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Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

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This is way more comprehensive than anything before, 5-14 is new

Jack by the hedge said:
Patrick - before I bother struggling through it, is there anything new in the wall above, or it it just a rehash of the same old stuff?
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This is much more comprehensive and detailed than my previous analyses. Also, have never taken apart figure 5-14 before. You should read this and get hip to the scam Jack by the hedge.
 
Agatha said:
No, it's a classic argument from incredulity padded out with needless repetition and basic misunderstandings.

If your argument had any merit whatsoever, P1k, you would be able to explain it in bullet points.
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I haven't got time right now to wade through the wall of text, "Patrick" (thanks for confirming it's two of you), but I have to agree with Agatha. I'm paid to be somewhat contrarian in a very large, well established company. I have learned to never mix my editorial comments with the data. First, no one wants to read it that way, second, it undermines my own credibility by making it look like I'm playing with the data, and third, it forces me to be intellectually honest - about 90 percent of what I end up writing says "yep, we were doing it right the whole time."

I'll be blunt: from what I've skimmed, you're still trying to force the data into a preconceived notion that we couldn't have gone to the Moon. So I will ask again in a different way: setting aside your theories regarding health issues and the military, why do you assume that, with the technology of the time, we couldn't go to the Moon? That's all. Don't go on about we how didn't because it was faked - that's circular. Tell us why the technology couldn't support the mission.
 
Must be so so so hard to pull this off with a straight face.

Ever wonder how a guy like Obama deals with it? You become prez, probably the moon thing is something you are briefed with regard to fairly quickly, the fact we didn't land people, only parts of weapons systems and so forth.

Then you are out a month later with your wife and kids, one of your girls turns and asks you about some detail having to do with the Apollo 11 Mission and you feel as though your mind is cartwheeling through space. How do you respond to your child, or to anybody for ever more? Your frame of reference is so different, directed, clear.

I guess that is just a tiny little thing, the moon stuff. Guess there is lots and lots more to freak one out, freak out the new prez..

I bring this up as for me it is very much "on topic". I remember seeing the prez with Neil, Buzz and Mike at a 40th anniversary photo op.. The prez looked like he was in some weird kind of strained state. You could see it in his eyes, knowledge of fraud.

I wonder if they give these guys acting lessons? Guess it would not hurt, but doesn't seem to help either given the outcome.

Oh well...................
 
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Risk

SUSpilot said:
I haven't got time right now to wade through the wall of text, "Patrick" (thanks for confirming it's two of you), but I have to agree with Agatha. I'm paid to be somewhat contrarian in a very large, well established company. I have learned to never mix my editorial comments with the data. First, no one wants to read it that way, second, it undermines my own credibility by making it look like I'm playing with the data, and third, it forces me to be intellectually honest - about 90 percent of what I end up writing says "yep, we were doing it right the whole time."

I'll be blunt: from what I've skimmed, you're still trying to force the data into a preconceived notion that we couldn't have gone to the Moon. So I will ask again in a different way: setting aside your theories regarding health issues and the military, why do you assume that, with the technology of the time, we couldn't go to the Moon? That's all. Don't go on about we how didn't because it was faked - that's circular. Tell us why the technology couldn't support the mission.
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Not sure if we could or not. I just know we did not go based on NASA's reports. Also, as I have said previously, even under the best of circumstances, the risk is insane.
Remember the Challenger investigation and what Richard Feyman said about NASA? He said the NASA guys were out of touch with reality. Boy, if Feyman only knew just how on target he was. He said NASA had no sense of real risk. I think that was the case because they did not take any risks with lives during Apollo. So with the Shuttle, and people really flying, they were out of touch, didn't really have a sense for the truth in the risk.

Feynman was on target. What he did not know was that NASA's lack of common sense as regards risk had to do with Apollo's being unmanned and so "without risk" human life wise. When they started really doing launches, with live ammunition, they were doing them in essence having forgotten that one important recent chapter, was a pretend chapter, the Apollo everything went perfect cuz' it was fake chapter.
 
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Patrick1000 said:
I think it is fantastic!!!
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I think it's garbage.

You can't understand why Collins was asked to search the map coordinates that he was given, therefore "fraud". And that's all it says. That whole boring screed - page after tedious page - and that's all it has to offer. An argument from incredulity. Pathetic.

It's impossible to believe you think it worth anyone's time to read your self-aggrandising puffery. I doubt I shall bother in future. Your walls of text are consistently worthless.
 
He can't summarize. He can't organize. And he can't write without constant digressions, or present facts without constant editorializing and general snark.

Patrick, learn to write.

