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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

Andy_Ross said:
I know, I wanted some details from Vixen.
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Holding @Vixen to account is a slippery task. The problem here is that she would very much have been able to point out that Orion is more robust than Apollo in that respect, therefore she would have been able to claim that Orion succeeded where Apollo would have failed (and therefore had to be faked) because of better attention to that detail. And it would appear casually that she has the facts on her side.

Better to get out front of that. The question is not, "Orion is more robust than Apollo." The question is, "Was Apollo robust enough?" Here we can take the design criteria for Orion—which are more strenuous than for Apollo—and show that Apollo meets those standards in the nominal case. This is not something Vixen would have been able to do on her own, or can be cajoled into doing.

As an engineer I understand the science thoroughly. As the spouse of a lawyer, I understand how to present a "bad fact."
 
W.D.Clinger said:
The spoiler relates a funny story about that, from my undergraduate class in psychology.

To provide the psychology department with a cheap source of involuntary human subjects, and to give students taking the course a better idea of what psychological experiments can be like, everyone taking the course was required to act as a human subject for a couple of experiments.

I was assigned to an experiment in which the human subjects were paired. The rules of the game were explained to both subjects, and the subjects were then separated to play the game in isolation, with the experimenter popping into each room at intervals to provide information on how the game was progressing.

The game was a classic two-person zero-sum game. Both subjects were shown the payoff matrix. It was immediately obvious (to me) that the optimal strategy would be a mixed strategy that involved a bit of randomness. I estimated the probabilities as best I could in the time provided, without the use of pen and paper, and proceeded to generate randomness with the appropriate probabilities by flipping a coin multiple times.

After each round, the experimenter came in to tell us how much we had won or lost in that round. When he realized I was flipping coins, he admonished me to take the game seriously, because this was a Serious Psychological Experiment. I told him I was taking the game quite seriously: "Go read your von Neumann and Morgenstern."

After the game was over, each of the human subjects was told to write a short essay in which they were to explain why they performed so well or so poorly in the game. I had performed poorly. In my essay, I speculated that my opponent must have understand the importance of mixed strategies as well as I did, and had either done a better job of estimating the optimal probabilities or had just been luckier. Mostly luck, I thought and said.

After we gave our essays to the experimenter, he told us the game was called Attribution. The point of the experiment was to study a hypothesis that said the winners of the game would be more likely to attribute their success to skill and the losers to bad luck. Or maybe vice versa; I forget which. The game had been rigged, of course. I had performed poorly in the game because no matter which pure strategy my random choice had selected for a round, the experimenter would tell me my opponent had selected one of the pure strategies that most effectively countered my choice of a pure strategy. He said he was unaware that optimal strategies for such games usually involve some degree of randomness, and had not anticipated that any of his human subjects would incorporate randomness into their game-playing. He said he wasn't sure what he was going to do with my essay; he might have to discard the results of my participation.



My own body has a volume of approximately 75 liters, which means I displace about 75 liters of air. The density of nitrogen, at room temperature, is a bit less than 1.2 kg/m3; the density of oxygen is a little over 1.3 kg/3. The air I displace is almost 80% nitrogen, and most of the rest is oxygen, so the density of the air I displace is about 1.2 kg/m3. 75 liters is 0.075 cubic meters, so the air I displace has a mass of about 0.09 kilograms.

When I'm overweight and out of shape, my bathroom scale says I weigh about 75kg. But my bathroom scale measures force, not mass, so it fails to take the buoyancy of air into account. If I were to weigh myself in a vacuum, to prevent my weight from being affected by the buoyancy of air, my scale would say I weigh about 75+0.09kg = 75.09kg. The buoyancy of air therefore reduces my weight as measured on a bathroom scale by about 0.12%. One part in eight hundred.

A similar calculation could tell you how much the buoyancy of air reduces the weight of any falling object. In a vacuum, the weight of a falling object would not affect the rate at which it falls, but heavier objects do fall slightly faster in air because their weight helps to overcome air resistance and (when deployed) the braking effect of a parachute. Taking that into account would involve a far more complex calculation, but changing the weight of a falling object by a small fraction of 1% isn't going to make a whole lot of difference to how rapidly it descends.


The phrase I highlighted says the craters are full of elemental hydrogen and oxygen rather than ice. That is not true, but it is what @Vixen believed when she wrote that.



