The Seemingly Infinitesimal Discrepancies of Apollo
So, in essence you've detected a seeming discrepancy in some written records that, I would guess, constitute an almost infinitesimal proportion of the total records generated, and that you're unable to reconcile (probably because of a lack of underlying knowledge), and you conclude that such seeming discrepancy, in and of itself, constitutes proof that the Apollo 11 lunar landing was faked. Your powers of deduction know no bounds P1K, but tend to gravitate towards scraping along that flat, unobstructed landing place otherwise know as the bottom of the barrel.
"Seeming" discrepancy? Infinitesimal? Hardly! If it is only seeming, why does Mike Collins himself not know where he is?
From everyone's favorite bogus space yarn, CARRYING THE FIRE;
"Of course the ground can take its measurements as well, but it really has no way of judging where the LM came down, except by comparing Neil and Buzz's description of their surrounding terrain (lurain?) with the rather crude maps which Houston has."
Seeming Southwind17? As much as one finds himself or herself surprised by our favorite Cislunar Nincompoop's lack of sense as regards all things up and down, the Apollo 11 Mission Commander does little better than his command module partner in stoogery. Here's something from the not so very Eagle Scout's authorized biography, FIRST MAN, subtitled "I Never Did Get The Hang Of Pretending To Actually Poop In A Bag". Everyone's favorite Apollo 11 icon, the man who measures every word with atomic age precision, and for good reason given the stakes!, space charlatan extraordinaire, Neil Armstrong, with coauthor, James Hansen;
"In retrospect, two items may seem curious about Apollo 11’s technical situation immediately following touchdown. First, no one in NASA knew exactly where Eagle had landed. “One would have thought that their radar would have been good enough to pinpoint us more quickly than it did,” remarks Neil. When a spacecraft was in a trajectory or when it was in orbit, with all the optical and radar measurements being taken, both the ground and the crew had a pretty good idea of where the flight vehicle was, but it was a different problem when the object was sitting in one spot and all that anyone was getting was the same single measurement over and over again. “There was an uncertainty in that that was bigger than I would have guessed it would have been.
” 04:07:02:03 Armstrong: Houston, the guys that said we wouldn’t be able to tell precisely where we are, are the winners today. We were a little busy worrying about our program alarms and things like that in the part of the descent where we would normally be picking out our landing spot, and aside from a good look at several of the craters we came over in the final descent, I haven’t been able to pick out the things on the horizon as a reference as yet.
Up in Columbia, which was passing over Tranquility Base at a height of sixty miles, Collins peered hard through his sextant trying to spot the LM. Over his radio he had heard the whole thing and rightfully felt he shared in the achievement. “Tranquility Base, it sure sounded great from up here,” Mike had radioed to his mates. “You guys did a fantastic job.” “Thank you,” Neil replied warmly. “Just keep that orbiting base ready for us up there.” “Will do,” answered Collins. With his right eye straining through his eyepiece, Mike had tracked them as long as he could during their descent until they disappeared from his view as a “miniscule dot” about 115 miles from the landing site. Now even with the ground sending up tracking numbers for him to input on his DSKY (display-keyboard) unit so that the command module’s guidance computer could accurately point his sextant, it frustrated Mike that he could not see them.
04:07:07:13 Collins: [To Houston] Do you have any idea whether they landed left or right of centerline? Just a little bit long—is that all you know?
04:07:07:19 CapCom (Charlie Duke): Apparently that’s about all we can tell, over. The limited information provided by Houston was no help to Mike: “I can’t see a darn thing but craters. Big craters, little craters, rounded ones, sharp ones, but no LM anywhere among them. The sextant is a powerful optical instrument, magnifying everything it sees twenty-eight times, but the price it pays for this magnification is a very narrow field of view, only 1.8 degrees wide (corresponding to 0.6 miles on the ground), so that it is almost like looking down a gun barrel. The LM might be close by, and I swing the sextant back and forth in a frantic search for it, but in the very limited time I have, it is possible to study only a square mile or so of lunar surface, and this time it is the wrong mile.”