At this point, a YouTube video has a greater content-per-unit percentage than his verbiage.
 
I love that essay/, it's fantastic, beautiful, read it again nomuse, you'll catch on!

nomuse said:
He can't summarize. He can't organize. And he can't write without constant digressions, or present facts without constant editorializing and general snark.

Patrick, learn to write.

At this point, a YouTube video has a greater content-per-unit percentage than his verbiage.
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I love that essay/post. I think it is downright fantastic! beautiful! Read it again mate, you'll catch on.
 
Well I am not making it up Jack by the hedge.

Jack by the hedge said:
I do not regard your opinion as reasonable or trustworthy.

This argument from incredulity is worthless.
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Well I am not making it up Jack by the hedge. It's not as though I am playing a hunch. The guys shuck and jive while they try and hide their pretend spaceship. What's the story with Collins going 'round and 'round like that Jack by the hedge? Why doesn't somebody give him the MSFN coordinates like they show in the Mission Report there? Is it because the whole thing is just so insanely FAKE!.????!!!! Guess that is the case, 'bout the only thing that explains such incompetency. That's a fact.

Also, if they had been in space, they'd have gotten a heck of a lot cozier with the bowel flora of their spaceship mates than the cislunar sanitation people would allow, let alone a qualified doctor. All the Apollo Missions are proven bogus right there, the sanitation angle.

Finally, the three blind mice, stuff. Have you ever seen such jive in your life?, as three star blind astronauts? It's enough to make one strap on an Apollo astronaut endorsed vacuum tested "Depends" and laugh oneself into oblivion.
 
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Obviousman said:
A checklist error was overlooked for Apollo 11: the rendezvous radar was left on, which meant that the PGNS was not only dealing with the landing but also trying to figure out the rendezvous with the CSM.
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I wrote the following over at ApolloHoax while I was waiting for the administrators here to approve my account. I'll post it here too, since that's where I had intended it to be read.

Program alarms are little more than error messages, although the response to them may automatically take any of several forms: business as usual, a soft restart, or a hard restart.

The soft restart is a software routine that resets a few key data structures, stops nonessential tasks, and reloads the real-time tasks from a predetermined, prioritized table. But it leaves alone things like the state vector and the REFSMMAT. A hard reset is equivalent to powering on the computer anew. 120x alarms prescribe a soft reset.

As you recall, there are only 2,000 words of erasable storage in the computer architecture. The operating system breaks that up into small segments, each of which can be allocated to a running program. Some are reserved for the interpreter and allocated separately by it. The 120x errors indicate that no segments of erasable storage are available for some program that asks for one, and the last digit of the 120x indicates whether it is a regular segment or an interpreter-allocated segment that was asked for.

What exhausted them? The real-time tasks. Normally the small real-time tasks started up, scheduled their next invocation, asked for erasable storage, did their deed, released the storage, and exited -- all in very short time. Some like Servicer ran every 2 seconds and completed their work in just a hundredth of a second or so.

But in the case of Apollo 11 the computer was unexpectedly overloaded. So the real-time tasks took more wallclock time to complete than normal. As a result they never got to the part of their program that released the core sets (the little segments of erasable memory) before new real-time tasks started up according to their wallclock schedule and demanded memory.

So new tasks being scheduled by the relentless wallclock tick of the timer interrupts found the erasable memory glutted by tasks delayed in the relative world of multitasking computing. Under a normal workload there was plenty of computing capacity for all the tasks the designers had assigned.

And what was taking up all the computing power? As stated, the rendezvous radar. In certain modes the radar interrupts the computer periodically to tell it new information. The computer stores it in memory were programs that need radar information can get to it. The radar generates information at a fixed rate, governed by a timing signal from the computer that is interpreted by the radar's power supply. The power supply tells the radar's digital interface when to interrupt the computer.

Now the rendezvous radar was considered important, so it has two redundant power supplies, each locked to the computer timing signal. The radar was in SLEW (i.e., manual) mode at this point. In SLEW mode no data was supposed to be sent to the computer, so the synchronization between the power supplies was allowed to "float" and the digital circuit was supposedly disabled. But it turns out that the out-of-phase power input confused the radar's digital circuit and caused it to emit computer interrupt signals. Not only that, the out-of-phase power-supply cycles generated twice as many interrupts as the digital circuit normally should have. As much as 15 percent of the computer's capacity was being eaten up in accepting the overzealous radar information.

Why was the radar on? Because in an abort, they'd have to turn on the radar, wait for it to warm up, and then give it time to lock onto the CSM and produce good range/rate data. Apollo 11 planners thought it would be a good idea to keep the radar on and warmed up in order to reduce the crew's workload in the case of an abort. Normally in the plan, the radar would be turned off. And in that case it wouldn't have been generating interrupts.

