Merged Discussion of the moon landing "hoax"

Status
Not open for further replies.
Justinian2 said:
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.
Click to expand...

Again you make this claim based on nothing more than your personal incredulity. And again I ask, how many bytes was required to land on the Moon?
 
Justinian2 said:
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.
Click to expand...
On the meme that the moon landings were beyond technology at the time. The reason Kennedy picked the Apollo program as means of showing up the Soviets was for the reason that it was considered beyond Soviet technology, but within the ability of US technology (otherwise a public failure would be quite embarrassing for the US). Even so, it was a case of pushing technological abilities to the limit, and the failure on Apollo 13 reveals just how close to the limit they were. The Soviets had a Moon program which failed, but they were able to conceal it.

The Apollo program does remain a remarkable feat of human and technological achievement, and quite possibly unsurpassed by anything since.
 
Justinian2 said:
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.
Click to expand...

Does it really? I don't think there is anything useful to discuss on the topic of moon landing hoax, but I could be wrong.

I think the "moon landing=hoax" is a textbook example of "When Skepticism Goes Bad". It's good to be skeptical, but one still needs to keep in touch with reality.
 
Justinian2 said:
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 ---
Click to expand...

Justinian2 said:
Just showing my skepticism of manually controlling a lunar lander. I'm not offering proof mind you, just skepticism.
Click to expand...

Justinian2 said:
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.
Click to expand...

Justinian2 said:
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.
Click to expand...

It's mine.
 
Neil Armstrong was over the moon aftering touching down on Earth as though it was an everyday thing.

Yes Neil was a spaceman never a moon man :)
 
Justinian2 said:
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.
Click to expand...

You made a claim, I corrected - You also need to look up how many successful retro rocket landings there have been on Mars. A clue, its higher than zero
 
matt.tansy said:
Again you make this claim based on nothing more than your personal incredulity. And again I ask, how many bytes was required to land on the Moon?
Click to expand...

That's an insult. Just because I state my claim without source doesn't mean that I haven't previously set forth the reasons for my claim, or that I can't defend the claim.

Back in that era, each bit of memory was a ferrite bead with three thin wires that went through the middle. A byte is usually eight bits - eight ferrite beads each of which is about 1/16th of an inch in diameter. A 1000 byte memory took up quite a bit of space and had significant weight.

Now my PC has 8 gigabytes of memory (eight billion bytes). That is eight million times more memory than a 1000 byte memory.

I would estimate that toys today have far more memory than a lunar lander.

matt.tansy said:
And again I ask [demand], how many bytes was required to land on the Moon?
Click to expand...

That is not an easy answer.

Remember that they not only had to land on the moon, but they had to take off and rendevous with the orbiting module. Giant computers controlled that process on earth. I think they probably had a separate paper tape that contained the equations for each part of that journey.

What they probably didn't have was a computer that automatically read instrumentation data, made calculations based on that data and then automatically controlled the propulsion. Most of the calculation of that era was done by mechanical algorithms - as in an automatic transmission.

Every time the astronauts had to calculate thrust, they would probably read the data from the instruments and punch it into the computer. Then they would read the computer and set another dial that would set the thrust and thrust timers.

This is an educated guess based on my knowledge of electronics of that era and my memory of all the TV programs on space flight during that time period. You are invited to research the subject on the internet.
 
Last edited:
Justinian2 said:
Just showing my skepticism of manually controlling a lunar lander. I'm not offering proof mind you, just skepticism.
Click to expand...

You seem to think that the crew just jumped in the thing and went. This is far from the truth, they spent hours and hours and hours flying simulators to get a feel for how the controls worked and what they had to do. The Commanders also got to fly the LLTV which we're already discussed. Just because you and your friends couldn't do it first time, the pilots were vetern fighter and test pilots with hundreds of hours of experience flying, you aren't.

You also don't seem to understand the way the LM worked either. P66, the manual program wasn't entirely manual. In fact the AGC was the first fly-by-wire computer. The computer still did the flying, when you were in P66, the hand controller just told the computer where to go.

It worked something like this....

The inputs from the gimbles and radar would be entered into the computer. It would then determine the LM's current state compared to its desired state. If these were too out of line, it would push the LM back towards the desired state.

Let's say that it's desired start is 0 +/- 1 so in the range -1 to +1.

