Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

[matt.tansy]

No he meant this to mean during his tenure as a military person this was the case. "Moscow's location" changed during his military career targeting Ruskie cities.

What do the years 1927 and 1972 and a datum difference of 0.13 NM imply to you? In the span of 45 years, which no doubt covered most, if not all, of his military career, and certainly all of his career involving ICBM guidance and navigation development the datum only changed by 0.13 NM. Our refinement of the shape of the Earth improves over times; it does not get worse. There is no way that sometime between 1927 and 1972 the military shifted to a datum that shifted Moscow's position more than a mile. The idea is laughable.

 

[JayUtah]

You didn't cite a reference for your claim that James Webb estimated the cost of landing on the Moon at "$20-40 billion," which you've apparently averaged to $30 billion. But since it's a reasonable figure, I'll stipulate that Webb probably made that estimate.

I've since located a number of sources documenting that James Webb's official estimate in 1961 to the White House, for the entire cost of Apollo, was $20 billion. It is explicitly for the entire project, not any sort of annual expenditure.

Actual expenditures vary between $19.4 billion and $25.4 billion, depending upon which years are included and what expenses qualify. In any case they do not depart from the $20 billion 1961 estimate by more than a reasonable margin, certainly not by factors or orders of magnitude.

By no account or reckoning were there any documented estimates or expenditures associated with Apollo that amounted to one-third of the U.S. federal budget, or in fact exceeded 7% percent of the overall federal budget for any given year.

There is no factual basis I can determine for Patrick1000's claim that Apollo cost some 9 times more than commonly believed.

 

[Patrick1000]

20-40 Billion for Apollo from PAt Norris' Spies in the Sky

I'm not sure what to say. You made a colossal arithmetical blunder in your previous post, and after attention was called to it by two different people, you turn around and make the same colossal blunder again in your rejoinder. Oh well, I guess it proves it wasn't just a simple arithmetic error, but instead an actual error in comprehension. Or it proves that you aren't paying attention to any of the responses in this thread.

In this thread you seem to praise Anders Lindman for "making [us] mad." If you want to be taken seriously and not dismissed as a troll, perhaps "needling" is not something you should be proud of. Especially when you're as mistaken as you are.


No. Again you seem not to know the vast qualitative difference between income and expenditure. The U.S. federal government took in $94 billion in 1961 and spent $97 billion that same year, for a deficit of $3 billion. How are we supposed to respect your budgetary analysis when you don't know the difference between money coming in and money going out?



No, they aren't.

You didn't cite a reference for your claim that James Webb estimated the cost of landing on the Moon at "$20-40 billion," which you've apparently averaged to $30 billion. But since it's a reasonable figure, I'll stipulate that Webb probably made that estimate.

While it may be a fact that he made such an estimate, the actual expenditures are a completely different set facts, which I've handed to you in a very neat table broken out by year, by cost center, and by percentage of NASA's budget, in non-adjusted dollars that you can compare to the non-adjusted dollars reported in your source for U.S. federal expenditures. You've ignored those facts in favor of your completely erroneous handwaving.

The other stone-cold fact that conspiracy theorists generally don't know about is that Apollo wasn't Kennedy's idea; it was Eisenhower's idea. He approved it and laid out the initial budget. Then it was Johnson's.

In the early 1960s Kennedy wanted a demonstration of U.S. superiority in science and technology. He asked the various departments of his administration to make proposals. They rolled in, from sea habitats to telecommunications to space stations. None of them met Kennedy's criteria for spectacle and scope.

Lyndon B. Johnson, then Vice President and head of the U.S. space program, proposed any of a set of variations on manned lunar fly-by or landings. The Kennedys (Jack and Bobby) rejected them as too expensive and with too poor a chance for success. Not to be so easily thwarted, Johnson summoned Wernher von Braun, James Webb, and leaders from the aerospace industry to beef up the proposal, finally handing the White House a detailed analysis replete with rosy (i.e., substantially lowered) cost estimates, assurances of feasibility, and endorsements by prominent American scientists. Then and only then did Kennedy agree to give Apollo the funding to transform it into a manned lunar mission.

