Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

[JayUtah]

I'll provide you with another one of my signature vacuum sealed presentations...

If by "vacuum sealed" you mean "completely isolated from the rest of the environment," then I agree. Your claims simply do not correspond with reality. Just in the past week or so you've raised several topics, each of which has demonstrated your total ignorance of the subject, each of which has been shot down within minutes of your posting it, and each of which is now treated to stony silence from you.

You are demonstrably incapable of defending your beliefs in the face of the relevant facts. So yes, you are reasoning in a vacuum.

As we'll see below, you just lay out an elaborate straw man, eviscerate him for your amusement, and then pretend it has any relevance to the real space program. You're not an expert, and at this rate you never will be, and it's a good thing that the real space program is in the hands of competent experts who accept Apollo as a real space program.

There were no redundancy provisions in this system.

It's a good thing, then, that Apollo spacecraft were engineered to operate autonomously from ground control if needed. This went back to the original Apollo design, before it was tasked as the Moon landing program. The original designers envisioned a case where several Apollo spacecraft would be aloft at any given time, and MSFN could pay attention to only one of them at a time.

Apollo was never designed to require constant contact with MSFN for each spacecraft.

The system was that tenuous.

And known to be such. Therefore constant contact with MSFN was never a mission requirement.

Apollo missions were meant to be flown by skilled pilots in spacecraft containing a high degree of on-board automation. Each phase of each Apollo flight plan contained contingency procedures to apply if MSFN contact was lost for an extended period of time. The original Apollo design never called for constant MSFN contact anyway, so it's no problem if contact were lost for accidental reasons -- intentional occasional loss of contact was part of the design.

No tracking, no communication for five and a half hours, think about that..... One dish out......

We have, and so did the Apollo designers. That's why they built the system the way they did, to employ skilled pilots and a degree of onboard automation.

Apollo spacecraft were design to be flown without ground contact for extended periods. You obviously didn't know that.

Obviously, such a set up is unacceptable.

Begging the question. Nothing of the sort is "obvious," and you're not qualified to make that judgment. Just because you, in your vast ignorance of space operations in general and Apollo design in particular, wave your hand and declare this to be "unacceptable" doesn't make it so.

As we've belabored now for months, your uninformed expectations are not the yardstick by which authenticity is judged. And those whose expectations are properly informed, and whose yardsticks are therefore properly calibrated, reach a vastly different conclusion than you do. Try to work out why.

They would have died, or may well have anyway, were any of this real.

Huh? How were the life-support systems in any way dependent on MSFN?

Please describe in precise technical terms how loss of contact with MSFN for a number of hours would have resulted in the astronauts' deaths. I know I've asked you for detailed rationales like this before, and you've declined to provide them. So I don't expect you to actually give me any details here. But I have to ask, just so it's obvious to the rest of the world that you're entirely incapable of providing it.

Clearly the missions are unmanned as were the missions manned the system would be viewed by anyone as unsafe to say the least.

Begging the question. "Viewed by anyone" is the telltale phrase people use when committing this fallacy.

The judgment of "anyone" is irrelevant since this is a matter of engineering expertise. Your judgment in particular is irrelevant since we know it to be poorly informed. You haven't given any sort of rationale for what threshold of safety would be acceptable in this case and exactly how loss of MSFN contact for a few hours would create an unsafe condition by that standard.

"It's fake because I say it's fake."

You simply would not send astronauts into space...

No. You're imposing your personal standard of safety, without providing a rationale. Begging the question.

...with their life line being a single antenna...

No. You define MSFN as a "lifeline" without dealing with the fact that Apollo was explicitly designed otherwise. You are ignorant of the facts.

...the failure of which might equate with their deaths.

No. You have failed to express any actual causal chain where the loss of MSFN contact for a few hours would result in death. Begging the question.

Now let's examine the role of a communication network in unmanned missions. Yes, Apollo provided a high degree of automation on board the spacecraft, but it was the kind of automation meant to relieve the pilots of certain tedious tasks while leaving the high-level judgment to them. The AGC/LGC contained very little high-level reasoning. That was meant to be accomplished by the pilots, using their senses augmented by the instrumentation provided in the automation. It's a closed-loop system with a high degree of responsiveness and adaptability. The lack of such a system is why so many Mars-bound systems failed.