Currently the inputs are at -5.

The AGC now knows that it has to push towards Zero, so it applies a +3

Now the inputs tell us that the current state is -2

The AGC now knows that it has to push towards Zero, so it applies a +3

Now the inputs tell us that the current state is +1

Now let's add the controller I want the state to go higher so I push the controller up. If I just make the state higher, I start to fight the computer, so instead I trick the computer by subtracting 5

Now the inputs tell the AGB that the current state is -4

The AGC now knows that it has to push towards Zero, so it applies a +3

Now the inputs tell the AGB that the current state is -1

When I release the controller, the inputs remove that -5

Now the inputs tell the AGB that the current state is +4

The AGC now knows that it has to push towards Zero, so it applies a +3

Now the inputs tell the AGB that the current state is +1.

The computer does the work, the controller just points it in the right direction.

So the LM was a mix of Computer and exceedingly well trained pilot. There was no reason they couldn't land them, that's what they had been trained to do.
 
Justinian2 said:
That's an insult.
Click to expand...

No the insult is that you are denegrating a programme and engineering feat that you know nothing about, that's insulting.

Back in that era, each bit of memory was a ferrite bead with three thin wires that went through the middle. A byte is usually eight bits - eight ferrite beads each of which is about 1/16th of an inch in diameter. A 1000 byte memory took up quite a bit of space and had significant weight.

Now my PC has 8 gigabytes of memory (eight billion bytes). That is eight million times more memory than a 1000 byte memory.

I would estimate that toys today have far more memory than a lunar lander.



That is not an easy answer.

Remember that they not only had to land on the moon, but they had to take off and rendevous with the orbiting module. Giant computers controlled that process on earth. I think they probably had a separate paper tape that contained the equations for each part of that journey.

What they probably didn't have was a computer that automatically read instrumentation data, made calculations based on that data and then automatically controlled the propulsion. Most of the calculation of that era was done by mechanical algorithms - as in an automatic transmission.

Every time the astronauts had to calculate thrust, they would probably read the data from the instruments and punch it into the computer. Then they would read the computer and set another dial that would set the thrust and thrust timers.

This is an educated guess based on my knowledge of electronics of that era and my memory of all the TV programs on space flight during that time period. You are invited to research the subject on the internet.
Click to expand...

You are writing garbage, you really have Zero knowledge of how the LM worked. Stop making stuff up and go and learn about it, there is a lot of material out there and it's all very interesting.

Here's a starting point.
 
likelystory said:
How hard can it be to go to the moon? Didn't JFK predict going to the moon in 1969???

Please wake up.
Click to expand...

JFK was dead in 1969, so I don't think he predicted anything.

And why does he have to wake up? Does he have to work this morning? Are you his alarm clock? His mommy? Huh?

What a bossy butt!

ETA: Oh, and it's not hard to go to the moon. Been there twice this week. Forgot to pick up some green cheese for the wife the first time, and had to go back.
 
Last edited:
likelystory said:
How hard can it be to go to the moon? Didn't JFK predict going to the moon in 1969???

Please wake up.
Click to expand...

No, he asked NASA when they thought they could get there if he revived and funded Apollo, and they told him that their pre-Murcury studies on the subject had determined that it should be possible by the end of the decade, so he went with that
 
PhantomWolf said:
No, he asked NASA when they thought they could get there if he revived and funded Apollo, and they told him that their pre-Murcury studies on the subject had determined that it should be possible by the end of the decade, so he went with that
Click to expand...

Why would JFK ask NASA? Was JFK an Illuminati frontman?
 
MG1962 said:
You made a claim, I corrected - You also need to look up how many successful retro rocket landings there have been on Mars. A clue, its higher than zero
Click to expand...

Going from memory, weren't there three Mars missions that failed in a year or so? I remember that a retro landing failed. Didn't the first few landings use parachutes and big balls to cushion the impact?

I'm not going to look this up because, with todays' technology, it should be possible to land with retro rockets. My point was only that the first retro rocket landing on Mars failed - even with today's advanced technology.

This is skepticism and I am not offering it as proof which remains to be the physics of authentic lunar video and perhaps the lunar rocks that may have been meteroites or volacanic in origin because they were so similar to what was found on earth (according to NASA).
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom