EEEEE! GADDDSSSS!!! Polite words only!!!! By all means!!!
Patrick -- those all come from you without a reputable cite.
In addition, if you are using them to advance an argument, you are standing behind them and must be therefor willing to defend them and explain them.
"I'm not a racist, but I have a friend who says the Irish are all drunks. Don't attack me...that's my friend saying that." That's exactly what you are attempting to get away with.
Patrick, I have no polite words for what you are doing here.
EEEEEEE GADDDSSSS! nomuse, get a grip! Talk about a poor sport. Sure I out-researched you guys, but at least we got to the bottom of it all.
In the University of Santa Cruz News Letter of July 2009 we learned from Joe Wampler, here again are his words;
""The Russians knew very accurately the distance between Russian cities and between cities within the United States, but they didn't know the distance between the U.S. and Russia," explained Joe Wampler, professor emeritus of astronomy, who coordinated the experiment for the observatory. "Having an accurate measure of the distance to the moon at a moment in time would've given them that information. I was kind of upset about that, because we went into this as a scientific experiment. We weren't doing it for national security."
And some of us, myself, you, included, were't exactly sure what Wampler meant by this, though we suspected it had to do with taking measurements from both sides of the Atlantic, and then we find out that is in fact the case.
It turned out, surprisingly really at first, and then not surprisingly when one paused to think about it and considered the times, the distances across the great oceans were not known, and ranging satellites, all kinds of satellites, whether artificial or natural, such as the moon, could help one determine with great precision terrestrial distances. And that has a lot of practical value if one is thinking about parking a big fat 20 megaton birthday present in Mao's backyard there at the Forbidden City, or in Nikita's garden there in the Kremlin.
So we didn't go in peace nomuse. Once the LRRR was up there, we got the French and others to do some ranging for us too, simultaneous ranging I would imagine, connecting the dots kind of stuff, and we figured out how best to blow up Moscow. Only makes perfect sense.
I am comfortable with that. Nikita Khrushchev was trying to slip one or two by us from Cuba. Now we understand a little better the rationale for the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, even though they weren't that good I guess.
Back in those days, they couldn't aim ICBMs so well, that is until we "landed on the moon".