In an unmanned system, your brains are either onboard morons (i.e., simple automation and control systems) or are ground-based humans hobbled by the limitations of available telemetry and telecommand systems. Since you say Grumman didn't have to do anything special to the LM to make it unmanned, you don't have any onboard brains. That means PDI, for example, has to be flown by remote control -- a guy sitting at a console watching TV screens and fingering a joystick that sends commands to the relevant autopilot programs, just as the human pilots would have had to do.

That's quite a trick, considering PDI occurs when the LM is out of contact with the MSFN as a planned outage. These spacecraft spend half of each lunar orbit on the far side, out of MSFN contact, and therefore unable to send information or receive commands.

What if the hypothetical ground-based pilot sees that P64's LPD has centered on a rocky rille, but a MSFN antenna fails before he can change the LPD? What if the LPD redesignation command never makes it to the spacecraft? The result is a huge crash^*. What would a human pilot have done? Why, simply say, "Oops, we should probably not land there," and wiggle his right wrist slightly to tell the LM to land long. No communication needed with the ground.

So that illustrates just how vital a reliable communication network is to an unmanned mission. Without it, you have no way to connect the brain to the joystick. In a manned mission, the brain and the joystick are connected by two feet of highly trained meat and nerve endings, and the 3D vision system is connected to the brain by a couple inches of miraculous nerves. Not so if MSFN fails and leaves your ground-based pilot with a screen full of static.

Your scenario requires a more reliable network than was provided. So all your attempts to show how fragile the MSFN was really end up shooting your claims in the foot, because without it none of your unmanned missions would succeed. Way to go.

---

^*A crash was inevitable anyway in your scenario because P66 takes its input from the onboard hardware, not telemetry. No ground-based pilot could have flown the as-built LM in P66. In the J-type LM the horizontal residuals could be canceled out automatically, but in the H-type LM the pilot had to do that manually. And there was no ground-based way to control the ROD switch, so the Apollo 11 under ground control would have plowed into the boulder field at an h-dot of around 12 fps and a forward speed of about 8 fps, guaranteeing almost complete destruction of the spacecraft.

 

[matt.tansy]

P.S. The 9 meter dishes were used to track Apollo at the Moon at the same time as the bigger dishes and their data was fed to the MSFN in case a big dish lost comms. The MSFN was very redundant.

 

[Tomblvd]

Jay said the LM could not auto land, I showed him to be, proved him to be WRONG. The point is as simple AND AS IMPORTANT! as that.

We all know Lovell had stated he was going to allow the LM to auto land. We all know the story about the Grumman engineers and their confidence in their "bug". I hardly need to remind you guys of this stuff.

Jay went into great detail in post 4472 showing how wrong you are. Please address the major points made in that post.

 

[JayUtah]

Jay said the LM could not auto land, I showed him to be, proved him to be WRONG.

No, you just proved that you didn't understand what those men meant by "automatic." You assumed that your personal definition was the one they intended.

The point is as simple AND AS IMPORTANT! as that.

No, you oversimplified it. I went back and took you through the PGNS landing sequence in great detail, pointing out exactly where and when the pilot input was required. I notice that you haven't even attempted to address that. You simply restate your original point and declare victory. You're not even paying attention.

Again, you read summaries in popular sources and think this gives you sufficient understand. Instead, I look at the actual designs and computer programs, from the perspective of decades of engineering experience.

You really don't know what you're talking about.

 

[matt.tansy]

Ah, my first post did not get approved. Here it is in a nutshell:

Each Deep Space Network (DSN) had a "Wing Station", a redundant station located near the main station:
-Goldstone had two 26-meters dishes and a 64 meter dish: Goldstone, Goldstone Wing, and Goldstone Mars.
-Honeysuckle, incorrectly named "Canberra" by Patrick1000, had two 26 meter dishes and a 64 meter dish: Honeysuckle, Honeysuckle Wing, and Parkes (300 km north of Honeysuckle). It was Parkes that relayed the Apollo 11 TV transmission from the Moon.
-Madrid had a 26 meter dish and a 9 meter dish: Madrid and Madrid Wing. As I pointed out in my previous post, the 9 meter dishes were capable of and in fact did, track the Apollo spacecraft at the Moon.

 

[Garrison]

Who says these unmanned missions are of higher technical complexity?

That would be everyone minus you.

 

[nomuse]

Who says these unmanned missions are of higher technical complexity?

Manned missions seem the most complex to me, given the safety concrens, and if an unmanned mission fails, there is no fallout. With manned missions, people die. I do not understand your rationale nomuse.

