Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

[nomuse]

Oh, and Patrick...you haven't explained why you quoted only line items in the 1966 Federal budget that were lower than your projection of the Apollo costs -- ignoring completely several line items that were much larger (Pensions, payment on the deficit, etc.)

 

[matt.tansy]

G. Harry Stine wrote in his often quoted and authoritative

Only quoted by you and we will need a citation as to his authoritative credentials. His Wikipedia page says he was one of the founding figures of model rocketry. Well, ok then.

"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.

If Stine wrote that then he did not research the validity of that sentence. Here are the differences between the Clarke Ellipsoid of 1880 and WGS 1972:

Semi-Major Axis (Equatorial Radius) 114.145 meters
Semi-Minor Axis (Polar Radius) -235.65 meters
Flattening 5.47819E-05

The biggest difference, semi-minor axis, is off by 0.002%.

0.002%. I would call that "knowing the shape of the Earth" pretty dang well.

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."

I have already given you the tool you need to determine how far Moscow shifted between two datums. For those surfing the thread, it was 0.13 NM.

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.

All that was accomplished by Satellite geodesy long before anything landed on the Moon. So your Apollo geodesy hypothesis remains cold and buried.

 

[matt.tansy]

P.S. If you're going to relay a signal from the Moon via a geosynchronous satellite to get this alleged "GPS accuracy" then the position of the satellite needs to be determined with the same accuracy as the Moon's transmitting station. Therefore, you do not need a transmitting station on the Moon.

To jam a signal you do not need to jam the transmitting antenna; you jam the receiver.

 

[sts60]

I see the OP, despite his claims to be a "mathematician", still hasn't been able to figure out the difference between a budget number quoted for an entire program spread over a decade and a budget number for a single year, and is still insisting that Apollo cost over one and a quarter trillion dollars in 2012 terms. In other words, the self-proclaimed "mathematician" and "top Apollo researcher" is still off by roughly an order of magnitude, despite careful explanations by several people who actually know what they're talking about, and despite having actual expenditures provided to him.

Also, he doesn't grasp that one can't simply make up by a number for a given year and come up with a fraction of the budget for that year, then multiply that fraction by the budget for another year many decades later and translate that into actual dollars.

Speaking of making things up, the entire claim of military hardware on the Moon is made up, as are the claims of anything but incidental military benefits from hardware landed on the Moon, as are the claims of hardware being landed by an unmanned LM - which contradict his earlier claims that the LM never landed on the Moon, which contradicted his earlier claims that the LM would work, which contradicted his original claim that the LM wouldn't work.

That claim was tied to another fantasy that Luna 15, a lander which (crash-)landed a significant part of the Moon's circumference away, could somehow have conclusively imaged the A11 landing site. Which was tied to a made-up claim of a "Surveyor-type" vehicle landing an LRRR by itself, which contradicts the latest version of his claim (about an unmanned LM). None of these stories had any evidence to support any of them, despite many requests for same to his various incarnations here and elsewhere.

Another pretty funny bit was the part about how lunar retroreflectors were required for timing purposes, which was also funny in that said alleged timing requirements ("billionths of a second") were needed to guide space missions. NASA had already sent probes to Mars and Venus before Apollo 8 circumnavigated the Moon - or, for that matter, even before Surveyor had landed there. And those unmanned probes not only went many times farther with much more energetic trajectories, they did not have human pilots augmenting the navigation approach - which enjoyed options not available to interplanetary missions.

That's the problem with just making up claims about things you don't understand, as the OP has repeatedly done; you never know when your claims are not only completely unsupported, but also hilariously at odds with both domain practices and observed reality in general.

By the way, the OP also botched an attempted comparison between Apollo expenditures and those for education and transportation. He claimed some numbers for the total NASA expenses for a certain year (which were slightly greater than numbers he claimed for the other categories), and then claimed that the Apollo outlay was greater than those for education and transportation. The "top Apollo researcher" didn't even grasp that Apollo was only part - even if a large part for a few years - of the total NASA budget.

 

[Patrick1000]

Navy liked the moon relay because it was not jammable

P.S. If you're going to relay a signal from the Moon via a geosynchronous satellite to get this alleged "GPS accuracy" then the position of the satellite needs to be determined with the same accuracy as the Moon's transmitting station. Therefore, you do not need a transmitting station on the Moon.

To jam a signal you do not need to jam the transmitting antenna; you jam the receiver.

The point is/was/will be matt, the Navy guys liked their moon relay set up, cuz' it wasn't jammable. That is per them.

So if you have a receiver there, and actively transmit, you would not be able to "jam" the receiver, unless you were right on top of it/knew where it was.

