Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd summarize
Justinian2's claims in this thread with brief assessments of their status. Apologies for the long post, but I think I'm going to stop spending so much time on this thread until he actually supports some of his claims.
Unfortunately, this summer I visited NASA and they made a movie of a re-enactment of the landing because the original had "low quality".
Unsupported. Can't even identify this movie.
Bet you didn't see any five foot jumps!
Wrong. Promptly shown exactly such jumps, but refused to acknowledge this.
You have a point, of course. The suit will diminish the jump. But from 144 inches or more to 15 inches?
Wrong. Multiple examples of jumps of several feet provided; never acknowledged.
I think they orbited the moon and crashed the lander on the moon.
Unsupported. No evidence given.
I think the 'landing' was filmed at area 51.
Unsupported. No evidence given; never acknowledged that Nevada doesn't really look like the Moon.
Also, failed to acknowledge that there were
six Apollo landings.
Heck, even recently NASA crashed a Mars probe that was supposed to land with retro rockets.
Yes, they more or less recently crashed a lander on Mars ...
Backtracked. "Recently" was pointed out as more than a decade ago, which led to "more or less recently". But this is the great memory which the poster stoutly defends.
Have you ever tried the old lunar lander program in which you control the throttle and try to set the lunar lander on the surface of the moon? It's almost impossible!
Argument from personal inadequacy. 'Nuff said.
I acknowledge that they had a computer with... a whopping 1K of memory.
Wrong by more than an order of magnitude. Repeated explanations to the poster resulted in revisions which were
still wrong, followed by attempts to argue the meaning of "order of magnitude".
Instead of a floppy disk, they had a paper tape reader.
Wrong.
It wasn't sufficient to run a program to do the real time calculations necessary to land.
Unsupported, and still unsupported after numerous requests to explain this claim. This is one of the poster's primary arguments, but he is evidently incapable or unwilling to offer more than his personal disbelief in support of it.
However, they couldn't/didn't practice the landing in 1/6 th gravity and therefore could not perfect the technology to land, blast off and dock.
Wrong. Extensive simulations of the 1/6 G environment were performed, and the Apollo 10 mission tested the descent profile before the actual landing on A11.
The reliability experts back then were great and probably calculated a 50% failure rate for each mission.
Unsupported.
The training vehicle used for simulating the lunar lander crashed before the first moon landing and almost killed the astronaut that was practicing his landings. They never practiced after that.
Wildly wrong. The LLRVs/LLTVs flew hundreds of missions with >98% success rate. The poster did offer a partial retraction, but never explained what this meant to his claim.
...NASA's explaination was that the old footage was too grainy and they had to re-shoot the footage.
If they were able to reshoot the footage, why weren't they able to shoot the footage the first time decades ago?
Contradictory. The poster asserts that the technology to land was insufficient at the time, but this statement assumes that the imaging and transmission technology of the time should have been roughly as good as today's!
The point is that NAZA had the opportunity. NASA could have covered it up.
Unsupported.
With the mixed footage, we will never be able to prove anything without a return trip to the moon
Doubly wrong. First, any reasonably knowledgeable observer can distinguish between the best known reproductions of lunar activities and the actual thing. Especially since the imagery record is far more extensive than the poster understands. Second, because a "return trip"
has been made - the LRO has already imaged the Apollo landing artifacts.
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).
Wrong. Misapplication of reliability analysis from one domain to another.
They were likely to fail far from home.
Unsupported. Why,
exactly?
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.
Wrong. The LMs underwent thermal/vacuum testing on the ground and in space (A9, A10), and before the landing A10 flew most of the descent profile above the Moon, in its 1/6G gravity field.
NASA tried several techniques for landing on the Mars. The retro-rocket technique failed.
Wrong. Vikings 1 & 2 (the U.S.' first attempts to land on Mars) were spectacular successes. Phoenix, the most recent lander, also used rockets for touchdown.
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.
Wrong. That's
exactly what the AGC did.
Most of the calculation of that era was done by mechanical algorithms - as in an automatic transmission.
Wrong.
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.
Spectacularly
wrong, and this is "based on [his] knowledge of electronics of that era and [his] memory" that we are supposed to trust.
Didn't the first few landings use parachutes and big balls to cushion the impact?
Wrong.
My point was only that the first retro rocket landing on Mars failed - even with today's advanced technology.
Doubly wrong. The first U.S. rocket landings on Mars were
successful, and happened in 1976 - definitely not with "today's 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
Wrong. Lunar samples gathered
in situ are readily distinguishable from samples of Earthly origin as well as from meteorites.
Secondly, I'm also sure that the lunar lander was designed to be theoretically functional. I believe that the engineers back then were far better than today's engineers.
See
this post for comments about revisionism and self-contradictory remarks related to this topic.
I don't think the lunar lander was ever landed with astronauts on board. Problems found in the vicinity of the moon, I theorize, prevented a human descent.
Contradictory. This "problems in the vicinity of the moon" was tossed out once, then abandoned as the poster went back to the "computer wasn't good enough" theme.
Whether it was 1K or 4K, it is still pitiful small given the big job it had to do.
I will concede that the memory was probably theoretically sufficient to get the job done.
Self-contradictory.
I don't know where to find a complete set of authentic and original videos and photographs. I remember analyzing them, but I didn't save the links.
Not credible. The poster is manifestly unfamiliar with what constitutes the "complete... authentic and original" imagery record.
I worked on a lot of '60s technology at Raytheon. I remember a whole cabinet of electronics contained nothing but a shift register. Each board in that five foot tall cabinet that contained the shift register had one or two discrete component flip flops. That was the era just before DTL, RTL and TTL.
Wrong. The AGC logic was
implemented in RTL. The poster tried to tap-dance around the error by citing factoids which confirmed his error, and adding a strawman.
I'm sure the computer had the power to fly to and around the moon. I'm a skeptic that it had sufficient power to help sufficiently with the descent to the moon, the launch from the moon and then control the docking with the CM.
Contradictory. Flying to the Moon required a docking [ETA: before getting to lunar orbit, which the poster says did happen], using the same hardware he says couldn't control the docking. The poster tried to fuzz his error by citing more factoids, not understanding that the same principles are involved in all rendezvous, and that such had been exercised during Gemini. He also confuses "altitude" for "yaw".
The guy called Buzz a liar and a coward! No need for that.
Contradictory. The poster's claims, if correct, necessarily mean that Aldrin is a liar.
If space flight goes commercial, we could get back up to the moon very cheaply
Wrong.
Handwaving. The poster manifestly does not understand what constitutes "our tracks".
The space shuttle could have delivered three LM's to the moon in one shot!
Wrong for many reasons.
The Russians could tell by monitoring our radio transmissions that some were coming from the moon. They could tell from radar that we sent a vehicle to the moon. It's my estimate that no country on earth had the ability to monitor our activity on or around the moon. No telescope or radar of that era had sufficient resolution to see our vehicles orbiting the moon.
Self-contradictory. The poster says that the Soviets (
not "the Russians") could monitor our transmissions from the Moon, but no one could monitor activity "on or around the moon".
Wrong. Even some radio "hams" were able to monitor transmissions from the lunar surface.
Irrelevant. Imaging of spacecraft orbiting the Moon was irrelevant to demonstrating the lunar origin of the telemetry. And, in any case, the poster has already said the vehicles orbited the Moon.