Which is why test pilots get the big bucks. Throughout the history of aviation, it has been considered worthwhile to have human hands (and human eyes) on the test vehicle in order to adapt to what the engineers did not predict and the computer wasn't programmed for, and (if worst comes to worst) report on what went wrong.

Think about this. At some point in the history of an aircraft or a spacecraft, it is going to carry human beings. Would you make those first human beings civilian ticket-holders, or would you make them trained professionals with experience in dealing with whatever bugs might have snuck past prior testing?

The Apollo craft, like the Gemini and Mercury before them, were designed to be man-rated. Which means that at some point during their operation they had to transition from automation to carrying humans. If you follow the sequence of Apollo launches, you see a clear progression of transitioning one new piece of the final package after another, until they were testing the final combined vehicle.

Unmanned parking of a military instrument a' la a big version of Surveyor seems a heck of a lot easier than landing men on the moon if you ask me, and if you ask the Ruskies as well. They had no trouble with unmanned soft landings, relatively speaking anyway. They at least achieved them.

You've forgotten your own scenario again.

Your automated/military/fake Apollo missions are not the kind of mission where the kind of failures that plagued the Luna program (or any nation's early rocket program) are appropriate. Remember; every time one of your Saturn V stacks launches, it is being followed by the eyes of millions of people who think there are live astronauts aboard.

Furthermore, when it gets to the Moon, it can't just land/crash randomly. Instead, it is entering into a cat-and-mouse game with a hostile foreign power, where the nature of the equipment carried, its function, even the precise location of the landing site must be carefully hidden.

What happens to this hoax of yours if the first stage starts pogoing and the rocket has to be destroyed by range control? What happens if it fails to enter lunar capture and instead comes bumbling back to Earth, to be watched by every telescope...and maybe even crash in lots of revealing pieces somewhere in Siberia?

You've forgotten entirely that your fantasy scenario requires both trying to hide sophisticated military technology and the very purpose of your missions from the Soviet Union. And in case those stakes aren't bad enough, you are also trying to fool the American public and the entire watching world.

Which means any screw-up, even as simple as one of your automated tape recorders (playing back pretend astronaut voices) jams, puts you and your fellow conspirators at risk for being hung out to dry for embezzlement at the least, grand treason most likely, and possibly mass murder as well (if the conspiracy was also involved in silencing whistle-blowers).

They, meaning the Ruskies, never pretended to do manned missons like we did, presumably because they could not pull then off either. But the unmanned stuff must be simpler, has to be. Consider the Mars probes for instance nomuse. No way we can do manned stuff to the RED PLANET, but the unmanned stuff is done rather routinely now, albeit with some inherent difficulties.

You are a bright guy nomuse, but you are way way way way off target here with your general point of counter.

Are you withdrawing your claim of a remote-controlled active LRRR that can shut down when anyone other than the military tries to access it, and has maintained that functionality to the present day?

Or have you simply forgotten that, and the variety of other technological feats you have propounded over this thread and others?

No, Patrick. You never suggested that instead of the manned Apollo missions, the final result of the Apollo spacecraft was to make a random landing (or crash) on some part of the Moon, take a few pictures then die.

The missions you describe had more sophisticated aims. As a single for-instance, every optical astronomer involved in pinging the LRRR's on the lunar surface agrees that the ones deployed automatically by the Soviets are of inferior quality and drastically inferior focus. So, already, something as simple as the large focused LRRR left by Apollo 15 is clearly ahead of the Soviet accomplishment.

And we are not restricted to simply having to fulfill your claims for the missions, Patrick. We also have to account for all the observations made of the Apollo missions, from radio traffic to the albedo change during urine dumps! Unless you want to greatly expand your conspiracy, your spacecraft and operation needs the sophistication to handle these needs as well.

 

[nomuse]

It is totally fake Garrison, I'll prove it to you right here, and in so doing, I'll provide you with another one of my signature vacuum sealed presentations for full on, flat out, Apollo Mission fraud. Consider the following my fellow Apollo historian.

According to the 1968 NASA Publication, "APOLLO 8, MAN AROUND THE MOON", so long as the spacecraft did not stray out of earth orbit, the ship could be followed by way of the tracking system's 30 foot antennas. Once out of earth orbit, NASA had to employ the 85 foot antennas located in Canberra/Australia, Madrid/Spain and Goldstone/California. This, for both tracking AND communications. The respective longitudes of these stations were 149 degrees east, 355 degrees east, and 243 degrees east.