Collins never did locate Eagle down on the surface, not on any of his passes, which was more of a concern to Mike than it was to anyone else. The main concern at Mission Control over the LM’s exact location did not come from the geologists—they were happy enough that Apollo 11 had landed anywhere in the mare. “They just wanted us to get out there and get some stuff!” Yet the question of where exactly the LM had come down did bother Mission Control, as Neil explains: “A lot of people were interested in where we landed, particularly those people who were involved in the descent guidance trajectory controls. After all, in later flights, we were going to try to go to specific spots on the surface and we needed to get all the information we could regarding methods that might help precision. However, not knowing exactly where the LM had landed did not affect what we did very much. Nor did people on the ground think that this was a disastrous occurrence. But the fact was, they didn’t know exactly where we were and they did want to know if they could.”
Hansen, James R. (2005-10-18). First Man (pp. 480-482). Simon & Schuster.
Yeah Southwind17, its only a reflection of a "seeming discrepancy" this business about finding one reference after another after another after another, an infinitesimal fraction of Apollo documents and literature reflective of this lack of orientation. Nothing like losing 3 astronauts Southwind17, or pretending to not know where they are anyway. Yeah, its only a "seeming discrepancy", hardly ever comes up in anything important like a voice transcript conversation from a day after the EVA when you'd think by then everyone would be sure to have their facts straight about what happened. I MEAN IT IS ONLY THE FIRST FAKE TRIP TO THE MOON!!!! NOT A BIG DEAL GIVEN IT IS PHONY AFTER ALL!
Southwind17's seeming discrepancy, a day after the make believe landing, Armstrong and Houston still hadn't figured out where Neil had pretended to land. The Voice Transcript if you will;
TIME: 06 07 33 59
CC: Roger. For 64 thousand dollars, we're still trying to work out the location of your landing site, Tranquility Base. We think it is located on LAM-2 chart at Juliet 0.5 and 7.8. Do you still have those charts on board? Over.
CDR: Yes. Stand by one. They're packed.
CC: Roger. You may not have to unpack it. The position which I just gave you is slightly west of West Crater. I guess it's about two-tenths of a kilometer west of it, and we were wondering if Neil or Buzz had observed any additional land- marks during descent, lunar stay, or ascent which would confirm or disprove this. One thing that we're wondering about is that if you were at this
position, you would have seen the Cat's Paw
during ascent just up to the north of your track. Over.
CDR: We were looking for the Cat's Paw, too, thinking we were probably downrange, beyond the Big V. But I think that it's likely that that might have been West Crater that we went across in landing, but - Stand by.
CDR: We're hoping, Bruce, that our 16-mm film was working at that point in descent, and we'll be able to confirm our touchdown position. We thought that during ascent we might be able to pick up some recognizable objects close to the landing site, and we did see a number of small craters, and crater rows, and things like that, which we may be able to pick out after the fact, but we haven't been able to yet."
See that there Southwind17, how nifty this all is, the ol' "seeming discrepancy" ploy? See there where Neil talks about picking things out "AFTER THE FACT"? I'll translate that for you Southwind17 since you have not been at this that long. "AFTER THE FACT" is Apollo astronaut jive for fixing things when all had been said and done long ago, but then you needed to get your lies to square up as best you could, so you change your story, or you tell 2 stories at the same time like with the landing coordinates, that is, you do this stupid "after the fact" stuff if you are a lying your cislunar rump off Apollo astronaut. Hope that is helpful Southwind17, my translation for you there.
Seeming discrepancy Southwind17? The Glassy Eyed Ph.D Zombie with his Outta' the Cornflakes Box Degree in Rendezvous was lost himself until the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal Editor found Fuzzy Buzzy YEARS AND YEARS AFTER THE FACT! Here's the Fuzzy one, Buzzy Aldrin himself;
"Somewhere, we had a state vector (three-axis position and velocity) update because of the tracking data that Houston got once we came around. But, how that happened and whether we were aware of it, I don't remember. I know that a lot of people got credit for developing the tracking filter that allowed them to do that. That neat capability contributed to the accuracy of our touchdown, even though nobody knew where we were.
