Merged Discussion of the moon landing "hoax"

[JohnG]

Reliability predictions showed that two space shuttles would crash with the given number of missions implying only that engineers have a handle on predicting failure rates.

I'm saying the lunar landers were new and untried. They were in the high failure rate zone of new products (the steep part of the bathtub curve). They were likely to fail far from home. If they succeeded, then they were the most successful space product ever made - considering the complexity and lack of testing at 1/6 gravity in a vacuum with harsh temperature changes.

Sorry, just want to double-check something; you are the same guy who points to your ineptitude at playing an ancient computer game as evidence that the moon landings were faked, right? Fair enough, I've always maintained that my low "Pong" scores totally disprove Newton's Laws of Motion.

 

[JimBenArm]

Yep. I just retired last month after 20 years.

Yay! Another Bubblehead!
I'm an old nuke myself, Got out in '87.
Qualified on USS Pollack, served on Guardfish, and decommissioned the George Washington.

There's quite a few here who either were on boats or were married to Bubbleheads (the poor fools).

Welcome!

 

[lionking]

Yay! Another Bubblehead!
I'm an old nuke myself, Got out in '87.
Qualified on USS Pollack, served on Guardfish, and decommissioned the George Washington.

There's quite a few here who either were on boats or were married to Bubbleheads (the poor fools).

Welcome!

Finally a sensible exchange in this rather sad thread.

 

[JimBenArm]

Finally a sensible exchange on this rather sad thread.

Hmm. We both seem to be appearing in all the sad threads lately.

What does that say about us?

 

[matt.tansy]

On my first ship in the Navy we had an old Zenith computer in our office. I wrote a lunar landing program in gw-basic on it. It was just text (altitude, horizontal velocity, fuel remaining, etc). It started in lunar orbit a few miles before Powered Descent Initiation. The other guys spent hours playing it. After a few weeks it burned in big black areas into the CRT. They competed to see who could land the closest to the target with the most fuel remaining at the lowest vertical velocity. After just a little practice you could land exactly on the target.

 

[excaza]

Reliability predictions showed that two space shuttles would crash with the given number of missions implying only that engineers have a handle on predicting failure rates.

I'm saying the lunar landers were new and untried. They were in the high failure rate zone of new products (the steep part of the bathtub curve). They were likely to fail far from home. If they succeeded, then they were the most successful space product ever made - considering the complexity and lack of testing at 1/6 gravity in a vacuum with harsh temperature changes.

This is 100% gibberish. Do you have any sources for the crap you're spewing, or are you just making it up on the fly?

 

[lionking]

Hmm. We both seem to be appearing in all the sad threads lately.

What does that say about us?

I'm sitting in my backyard with my new puppy, a glass of wine and an iPad. What's your excuse?

 

[Corsair 115]

I have yet to come across a Hoax Believer that even knows what this Acronym means.

All the more reason for them to get themselves to a library.

IBTW, I once created a fairly clever lunar lander game in Flash/ActionScript and even I had trouble mastering it. Difficult things (from silly little computer games to well, rocket science) take time, hard work and a little raw talent to master. How can you not know this??

Yeah, it's not like the Apollo crews spent years training for their missions... oh, wait, they did.

You are just not getting it. The LLRV and TV was harder to fly than the actual lander. On final decent when the radar and computer failed. Armstrong began flying the luna lander like a helicopter to trying to clear a boulder field. Up to that instant none of the engineers realised you could do that with the equipment.

Armstrong was helped by a little toggle switch in the LM. It allowed him to increase or decrease the vertical speed of the LM in one foot per second increments. During training he had been skeptical about its effectiveness, but it worked well during the actual descent. Indeed, Armstrong found flying the actual LM easier than the simulators.

 

[PhantomWolf]

I'm saying the lunar landers were new and untried. They were in the high failure rate zone of new products (the steep part of the bathtub curve). They were likely to fail far from home. If they succeeded, then they were the most successful space product ever made - considering the complexity and lack of testing at 1/6 gravity in a vacuum with harsh temperature changes.

Quite untrue, the LM's technology was fully tested.

It was tested unmanned on Apollo 5
It was tested manned on Apollo 9
It did a simulated landing and abort testing on Apollo 10
And finally it did a full test landing on Apollo 11.

This is more testing that the Space Shuttle got in space before having manned missions.

 

[PhantomWolf]

The two NASA films I watched that discussed the LLRVs briefly showed one really bad crash where the astronaut just barely ejected and then changed the subject. Subsequent crashes and successes were not discussed.

GIGO

The most famous is Armstrong's. This occurred due to a fuel line leak causing the steering to fail. It'd be a little like the steering wheel coming off in your hands. Since the LLRV was not related to the LM technology such an incident was not am issue towards the LM safety. It's like practicing to drive by operating a go-kart and crashing it because the front wheels fall off. This doesn't make your car undrivable.

The first LLTV crash was caused by wind sheer that made the platform unstable, something that resulted in lift being lost, and the vehicle going down. Wind isn't a factor on the moon, and the Apollo Commanders commented on how it made the LLTVs harder to fly than the LM.

