Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[welshdean]

Because you claimed you would treat someone brutally who, in your view, made a mistake at a job interview with you.

Liar! I did not mention an interview at all. Read it again, it wasn't 'an' error, it was many, too many. It was the stubbornness that I was pointing out.
Another mistake you've made.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

I wasn't referring to the slim shadow of the Moon Lander, obvs. The lunar sun had only just barely risen so plenty of darkness in the opposite landscape, especially behind one of the enormous rocks Pat Norris referred to. Obviously, this is theoretical assuming your camera film hasn't already been damaged by the unrelenting radiation.

You're just wrong.

Fifteen degrees above the horizon is not "only just barely risen". You can feel free to imagine yourself standing behind a gigantic lunar boulder if you prefer. The fact that you can see the sunlit moonscape stretch away for a few miles into the distance means that light from that same moonscape is also illuminating you.

If you would like to describe the type and the intensity of the radiation you think would be damaging your camera's film, feel free to give us the numbers.

 

[zooterkin]

The only way to be as relentlessly wrong as Vixen manages is when it's deliberate.

It's certainly an achievement to have such a high proportion of posts with errors in, whether deliberate or not.

 

[JayUtah]

It's certainly an achievement to have such a high proportion of posts with errors in, whether deliberate or not.

She'll get another ten pages today for sure.

 

[JayUtah]

Fifteen degrees above the horizon is not "only just barely risen".

On the Moon, true. Where I live, 15º above the horizon is just barely above the mountains. Nevertheless, still full sun as I demonstrated photographically.

Once again the conspiracy theorists come to the table with nothing more convincing than, "Wot I reckon is..." while the debunkers are the ones actually demonstrating what the physical facts are. Let's sit back and watch the inevitable mental gymnastics @Vixen employs to deny factual reality.

 

[threadworm]

OK, so the frogmen sprayed the capsule with 'chemicals' to 'kill the Moon germs'. Then they sloshed the astronauts inside with same. They got them to change clothes in case of 'Moon germs'. Are you serious?! Not a single mention of the extremely dangerous possibility of radiation..?

An older sibling and a friend as part of their (British) degrees, spent a year at Grenoble Uni in which they spent time with radioactive materials (Chemistry course). After EVERY session they had to undergo intensive decontamination and scrub downs. I can't remember the exact details now. This would have been a similar era - early to mid-70's - so you can't argue the dangers of radiation weren't known then. The thing is, the friend subsequently died young of bone cancer, still in 30's or 40's with small children, so it was incredibly sad. A child of my sibling was born with a birth defect, possibly congenital, and thankfully, easily rectified by surgery. Now, of course, we don't know it was because of the time spent at Grenoble but for NASA to believe 'germs' are the main problem makes me realise it's not serious. Spraying with chemicals indeed.

Well, that's one debating point.

Citation required.

'Chemicals' doesn't = radioactive.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

I was right and I know I am right.

Words to be wrong by.

The Dunning-Kruger effect (DKE) is the finding that, across a wide range of tasks, poor performers greatly overestimate their ability, whereas top performers make more accurate self-assessments.

The only way to be as relentlessly wrong as Vixen manages is when it's deliberate.

Here I must disagree. Highlighting the important qualifier you left out:

The only way for an intelligent person to be as relentlessly wrong as @Vixen manages to be is for the wrongness to be deliberate.

 

[threadworm]

I'll save Vixen the bother. The chemicals involved were Betadine and sodium hypochlorite.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

On the Moon, true. Where I live, 15º above the horizon is just barely above the mountains. Nevertheless, still full sun as I demonstrated photographically.

You guys do have some above average dramatic geography around Utah. I idly searched for a calculator of the sun's elevation in different places and times, and found if you live in, say Helsinki, Finland, 15° is about how high the sun gets at noon in the first weeks of February or November. (I have no idea which parts of Finland any of our contributors might live in, but that might be a useful comparator for some of us.)

 

[Foster Zygote]

As per the video in the OP, Trevor Weaver, IIRC, points out that they simply did not have the technology.

And Trevor Weaver is 100% full of ◊◊◊◊. The technology used to convert the early SSTV Apollo TV signals to NTSC was all based on standard television studio/station equipment. Kinescope and telecine machines were in TV facilities all over the world. Even after magnetic tape replaced the kinescope, most TV shows were actually still shot on film and converted to video with telecine machines, even into the early '80s. RCA built a bespoke SSTV/NTSC converter for NASA, but there was nothing technologically novel about anything it did.

By the way, your "vacuum tube = analog/≠ digital" is another overly simplistic misconception. Early vacuum tube computers were, indeed, digital devices. Just pointing that out as yet another instance of you pretending to understand something that you actually don't.

He points out the extreme effect of solar storms. What does Pat Norris the 'debunker' have to say to this? Oh, they can 'just hide behind a rock' !

How extreme? Come on, you're a "numbers person" - give us the relevant physics.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Vixen simply cannot understand that on the moon the day sky is black.

Nor that you can't simply point a camera with daytime settings at even an actual night sky and image "beautiful pictures of brightly twinkling stars".

 

[Foster Zygote]

OK, so the frogmen sprayed the capsule with 'chemicals' to 'kill the Moon germs'. Then they sloshed the astronauts inside with same. They got them to change clothes in case of 'Moon germs'. Are you serious?! Not a single mention of the extremely dangerous possibility of radiation..?