(exactly)"
So see the very neat and only "seeming discrepancy" there Southwind17. They have a neat capability of executing "accurate touchdowns", yet at the very same time, "nobody knew where they were". Not until the editor found the Ph.D Zombie's dumb rump and saved it by inserting a parenthetical "(exactly)" into his shuck and jive babble. Pretty neat, don't you think too Southwind17?
I always like to save the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal editor's "(exactly)" for the end, like I did above, just for emphasis. Because this sort of thing is so very RARE, only occurring in an infinitesimal amount of the Apollo 11 material. It's not like these yo-yos really are/were lost you know. So I do take my cheap shots wherever/whenever I can cuz' you never know, it might be a million years before you get a chance at another one, another cheap shot.
Whoops!!! Oh look Southwindd17! Spoke too soon! Here's another one, another chance at a cheap shot, another example of a small and only "seeming discrepancy", astronauts lost and at the very same time found. Armstrong biographer Leon Wagner;
"While Houston and Eagle prepared for liftoff, feeding coordinates into the computer that would, with luck, achieve a smooth rendezvous with Columbia on its twenty-fifth lunar orbit, there were two nagging worries. One was a slightly embarrassing technical failure: Houston wasn't precisely sure where Tranquility Base was located on the lunar surface. Ever since touchdown, NASA's geological survey team had been scrambling to unravel just how far away from the planned landing site Neil had gone while scrambling to avoid the deadly escarpment.
The United States Geological Survey in Houston and the Center for Astrogeology in Flagstaff, Arizona, desperately studying maps and analyzing information available, had finally come to a consensus. But it was just an educated guess. There had been no provision for an aborted site and a zig-zag, last-second dash to find a safe landing zone. The one hope for a completely accurate fix was the laser retro-reflector experiment Aldrin and Armstrong had assembled a few hours prior. But, thus far Houston hadn't been able to locate the reflector with the laser.
Less than an hour prior to scheduled liftoff, Capsule Communicator Ron Evans apologetically briefed the astronauts on the situation: "We have fairly high confidence that we know the position of the Eagle. However, it is possible that we may have a change of plans. But in the worst case it could be up to 30 feet per second, and of course we don't expect that at all". Meaning: If they were far off Eagle's location, a successful rendezvous would require some quick and accurate throttling up or down to thread the needle properly tricky work at 5,000 miles per hour. Of course, it was for such contingencies that Buzz Aldrin, a man with a genius for astrophysics, who held a Ph.D. in space rendezvous from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Neil Armstrong, one of the coolest hands in the history of aviation, were chosen for the job. NASA believed the Apollo 11 team could do it, and so did they. In the end, NASA's failure to ascertain the exact location of Tranquility Base had no great impact on the docking of Columbia and Eagle, which was fortunate, because it wasn't until 5 days after splash-down on July 29, when film taken by the astronauts was processed and studied, that an official determination was reached."
Leon Wagner's biography of Neil Armstrong,* ONE GIANT LEAP.
From the infinitesimal fraction of the Apollo 11 astronauts lost and found literature, Lunar Scientist Donald Beattie;
"In the meantime we were monitoring the signal sent back by the passive seismic experiment and attempting to find the LRRR that the astronauts had left behind. This latter operation was not as easy as we expected, since the exact location of the landing site was not immediately known. Mike Collins had attempted unsuccessfully to locate the LM from orbit using the command module sextant. After analyzing the flight data and the returned photographs, we passed our best estimate to the LRRR PIs, and the LRRR was found on August 1, 1969 by the Lick Observatory in California."
Apollo experimental scientist Donald Beattie, book, TAKING SCIENCE TO THE MOOON.
Big daddy Andrew Chaikin himself weighing in here with a bit of seeming discrepancy;
"But no one, not Armstrong and Aldrin nor anyone in mission control, knew just where Eagle was. The location would be a helpful, though not essential, piece of information for this computer to have during tomorrow's rendezvous. It fell to Collins to try to find the LM on the surface, using the command modules 28 power sextant.…………
Each time he went around from the far side, mission control had a new set of coordinates for him to try, but on his map, one guess was as much as 10 grid-squares away from the last. It didn't take long to realize no one had a handle on the problem. His search continued fruitlessly for the rest of his 22 solo hours."
