Merged Discussion of the moon landing "hoax"

[Justinian2]

A7L suit weighed 200 pounds, used on Apollos 7 to 14.
A7LB suit weighed 212 pounds, used on Apollos 15 to 17.

I checked that out. You are right. From Wikipedia:

Name: Apollo A7L Spacesuit

Manufacturer: International Latex Corporation (ILC) Dover and Hamilton Standard (primary life support systems)[3]

Missions: Apollo 7-14[3]

Function: Intra-vehicular activity (IVA), orbital Extra-vehicular activity and terrestrial Extra-vehicular activity (EVA)[3]

Operating Pressure: 3.7 psi (25.5 kPa)[3]

IVA Suit Weight: 62 lb (28.1 kg)[3]

EVA Suit Weight: 76 lb (34.5 kg)[3]

Total EVA Suit Weight 200 lb (91 kg)[3]

Primary Life Support: 6 hours (360 minutes)[3]

Backup Life Support: 30 minutes[3]

Although the EVA suit is only 76 pounds, the total weight is 200 pounds. Were a 150 pound man to wear this, his total weight on earth would be 350 pounds. His weight at 1/6th G would be 58 pounds. His vertical leap in this suit would be a maximum of 4 feet. His jumps should be between 2 and four feet.

The extra weight of the suit cuts down my original estimate of the jump height of three to five feet. Not only that, but the back pack makes jumping awkward.

An astronaut's moon jump with suit should be at most 2.6 times higher than on earth.

 

[Spindrift]

The jumps I saw where the astronaut used a 45 degree knee bend should have been about four feet high for a 150 pound astronaut wearing a 120 pound suit.

On earth, a 45 degree knee bend produces a vertical leap of one foot for me. My all out vertical leap is sufficient to smash the back of my hand against a nine foot ceiling (ouch). My vertical leap is about 19 inches. I think Michael Jordan and some athletes have a 30 inch vertical leap.

On the moon, I should have easily exceed the height of all the astronauts jumps wearing a suit that weighed 150 pounds. On the other hand, wearing those same suits on earth would have resulted in a maximum vertical leap of one foot. The conundrum is that on earth, I could not have jumped as high as the astronauts while wearing a suit weighing 150 pounds.

Not even close. Strap on 150 lbs and your leap on earth may be 6 inches at best. Strap on 200+ and it's even less. You have the same muscle strength to move twice as much, that doesn't mean it will move 1/2 as far.

 

[drewid]

Don't forget, the weight changes but the mass stays the same.

 

[Justinian2]

Knee bend (and subsequent flexibility) is certainly one component of potential leap height. As is weight/mass. And so is muscle strength. However, so is effort. That seems to be the component you have not addressed in your estimates: how much effort was being put into the leap.

On Earth, I can bend my knees 45 degrees, and jump pretty high. And I can bend my knees 45 degrees, and jump a couple inches.

Without knowing the actual effort put into the leap, it is impossible to make any estimates on how high a given knee bend SHOULD HAVE allowed the person to leap.

Does that make sense, Justinian2?

Your statement is entirely possible. However, usually a person doesn't bend his knees at a 45 degree angle just to jump three inches. I should also think starting and stopping would be more difficult since the mass would be greater
(with the 200 pound suit) and yet the friction with the lunar surface would be less (due to 1/6 gravity) since your moon weight is only 58 pounds. More mass, less weight.

 

[Denver]

Your statement is entirely possible. However, usually a person doesn't bend his knees at a 45 degree angle just to jump three inches. I should also think starting and stopping would be more difficult since the mass would be greater
(with the 200 pound suit) and yet the friction with the lunar surface would be less (due to 1/6 gravity) since your moon weight is only 58 pounds. More mass, less weight.

Well. usually a person bending there knees isn't on the moon, wearing a suit that is keeping them alive.

And in that kind of suit, I expect starting and stopping would indeed be more difficult: some because of mass, but also because of the bulk and restrictions of the suit in general. This would translate into needing to put more effort into a leap, and getting less out of it.

 

[Justinian2]

Someone said that the astronauts wouldn't want to fall and break their suit in the vacuum of the moon. That would be lethal. That, coupled with the 200 pound mass of the suit makes the moon video more plausible.

However, with a lunar weight in your suit of only 58 pounds, I should think that every step would be a jump sufficient to lift you off the ground by a foot.

