A problem with the fake-apollo landings theories

[Bell]

The United States was behind in the space race. They were embarrassed by Sputnik.

And I'm sure you're going to embarras yourself.

The US did have a real moonlanding, but it was too afraid it might fail. So, they did a fake moon landing, with a hollywood set in Nevada.

The moonlanding was both REAL and FAKE? What did they send up in space, Schrodinger's cat?

They used fake photography, you can see that in the fake and missing or wrongly directed shadows of the flag on the moon.

Just look at the pictures. Look at the shadows. They don't match.

Neither do the two halves of your brain.
Conclusion: Yup, you embarrased yourself.

 

[uruk]

They used fake photography,

As opposed to "real" photography" where you actually take pictures and not just fake taking pictures.

 

[maccy]

There are no smilies on this post, so I can't tell if it's meant to be taken seriously or not.

If it's satire, good one, you had me going!

If it's genuine, I'll back away slo-o-o-ly, making no sudden movements that might startle you.

septicjism is holocaust denying flat-earther. You can check his previous posts for this, but it isn't pleasant reading.

 

[Mashuna]

septicjism is holocaust denying flat-earther. You can check his previous posts for this, but it isn't pleasant reading.

That'll be me backing away slowly then

ETA I've just read some of the other posts. I see what you mean. I've never used the ignore function before, I think I'll give it a whirl now though.

 

[gtc]

The moonlanding was both REAL and FAKE? What did they send up in space, Schrodinger's cat?

Indeed they took Schrodinger's cat up with them, they had to fake the photos to get rid of the claw marks on their space suits. Never ask an astronaut about the 'kitty litter incident'.

 

[geni]

The United States was behind in the space race. They were embarrassed by Sputnik.

US caught up during gemini

The US did have a real moonlanding, but it was too afraid it might fail. So, they did a fake moon landing, with a hollywood set in Nevada. They used fake photography, you can see that in the fake and missing or wrongly directed shadows of the flag on the moon.

Just look at the pictures. Look at the shadows. They don't match.

http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/Shadow_Angles.htm

 

[R.Mackey]

The US did have a real moonlanding, but it was too afraid it might fail. So, they did a fake moon landing, with a hollywood set in Nevada. They used fake photography, you can see that in the fake and missing or wrongly directed shadows of the flag on the moon.

So... we did go to the Moon, and took pictures, but decided that we'd never release them, and released some fake pictures instead. That's what you're saying.

I can only assume you're one of those special people who believes in this theory, namely that the pictures were withheld to keep people from learning the Truth, which in your particular brand of illness involves an infinite series of turtles.

I'd just like to point out that this particular theory is the absolutely stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. Get help.

 

[Bell]

So... we did go to the Moon, and took pictures, but decided that we'd never release them, and released some fake pictures instead. That's what you're saying.

I can only assume you're one of those special people who believes in this theory, namely that the pictures were withheld to keep people from learning the Truth, which in your particular brand of illness involves an infinite series of turtles.

I'd just like to point out that this particular theory is the absolutely stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. Get help.

Says the NASA employee who can't even launch a Shuttle because of some overcast clouds

 

[R.Mackey]

Not my department. I don't work Shuttle.

Besides, you better watch it, 'cuz I know how to fry your house from orbit.

 

[Bell]

My bad

And.. yikes! I'll shut up now

 

[bjb]

The weather has to be good so the vehicle can be photographed from the ground during ascent. There is a concern that foam may fall off the external tank and hit the orbiter. Also, the weather needs to be good in case of an abort after launch. There are several types of aborts, one where the vehicle might need to return to Florida after a single orbit (abort once around, or "AOA"), one where it lands in Spain, Gambia, or Morocco (transatlantic abort, or "TAL"), and the most frightening of all, the dreaded 'return to launch site', or RTLS. In an RTLS abort, the vehicle makes a U-turn while the main engines are still firing and returns to Florida for a landing, in theory at least. None of these aborts have ever been used in practice.

For all of these aborts, the weather needs to be good at the landing sites. Not only in Florida, but in Spain, Morocco, and Gambia.

R. Mackey, I liked you analysis of the Star Wars death weapon,but I would like to point out that high voltages are commnoly used in space vehicle applications. It is true that most satellites run at a bus voltage of around 100V or less but the travelling-wave tube used in communication satellites needs a couple of kV to operate. I'm seeing numbers like 3.2kV, 15kV, etc. Also, I'm not sure what kind of capacitors you used in your analysis. The Maxwell ultracapacitors are good 13,587 W/kg, which gives a mass of only 44 tons to produce 1.2E9 watts of power. You also left out the possibility of using a flywheel energy storage system. I don't have enough information to calculate a size for the flywheel but it will still be very heavy. I did like your point about the visibility of the flash. I've seen a small welding laser in action and unsurprisingly, you need to wear welding glasses to look at it. A Death Beam weapon would have produced an incredibly intense and blinding flash when it vaporized an entire building but of course, no such flash is visible in the many videos of the collapse.