There were no redundancy provisions in this system. If one of the antennas went out for whatever reason, communication and tracking of the astronauts would have been lost per NASA's own report on the subject. Let's take a look at the consequences given the system's being set up this way, set up without any back up whatsoever.

Between Canberra's longitude and Madrid's longitude, the earth turning "eastward" there are 154 degrees, 10,652 miles at the earth's equator, given an earth circumference of 24,900 miles. If the Canberra dish went out for whatever reason, the Goldstone dish 92 degrees to the east of Canberra could cover for a while, but that coverage would only be for 88 degrees of rotation or equivalently, just a little under 6 hours. This would leave another roughly 5 hours of vulnerability where neither Goldstone nor Madrid were in the moon's line of sight. So, during those 5 hours, were Canberra out, tracking and communications with the astronauts would have been completely out for 5 long hours. All this, with the failure of a single dish. The system was that tenuous.

The Madrid dish was 112 degrees west of Goldstone, and so if Madrid had gone out, with glodstone's longitude 7,747 miles away at the eaquator, and with Canberra 154 degrees to the east, the latter station could have provided coverage for Madrid for some 26 degrees of rotation only, less than two hours. As such with Goldstone then 5 and a half more hours away from the moon's line of sight by rotation, it would have taken that long for the California dish to come on line. No tracking, no communication for five and a half hours, think about that..... One dish out......

If Goldstone went out, with Canberra 94 degrees to the west, or equivalently 6,502 miles distant longitudinally(at the equator), and Madrid 112 degrees to the east, the latter station could have provided coverage for the down Goldstone antenna for 68 degrees or roughly 4 and a half hours. With Canberra a little over six hours of rotation away, this is the best situation, and there would be no communication for perhaps an hour and a half or so.

In summary, the system was vulnerable such that with one anentaa going out, there could have been no tracking an no communication for 5 and a half hours or so. NONE! Far too long were a ship in trouble.

Obviously, such a set up is unacceptable. Imagine were Apollo 13 real, and Canberra goes off line for whatever reason. There would have been no communication with the Apollo 13 astronauts for as many as 5 and a half hours. They would have died, or may well have anyway, were any of this real. IT is not of course. This is not a real communication system obviously. It functions, but is not part of a MANNED Apollo mission system. Clearly the missions are unmanned as were the missions manned the system would be viewed by anyone as unsafe to say the least.

The fact there was no redundancy in the long distance tracking/communications system to back up the large dish antennas at Canberra, Madrid, and Goldstone, proves Apollo fraudulent in the sense that it proves the missions had to be unmanned, for safety's sake alone.

You simply would not send astronauts into space with their life line being a single antenna, the failure of which might equate with their deaths. That would be reckless to say the least. So we may confidently conclude, it simply did not occur.

It is as simple as that Garrison.

Apollo, all of it, must be fraudulent in the sense that the missions were unmanned. They had to be. The system simply was not safe for the complexities, requirements of manned space flight. Witness this profoundly disturbing lack of communication redundancy.

Are you still claiming Apollo was a completely automated mission? Wouldn't this potential you describe for loss of communications be kind of a problem for a spacecraft that was under remote control?

How does the one assertion support the scenario of the other?

 

[Laton]

I understand Charles Lindbergh had no radio during his trans-Atlantic flight, obviously that didn't take place either as it would have been to dangerous to be out of touch with land-based stations.

 

[Hans]

I understand Charles Lindbergh had no radio during his trans-Atlantic flight, obviously that didn't take place either as it would have been to dangerous to be out of touch with land-based stations.

Charles was in that aircraft for thirty-three and one half-hours it had no bathroom - I cry fake!! lol

 

[tsig]

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.

The thing is that America had thousands of nuclear weapons.

 

[PhantomWolf]

I understand Charles Lindbergh had no radio during his trans-Atlantic flight, obviously that didn't take place either as it would have been to dangerous to be out of touch with land-based stations.

Exactly, and the idea of Columbus, Drake, and Cook sailing for months on dangerous seas doing trips that men did die on and without any contact with their home Admiralties. Unthinkable.

Of course the idea that perhaps explorers have always been willing to take risks with their lives to further the knowledge of mankind is just preposterous. That the likes of Magellan, Drake, Cook, Scott, and Mallory were obviously fake because no one would put themselves and others in such dangerous positions.