Even under this unexpectedly high load from the double rate of radar interrupts, when none at all were expected, the computer was holding its own. But then Aldrin innocently and expectedly punched Verb 16, Noun 68 into the computer. Verb 16 means "monitor on the DSKY" and Noun 68 is a set of descent parameters: range-to-go, time-to-go, and velocity.

Under the hood, V16 activates a real-time task to read the values from the proper noun location -- here a known place in Program 63's erasable memory -- and load them into the DSKY display registers at regular intervals (once per second, if I recall correctly). A very simple routine, but in this case the straw that broke the camel's back. The continuous-display request was just enough additional workload to keep other real-time tasks from exiting cleanly and releasing their memory before it was needed.

Program 63 is, in guidance terms, a workhorse. It has a lot to do. Programs 64 and 66 require less computing power, so after the computer switched descent modes to P64, the overall computing load lessened so that the computer could maintain its normal workload even with the radar interrupts blazing.

When 120x alarms hit and the soft reset occurs, one of the first things that gets eliminated is the real-time display routine from Verb 16. It's not on the "magic" list of required real-time tasks for this flight mode, so Aldrin's display blanks and the computer goes back to a lean-and-mean operation. Only when he re-enters the display routine does he get in the same situation -- "It seems to happen whenever we have a 16-68 up."

In addition, Armstrong several times switched the flight controller into ATT HOLD mode (i.e., manual flight) which considerably reduces the digital autopilot's workload. ATT HOLD (i.e., attitude-hold, which simply keeps the LM fixed in the attitude the pilot establishes with the joystick) isn't as demanding as the modes ordinarily employed in the programmed descent modes. So in P64 and P66, with Armstrong occasionally flying manually, the computer was able to keep up with the spurious radar interrupts, and even V16N68.

In later LMs the rendezvous radar was revised to properly cross-strap the power supplies even in SLEW and AUTO TRACK mode, and the CDUs (the digital interface circuits) were revised to more reliably inhibit interrupts altogether except in LGC radar mode.
 
Patrick1000 said:
Well I am not making it up Jack by the hedge. It's not as though I am playing a hunch. The guys shuck and jive while they try and hide their pretend spaceship. What's the story with Collins going 'round and 'round like that Jack by the hedge? Why doesn't somebody give him the MSFN coordinates like they show in the Mission Report there? Is it because the whole thing is just so insanely FAKE!.????!!!! Guess that is the case, 'bout the only thing that explains such incompetency. That's a fact.

Also, if they had been in space, they'd have gotten a heck of a lot cozier with the bowel flora of their spaceship mates than the cislunar sanitation people would allow, let alone a qualified doctor. All the Apollo Missions are proven bogus right there, the sanitation angle.

Finally, the three blind mice, stuff. Have you ever seen such jive in your life?, as three star blind astronauts? It's enough to make one strap on an Apollo astronaut endorsed vacuum tested "Depends" and laugh oneself into oblivion.
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Apparently submarines, antarctic winter-overs, and daycare centers don't exist either.

Seriously...do we have here a medico, or a sufferer from some sort of Howard Hughes Syndrome?
 
Patrick1000 said:
Well I am not making it up Jack by the hedge. It's not as though I am playing a hunch. The guys shuck and jive while they try and hide their pretend spaceship. What's the story with Collins going 'round and 'round like that Jack by the hedge?
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He was in orbit, Patrick1000.

<argument form incredulity>

<argument from incredulity>

<willful ignorance/strawman>
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Got anything new?
 
Patrick1000 said:
Remember the Challenger investigation and what Richard Feyman said about NASA? He said the NASA guys were out of touch with reality.
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Feynman made this statement in the narrow context of reliability estimates given by NASA administrators during the Challenger hearings. What is your evidence that he intended it to apply more broadly than that? Keep in mind that engineers had also testified and had given reliability estimates that were generally considered accurate in the industry. Feynman was calling out NASA management for its unwillingness to face the reality expressed by NASA engineers.

Why are you comparing NASA of 1986 with NASA of 1969? Are you aware of findings by organizational psychologists and sociologists such as Charles Perrow and Susan Vaughan that point to a marked shift in NASA's organizational dynamics in the Shuttle era? Please comment on their findings in light of your desire to paint with such a broad brush.
 
Whoah. I thought it was aquila non capit muscas.

Always good to hear again about the AGC's approach to interrupt handling. Reading about it really helped me get a handle on using interrupt vectors on the AVR series of chips.
 
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