 

[R.Mackey]

R. Mackey, I liked you analysis of the Star Wars death weapon,but I would like to point out that high voltages are commnoly used in space vehicle applications. It is true that most satellites run at a bus voltage of around 100V or less but the travelling-wave tube used in communication satellites needs a couple of kV to operate.

Correct, I was mainly talking about main bus voltage. There are localized high-power systems in some spacecraft, although since we're talking about a million amps of current here, our situation is not "localized." Our capacitors, which would be the largest non-chemical and non-nuclear storage system ever flown, are by definition part of the main power bus.

High voltage is common in instruments and some communications or radar gear, at a few tens or hundreds of Watts. The highest-power high voltage system I'm aware of is in ion drive propulsion at a few kilowatts. There could be others, but that's the biggest one I know. (Well, there's the megawatt-class VASIMIR, but it hasn't flown, and they haven't solved their powerbus problem either.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that if the spacecraft bus is "low" voltage, but the operating voltage is higher, we need a power converter. That means even more efficiency losses, making our spacecraft even less practical.

Also, I'm not sure what kind of capacitors you used in your analysis. The Maxwell ultracapacitors are good 13,587 W/kg, which gives a mass of only 44 tons to produce 1.2E9 watts of power.

That agrees pretty well with my lower estimate of 10 tons of capacitors. I picked the highest density I could find in boutique audio applications for my estimate, a field where people are willing to pay top dollar for insane capacitance even though they really don't need it...

You also left out the possibility of using a flywheel energy storage system. I don't have enough information to calculate a size for the flywheel but it will still be very heavy.

I'd be highly surprised if any flywheel exists with the energy or efficiency to compete with the explosive compression generator. Really, they're the same system, except the explosive generator uses a bomb to create motion in the coils, where the flywheel uses inertia. The bomb will be inherently safer, more stable, lighter, and easier to point (gyroscopic effects!) than any flywheel. Anyway, nobody I work with takes flywheels seriously for now, but it could be a useful technology someday.

All things considered, the explosive compression generator solution isn't too bad, worked out much better than I would have thought. Except that it'll require a beam weapon that fires in extremely short pulses. That might not be an impossible roadblock, although the whole mission concept is still pretty inefficient.

I did like your point about the visibility of the flash. I've seen a small welding laser in action and unsurprisingly, you need to wear welding glasses to look at it. A Death Beam weapon would have produced an incredibly intense and blinding flash when it vaporized an entire building but of course, no such flash is visible in the many videos of the collapse.

Yup. Also, the losses to atmosphere would be pretty severe. I neglected those to make the exercise remotely possible.

 

[bjb]

You didn't take atmospheric absorbtion into account? For shame! Please don't tell me you sized the batteries based on beginning-of-life (BOL) performance, not end-of-life (EOL).

As for high-power space applications, the biggest on I know of was the space shuttle Electric Auxiliary Power Unit project. Here's a link to a NASA RFO (request for offer) for a cell to be used in this application:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=3893

The continuous power is shows as '28 kWh' and the peak power is '130 kWh'. Unfortunately, someone in Building 15 didn't realize kWh is energy, not power. The bus voltage is indicated as 230-360V.

I had some involvement with the EAPU project. Early on, we studies using ultracapacitors or flywheels to supply two-second power peaks, but it turns out the battery was so big it could handle the current pulse on its own. It turns out there are some thin-film lead-acid batteries around that can handle very large current peaks but their shelf life is too short. They were built by Boulder Battery but I'm not sure if these guys are around any more. We did build a full-scale li-ion battery for ground tests and it met all of the power and energy requirements, no problem. The real problem was with size and weight, and it was looking like we would need a cooling system for the battery, another source of added weight. For a pulse application like a death beam, cooling shouldn't be a problem because of the battery's own thermal capacitance.

X-33 also ran at a high voltage, 270V nominal, and their power requirement was something like 10-20kW. Much work was done to take care of the arcing problem around 80,000 feet and we made use of that information in our designs. The X-33 used two redundant sets of silver-zinc batteries, only one was necessary to complete the mission. Our flight EAPU battery design also called for redundancy, which was going to add a lot of weight to the system. I suppose a real-life Death Ray would also need to have redundancy in the power supply and elsewhere, adding many tons of weight to the vehicle.

 

[R.Mackey]

You didn't take atmospheric absorbtion into account? For shame! Please don't tell me you sized the batteries based on beginning-of-life (BOL) performance, not end-of-life (EOL).

Ah, don't worry. I declared that explicitly as an assumption, as a way of finding a deliberately relaxed estimate. Partly because we assumed up front that we wouldn't know the wavelength or particle used in the beam weapon, and therefore wouldn't know absorption or scattering cross section. And partly to further highlight just how nutty the idea would be... From the writeup:

It should be pointed out that we have neglected many efficiency-robbing problems to arrive at this figure -- attenuation by the atmosphere, for instance, and beam absorption or reflection by the target are both major concerns.

As for battery size, since I came up with several thousand tons of battery, it didn't really matter where they were in the life-cycle.