Then again, perhaps some people didn't understand Gus Grissom's famous , and unfortunately prophetic words....

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

Virgil "Gus" Grissom

The Astronauts were aware of the risks, they were men that flew fighter planes in combat against the Soviets over Korea. Many felt guilty for not being in Veitnam with their peers, fighting beside them and being shot at, a far more dangerous occupation than going into space. Others were test pilots at a time that 1 in 3 test pilots were being killed on those flights. These weren't men who were scared of death or even just being out of contact with Flight Control for 5 hours. To even suggest it shows a total lack of understanding of who these guys were and what they did.

 

[Patrick1000]

Every source I have looked at matt says the big dishes were needed for communication

P.S. The 9 meter dishes were used to track Apollo at the Moon at the same time as the bigger dishes and their data was fed to the MSFN in case a big dish lost comms. The MSFN was very redundant.

Every source I have looked at matt says the big dishes were needed for communication. EVERY ONE! If I might die in outer space, seems like I'd have more of a fighting chance regardless of the problem were someone able to talk to me and tell me what to do, assist me with getting out of whatever predicament. Ain't gonna' be able to do that with a 9 meter dish. Maybe they can "track my death". That hardly inspires confidence matt, and strongly implies Fraud, matter-o-fact my good friend.

The system generally is very much not redundant at all matt. Let's take a look at the tracking complex in Madrid.

http://insa.org/node/112

The complex there features/featured a total of 6 dishes; DSS-54, DSS-55, DSS-61, DSS-63, DSS-65, DSS-66.

Of the six dishes, only 2 were installed pre 1968; DSS-61 was installed in 1965 and DSS-66 was installed in 1967. The latter, the DSS-66 dish, was a 26 meter dish primarily employed in near earth tracking.

The DSS-61 dish was an azimuth/elevation mount, and the DSS-66 dish a north south/east west or X/Y mount.

First of all, the DSS-66 dish was a dish utilized for near earth operations. If DSS-61 "went out" would DSS-66 be adequate to handle tracking and communications for both craft, the command module and the Eagle by itself? I see no support for that, and I suspect that it is not the case. Were DSS-61 to have gone out for whatever reason, I suspect DSS-66 operating alone, would not have been able to track both craft, and perform transmitting and receiving duties for both. During a landing, and an ascent, this would be of course particularly critical.

AND ! , even if that were the case, let's assume both dishes are operating in the parlance of Michael Collins, "swimmingly", there was no Houston/Madrid link back up. Regardless of how well the dishes operated, and again, I would emphasize were say DSS-61 down, DSS-66 in all likelihood could NOT handle tracking of both ships and transmission/reception for both, STILL!!!, a problem with the Houston-to-Madrid-to-Houston-to-Madrid link would be potentially disastrous, say in an Apollo 13 scenario type situation.

This is a rinky dink system Matt, and you know it.

Apollo is Fraud my friends. Let's shout it from the roof tops right into that all knowing, dark and unforgiving sky.

Phony, fake, bogus, bull, charade, jive, con, scammy, malarkey it is matt, 100% pure invention, ZERO percent reality.

 

[TjW]

Every source I have looked at matt says the big dishes were needed for communication. EVERY ONE! If I might die in outer space, seems like I'd have more of a fighting chance regardless of the problem were someone able to talk to me and tell me what to do, assist me with getting out of whatever predicament. Ain't gonna' be able to do that with a 9 meter dish. Maybe they can "track my death". That hardly inspires confidence matt, and strongly implies Fraud, matter-o-fact my good friend.

The system generally is very much not redundant at all matt. Let's take a look at the tracking complex in Madrid.

http://insa.org/node/112

The complex there features/featured a total of 6 dishes; DSS-54, DSS-55, DSS-61, DSS-63, DSS-65, DSS-66.

Of the six dishes, only 2 were installed pre 1968; DSS-61 was installed in 1965 and DSS-66 was installed in 1967. The latter, the DSS-66 dish, was a 26 meter dish primarily employed in near earth tracking.

The DSS-61 dish was an azimuth/elevation mount, and the DSS-66 dish a north south/east west or X/Y mount.

First of all, the DSS-66 dish was a dish utilized for near earth operations. If DSS-61 "went out" would DSS-66 be adequate to handle tracking and communications for both craft, the command module and the Eagle by itself? I see no support for that, and I suspect that it is not the case. Were DSS-61 to have gone out for whatever reason, I suspect DSS-66 operating alone, would not have been able to track both craft, and perform transmitting and receiving duties for both. During a landing, and an ascent, this would be of course particularly critical.