Here's the press release for when they started flying them again:

HOUSTON_ TEXAS--Flights of the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) are scheduled to resume Friday morning at Ellington AFB.

During a flight of five to six minutes three takeoffs and landings will be made by test pilot Harold E. "Bud" Ream of Aircraft Operations a veteran of more than 35 lunsr landing vehicle flights. LLTV #2 will hover close to ground --about 5O feet -- to check the basic systems of the LLTV and examine the handling and flying characteristics of the vehicle with an increased thruster output in the attitude control system. Thruster level had previously been 60 pounds. Since the crash of LLTV #1 on December 8th the level of thrust has been increased to 90 pounds. A total of 16 attitude thrusters are positioned on the LLTV with eight in reserve status as a backup system.

The second LLTV crach is 1971 was caused by an electrical fault.

Here's the press release:

HOUSTON, TEXAS--Stuart M. Present, 40, a MSC staff pilot, ejected today from a lunar landing training vehicle at Ellington Air Force Base, Texas. He was not injured.

Preliminary investigation indicates that a loss of electrical power was the cause of the crash. Up to the time electrical power was lost, the attitude control system and the lunar module hand controller appeared to be functioning normally.

Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., MSC Deputy Director, said,"A complete investigation will be made of the accident. This accident should not affect Apollo 14. The only piece of hardware common to the LM and the LLTV is the hand controller, and that does not appear to have been the problem. The LLTV electrical system is totally different from the one in the lunar module."

Present was on a routine check flight when the accident occurred at 10:35 a.m., CST. He ejected moments before the vehicle crashed on a runway and burned. He had made 28 previous LLTV flights, beginning in April, 1970.

None of these three accidents was because of an issue that could have effected the LM in any way whatsoever. The vehicles (LLRV/LLTV and LM) were completely different machines, only the hand controller was the same.

 

[PhantomWolf]

You are just not getting it. The LLRV and TV was harder to fly than the actual lander. On final decent when the radar and computer failed. Armstrong began flying the luna lander like a helicopter to trying to clear a boulder field. Up to that instant none of the engineers realised you could do that with the equipment.

Since one of the things we should be doing is educating, I thought I should correct this.

Neither the computer, nor the radar failed.

The LM had two radars, the Landing Radar which detects the height above the surface the LM is at and feeds this to the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) so that it can determine if it is at the right altitude and made the landing safely by throttling the thrust appropriately. The second radar is the Rendezvous Radar and is used to keep track of the CMS so that the LM can find and dock with it when they launch back up to come home.

Buzz decided that he wanted to be able to make sure that if they had to abort they'd know where the CSM was, and so left the rendezvous radar on during the landing. This meant that they had both radar systems feeding data to the AGC.

The problem was that the guys at MIT had programmed the AGC assuming that the crew would have either only the Landing Radar on (for landing) or only the Rendezvous Radar on (for launch and redocking.) They hadn't considered the idea of Buzz having both on, and so once the LM pitched over and the Landing Radar started feeding information, the data was enough to overload the AGC. Basically it had too much information coming in and so started to drop data that it couldn't handle having. It did this by considering the Rendezvous Radar information to be unimportant to the program it was currently running (P64) and ignoring it, though it did issue the 1201 and 1202 Alarms that caused a number of hearts to skip a few beats.

The other issue was Armstrong's decision to take control. The LM was certainly techincally able to land without human control (except for turning off the engine), however Armstrong believed that the programmed descent was going to land them in the middle of a boulder field and so took control to land long. This was not only known about by the engineers, but had its very own program for doing it, P66. After dealing with the alarms, Armstong looked back outside and realised that they didn't have a clear landing place, so he switched over to P66 to take control. He then set the decsent to taken them down slowly and aimed at a spot beyond the boulders. Saying this was like a helicopter is quite misleading as they were still in descent even as they landed long.

102:43:10 Armstrong: Pretty rocky area.

102:43:11 Aldrin: 600 feet, down at 19.

102:43:15 Armstrong: I'm going to... (manual [P66].)

102:43:16 Aldrin: 540 feet, down at...(LPD angle is) 30. Down at 15. (Pause)

102:43:26 Aldrin: Okay, 400 feet, down at 9 (feet per second). 58 (feet per second) forward.

102:43:32 Armstrong: No problem.

102:43:33 Aldrin: 350 feet, down at 4.

102:43:35 Aldrin: 330, three and a half down. (Pause)

102:43:42 Aldrin: Okay, you're pegged on horizontal velocity.

102:43:46 Aldrin: 300 feet (altitude), down 3 1/2 (feet per second), 47 (feet per second) forward. Slow it up.

102:43:52 Aldrin: 1 1/2 down. Ease her down. 270.

102:43:58 Armstrong: Okay, how's the fuel?

102:44:00 Aldrin: Eight percent.

102:44:02 Armstrong: Okay. Here's a...Looks like a good area here.

None of the other Commanders actually landed using P64 either, all switched over to P66 and landed manually.

 

[Justinian2]

This is 100% gibberish. Do you have any sources for the crap you're spewing, or are you just making it up on the fly?