An older sibling and a friend as part of their (British) degrees, spent a year at Grenoble Uni in which they spent time with radioactive materials (Chemistry course). After EVERY session they had to undergo intensive decontamination and scrub downs. I can't remember the exact details now. This would have been a similar era - early to mid-70's - so you can't argue the dangers of radiation weren't known then. The thing is, the friend subsequently died young of bone cancer, still in 30's or 40's with small children, so it was incredibly sad. A child of my sibling was born with a birth defect, possibly congenital, and thankfully, easily rectified by surgery. Now, of course, we don't know it was because of the time spent at Grenoble but for NASA to believe 'germs' are the main problem makes me realise it's not serious. Spraying with chemicals indeed.

Well, that's one debating point.

Oh, Vixen. You're so, so funny. And not because you don't understand physics. If you actually asked questions and accepted answers, no one would mock your arguments. The comedy comes from the way you demonstrate your ignorance of a subject by the very act of pretending to have a deep understanding of it.

The Apollo crews were exposed to particle radiation, not radioactive materials. The reason they had to undergo decontamination was because of the risk of even the smallest bit of a radioactive sample remaining on them, or even worse, getting inhaled into a lung, or ingested, where it will continue to emit radiation. They were eliminating any radioactive materials, they weren't "washing off the radiation" they'd been exposed to.


And no, virtually no one at NASA thought that "moon germs" would be the main problem. The quarantine was more about demonstrating due diligence in the face of the very small risk of some pathogen or toxin being brought back.

 

[JayUtah]

As per the video in the OP, Trevor Weaver, IIRC, points out that they simply did not have the technology.

He is incorrect.

Scan conversion technology was well established by 1969, at least in terms of converting one standardized television signal to another (such as from PAL to NTSC). The problem is that Apollo television signals were not any of those standards. For the contemplated color television transmissions in later missions, there was already a custom scan conversion system in development. That's what was used from Apollo 12(-ish) onward.

Apollo 11 was a one-off. It was literally the only mission that was going to use that particular slow-scan system, because it was the only mission where they would try to cram the entire signal into the capacity of the 1-meter high-gain antenna on the lunar module. So the dilemma was whether to spend a lot of time and effort building yet another scan conversion system that would only be used on one mission.

It's true that digital frame buffers did not exist in 1969, but this falls into the same trap as saying that because we do everything digitally now, it wasn't possible to do it at all prior to digital technology. Analog frame buffers existed, but they were finicky and highly specialized for each task. The color TV system under developed indeed used an analog frame buffer based on magnetic storage, and it was indeed difficult to engineer. That's why there was little interest in going to all that effort to make an entirely different one for only one mission.

Aiming cameras at screens (e.g., kinescopes) was already common practice in the television industry as a front-line method. It had nothing to do with "we don't have the technology." So it was no great light-bulb moment to say, "Let's just point the NTSC camera at the long-phosphor tube on the slow-scan display." Moreover, there was no bleeding-edge technology to deal with. The slow-scan display was unremarkable. The camera was unremarkable. All these could be operated and serviced by technicians with no special training or knowledge. That makes the system much more reliable than an unnecessarily high-tech alternative.

Valves can be used for either analog or digital purposes, as can transistors. The Apollo flight equipment used solid-state components, not valves.

He points out the extreme effect of solar storms.

Which might have been a problem had there been any on any of the missions.

 

[JayUtah]

And no, virtually no one at NASA thought that "moon germs" would be the main problem. The quarantine was more about demonstrating due diligence in the face of the very small risk of some pathogen or toxin being brought back.

The quarantine was quietly known from the start to be mostly theater, which was why it was quickly abandoned.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Exposing something to radiation doesn't make it radioactive.

If that were the case, Louis Slotin would have been buried in a nuclear waste storage facility.

 

[Foster Zygote]

I heard that Buzz Aldrin gained the ability to kill embarrass conspiracy theorists by focusing his mind fist on them.

Fixed it.

 

[JayUtah]

The Apollo crews were exposed to particle radiation, not radioactive materials. The reason they had to undergo decontamination was because of the risk of even the smallest bit of a radioactive sample remaining on them, or even worse, getting inhaled into a lung, or ingested, where it will continue to emit radiation. They were eliminating any radioactive materials, they weren't "washing off the radiation" they'd been exposed to.

"They" meaning the students, not the astronauts. The difference between contamination and exposure is pretty fundamental. When I worked at LLNL I had to wear a dosimeter. But I didn't have to undergo any decontamination procedures because I was never in contact with any radioactive substances. I was very near them (literally across the street from the national plutonium bunker), and so could have been irradiated. But I was not contaminated.

Similarly the astronauts were irradiated, but not contaminated. There is no need for a decontamination protocol after splashdown.

 

[JayUtah]

If that were the case, Louis Slotin would have been buried in a nuclear waste storage facility.

In contrast, the Chernobyl first responders had to be buried with contamination protocols because they were both irradiated and contaminated, as was Marie Curie. When you are exposed to radioactive materials (as opposed to being merely irradiated by them), you can ingest or otherwise incorporate them into your body. This is contamination. If they remain there—and many do—they will continue to irradiate you. If you wear PPE to avoid direct contamination, you can still be indirectly contaminated while you are removing the PPE unless steps are taken to decontaminate you before doffing.

 

[JayUtah]

Obviously, this is theoretical assuming your camera film hasn't already been damaged by the unrelenting radiation.

Should someone as ignorant as you are about radiation be offering opinions about this?

 

[Foster Zygote]

You're just wrong.

Fifteen degrees above the horizon is not "only just barely risen". You can feel free to imagine yourself standing behind a gigantic lunar boulder if you prefer. The fact that you can see the sunlit moonscape stretch away for a few miles into the distance means that light from that same moonscape is also illuminating you.

If you would like to describe the type and the intensity of the radiation you think would be damaging your camera's film, feel free to give us the numbers.

She's also still ignoring the fact that without an atmosphere, you don't get the gradual increase and decrease in brightness, and the softening of light that we get on earth at sunrise or sunset.