 

[Patrick1000]

I'll quote Miller for you here, his credentials are impeccable

Only quoted by you and we will need a citation as to his authoritative credentials. His Wikipedia page says he was one of the founding figures of model rocketry. Well, ok then.





If Stine wrote that then he did not research the validity of that sentence. Here are the differences between the Clarke Ellipsoid of 1880 and WGS 1972:

Semi-Major Axis (Equatorial Radius) 114.145 meters
Semi-Minor Axis (Polar Radius) -235.65 meters
Flattening 5.47819E-05

The biggest difference, semi-minor axis, is off by 0.002%.

0.002%. I would call that "knowing the shape of the Earth" pretty dang well.




I have already given you the tool you need to determine how far Moscow shifted between two datums. For those surfing the thread, it was 0.13 NM.





All that was accomplished by Satellite geodesy long before anything landed on the Moon. So your Apollo geodesy hypothesis remains cold and buried.

From Jerry Miller's highly regarded book, STOCKPILE. Vice Admiral Jerry Miller was a nuclear weapons delivery pilot. He helped to prepare the national Strategic Target List, not to mention the infamous Single Integrated Orchestrated Plan for waging nuclear war. That was the comprehensive plan to vaporize Mikhail Baryshnikov, Sviatoslav Richter, and the other commie no goods in one poof. Here's Jerry;

"Some physical facts had an effect on accuracy. One was the precise location of the target. In the early days, latitude and longitude were used to define the location of a target. As the science of geodetics improved with the use of satellite, we began to obtain a much better picture of the exact location of a target. For example, Moscow moved about a mile as we improved our ability to determine its true location. Geodetics improved accuracy."


There you have it matt. Let's see Baryshnikov was 21 in 1969. Guess he heard the capitalist dogs got his exact address there in Leningrad in '69. That set the wheels turning. Only took him 5 years to "get out", '74. Not bad for such a talented sitting duck.

 

[JayUtah]

The point is/was/will be matt, the Navy guys liked their moon relay set up, cuz' it wasn't jammable. That is per them.

So if you have a receiver there, and actively transmit, you would not be able to "jam" the receiver, unless you were right on top of it/knew where it was.

Already discussed. The Soviets and the Americans had to coordinate their radio frequencies for their "receivers" (i.e., unmanned) spacecraft operating in cislunar space so that they wouldn't accidentally jam them just by normal operations. You clearly know nothing about actual radio operations in space.

From Jerry Miller's highly regarded book, STOCKPILE.

"As the science of geodetics improved with the use of satellite, we began to obtain a much better picture of the exact location of a target."

That's a case for using satellites, not a case for using the Moon. No one is disputing the use of artificial satellites in military operations. You seem to be under the strange delusion that this means the Moon too. You've been asked to reconcile the differences and difficulties and you have not done so.

You say a radio relay on the Moon is "unjammable," but you haven't explained the counterexamples.

You say the Moon is untouchable, but you haven't been able to explain the counterexamples (e.g., booster impacts).

You say the "enormous" budget of Apollo could only be used for weapons, but you haven't reconciled those claims with the actual expenditures and estimates.

Does that sum up the extent of your ineptness over the past week? Please at least try to engage in the conversation.

 

[matt.tansy]

From Jerry Miller's highly regarded book, STOCKPILE. Vice Admiral Jerry Miller was a nuclear weapons delivery pilot. He helped to prepare the national Strategic Target List, not to mention the infamous Single Integrated Orchestrated Plan for waging nuclear war. That was the comprehensive plan to vaporize Mikhail Baryshnikov, Sviatoslav Richter, and the other commie no goods in one poof. Here's Jerry;

"Some physical facts had an effect on accuracy. One was the precise location of the target. In the early days, latitude and longitude were used to define the location of a target. As the science of geodetics improved with the use of satellite, we began to obtain a much better picture of the exact location of a target. For example, Moscow moved about a mile as we improved our ability to determine its true location. Geodetics improved accuracy."

It seems you've been reading the links I've been providing. Be careful. You don't want to learn anything that would prove you wrong.

You've already quoted from VADM Miller's book. It's just another argument from authority. It doesn't hold up to the known science of geodesy. The North American Datum of 1927, which was developed for use in the continental USA, which means its accuracy degrades with distance outside the continental USA, is only 0.13 NM different than the World Geodetic System of 1972 for the position of Moscow.

 

[matt.tansy]

The point is/was/will be matt, the Navy guys liked their moon relay set up, cuz' it wasn't jammable. That is per them.

So if you have a receiver there, and actively transmit, you would not be able to "jam" the receiver, unless you were right on top of it/knew where it was.