Johnson was happy because it gave him direct control over a new, important, and well-funded federal effort. Webb too. In fact, Webb traded his political future for the chance to build Apollo on his watch. After Kennedy's death he went to Congress time and again to fight for the promised funding levels, invoking the ghost of an assassinated President to compel reluctant Congressmen to maintain the effort. The ink wasn't even dry on Nixon's inaugural papers when Webb was kicked to the curb by sore politicians.

The Johnson-Webb machine made a number of powerful enemies in Congress, including senators Mondale and Proxmire, who dogged NASA and Apollo all through the 1960s and well beyond the first landing, pulling out all the stops to try to defund it. And this is the program you're saying had all sorts of skeletons in its closet, none of which these noted campaigners against government waste and fraud were able to find. Even Kennedy, who was never really sold on the idea, summoned Webb to the Oval Office and told him that needed to stay focused on the deadline and not throw too many bells and whistles into the effort.

Kennedy didn't just run to Congress and ask for $30 billion, which was then handed to him without question.

Those are the actual historical facts, not the caricature of them that's presented in conspiracy theories.



Why? You still haven't gotten Kennedy right. You don't need to deal in 2011 dollars or in the politics of the sitting President. Everything we need to show the glaring error in your logic is right there in the 1960s. You still don't see it.



No. This is your colossal blunder again. The estimate of $30 billion for Apollo in 1961 was not $30 billion per year for each of the following 10 years, but instead a total of $30 billion, to be spread out over 10 years. Apollo was never one-third of the entire federal budget for any one year between 1959 and 1973, the official years of its operation. As repeatedly stated, and as evidenced in the references I cited, the Apollo expenditures never rose above the single-digit percentages of the overall federal budget.

Maybe it's been a while since you got your claimed math degree, but you take the total and divide by the number of units to get the average unit cost. By your estimate ($30 billion over 10 years) that's three billion per year, or an average of 3.3 percent of 1961's budget for each of 10 years. Your math is off by a factor of ten.



No, and that's nowhere near the equivalent of what the Kennedy administration did.



You haven't proven it was fake. And <snip> you even admitted you couldn't prove it was fake.

Edited by LashL: 

Moderated thread

Given the stunning errors you've committed in this thread over the past 24 hours, I'll let your statement speak for itself.

My 20-40 Billion dollar figure is for the cost of Apollo is from Pat Norris' book SPIES IN THE SKY. One sees that figure all over the place Jay, roughly 30 billion in 1960/1970 dollars, and that translates to 125 billion dollars in today's currency.

My point is that as a percentage of the federal budget, it is a huge figure. Total federal spending on education in 1966 was 5.2 billion, health care 2.6 billion, transportation 5.7 billion. The NASA budget in 1966 was 5.933 billion. So we spent more on Apollo than on education, more on Apollo than on health care, more on Apollo than on transportation. This is military stuff Jay.

They don't lay out that kind of dough for iffy projects. This is about GUNS! Big ones.

 

[Patrick1000]

I said that Garrison. 30 bil over 11 years.

$30 billion dollars was the total cost of the whole program over its lifetime, not the annual cost.

That Patrick is the fact, that you cannot simply own up even to such an obvious mistake speaks volumes.

I said that Garrison. 30 bil over 11 years.

My point is that the totally federal budget in 1961 was 94 billion dollars. So Kennedy was apprised by Webb, NASA head, that a simulated moon landing would cost the US taxpayers one third of their total 1961 federal budget. This is in fact what Apollo cost more or less, 30 billion dollars over 11 years time.

In terms of gleaning some comparative sense here in 2011 of the fiscal stress incurred by the 1960 American taxpayers in funding this Apollo moondoggle, consider if Obama did as Kennedy did, presented a plan to the American public for say now going to Mars, and funding it over 11 years with one third of the total 2011 federal budget . Obama's 2011 fiscal budget is $ 3.818 trillion. So a 2011 Apollo equivalent program would be a program costing one third of the 2011 budget to be paid out over 11 years. That is One trillion two hundred and seventy there billion dollars to be paid out over 11 years. That is one hundred and fifteen billion dollars a year. $115,000,000,000 annually.

If Obama asked for that, even if he could convince us that we could really make it to Mars, really go there, we'd laugh him off the stage.


Apollo is military Garrison face the monitory facts.

 

[Patrick1000]

The moon is one in a system of military satellites TjW.