So you are skeptical about my skepticism and I about yours.

Show me proof they were in 1/6 gravity in those videos. Show me proof that they were on the moon.

1.) Re-creations aren't proof.
2.) BS isn't proof.
3.) ad homs aren't proof.
4.) skepticism of my skepticism of your skepticism isn't proof.
5.) pictures with earth in the background aren't proof.

 

[Justinian2]

On my first ship in the Navy we had an old Zenith computer in our office. I wrote a lunar landing program in gw-basic on it. It was just text (altitude, horizontal velocity, fuel remaining, etc). It started in lunar orbit a few miles before Powered Descent Initiation. The other guys spent hours playing it. After a few weeks it burned in big black areas into the CRT. They competed to see who could land the closest to the target with the most fuel remaining at the lowest vertical velocity. After just a little practice you could land exactly on the target.

Everybody I know would have been killed in a crash or a vehicle too damaged to return long before they learned how to land. Just my skepticism ---

 

[Justinian2]

Sorry, just want to double-check something; you are the same guy who points to your ineptitude at playing an ancient computer game as evidence that the moon landings were faked, right? Fair enough, I've always maintained that my low "Pong" scores totally disprove Newton's Laws of Motion.

Just showing my skepticism of manually controlling a lunar lander. I'm not offering proof mind you, just skepticism.

 

[Justinian2]

Oh really... 132 Shuttle flight - 2 failures 98.5% success

Apollo..... 9 missions - 1 failure 89% success

These things had to make two take offs and two landings on every flight.

NASA tried several techniques for landing on the Mars. The retro-rocket technique failed. This is not proof, just reason for skepticism.

 

[Justinian2]

Ignoring the many good points others have made is just trolling, and not very good trolling at that.

That's not my definition of trolling. The intent of trolling is to get someone to make an angry response. Of course the truth can get angry responses too, but the truth is not by definition considered trolling.

 

[bobc]

Just showing my skepticism of manually controlling a lunar lander. I'm not offering proof mind you, just skepticism.

Please tell us you are trolling...

And if not, have you applied the same skepticism to the moon landings as you have to the Amanda Knox case?

For the record, I nailed the moon lander game every time. I admit I cheated somewhat by using a calculator to compute the correct inputs. For the same reason I conclude that the moon landings were a hoax, because I have never seen an astronaut with a calculator.

 

[Justinian2]

I think something in me just died a little reading that. That may be the most woefully inept bit reasoning I've ever encountered in my life. It's like something a seven year old boy would say, rather than a supposed adult who is old enough to have voted for Nixon. Please tell me you're not serious.*

BTW, I once created a fairly clever lunar lander game in Flash/ActionScript and even I had trouble mastering it. Difficult things (from silly little computer games to well, rocket science) take time, hard work and a little raw talent to master. How can you not know this??





I was going to ask you what you'd say if the Russians or Chinese landed on the moon and confirmed the evidence of the Apollo landings and lo and behold you anticipated my question.

Rational adults don't want to be told "what they want to know", they want to be told the truth, no matter how disappointing or embarrassing that truth may be. Not that I'm not occasionally irrational, though. In fact I am currently nursing the no doubt irrational and baseless hope that you are merely a troll who just wants a little attention.





*About either your lunar lander argument or voting for Nixon.

My skepticism is about manually landing the lunar lander. Although writing a program that would land flawlessly is super easy, landing it manually is very difficult. It was too easy to crash. If one was to hover to find a new landing site and then land, it was especially easy to goof since fuel was quickly expended.

The tiny little calculators they called computers were too primative to be used for much more than a thrust calculator. Heck, today a talking birthday card has more computational power than the lunar lander had.

Today the nearest comparable to the lunar lander are those one man jet packs you see stunt men flying. This I offer as a reason for skepticism and not proof.

If you want to prove that the lunar video is real, calculate the acceleration of bounces, falls and jumps.

If you want to prove that the lunar video is real, prove that the lighting is not due to a spotlight that would show divergance from the light source as some of the earlier photos showed. I think that various new NASA re-creations have fixed that flaw.

 

[frenat]

These things had to make two take offs and two landings on every flight.

Where do you get that? The descent module carried the ascent module and separated from the CSM in lunar orbit. It made ONE landing on the Moon. The ascent module then separated and made ONE takeoff back to lunar orbit where it rejoined the CSM and then was discarded. How do you figure two takeoffs and two landings?

 

[Justinian2]

Please tell us you are trolling...

And if not, have you applied the same skepticism to the moon landings as you have to the Amanda Knox case?

For the record, I nailed the moon lander game every time. I admit I cheated somewhat by using a calculator to compute the correct inputs. For the same reason I conclude that the moon landings were a hoax, because I have never seen an astronaut with a calculator.

That was a triple troll.

As for the AK case, I am even more skeptical of the ability of government to get that right.

As for manually controlling the lunar lander add the difficulty of manual control to the rocky surface, paucity of fuel, and the fact the lander was never tested in moon gravity and there is plenty of reason for skepticism.

Authenticating the lunar video would require, as a start, that the gravitational acceleration constant be proved.