If you're going to have a transmitter on the Moon to relay information sent from the Earth then, of course, it's going to have a receiver. But for someone on the Earth to receive that information they need to have a receiver as well. Get it? It's not that hard of a problem to figure out.

 

[TjW]

The point is/was/will be matt, the Navy guys liked their moon relay set up, cuz' it wasn't jammable. That is per them.

So if you have a receiver there, and actively transmit, you would not be able to "jam" the receiver, unless you were right on top of it/knew where it was.

This is just wrong.

All that's required to make it unusable is to hit the repeater input with enough power. Eventually, the repeater front end saturates. Then it can't hear anything.
The beauty of this is that the more power the legitimate user of the repeater transmits with, the less power the interferer requires for the receiver to reach saturation.

 

[Andy_Ross]

So just jam the people the message is aimed at.

WHenever we were on Exercise in the Norht Atlantic we had a Red Trawler shadowing us listening in on our sigs traffic. We would plau music to him. Signals from the moon are going to be tiny compared with the local mush. Why do you think the Earth stations had such big dishes to pick up Apollo?

 

[Patrick1000]

For what it is worth, that is what I read.

This is just wrong.

All that's required to make it unusable is to hit the repeater input with enough power. Eventually, the repeater front end saturates. Then it can't hear anything.
The beauty of this is that the more power the legitimate user of the repeater transmits with, the less power the interferer requires for the receiver to reach saturation.

For what it is worth, that is what I read TjW. The Navy guys liked it because it could not be jammed. Perhaps what I read was not correct, but it does make at least some sense to me, certainly with regard to natural jamming anyway. Anyhoo, it was the first functioning relay regardless.

Did you know TjW one of the ways they detected Russian ICBM launches was by way of picking up Ruskie missile telemetry that had bounced off the moon? So of course during Apollo, one of the things they would do would be to put a bona fide receiver up there. Why bounce, when one can catch????

Another thought I just had TjW, when one thinks about it, assuming Apollo did employ the LMs themselves as the devices, the military hardware they landed on the moon, that would mean the LM itself, the basic idea of employing the LM, was not a true "decision point". It was part of the grand Apollo scheme/script to begin with. Assuming that to be the case, John Houbolt, the guy who invented the "lunar orbital rendezavous" concept, he may be a fraud program Apollo plant.

I say this because the LM thing seen in this way is not a real "decision point". And as I have pointed out in the case of Steve Bales and Jack Garmin, the "1202 GO! Brothers" bothof those dudes are fraud guys cuz' the 1202 "Go!" really never had the potential to be a "NO GO!!!ABORT!!!!". Likewise, we may find that the LM decision broadly speaking is not a true "decision point" as they are going to park a LM no matter what. That wouldn't make Thomas Kelly , the Grumman engineeer who designed the LM a fraud guy. One would think Kelly to be legit, a real engineer, a real designer, but Houbolt, the guy who proposed and pushed for the LM, that may well be all an act, an act von Braun was aware of from the get go. They plant this guy to push for a LOR, and it looks like he is this weird, eccentric genius outsider, when all along, he is a fraud insider, big time. Von Braun goes, "YES!!! I finally see it!!! You are right Houbolt!!! " Which is all a big act.

So TjW, we'll pencil in for now John Houbolt as a possible perp. See how much progress we are making figuring out who is on the inside?Told you this was not going to be so hard. Just need a little patience.

 

[Patrick1000]

Au Contraire Jay

Already discussed. The Soviets and the Americans had to coordinate their radio frequencies for their "receivers" (i.e., unmanned) spacecraft operating in cislunar space so that they wouldn't accidentally jam them just by normal operations. You clearly know nothing about actual radio operations in space.



That's a case for using satellites, not a case for using the Moon. No one is disputing the use of artificial satellites in military operations. You seem to be under the strange delusion that this means the Moon too. You've been asked to reconcile the differences and difficulties and you have not done so.

You say a radio relay on the Moon is "unjammable," but you haven't explained the counterexamples.

You say the Moon is untouchable, but you haven't been able to explain the counterexamples (e.g., booster impacts).

You say the "enormous" budget of Apollo could only be used for weapons, but you haven't reconciled those claims with the actual expenditures and estimates.

Does that sum up the extent of your ineptness over the past week? Please at least try to engage in the conversation.

Au Contraire Jay! Our instrumented moon is but one "satellite" in a grand system, but what a ONE it is. You cannot measure gravity with earth orbiting satellites Jay as you can studying the earth moon sytem by way of an LRRR. One needs a very accurate measurement of gravity's strength in order to convert the Bolshoi Ballet Company into a high energy plasma Jay.

