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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

JayUtah said:
For crying out loud, I just taught my eight-year-old niece what "line of sight" means. It took less than five minutes and she understood it perfectly the first time. What is your major malfunction? It's taken hundreds of pages and you're still not up to speed.
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One of the implications of Vixen's claim is that a "non-geopositioned" satellite is needed for us to even be able to see the Moon.
 
JesseCuster said:
There was a planet in between where the signal was being sent from and where it was being received, so a satellite which had line of sight with both locations was used to relay the signal.

However, there was no planet or anything in between the TV signal coming from the moon and earth so no geopositioned or geostationary or any satellite was needed to relay the signal to earth, NASA had receiving stations around the globe so there was always a radio dish available on the side of earth facing the moon to receive the signal directly from the source. Can you genuinely not pictures this or understand this? It’s really that simple.
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She knows this but wants to play her game.
 
Is this geopositioned/geostationary satellite in orbit around the moon and capturing TV footage with no background whizzing by? Or is this geopositioned/geostationary satellite in orbit around the earth and involved in relaying the signal from the moon? Or does geopositioned have something to do with figuring out your coordinates with a sextant and pocket watch? Who knows? Not Vixen, that’s for sure, which is why she can’t commit to any of them, even though they’re mutually exclusive and she’s waved her argument in all those directions while doing her best to be as vague and non-commital as possible. Who does she think she is fooling with this mixed up nonsense?
 
wollery said:
FFS, I used to work as a professional astronomer, you are incapable of teaching me anything about orbital mechanics, satellites, the Moon, or anything else remotely related to Physics or astrophysics. Please stop trying to speak to me like I am an idiot who needs leading to a great discovery.

I asked YOU a very simple question, please have the common courtesy to answer as simply as you can.

Unless of course you don't know the answer, or are so rude as to think that I don't deserve one.
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No need to go into orbit 🛰️. :) In answer to your question, Telstar wouldn't have been much use, as it wasn't geosynchronous, even were it still in commission in 1969 because being in MEO, with an elliptical orbit path, it had a habit of dipping below the horizon so it was only available in 30-minute slots (which might be doable if NSA knew exactly what time the live broadcast would start). It had low power which meant ground infrastructure would have been ultra-expensive (but again, doable). In addition, it didn't have any radiation shielding, which was part of the reason it was written off so quickly. Further, low capacity, in that it could do only one image at a time. But by 1969, from 1962, if NASA was ready to send guys to the Moon to beat the Soviets you'd think they'd have a better plan than a basic Westinghouse SSTV system, but then maybe it wasn't thought through ATT that anyone would query it.
 
JayUtah said:
Which it very much is, for reasons I've explained at length several times and which everyone else but the self-proclaimed Triple Niner has managed to understand.

She has to flee back to the notion of geostationary satellites around Earth because it seems she finally figured out how absolutely full of crap Allen and Weaver are on the subject of lunar orbit television. You don't need to be in a selenostationary orbit around the Moon in order to video lunar surface features from orbit and keep them in frame. You merely pan the camera, something that everyone with a cell phone instinctively knows how to do but which seems to have exceeded Allen's professional experience.

So now we're back to @Vixen trying to pontificate about Earth-orbiting satellites. I'm sure she'll be back shilling for the frauds Allen and Weaver when she realizes how full of crap she is on this point too.


Congruently, I have designed, built, operated, and communicated directly with the very type of spacecraft @Vixen is trying to lecture about. I probably forgot more about geostationary satellite operations last night than she will ever be able to learn. Yet she arrogantly believes I need a tutorial from her on the subject.

@Vixen, we're past you pretending to spoon-feed your critics one oblique point after another and quizzing them to "get them thinking." Now, pretend you're standing in front of a panel of expert satellite designers and operators—because you very much are—and tell us what you think a "non-geopositioned satellite" is and why you think Apollo signals need to be sent "via" a "geopositioned" one in order to implement a valid Earth-Moon communication system. You don't get to quiz them. You don't get to "get them thinking." You don't get to trot along endlessly with "baby steps."

Pretend you have one minute to make your point completely or something bad will happen.


Line of sight.