Andrew Chaikin, book, A MAN ON THE MOON.
Adding to the infinitesimal heap, from "Chariots for Apollo";
"They wondered about their exact location, glancing out the windows and describing what they saw to give flight control and Collins some clues to aid in the search. While waiting to be found, Armstrong relayed all that he could remember about the landing. They knew they were at least six kilometers beyond the target point, although still within the planned ellipse.
While his crewmates had been active on the surface, Collins had been busy in the command module. There was not much navigating to do, so he took pictures and looked out the window, trying to find the lunar module. He never found it; neither did flight control. There was just too much real estate down there to be able to search the whole area properly. Collins divided the part of the moon he was flying over into segments, but he had no better luck. Armstrong and Aldrin had taken the 26-power monocular with them, but Collins did not think it would have helped much, anyway. He did complain that all this searching cut into the time he needed for taking pictures on each circuit, but he was philosophical about it. As he said, “When the LM is on the surface, the command module should act like a good child and be seen and not heard.”
Brooks, Courtney (2008). Book, CHARIOTS FOR APOLLO
Yeah Southwind17, pretty "seeming" this discrepancy. Its not like I didn't point out they pretty much had the bloody LM coordinates, the ones listed right there in the Apollo 11 Mission Report. At least they looked/look pretty good to me, those coordinates for PNGS, AGS, powered flight processor/MSFN determined landing site solutions, all there, each one, in the J latitude of the famous bogus Collins map, yet they tell Cislunar Mike to look at latitudes P,M.N,K,E. Here's Mike himself writing about the SEEMING DISCREPANCY;
"For the next couple of orbits, I tried very hard to spot Eagle through my sextant, but I was unable to find it. The problem was, no one knew exactly where Neil had landed, and I didn't know which way to look for them. Oh, I knew approximately where they were, but the sextant had a narrow field of view, like looking down a riffle barrel, and I need to know exactly which way to point it."
Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot/"NAVIGATOR!", from FLYING TO THE MOON, AN ASTRONAUT'S STORY.
Thanks a lot for that Mike! Even though this crazy business about you guys being lost, the "seeming discrepancy" business to which Southwind17 refers gets us confused often times, when you write stuff like that in the FLYING TO THE MOON book and the other really dumb stuff you write about not being able to see stars and what not, well it just warms us up, and straightens our confused and wandering minds out.
It's not as though this kind of "seeming discrepancy" nonsense is anywhere much, its only insanely semi rarely very frequent, but then again not and oh so very almost never recognized, but one can always shuck and jive when you find it, and pretend it not to be; like Thomas Kelly, one of the chief lunar module engineer's writing in his book MOON LANDER on page 222;
"Apollo 11 had landed four miles from its targeted landing point, and for the first few hours Houston and the astronauts were trying to determine exactly where on the moon they were. Exasperated, Gen. Sam Phillips, Apollo Program Director, demanded a pinpoint landing for the next mission"
I'll bet, I'll bet he demanded a pinpoint landing. Then he told stumbling and bumbling paint by the numbers Alan Bean to bust the fake tv camera so there would be no fake video evidence of the phony Apollo 12 simulated pretend landing.
Yeah Southwind17, not much on this subject, hardly nothing at all, groups of US Geological Survey map specialists looking for make believe astronauts on a make believe moon all throughout the evening of 07/20/1969 and well into the next day. Just a seeming discrepancy, no big deal, just in a book here and there. Not like the astronauts are mentioning it themselves or anything.
Diagnosis; Complete and utter lack of familiarity with Apollo literature, especially the important stuff.
Punishment; You Southwind17, Sally Ride and the Glassy Eyed Ph.D Zombie must play spin the bottle Ruskie roulette, one spin sudden death. Loser, the third one out, spends the entirety of next weekend reading poetry to RAF.