There is nothing like instrumenting the moon my friend, in terms of 1960 vintage ICBM work anyhoo. God only knows what else they were doing up there. Makes one wonder if there is any truth to that "HAARP" nonsense. Know what I mean Jay?

Think of it this way. The moon is what amounts to an unmanned military base/platform. That is pretty much what it amounts to Jay. We run it from here. Very cool on some levels I think. though I would hate to see anything happen to the Bolshoi, know what I mean? Anyhoo, pretty dumb to try and keep it secret now that everything is so insanely obvious with regard to what they were and are up to. I ain't paying for this stuff any more.......

Obama, I want my money back!

 

[Patrick1000]

Whatever you do, don't read the Dallas Morning News from July 24 2011

How embarrassing it is almost for me to be an American this evening as I go through these old incriminating newspaper articles. Maybe I will get a paper bag, paint "Old Glory" with a red circle around it and a line though that circle and flag, and wear said bag around tomorrow. This one is bad guys. It really is. Check this out.........

There is a UPI article I read in the Dallas Morning News from 07/24/1969, the day the Apollo 11 capsule allegedly made its simulated non splashdown. Harlan Smith, the McDonald Observatory Astronomer/telescope expert is quoted in the article as saying, now get this, he could not find the LRRR, partly because he did not know where it was. He was trying the most likely coordinates, but sdince the weather was bad, he had only been able to test/check for the 6 most likey spots, the 6 coordinate solutions viewed as most probable, the 6 places where the Eagle might most likely be.

Do you believe this? Why does the guy need to check 2 spots, let alone 6, let alone more than 6 once the weather clears. The Lick Observatory guys have the exact spot; 00 41' 15" north and 23 26' 00" east. Talk about coordinate confusuion! Talk about getting played for a chump!!!

 

[drewid]

So we can add radio jamming to the ever-growing list.

 

[matt.tansy]

You cannot measure gravity with earth orbiting satellites Jay as you can studying the earth moon sytem by way of an LRRR.

Add orbital mechanics to the list.

 

[Garrison]

Au Contraire Jay! Our instrumented moon is but one "satellite" in a grand system, but what a ONE it is. You cannot measure gravity with earth orbiting satellites Jay as you can studying the earth moon sytem by way of an LRRR.

Actually you can achieve vastly better accuracy from LEO as GOCE demonstrates.

One needs a very accurate measurement of gravity's strength in order to convert the Bolshoi Ballet Company into a high energy plasma Jay.

And as has been pointed out they knew it with an accuracy more than adequate for thermonuclear weapons well before Apollo.

There is nothing like instrumenting the moon my friend, in terms of 1960 vintage ICBM work anyhoo. God only knows what else they were doing up there. Makes one wonder if there is any truth to that "HAARP" nonsense. Know what I mean Jay?

We know that you mean to ignore the hard facts that prove your every claim wrong. The rest of this post of your post is just waffle so I've cut it.

Oh and are you ever going to admit you mistake about the Apollo budget, or is that yet another glaring mistake to be skated over?

 

[TjW]

For what it is worth, that is what I read TjW. The Navy guys liked it because it could not be jammed. Perhaps what I read was not correct, but it does make at least some sense to me, certainly with regard to natural jamming anyway. Anyhoo, it was the first functioning relay regardless.

Natural jamming? Jamming is deliberate interference with a signal. While all jamming is interference, not all interference is jamming.

 

[Erock]

There is a UPI article I read in the Dallas Morning News from 07/24/1969, the day the Apollo 11 capsule allegedly made its simulated non splashdown. Harlan Smith, the McDonald Observatory Astronomer/telescope expert is quoted in the article as saying, now get this, he could not find the LRRR, partly because he did not know where it was. He was trying the most likely coordinates, but sdince the weather was bad, he had only been able to test/check for the 6 most likey spots, the 6 coordinate solutions viewed as most probable, the 6 places where the Eagle might most likely be.

Do you believe this? Why does the guy need to check 2 spots, let alone 6, let alone more than 6 once the weather clears. The Lick Observatory guys have the exact spot; 00 41' 15" north and 23 26' 00" east. Talk about coordinate confusuion! Talk about getting played for a chump!!!

Talk about selectively reinforcing what you alone have decided. This account calls into doubt the veracity of Wampler and Stone in their recollection. Your conclusion is illogical and highly predictable. What would be more likely to be correct, an account written at the time, or an account written 42 years later?

 

[slyjoe]

Add orbital mechanics to the list.

I think orbital mechanics is on the list already - maybe add gravity?