X-33 also ran at a high voltage, 270V nominal, and their power requirement was something like 10-20kW. Much work was done to take care of the arcing problem around 80,000 feet and we made use of that information in our designs. The X-33 used two redundant sets of silver-zinc batteries, only one was necessary to complete the mission. Our flight EAPU battery design also called for redundancy, which was going to add a lot of weight to the system. I suppose a real-life Death Ray would also need to have redundancy in the power supply and elsewhere, adding many tons of weight to the vehicle.

Cool. I did a little bit of work with X-33, analyzing the Aerospike engine and structural loading tests. Some of my colleagues worked an avionics experiment called the AFE (Airborne Flight Experiment).

If I was designing the WKBWoD, I'd probably go light on the redundancy, except secondary power, attitude control, and communications. The numbers strongly suggest that a one-shot, disposable deathsat is recommended, in which case I'd rather build more of them than try to make any individual one reliable. Just so long as one doesn't accidentally fry my house.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

Good points, Drbuzzo. Too bad Wayne Green doesn't read this forum. One of my ham radio buddies built a homemade stressed parabolic dish and was able to monitor S-band transmissions from the Command Module while it was in orbit around the moon. I'd be interested to know how NASA would have been able to fake that.

Well...nasa could have possibly sent some sort of probe to the moon, containing a tape player and a transmitter. Possibly they could fool a few hams or others who might be listening in.


But the Soviets were more than capable of detecting any sort of dopler shift problems or if the craft was moving in a manner not consistent with the stated mass and size of the vehicle.

Not to mention, they did have a pretty good system for tracking missile launches. It would have probably not been able to get a radar fix on the capsule after trans-lunar-injection. However, it could still tell if a mass of the proper size was on the proper trajectory.

It's pretty hard to imagine that you could pull off something has complicated as a moon landing hoax and fool a super power. If any sort of thing raised an eyebrow at the Cosmodrome (IE: "That's funny. They just said they landed, but tracing seems to show that the transmissions are not coming from that area" or "Hey. That's weird. The analysis of the nasa moon rock samples we just got from our unmanned probe look nothing like the ones nasa published") they would have been ALL OVER IT


And the fact that they built and tested (unscuccessfully) the N1 rocket demonstrates that there was agreement that a lunar landing was possible.


No sign of:
"You can't go to the moon! You'd never make it past the Van Allen belts. If the American's think you can, they must be faking it!"

 

[DRBUZZ0]

You people have no idea how space-based laser weapon systems work.

It's not about having the power to destroy aircraft or buildings. No.. it's a psycological weapon. My sources have even told me that it's been used in a clandestine project to discreet the North Korean government in a program dubbed "Operation Dear Leader Boobies"


A rare photo shows the system in action:

A rough translation of the speech is said to be "Hey. What what is so funny? What? Hey! What the! Get that off of me! Stop it! Hey!"

 

[Obviousman]

BTW - what is the discrimination for ground-based tracking?

Could they tell the (angular / doppler) difference between the CSM and the LM orbital / LM S-Band on surface?

 

[R.Mackey]

BTW - what is the discrimination for ground-based tracking?

Could they tell the (angular / doppler) difference between the CSM and the LM orbital / LM S-Band on surface?

Easily. The CSM would be in Lunar orbit, and moving a visible distance as seen from Earth, whereas the LM was fixed on the Lunar surface.

Ranging in space comm has gotten dramatically better since then, of course, but we're talking a range difference of thousands of kilometers and a Doppler difference of several kilometers per second. You also have occlusion of the CSM behind the Lunar surface to use as a marker, though I suppose by itself that could be faked...

 

[Obviousman]

Easily. The CSM would be in Lunar orbit, and moving a visible distance as seen from Earth, whereas the LM was fixed on the Lunar surface.

Ranging in space comm has gotten dramatically better since then, of course, but we're talking a range difference of thousands of kilometers and a Doppler difference of several kilometers per second. You also have occlusion of the CSM behind the Lunar surface to use as a marker, though I suppose by itself that could be faked...

So does that negate the HB claim of a TETR-A type satellite mimicing the signals of an Apollo lunar mission?

 

[DRBUZZ0]

BTW - what is the discrimination for ground-based tracking?

Could they tell the (angular / doppler) difference between the CSM and the LM orbital / LM S-Band on surface?

It would not be any kind of problem to track the signals independently.

The launch of the Saturn 5 as well as the return of the capsul would be very apparent on their high altitude radar. The lunar phase of the mission would be easily received with their space-based communications systems. Parts of the mission, such as the seperation of the larger stages and parts of the earth orbit phase could even be tracked optically.

It would be VERY hard to make these all mesh properly if it were fake, eh? You'd basically need to send a lot of probes up with transmitters.

That would be almost as difficult as just doing the mission with people on board.

I saw a documentary (sorry cannot remember which) where they were talking to astronomers at the British radio telescope which, at the time, was one of the best faculties in the world for microwave reception.

The resolution of their reception was so good, that they could see that the LM was descending and that it stopped descending and began flying at a constant altitude for a minute or so and then descended again.

This, of course, was the time when Neil Armstrong shut down the autopilot and took manual control to fly away from a bolder-filled crator and toward a better landing spot.