Well, Intelsat2B, perched over the Pacific in 1967, was certainly observable. Signals were sent to and from it all the time, since it was a communications satellite.
How do you know it didn't also have a secret military payload of a retroreflector? Being ten times closer, it would reflect 100 times more laser power than a reflector on the moon. So the retroreflector array could have been ten times smaller than the lunar experiment (which, being man-deployable, wasn't all that big) and still returned ten times as much power.
Of course, measuring the time-of-flight and phase of the active communications signals they were already sending would have been a much simpler method of ranging than laser ranging, but if you just gotta have the latest thing and do it by laser, how can you prove there wasn't a military retroreflector on Intelsat?

The moon is one in a system of military satellites/platforms TjW.

Pat Norris, the renown Apollo Program computer specialist/early satellite expert/trajectory system specialist, wrote a great deal in his book SPIES IN THE SKY that speaks directly to the Apollo military mission issues TjW.

Norris discusses how he was involved in Apollo's early GPS like effort. Navigation, including navigation to the moon during the Apollo era, was greatly dependent on the accuracy of the clocks NASA employed in their tracking system, as it certainly is until this day. One of Norris' Apollo jobs in the late 1960s was to find methods to determine the errors, the uncertainty, in NASA's clocks. During that time, Norris informs us that clocks were "synchronized" to radio signals received from stations in the US, UK and other allied locations. The uncertainties in the times of propagation to those stations was initially on the order of milliseconds. In order to satisfactorily track things in space like rockets, not to mention direct them, steer them, the clock uncertainties had to be reduced from millionths of a second where NASA began, to billionths of a second. Obviously, one of the reasons for the LRRR type and allied/associated "peaceful" experiments. Think of clock accuracy in terms of positional accuracy. If one knows how long it takes for light to get to and from something and can do this to something from several sources, and do it within nanosecond accuracy, then one knows where that thing is, whether it be a pretend Apollo rocket going to the moon, a Ruskie ICBM, or even a friendly American nuke carrying space torpedo.

Norris also talks about how NASA scientists/technicians bounced signals off the moon to be picked up by various stations in an effort to get this timing thing down and so be able to find things, locate, navigate. Obviously if they are bouncing things, and that is helpful, then it sure makes a heck of a lot more sense to shoot a signal directly at the moon to be picked up there and also sent, transmitted, actively from the moon. It is not unreasonable to propose that by the time Apollo was completed and the moon fully instrumented for US military use in 1972 or shortly thereafter, our people more likely than not had a full fledged GPS system that employed the moon as a key, if not THE KEY PLATFORM.

They say Norris' work with clocks is what made the Apollo tracking system as accurate as it was. When Neil Armstrong got out of quarantine in August of 1969 he drove over personally to see Norris and thanked him, presenting him with the Apollo Individual Achievement Award.

Norris also tells us in his book that when the Ruskie's would shot off a mid 1960s vintage ICBM, one of the ways that we detected the launch, and detect the launches now as well, is by way of intercepting the telemetry that informs the missile's ground crew about the rocket's status specifics. According to Norris, this telemetry data would bounce, ECHO, off the moon, and was then picked by giant antennas on the earth.

So obviously, one of the things we planted up there were listening/sensing devices to pick up the telemetry directly. No reason to depend on the bouncing when you can place a receiver on the moon herself.

So as I go on TjW. i'll continue to share more and more details/specifics of this stuff as I come across it. It is important moving forward to go beyond what I have learned so far an fully elucidate the exact nature of the things they did up there on the moon. What kind of equipment did they plant and why?

This is the question that we now want to answer.

 

[nomuse]

My 20-40 Billion dollar figure is for the cost of Apollo is from Pat Norris' book SPIES IN THE SKY. One sees that figure all over the place Jay, roughly 30 billion in 1960/1970 dollars, and that translates to 125 billion dollars in today's currency.

My point is that as a percentage of the federal budget, it is a huge figure. Total federal spending on education in 1966 was 5.2 billion, health care 2.6 billion, transportation 5.7 billion. The NASA budget in 1966 was 5.933 billion. So we spent more on Apollo than on education, more on Apollo than on health care, more on Apollo than on transportation. This is military stuff Jay.