AND ! , even if that were the case, let's assume both dishes are operating in the parlance of Michael Collins, "swimmingly", there was no Houston/Madrid link back up. Regardless of how well the dishes operated, and again, I would emphasize were say DSS-61 down, DSS-66 in all likelihood could NOT handle tracking of both ships and transmission/reception for both, STILL!!!, a problem with the Houston-to-Madrid-to-Houston-to-Madrid link would be potentially disastrous, say in an Apollo 13 scenario type situation.

This is a rinky dink system Matt, and you know it.

Apollo is Fraud my friends. Let's shout it from the roof tops right into that all knowing, dark and unforgiving sky.

Phony, fake, bogus, bull, charade, jive, con, scammy, malarkey it is matt, 100% pure invention, ZERO percent reality.

You don't know how radios work, do you?

 

[Tomblvd]

Every source I have looked at matt says the big dishes were needed for communication. EVERY ONE! If I might die in outer space, seems like I'd have more of a fighting chance regardless of the problem were someone able to talk to me and tell me what to do, assist me with getting out of whatever predicament. Ain't gonna' be able to do that with a 9 meter dish. Maybe they can "track my death". That hardly inspires confidence matt, and strongly implies Fraud, matter-o-fact my good friend.

Along with many other things, you never got around to telling us exactly why continuous communication was even necessary.

 

[Patrick1000]

We were not paying Lindbergh $30,000,000,000 to cross the Atlantic.

I understand Charles Lindbergh had no radio during his trans-Atlantic flight, obviously that didn't take place either as it would have been to dangerous to be out of touch with land-based stations.

We were not paying Lindbergh $30,000,000,000 to cross the Atlantic. The stakes were higher. AND, in the case of Lindbergh, navigation was up to him. With Apollo, the navigation commands were uplinked. The orders to the ship for flying from points A to B to C were sent via the communication system. I could go on and on, but I shan't .

Communication was critical with Apollo, and if out, the boys might well be dead. Lindbergh, to his credit, took his own chances. Now THAT! was beautiful.

 

[Patrick1000]

You missed Miller's and my point

The thing is that America had thousands of nuclear weapons.

You missed Miller's and my ultimate point. If you miss Moscow by a mile it may be important, depending. Submarine launched missiles of 60 vintage were primarily targeting cities because they were not accurate enough to hit other things, targets requiring high accuracy to ensure a "kill". If you miss a hardened ICBM silo by a mile, you may well have missed altogether. Your opponent's missile may survive.

 

[Patrick1000]

Same to you Phantomwolf, I am surprised to be quite frank

Exactly, and the idea of Columbus, Drake, and Cook sailing for months on dangerous seas doing trips that men did die on and without any contact with their home Admiralties. Unthinkable.

Of course the idea that perhaps explorers have always been willing to take risks with their lives to further the knowledge of mankind is just preposterous. That the likes of Magellan, Drake, Cook, Scott, and Mallory were obviously fake because no one would put themselves and others in such dangerous positions.

Then again, perhaps some people didn't understand Gus Grissom's famous , and unfortunately prophetic words....

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

Virgil "Gus" Grissom

The Astronauts were aware of the risks, they were men that flew fighter planes in combat against the Soviets over Korea. Many felt guilty for not being in Veitnam with their peers, fighting beside them and being shot at, a far more dangerous occupation than going into space. Others were test pilots at a time that 1 in 3 test pilots were being killed on those flights. These weren't men who were scared of death or even just being out of contact with Flight Control for 5 hours. To even suggest it shows a total lack of understanding of who these guys were and what they did.

Same to you Phantomwolf, I am surprised to be quite frank, surprised that you of all people would float such a lame excuse for a bogus communication system.

This is not about astronauts being macho, it is simply about how one would go about providing the requisite redundancy for communication under these circumstances. There is no need for macho. We want live astronauts, not dead macho men.

Lindbergh did not need uplinks to fly the Spirit of Saint Louis, but the Apollo ships employed them. Now Apollo could fly without uplinked direction in some of the flight circumstances, but in the case of the Apollo 11 lunar launch circumstance, they did not know where the Eagle was, claimed this to be the case anyway. So without effective deep space communication, voice, reception , transmission, uplinking downlinking, a launch solution a' la that of H. David Reed's, never could have been provided and the astronauts would have died.