Walking on the moon would be equivalent to walking in water up to your nipples. At least the up and down motion would be like walking in water. The foward progress in water would be much more difficult due to the resistance of the water.

Once you got going, you would slide five feet to stop. It would be a little like walking on ice (58 pounds of friction on powder with 350 pounds of intertia). It's almost the same as having a coefficient of friction of .1.

I didn't see that in the moon walk video.

 

[Spindrift]

Someone said that the astronauts wouldn't want to fall and break their suit in the vacuum of the moon. That would be lethal. That, coupled with the 200 pound mass of the suit makes the moon video more plausible.

However, with a lunar weight in your suit of only 58 pounds, I should think that every step would be a jump sufficient to lift you off the ground by a foot.

Walking on the moon would be equivalent to walking in water up to your nipples. At least the up and down motion would be like walking in water. The foward progress in water would be much more difficult due to the resistance of the water.

Once you got going, you would slide five feet to stop. It would be a little like walking on ice (58 pounds of friction on powder with 350 pounds of intertia). It's almost the same as having a coefficient of friction of .1.

I didn't see that in the moon walk video.

You don't see it because you are wrong in your assumptions.

 

[Denver]

Someone said that the astronauts wouldn't want to fall and break their suit in the vacuum of the moon. That would be lethal. That, coupled with the 200 pound mass of the suit makes the moon video more plausible.

However, with a lunar weight in your suit of only 58 pounds, I should think that every step would be a jump sufficient to lift you off the ground by a foot.

Walking on the moon would be equivalent to walking in water up to your nipples. At least the up and down motion would be like walking in water. The foward progress in water would be much more difficult due to the resistance of the water.

Once you got going, you would slide five feet to stop. It would be a little like walking on ice (58 pounds of friction on powder with 350 pounds of intertia). It's almost the same as having a coefficient of friction of .1.

I didn't see that in the moon walk video.

I also don't see 58 pound children on earth lifting off the ground by a foot with each step.

 

[uk_dave]

To be fair, Justinian2 is creeping slowly towards accepting the reality of the moon landings.

I just wonder if this threads continues for another two to three weeks will Justinian2 actually go to the other extreme and become a fervent believer in secret bases on the moon?

 

[Spindrift]

You don't see it because you are wrong in your assumptions.

ETA: Anything disputing the LRO photos yet?

 

[tsig]

kneeangleometry of course. I mean you weren't taught that in Jr. High by a particularly strong teacher?

No, all my shop class teacher said was "Stop fooling around in shop class, y'hear".

 

[tsig]

No. You have yet to supply a name for this super-duper hoax-busting movie you claim you saw, or why exactly no one else - i.e., people actually familiar with the topic - should be able to tell a movie from the real thing.

Hint: multiple reasons have been given to you for this.

Hint 2: unlike you, people here have actually made an attempt to identify the movie, and at least one poster made a reasonable guess - all we have to go on since you, who said you would only answer "sourced" arguments, refuse to provide a source - and showed several specific reasons he could distinguish it from the real thing.

You also have failed to provide any evidence for any of your claims, e.g., of actual fakery, or of crashed lunar modules.

You have failed to support your opinion that the AGC was insufficient for the task of landing on and returning from the Moon; you can't say what would be sufficient. You were manifestly unfamiliar with what the AGC did, with how it fit into the overall GN&C scheme, and were wildly wrong on what the underlying technology was at the time. You were off by more than an order of magnitude on the memory, and even after people provided direct answers to you, you still couldn't get it right.

You have also failed to acknowledge your numerous errors of fact and contradictory arguments and what they mean to your claims. The lone exception was your partial retraction of your ludicrous claims about the LLRV/LLTV.


Absurd. Many jumps were intended to be short jumps. There is nothing that prevents someone from using less effort to make a jump. This is equally as ridiculous as saying that all jumps on Earth must be at least, x inches. Why is it that hoax believers seem to be so much less observant of how things actually work in the real world?

And, once again, you fail to acknowledge that exactly such a jump was shown to you. The same sort of jump your "analysis" of the "complete" record (in itself a ridiculous claim) failed to show.

It must be said that your refusal to acknowledge evidence refuting your very first claim, and one to which you keep appealing, smacks of dishonesty.

In the meantime, not only have you avoided dealing with these issues, you have pressed on and made yet more mistakes while continuing to wave your hands about what you think should have happened, without once actually addressing any of the challenges put to you. Please yourself, but please don't think you're fooling anybody either.