They don't lay out that kind of dough for iffy projects. This is about GUNS! Big ones.

Also; Welfare 6.4 billion, Pensions 17.7 billion, the interest on the National Debt was 9.4 billion....and, oh yes, the actual Defense spending in that fiscal year was 69.6 billion.

In case your math is a little rusty, that's 11.8 x the entire NASA budget.

Very, very selective, Patrick. This isn't poor research -- this is fact-picking.

 

[JayUtah]

My 20-40 Billion dollar figure is for the cost of Apollo is from Pat Norris' book SPIES IN THE SKY.

Thank you. My figure of $20 billion as the estimate Webb gave to the White House is from the documents Webb gave to the White House, and confirmed by many other secondary sources. Since one cannot get more authoritative than the official document, I'll ask you to stay faithful to that figure unless you can prove that Norris is a more authoritative source for Webb's estimate than Webb himself.

...and that translates to 125 billion dollars in today's currency.

Stipulated but irrelevant. We don't need to convert to modern dollars because we can reason just as effectively in non-adjusted dollars. Plus the actual expenditures, budgets, and estimates are in non-adjusted dollars, so trying to convert them for inflation adds an unnecessary step.

My point is that as a percentage of the federal budget, it is a huge figure.

And our point, that you still fail to grasp, is that it's invalid to take a lump sum meant to be divided over several years and compare it as a percentage to the budget for any one of those years.

So we spent more on Apollo than on education, more on Apollo than on health care, more on Apollo than on transportation.

No. Your arithmetic error has been explained now to you three times and you fail to grasp it.

Further, you have been given the year-by-year actual dollar expenditures on Apollo for each of its operational years, and you have failed to reconcile your budgetary arithmetic with those figures, or even acknowledge that they exist.

Apollo's expenditures never exceeded 7% of the total U.S. federal expenditures for any of the operational years. You have been shown evidence of this.

This is military stuff Jay.

They don't lay out that kind of dough for iffy projects. This is about GUNS! Big ones.

No. Even if your claims of huge expenditures were true, all you have here is a begging of the question. Showing that a huge amount of money was spent is not proof of your claim for what it was spent on.

 

[Andy_Ross]

I said that Garrison. 30 bil over 11 years.

My point is that the totally federal budget in 1961 was 94 billion dollars. So Kennedy was apprised by Webb, NASA head, that a simulated moon landing would cost the US taxpayers one third of their total 1961 federal budget. .

Not comparing like with like. How much was the federal budget over 11 years? you can't add up 11 years worth of apollo and take it from one years budget.

 

[JayUtah]

I said that Garrison. 30 bil over 11 years

And you seem incapable of dividing 30 billion by 11 years to get the average expenditure per year.

My point is that the totally federal budget in 1961 was 94 billion dollars. So Kennedy was apprised by Webb, NASA head, that a simulated moon landing would cost the US taxpayers one third of their total 1961 federal budget.

No. 30 billion dollars over 11 years would be $2.727 billion the first year -- compared against the $97 billion total expenditures for that year -- followed by another $2.727 billion spent on Apollo in 1962, taken out of that year's new federal budget, followed by another $2.727 billion spent in 1963 (a total of roughly $8.182 billion spent so far), and so forth for each yearly budget until by the end of the 11th year the entire $30 billion dollars would have been spent.

If your mom gives you $7 for your weekly allowance and reminds you that it has to last all week, under what fantasy of accounting would you think you were going to get another $7 the next day?

Now in practice the money wasn't spent in equal parts in each of the affected years. Spending peaked in the late 1960s and then tapered off as development costs were eliminated and more predictable operational costs took over. But in no year did Apollo's costs rise above 7% of the federal budget for that year.

This is in fact what Apollo cost more or less, 30 billion dollars over 11 years time.

No. NASA reckons by one method that the total cost of Apollo, from beginning to end, was just over $19 billion -- that is, the sum total of all money spent on Apollo. The Congress GAO reckons by a different method that the total expenditure -- again, every single dollar spent on it, summed up at the end -- was approximately $24 billion, which nicely brackets Webb's initial 1961 estimate of $20 billion.