This is all fake, phantomwolf, sorry buddy but it simply is.

 

[JayUtah]

Every source I have looked at...

Please name those sources.

If you're going to make an argument based on the alleged exhaustiveness of your research, I think the readers here have a right to know whether you've stumbled across the seminal works on the subject of Apollo tracking and communication. Because if you haven't, there are quite a few surprises in store for you.

So please list the titles and authors you've read on this subject. And please list any relevant experience you have in deep-space telemetry and mission planning.

If I might die in outer space, seems like I'd have more of a fighting chance regardless of the problem were someone able to talk to me and tell me what to do...

That's the best you can come up with?

You've told us maintaining constant MSFN contact was a matter of life and death. And now all you can do is wave your hands wildly at some vague, paranoid scenario? Usually when you sidestep my questions, you simply pretend I never asked them. Come on! You own us a specific, technically expounded, plausible scenario to prove that your personal paranoia has any teeth.

It's a good thing the rest of the world respects the actual Apollo design, rather than what "seems" necessary to you. And it's a good thing we hired excellent pilots and mission planners who didn't need their hands held the whole way.

Yes, of course ground control is helpful, otherwise we wouldn't have gone to the trouble of building the MSFN. The question is not whether MSFN is helpful, but whether it's so critical to the mission that a loss of contact with it for a few hours puts the astronauts in imminent mortal danger.

Tsk, tsk -- you're backpedaling. Better to get it over quickly and admit you can't come up with a fatal LOS scenario that has any actual causal evidence from the actual Apollo design -- just as the designers intended.

During a landing, and an ascent, this would be of course particularly critical.

Bzzzt!

The critical events such as LOI-1, DOI, TEI, and initial rendezvous happen on the far side, where there was no possibility of contact with MSFN no matter how robust the system might have been.

MSFN contact would be critical during those operations if there were no crew aboard the spacecraft, such as in your militarization scenario, and the spacecraft had to be flown somehow from the ground. Sorry, your "Flaky MSFN" claim is far more devastating to your own theory than it is to Apollo. Don't you wish you could think things through more carefully before shooting your mouth off and committing to hogwash you can't sustain?

In my case I'm very lucky, because I don't have to make things up. I can simply tell you how the system was actually designed and operated. Having the truth on my side means I never have to scramble to come up with some new scenario and wonder if it is still consistent with the crap I made up two days ago.

You need to wrap your mind around the fact that the Apollo system was not designed to require constant contact with MSFN. Why? First, because the Moon-landing problem itself precluded the possibility. Engineers aren't so dumb as to design something that's defeated by the expected use -- like a diver's wet suit that you can't get wet, or a frying pan that melts at 150 F.

Second, because the original system design encompassed the possibility of one MSFN and several simultaneous missions. That requires a certain degree of autonomy in each mission, to be accomplished by a combination of onboard pilots and onboard computer automation.

Third, four-fifths of any space mission plan are the contingencies at each phase: what to do when things happen like losing contact with the ground. Consequently mission operators are thinking many hours ahead at each step. Unexpected loss of contact with MSFN was a planned-for contingency.

This is a rinky dink system Matt, and you know it.

You're not qualified to make that judgment.

The question is not whether the MSFN by itself achieves some arbitrary measure of reliability, but whether MSFN achieves the degree of reliability called for in the system design. You haven't shown any sign that you understand the system design, and several signs that you don't. You haven't given any rationale for the degree of reliability you think is required for that component, much less settled on what that degree might be.

You're just waving your hands again and again saying, essentially, "It's fake because I say it's fake."

100% pure invention, ZERO percent reality.

An amusing choice of words, considering that your latest attempt at proof is based on a new "requirement" that you just invented 100% out of your own imagination. You don't get to hold Apollo responsible for satisfying objectives that you just make up.

 

[matt.tansy]

Every source I have looked at matt says the big dishes were needed for communication. EVERY ONE!

This graph from the MSFN Apollo 11 Post-Mission Report shows when the Madrid Wing Station tracked the Apollo 11:

"MADX" is the station identifier for "Madrid Wing".
"Translunar Coast" means the spacecraft is en route to the Moon.
"Lunar Orbit" means the spacecraft is orbiting the Moon. Note the banded coverage one would expect for LOS and AOS.
"TransEarth Coast" means the spacecraft is en route to the Earth.
The darkened segments indicates the time periods the Madrid Wing Station was tracking the spacecraft.