Quantum jumping is the only answer.

 

[tsig]

Your statement is entirely possible. However, usually a person doesn't bend his knees at a 45 degree angle just to jump three inches. I should also think starting and stopping would be more difficult since the mass would be greater
(with the 200 pound suit) and yet the friction with the lunar surface would be less (due to 1/6 gravity) since your moon weight is only 58 pounds. More mass, less weight.

What does friction have to do with a jump?

 

[Denver]

What does friction have to do with a jump?

I wondered about that one too. Maybe something to do with getting traction on ground that is more easily shifted? Not sure.

I also don't see 58 pound children on earth lifting off the ground by a foot with each step.

In retrospect, I'm not sure my analogy really works.

 

[sts60]

However, with a lunar weight in your suit of only 58 pounds, I should think that every step would be a jump sufficient to lift you off the ground by a foot.

Walking on the moon would be equivalent to walking in water up to your nipples. At least the up and down motion would be like walking in water...

Of course. That's why, when walking in chest-high water, I come up out of the water at least a foot with every step. I'm like a freakin' porpoise.

 

[CptColumbo]

I glanced at some of these pages and one thing that has struck me Justinian2 is that you believe the technology wasn't perfect enough to achieve a Moon landing flawlessly. They weren't done flawlessly. Each Apollo mission (and many prior missions) had its difficulties. If they were unmanned, many would have crashed into the moon (if they even made TLI), like the USSR probes did. The problems range from the disaster of Apollo 1 to Gene Cernan struggling to get into his rocket pack on Gemini 9 (read his book, he does not sugar coat anything). There were lightning strikes during launch (Apollo 12), exploding tanks (Apollo 13), gyration in the lunar lander's motion (Apollo 10) and constant illnesses (usually motion sickness (Apollo 7,8,9 and 13). Read some books on the subject and you'll see how difficult it was and the human cost that had to be paid to take us to the Moon and someday beyond (Freeman, See, Basset, Grissom, White, Chafee, Williams, Adams, Lawrence, Scobee, Smith, McNair, Jarvis, Resnik, Onizuka, McAuliffe, Husband, McCool, Brown, Chawla, Anderson, Clark, Ramon, Komarov, Dobrovolsky, Bondarenko and Volkov).

 

[twinstead]

the woo is just too strong

 

[excaza]

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm perfectly capable of walking around in a pool without firing myself a foot upwards with each step.

 

[jaydeehess]

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm perfectly capable of walking around in a pool without firing myself a foot upwards with each step.

Must be the extra friction

 

[Justinian2]

I glanced at some of these pages and one thing that has struck me Justinian2 is that you believe the technology wasn't perfect enough to achieve a Moon landing flawlessly. They weren't done flawlessly. Each Apollo mission (and many prior missions) had its difficulties. If they were unmanned, many would have crashed into the moon (if they even made TLI), like the USSR probes did. The problems range from the disaster of Apollo 1 to Gene Cernan struggling to get into his rocket pack on Gemini 9 (read his book, he does not sugar coat anything). There were lightning strikes during launch (Apollo 12), exploding tanks (Apollo 13), gyration in the lunar lander's motion (Apollo 10) and constant illnesses (usually motion sickness (Apollo 7,8,9 and 13). Read some books on the subject and you'll see how difficult it was and the human cost that had to be paid to take us to the Moon and someday beyond (Freeman, See, Basset, Grissom, White, Chafee, Williams, Adams, Lawrence, Scobee, Smith, McNair, Jarvis, Resnik, Onizuka, McAuliffe, Husband, McCool, Brown, Chawla, Anderson, Clark, Ramon, Komarov, Dobrovolsky, Bondarenko and Volkov).

I am familiar with most of what you've said. That is one reason that I wonder why the lunar landings went so well. There were no major problems on the descent to the moon and the return on any of the missions either in your list or my recollection of the landings.

lightning strikes during launch (Apollo 12), exploding tanks (Apollo 13), gyration in the lunar lander's motion (Apollo 10) and constant illnesses (usually motion sickness (Apollo 7,8,9 and 13).

Only one of the Apollo missions you listed went to the surface of the moon. Apollos 7, 8, 9, or 13 did not go to the moon's surface.

The six missions that went to the surface of the moon were 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. They all happened during the Nixon administration. The landings, moon exploration, ascent from the moon and the docking were all successful and nearly flawless - a little hard to believe considering the list of problems you gave.