You've been shown documents that substantiate this. If instead, as you claim, a total of some three hundred billion dollars was spent (i.e., $30 billion each year for more than 10 years), then you should be able easily to find a creditable source that gives the sum total of Apollo explicitly in the hundreds of billions of dollars in 1960s dollars. Instead they all give the total cost of the project at between $19 and $25 billion, depending on accounting differences.

Webb explicitly gave his estimate for the total cost of the entire project. It is not a yearly cost. I've explained this already three times using different words each time. Are you really this dense?

Apollo is military Garrison face the monitory facts.

No, the monetary facts are as we've explained them now several times and as we've documented. You simply don't seem to understand the basic fiscal concept of amortization, something you typically learn when you make your first car payment.

 

[PetersCreek]

I said that Garrison. 30 bil over 11 years.

Rounding off to the nearest million, it $19.4B over 13 fiscal years (1960–1973). [NASA source: Apollo Program Budget Appropriations]

My point is that the totally federal budget in 1961 was 94 billion dollars.

Once again, your using the wrong figure. Receipts were $94.388B. Outlays (that's the total of what was appropriated and spent) came to $97.723B. [source: Historical Tables, Budget of the U.S. Government, Table 1.1]

Apollo is military Garrison face the monitory facts.

Please provide the Appropriation, Account, Allotment, Budget Line Item, or other fiscal category/classification that supports this claim.

 

[mercatormac]

my point is that as a percentage of the federal budget, it is a small figure. Total federal/state/local spending on education in 1966 was 35.3 billion, health care 8.5 billion, transportation 16.4 billion. The nasa budget in 1966 was 5.933 billion. So we spent less on apollo than on education, less on apollo than on health care, less on apollo than on transportation. it is only fair to include the state/local budgets because some types of spending occur only at the federal level such as nasa and the military whereas most occur at all three levels, otherwise my comparison could be misleading.
this is not military stuff jay because due to the extremely large military budget we don't have to sneak extra spending in under a different category.

They don't lay out that kind of dough for iffy projects so they planned carefully. This is not about guns! it's about rockets, big ones.

ftfy

 

[matt.tansy]

The uncertainties in the times of propagation to those stations was initially on the order of milliseconds. In order to satisfactorily track things in space like rockets, not to mention direct them, steer them, the clock uncertainties had to be reduced from millionths of a second where NASA began, to billionths of a second. Obviously, one of the reasons for the LRRR type and allied/associated "peaceful" experiments.

Ridiculous. Determining the range to the Moon has absolutely nothing to do with improving the accuracy of clocks.

It is not unreasonable to propose that by the time Apollo was completed and the moon fully instrumented for US military use in 1972 or shortly thereafter, our people more likely than not had a full fledged GPS system that employed the moon as a key, if not THE KEY PLATFORM.

It requires 4 transmitting stations to triangulate a position in space. A large constellation of satellites is needed to provide full coverage of the Earth. Having your "KEY" platform inaccessible to users for 12 hours 25 minutes a day is a waste of effort.

 

[Garrison]

I said that Garrison. 30 bil over 11 years.

In terms of gleaning some comparative sense here in 2011 of the fiscal stress incurred by the 1960 American taxpayers in funding this Apollo moondoggle, consider if Obama did as Kennedy did, presented a plan to the American public for say now going to Mars, and funding it over 11 years with one third of the total 2011 federal budget . Obama's 2011 fiscal budget is $ 3.818 trillion. So a 2011 Apollo equivalent program would be a program costing one third of the 2011 budget to be paid out over 11 years. That is One trillion two hundred and seventy there billion dollars to be paid out over 11 years. That is one hundred and fifteen billion dollars a year. $115,000,000,000 annually.

Amazing after apparently getting the correct idea at the beginning of that paragraph you still manage to be completely wrong at the end of it. That $113 billion dollars would be the TOTAL equivalent cost of mounting Apollo today(if your estimate of the original cost and inflation calculation were accurate, neither of which appears to be true) NOT the cost per annum.

If Obama asked for that, even if he could convince us that we could really make it to Mars, really go there, we'd laugh him off the stage.

Well if his maths skills were as bad as yours apparently are probably they would.

Apollo is military Garrison face the monitory facts.

The 'monetary' facts speak quite loudly, and they are saying you can't do simple maths.

 

[TjW]

The moon is one in a system of military satellites/platforms TjW.

