attempt to sound knowledgeable, but not so much someone who made his scientific career studying radiation.

(Oh, never mind. You got that from aulis.com.)😄

And again, no one is suggesting, much less stating that the Apollo missions went into a polar orbit prior to TLI. Plane change maneuvers are expensive in terms of fuel. They didn't do that, because they didn't need to.

Vixen said:
Van Allen stated that the 'maximum radiation level as of 1958' in entering the radiation belts is equivalent to between 10 and 100 roentgens per hour. Your exact same diagram, as used by the 'debunkers', shows a thick black line, implying this is the route the Apollo 11 travelled but there is zero confirmation it travelled this 'safe route' at all. The aim of your hypothetical diagram is to 'show' Apollo missed the most dangerous inner belt (as is thought) but this is completely fabricated PR. NASA itself has never confirmed it.
In fact, if anything, its records shows the spacecraft travelled right through the inner belt.
But not to worry, it went through 'very rapidly' so no worries, there, is the back up argument. :rolleyes:
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Why don't you show us those records, then? Surely you must have access to them, because you would never just make something up to hide your appalling ignorance about some subject.


Seriously, Vixen, is it just all about being the center of attention, or are you genuinely so deluded that you think you can authoritatively look at what entire scientific fields have unanimously confirmed for over half a century and say "they're wrong"? Essentially, are you knowingly making foolish arguments to be the center of attention, or are you just earnestly making foolish arguments?
 
Foster Zygote said:
Can you provide a citation for that Van Allen quote*. I'm curious to know why someone with a doctorate in physics would refer to roengens when discussing the VARB, because roengens are an outdated measure of ionization of air.
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No, I'm pretty sure this one is legit. Van Allen uses roentgens in his March 1959 Scientific American article on the belts.


I deliberately used the moonfaker link because I suspect that this is exactly where Vixen found it.
 
Vixen said:
I haven't said it was a 'hoax'. You know perfectly well the mechanics of a geopositioned satellite. The fact the Apollo missions did not utilise one should make you wonder at the miracle of the live transmission to earth.
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No, it doesn't make someone wonder at all, unless they know absolutely nothing about radio communications.

Amateur radio operators have been bouncing signals off the moon, for fun, since 1953. If they can send a signal all the way to the moon, have it bounce back, and receive it back on earth without involving a satellite relay, then why would one be necessary to act as an intermediary between antennae on earth and moon with direct line of sight between each other?

As Jay already pointed out, communication satellites were involved in sending the signals back and forth between the DSTN antennae and facilities like Mission Control in Houston, but the Apollo crews were LOS to those antennae except when behind the far side of the moon.
 
Reformed Offlian said:
The spacecraft *did* go through the belts rapidly, because of how the TLI burn worked: they generated all of the speed they needed towards the moon while still in low earth orbit, then gradually lost speed as they climbed towards the moon. They did this mainly because it is efficient to do it this way, using something known as the "Oberth effect". Getting the astronauts through the radiation belts as quickly as possible was a useful side effect of something it made sense for them to do, anyway.
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Yes and no.

The initial parking orbits were practically circular so the Oberth Effect doesn't really apply. It only matters when your apoapsis and periapsis are markedly different.

Other than that, yes the Apollo spacecraft raised their apogee to coincide with lunar capture. This is just straight-up Kepler, though. The TLI burn actually takes place at the orbital antipode, which may or may not correspond to the orbital periapsis. Either way, the speed of the ship near Earth is governed by Kepler and mandates that the fastest part of the orbit is the part nearest Earth, which happens also to be where the trapped radiation is.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the Moon's orbital plane and the Earth's magnetic field are not aligned. The Moon's orbital plane is tilted 5.1° from the ecliptic. Earth's rotational plane is tilted 23.4° from the ecliptic, but not in the same direction. The Moon's orbit precesses on an 18-year cycle, so sometimes that different compounds and sometimes it partially cancels. The Earth's magnetic field is further tilted 11.5° with respect to Earth's rotational axis. Again, not aligned with anything, and again sometimes these directions cancel and sometimes they compound. When we speak of the "polar regions" for the purposes of trajectory planning through the magnetosphere, we mean the magnetic polar regions, which may place the "holes" in the top and bottom of the Van Allen belts as low as 60° terrestrial latitude. It requires no special orbital mechanics to guide a ship launched from the ordinary launch sites on Earth through those holes. Spaceships are launched into inclined orbits anyway, and it's the inclination of the orbit that matters, not the location of the launch site.
 
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Foster Zygote said:
'm curious to know why someone with a doctorate in physics would refer to roengens when discussing the VARB, because roengens are an outdated measure of ionization of air.
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Van Allen's initial work is outdated. He was using the accepted units for the time at which he was writing.

Foster Zygote said:
(Oh, never mind. You got that from aulis.com.)😄
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A thoroughly reputable source—not!

Foster Zygote said:
Seriously, Vixen, is it just all about being the center of attention...
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Clearly.
 
Foster Zygote said:
No, it doesn't make someone wonder at all, unless they know absolutely nothing about radio communications.
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Even if it did, MSFN specifications were publicly available and even described in some detail in the Apollo Press Kits.

Foster Zygote said:
As Jay already pointed out, communication satellites were involved in sending the signals back and forth between the DSTN antennae and facilities like Mission Control in Houston, but the Apollo crews were LOS to those antennae except when behind the far side of the moon.
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In addition to the ground stations, there were five ships stationed around the world to receive Apollo telemetry. These ships relayed telemetry via satellite or HF radio. It is certain that the Intelsat system was used for the satellite portions. Sources differ on whether the military IDCSP was used for telemetry as well or whether that system was only used for operational coordination among vessels. IDCSP was a medium-Earth orbit system, not geostationary. Intelsat, of course, was a geostationary system and part of the ordinary global telecommunications network intended for commercial traffic. It wasn't NASA-owned or NASA-operated. NASA leased bandwidth from Intelsat just as any other customer would.
 
lionking said:
Oh for goodness sake, how many times does this have to be debunked?
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That is what drives me crazy about conspiracy theories. No matter how much they are debunked, you have to do it time ant time again.
And is not just with the Moon Hoax crap. People still make the 'No way Oswald could have gotten off all those shots with a bold action rifle" crap argument , which anybody with experience with a bolt action rifle could tell you is pure crap.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
where did you get the term geopositioned from anyway?
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I think we all know the answer to that.

However, now that Vixen has used the term, and has been told there's no such terminology, because she is pathologically incapable of admitting error, she will not acknowledge that "geopositional" , is pure Star Trek-esque technobabble on her part, and even quietly switching to using "geostationary" would implicitly acknowledge her error, so she has no choice but to double down and use the term "geopositional" from now on on every occasion she should be using the term "geostationary".

Kimo sabe?
 
JesseCuster said:
I think we all know the answer to that.

However, now that Vixen has used the term, and has been told there's no such terminology, because she is pathologically incapable of admitting error, she will not acknowledge that "geopositional" , is pure Star Trek-esque technobabble on her part, and even quietly switching to using "geostationary" would implicitly acknowledge her error, so she has no choice but to double down and use the term "geopositional" from now on on every occasion she should be using the term "geostationary".

Kimo sabe?
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"geopositional" sounds like a joke name for a satellite that failed to launch.
 
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