Furthermore, even the craters whose depths are permanently sheltered from direct sunlight are exposed to sunlight reflected from the crater walls. That reflected sunlight appears to be one of the more significant reasons why there is so little ice in those craters.
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The psychological concept you are referring to is Locus of Control.

Re parachutes, that should of course be drag not buoyancy.
 
Vixen said:
Because, as with photography anywhere with a manually operated camera when in an unfamiliar place or situation, or where you want to 'create memories', you'd take numerous or at least several shots of the same pic, using different shutter speeds if you are unsure of how the light will affect your film. The Apollo 11 guys didn't do that.
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How would the amount of light vary on the Moon?
 
Vixen said:
Because its presence is presumed. In addition, it may need electrolysis or some other combustion technique to combine it with hydrogen in order to make it water, possibly via Moon soil extraction (= mining).
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Electrolysis is used to separate water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, not combine oxygen and hydrogen into water. It's right there in the name. How can you pretend that you introduced us to the concept of water ice in deep polar craters, then get the reason for interest in said ice so completely wrong?

Water ice on the moon, if it can be processed in enough quantity efficiently enough, can be used to support life in habitats, provide shielding, and, with enough energy, can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, which can, among other uses, serve as rocket fuel. The presence of oxygen on the moon isn't presumed. If there's water there, then there is oxygen there.
 
Vixen said:
Nobody said it can't. But remember how the Soviets had their module crashed into the surface (they claim) just before Apollo 11, in an effort to beat them? So whilst landing on earth, one has the buoyancy of air to help deaccelerate - hence the multiple parachutes and rapid deacceleration on earth-reentry and splashdown - and into an ocean - there is no atmosphere on the Moon, no air to cushion the impact with the ground, and no body of water. Being 1/6th of Earth's gravity doesn't make it any less highly dangerous.
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Exactly, they misunderestimated the deacceleration.
 
Vixen said:
Right, and so your logic and knowledge immediately made you think, 'Ah, the Dark Side of the Moon'!

I had no way of knowing in advance that a lot of people had never heard of this mining plan so tried to correct it with 'Ah but that's a Pink Floyd LP. What is called the Dark Side of the Moon is not what astronomers call the X,Y and Z, etc'.

Maybe you personally were aware, but the usual suspects caught themselves out and tried to make out they had a problem with one of my words. As if I had Pink Floyd in mind at all.
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No one thinks you had Pink Floyd on your mind. We were just making a joke about your scientifically illiterate terminology.
 
Vixen said:
No. Imagine you are a barrister representing a client in a criminal court of law in which facts are being established. Your client accused of murder claims they changed out of the clothes they were wearing on the night 'to go to a nice beauty spot'. They might eleborate it was planned in advance and an aunt and uncle can vouch for it. Do you see the problem the judge and jury face? Having to work out whether it is a cute story to make the 'trip to the beauty spot' sound more convincing or is it because they are guilty and needed a story. One theory is, the more complex an explanation, the bigger the lie.
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For example:
 
P.J. Denyer said:
Sorry catch me up, is it now suspicious that they didn't take more photos of each other? I thought it was suspicious that they were taking photos of each other rather than things they couldn't photograph at home, like apparently, the stars?
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SuperMurrio said:
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!
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Called it way back on page 21...
 
Vixen said:
They didn't leave the space craft for a start. Completely modernised spacecraft structure to safeguard the spacecraft inhabitants.
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I thought we were talking about the Van Allen belts. Did the Apollo crews leave their spacecraft during the transit through the belts?

And maybe you could tell us more about that "completely modernized structure" and how it compares to the Apollo CM?
 
Vixen said:
I am not sure this is a safe environment when derogatory names are bandied about. So I am out unless someone has a valid point.
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Vixen said:
The psychological concept you are referring to is Locus of Control.

Re parachutes, that should of course be drag not buoyancy.
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It appears the reports of your flounce were greatly exaggerated.
 
Vixen said:
If it makes you feel better. I once had a boss who used to bring me 'brainteasers' every morning.
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Oooh I've got a brainteaser for you!
  • There were 5,771 photos taken over a total of 4,834 minutes, over all six missions (excl. Rover photos) or one every 50 secs, according to Marcus Allen. The Hasselblad shutter speed is 1.5 sec, for the shutter to open and shut and auto-wind on to the next frame. Apollo 11 took 123 surface pics in 151 minutes does the maths work?
 
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