Pat Norris, the renown Apollo Program computer specialist/early satellite expert/trajectory system specialist, wrote a great deal in his book SPIES IN THE SKY that speaks directly to the Apollo military mission issues TjW.

You didn't answer my question.

 

[Patrick1000]

The moon is accessable 24/7/365

Ridiculous. Determining the range to the Moon has absolutely nothing to do with improving the accuracy of clocks.



It requires 4 transmitting stations to triangulate a position in space. A large constellation of satellites is needed to provide full coverage of the Earth. Having your "KEY" platform inaccessible to users for 12 hours 25 minutes a day is a waste of effort.

The moon is accessible 24/7/365 matt. The Japanese can access it, the Brits, the South Africans, the Australians, the guys in the Philippines, Hawaii and so forth. The moon can signal anything in its line of sight, including satellites on the other side of the earth from it.

Satellites orbiting at geosynchronous ranges, 22,300 miles and satellites orbiting earth beyond this already distant geosynchronous range are the very satellites that are most involved in/responsible for EARLY WARNING ATTACK SENSING, NAVIGATION, COMMUNICATIONS RELAY, MISSILE TELEMETRY, ELECTRONIC SIGNAL INTERCEPTION ABM RADAR TESTING , and so forth. (This from William E. Burrows' book, DEEP BLACK.)

If the moon is floating over Japan matt, well it hardly eliminates the dark cold gray orb as an asset. Behind the earth relative to the moon, and well left or right, well above or below the earth, there were and are plenty of satellites in direct line of sight reachable from the moon. AND, those satellites being on the earth's far side, the non moon side, in our little example here, would be in direct line of site with Los Angeles, Hawaii, Washington D.C. and so forth.

The moon platform is a platform that cannot be taken out, essentially impossible to jam, stable, well equipped, and within a system of satellites, available to the president or whomever is important enough to merit "using it" it 24/7/365.

I heard they have a military receiver and transmitter matt right on Clavius. Maybe Jay would be so kind as to confirm/disconfirm that one for us, one way or the other.

 

[Patrick1000]

Not at all

There are numerous datum transformation tools on the internet. Using this one: http://home.hiwaay.net/~taylorc/toolbox/geodesy/datumtrans/

and plugging in the coordinates for Moscow (57 N 037 E) and selecting the North American Datum 1927 (mean for CONUS) and WGS 72 datum (alleged by Patrick1000 to have been derived from the Apollo program) the difference in lat and long is 0.1 NM and 0.07 NM, respectively, for a total difference of 0.13 NM.

Obviously, when the Vice Admiral was referring to "pre modern" he was referring to sometime between Eratosthenes and 1927.

G. Harry Stine wrote in his often quoted and authoritative "ICBM, THE WEAPON THAT CHANGED THE WORLD", there were 2 huge guidance related problems facing rocketeers in acute need of solution. According to Stine;

"In 1954, no one knew the exact shape of the earth. Therefore, if you wanted to shoot from, say, New York to Moscow, no one knew exactly how far New York City was from Moscow. THE ERROR COULD BE A MATTER OF SEVERAL MILES."

Caps above are of course mine. The emphasis for all too obvious reasons.

Stine goes on to corroborate one of the explanations for this that we have heard before, the distances across the great oceans were not know with the accuracy requisite for effective ICBM targeting.

Sound familiar? Professor Wampler of Lick Observatory informed us of this several months ago. I have posted rather extensively on the topic.

Additionally, as is true with the moon and its mascons, so too the earth's mass is not distributed uniformly. With regard to ICBM targeting, it simply couldn't be done, not well anyway. This, according to G. Harry Stine. ICBMs weren't accurately targeted until the appropriate measurements were made, measurements which determined the earth's gravitational strength/relative weakness/variability point to point to point over the planet.

Maybe von Braun was channeling Eratosthenes or something like that matt????.........

 

[JayUtah]

The moon is accessible 24/7/365 matt.

No. Two-thirds of the Earth has no view factor to the Moon at any given instant, and vice versa.

Satellites orbiting at geosynchronous ranges...

Try to work out why artificial satellites are better than the Moon at observing the Earth. You're making the case that because we use orbital platforms for observation, command-and-control, and so forth, that any orbital platform (even a natural one) is a strategic advantage. That is not the case. Those artificial platforms (I emphasize the plural) have distinct advantages over a fixed lunar installation. You don't account for this in any of your analysis.