For crying out loud, I just taught my eight-year-old niece what "line of sight" means. It took less than five minutes and she understood it perfectly the first time. What is your major malfunction? It's taken hundreds of pages and you're still not up to speed.

For radio communications, the sender and receiver need to have a line of sight to each other. For points on Earth that are close enough, that line of sight is direct. If they are sufficiently separated, there needs to be a relay above the surface to which both sender and receiver have line of sight. Originally that was Earth's ionosphere, and the relay was a passive reflection. Also you can use very tall towers that relay by retransmission. We still use this for the backhaul in cellar networks.

If you can't build a tower tall enough to provide simultaneous line of sight, you can use aircraft such as were employed in the Vietnam War. But since they have endurance issues, there is great interest in using satellites which can orbit indefinitely.


That there were too few of them (compared to, say, Iridium or Starlink) and that they were in low orbit and as such had to orbit much faster than the comparatively sedate rotation rate of Earth.

You can solve that problem by providing many satellites so that as one passes beyond the horizon, another has come into view. This is especially effective if the satellites can communicate with each other in addition to the air-to-ground channel.

You can solve that problem by moving the satellite farther out so that it's visible for longer. This gives you both greater coverage and longer duration at the expense of signal-handling over a greater distance and latency. The latter reason is why we still invest in landlines. Geostationary spacecraft are also insanely expensive to build, launch, and operate. They have end-of-life disposal issues too, which is why the industry is switching back to LEO solutions. GSO spacecraft are one way to solve the problem but by no means the only or necessarily best way.

This is all elementary. I would expect a bright high school student to be able to pick this up. Or even an 8-year-old girl. It explains why two points on Earth need an intermediary when they have no direct line of sight to each other. It does not explain why a transmitter on the Moon supposedly needs an intermediary when it does have a line of sight to the receiver on Earth. A given point on Earth has direct line of sight to the Moon for at least 8 hours at a stretch.

This is what you're being repeatedly asked to explain. Pointing out that GSO spacecraft solve other problems is not the same as saying they solve your problem or are required (or even convenient) for all problems. You're slinging cargo-cult reasoning and pretending that you can bluff your way past experts.


...which provides direct line of sight to the Moon for 8-12 hours on end. One is the practical limit. The other is the theoretical limit. The Deep Space Network provided several dishes spread out over the available longitudes to cover the entire rotational period of the Earth.

This is basic geometry.

(I'll just note that Cattell III B does not test spatial or quantitative reasoning.)

Literally everyone else here but you understands this principle.


The diameter of the geostationary belt subtends about 12º as seen from the Moon. As your GSO spacecraft goes from one side of its orbit to another over 12 hours you will need to constantly redirect your antenna to track it. The Earth itself is a comparatively stationary target.


But not wide enough to paint the entire geostationary belt. Yes, you can expand the beam width, but at the expense of power and effective SNR.

Of course you can just use several geostationary satellites so that one is always within your beam and you don't have to constantly steer it. But then you've just badly reproduced the actual solution of having several ground stations spaced around the world.

Just point the dish at Earth and have at least three ground stations. It really is that simple.

Vixen, complete this sentence: "An Earth-orbiting geostationary satellite would have been required to receive Apollo signals from the Moon because ____________________."

No bad-form answering questions with questions. No "let's get you thinking." No coy insinuations that you know the answer but you'll only give it if we jump through hoops.

I'm an expert practitioner in this field. I'm the examiner. You're the examinee. You're being given a chance to display your understanding before I give you your score.
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Yes, of course, 'line of sight' is the official version of the 'live' tv broadcast, 250K miles away, with no problem with the images.
 
Trebuchet said:
And is always in the same spot in the lunar sky. So all you need is a high gain antenna that is pointed more or less at the Earth, and three or four receiving stations so at least one always has line of sight to the moon.
The high gain antennas were NOT highly directional. They pretty much blanketed the Earth with what was, by the time it got here, a pretty weak signal. But the receiving antennas were very large and were highly directional. They could be pointed directly at the moon, or ever a specific area of it.
I am, of course, still waiting to see what Vixen has looked up on how long it takes the Earth to transit the lunar sky.
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Just because you can look up and see the Moon in the sky, doesn't mean, it too, is not orbiting Earth at the same time Earth itself is spinning (albeit relatively slowly in the same direction).
 
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