The moon platform is a platform that cannot be taken out...

False. The Soviets had the capacity to land projectiles on the Moon, and did so with suitable accuracy and reliability even before Apollo. A fixed lunar installation is a sitting duck.

The U.S. military studied the strategic factors of space and determined that for most purposes, a single orbital fixture was too vulnerable to attack to be very useful. You don't account for any of that in your analysis except through sheer denial.

...essentially impossible to jam

False. Both the Soviets and the United States coordinated their radio frequencies for lunar missions by registering them with international clearinghouses, precisely so that they would not accidentally jam each other.

Maybe Jay would be so kind as to confirm/disconfirm that one for us, one way or the other.

Not taking the bait.

I wonder why you have stopped talking about the Apollo budget. Has it finally sunk in just how inept and factually bankrupt your analysis was?

 

[Garrison]

The moon is accessible 24/7/365 matt. The Japanese can access it, the Brits, the South Africans, the Australians, the guys in the Philippines, Hawaii and so forth. The moon can signal anything in its line of sight, including satellites on the other side of the earth from it.

Firstly if you are using all these satellites why exactly do you need the moon?
Secondly it doesn't matter how many relay stations on earth can observe the moon, it's the fact that the moon can't observe enemy targets for half the day and it's schedule is completely predictable, which makes it nigh on useless as observation platform even leaving aside the other problems created by its distance.
Thirdly does the fact you've abandoned the financial argument mean you've finally realized how badly wrong your figures were?

 

[JayUtah]

In 1954, no one knew the exact shape of the earth.

True. But why would this require observation from the Moon? Yes, it would require observation from space, at least from some distance out. But explain why an observation post hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth could do the job so much better than an observation post only ten or fifteen thousand miles out.

Additionally, as is true with the moon and its mascons, so too the earth's mass is not distributed uniformly.

And measuring Earth mascons from the Moon makes about as much sense as trying to smell a milkshake from across the street. Mascons can be measured much better, cheaper, and more accurately from Earth orbit. You can even measure them using airplanes, although it's tedious to do so that way on a large scale.

The militarization of space is not equivalent to the militarization of the Moon. Your sources give you good reasons for the former, but your application of them to the latter is naive and poorly informed. I've asked you a number of times to explain why the needs you say were satisfied by clandestine militarization of the Moon could not have been better, more cheaply, and more easily achieved by other means. You keep ignoring that request.

 

[nomuse]

The moon is accessible 24/7/365 matt. The Japanese can access it, the Brits, the South Africans, the Australians, the guys in the Philippines, Hawaii and so forth. The moon can signal anything in its line of sight, including satellites on the other side of the earth from it.

Satellites orbiting at geosynchronous ranges, 22,300 miles and satellites orbiting earth beyond this already distant geosynchronous range are the very satellites that are most involved in/responsible for EARLY WARNING ATTACK SENSING, NAVIGATION, COMMUNICATIONS RELAY, MISSILE TELEMETRY, ELECTRONIC SIGNAL INTERCEPTION ABM RADAR TESTING , and so forth. (This from William E. Burrows' book, DEEP BLACK.)

If the moon is floating over Japan matt, well it hardly eliminates the dark cold gray orb as an asset. Behind the earth relative to the moon, and well left or right, well above or below the earth, there were and are plenty of satellites in direct line of sight reachable from the moon. AND, those satellites being on the earth's far side, the non moon side, in our little example here, would be in direct line of site with Los Angeles, Hawaii, Washington D.C. and so forth.

The moon platform is a platform that cannot be taken out, essentially impossible to jam, stable, well equipped, and within a system of satellites, available to the president or whomever is important enough to merit "using it" it 24/7/365.

I heard they have a military receiver and transmitter matt right on Clavius. Maybe Jay would be so kind as to confirm/disconfirm that one for us, one way or the other.

The Moon sets in about one hour for me. Tell me, if I am an airbase or a tank or a missile crew, what am I going to do if Russia attacks TWO hours from now?

And don't say "look for a satellite" because I could look for a satellite whether or not there was a Moon. Ever. At all.