Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

[matt.tansy]

Oh, my. So many errors I don't know where to start so I'll just address the whoppers.

A star can ONLY be confirmed/identified in the context of its relation to other celestial objects.

Not true. Sight the star, calculate the error, if the error is about what you expected then you used the right star. That is how it is done on submarines to check for gyro error: using the star finder, find a bright star close to the horizon, aim your periscope in the direction of that star, take a bearing, and compute your gyro error.

So the "constellations" would not appear as they do here on earth, not consistently anyway.

The nearest star is 25 trillion miles away. The apparent shift from parallax would be a maxumum of 0.002 seconds of arc. Please, please, please tell me you weren't serious about constellation appearing differently?

There would be times wherein any given constellation pattern would become unreadable due to the presence of too many stars, other times unreadable due to there being too few; here a half as many, there a a third as many, next time a fourth as many, not to mention at times a fifth as many, sometimes a jillion stars, sometimes handfuls, and EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN!

Are you seriously suggesting that all stars appear equally bright in space?

 

[JayUtah]

And Apollo 12 was not built to be lightning proof either nomuse...

False.

The statement of the licensed engineers of record has been provided, and you have expressly chosen to ignore it.

I have further provided an explanation of what is done in airframes to mitigate lightning strikes, and shown specifically how the Apollo CSM conformed to that. I have also shown how the electrical system, in addition to airframe measures, was made to be sufficiently robust.

Against that wall of expertise and data you have simply stuck your fingers in your ears and repeatedly expressed your contrary belief.

Thomas Kelly when he designed the LM wasn't told...

Changing horses. The LM is irrelevant to lightning strikes, and in any case was discussed in the engineer's report, which you obviously have not read.

"Now Tommy..."

Continued puerility noted.

The Apollo 12 was not built to take a hit...

False. You simply ignore the evidence that it was.

...and responsible parties would not allow astronauts to fly to the moon in Apollo 12

You're not qualified to make that judgment.

...no one in his or her right mind would ever chance it.

Begging the question.

I notice you continue to ignore my challenge. I asked you, based on the reported damage and uncertainty in Apollo 12 (i.e., the indeterminate state of the parachute pyros), to provide any scenario from that point on that was any less risky than the other.

Your continued failure to do so leads me to conclude that you cannot, and that you have nothing concrete with which to dispute the decision to proceed in that case with the mission as planned.

 

[Patrick1000]

The atmospheric conditions are "ideal" and one is viewing through scopes ....

I should believe this why? Why would you expect to see more stars from a spacecraft on the far side of the moon than from a telescope on Earth? Which constellation patterns became "unreadable" by the astronauts? What did these patterns look like from space?

Ranb

The atmospheric conditions are "ideal" and one is viewing through scopes which increase the amount of light collected for any given star and so would render a star more visible. For many years, pre Apollo, astronomers have salivated photons over the prospect of parking a big telescope on the moon to be able to take pics, first and foremost, while the scope was in the shade.

 

[Patrick1000]

Worden himself said he could not find his 37 navigational stars....

I should believe this why? Why would you expect to see more stars from a spacecraft on the far side of the moon than from a telescope on Earth? Which constellation patterns became "unreadable" by the astronauts? What did these patterns look like from space?

Ranb

Worden himself said that he could not find his 37 navigational stars while flying through the simulated dark side during the Apollo 15 simulated Mission....He was adamant. Take a look at the video for yourself.

As such, those constellations, of which those 37 stars are members, could not be identified by astronaut Al Worden.

We may further claim with utter unmitigated metaphysical certainty based on astronaut Worden's enlightening statement, that given his inability to identify these stars, the inertial platform could not have been realigned were that to have been required any time during a trip through the "dark side" of the moon during the simulated Apollo 15 Mission.

I think those are fair claims that we all can agree to given astronaut Worden's statement, don't you Ranb?

 

[JayUtah]

However, my point is that these are special lies. Their motivation is historically unique, and understanding that motive leads to a full elucidation of Apollo's true history

Special pleading and circular reasoning -- the premise is rejected.

When Armstrong says the first time they were able to see constellations was 200,000ish miles away from earth at the time of the corona photographing...

Misrepresenting Armstrong's "corona photography" statement, and an irrelevant analogy. The view through the sextant is all that matters.

...why is it that this great great man, Neil Armstrong, is lying, AND!, so obviously so.

Circular reasoning.

By pretended to land men, they could land equipment which they weren't supposed to be landing on the moon...

False. In your rush to discredit the commonly-accepted Apollo, you have introduced evidence that clearly precludes your own theory. By your own evidence and admission, your theory is impossible.

Worden's "lie" is of a more indirect and complex variety.

No. It only becomes a "lie" when subjected to your uninformed and hysterical framing. When interpreted as does the rest of the world, with an appropriate context and sufficient understanding of the relevant sciences, it's not a big deal.

To be able to fly to the moon in earnest, astronauts must be able to fly a ship independently of ground support...

Bzzt!

Don't you remember that last week you were telling us all that without MSFN contact they'd have to abort immediately? True to form, you can't even stay consistent with your own claims.

Now your little rant against Apollo requires the astronauts to be able to fly unaided, simply so you can pretend to show that such a thing isn't possible. So you promptly forget that you once said the opposite -- that the spaceships were essentially flown from the ground by remote control. That's back when you were trying to prove that the MSFN was too flaky for that to happen.

If you were conscientious, you'd admit that error. Oh, but then you'd have to own up to that fairly inescapable proof that your "common sense" isn't sufficient to get Apollo answers right. Your common sense leads you to flip-flop on important topics. Therefore it isn't a substitute for the actual expertise you lack.

...and be able to align the inertial platform under the circumstance of any reasonably anticipated contingency

Your personal judgment of what is "reasonably anticipated" is irrelevant. As a matter of fact, the IMU was turned off when not needed. And if the primary IMU is somehow not available, there is always the SCS. There is never a need to align the primary IMU on short notice or if conditions do not permit.

...one such contingency being a circumstance where the platform would need alignment when it is dark

You haven't shown that those conditions prevent platform alignment.

Worden "admits" in the interview that he would not have been able to do this.

False.

Worden said nothing about being unable to align the platform. He said that under certain narrowly-defined circumstances he couldn't immediately identify any of his reference stars while looking casually out the window.

You have been informed of the following, which you have failed to consider.

First, the conditions in question persisted only for 23 minutes in each orbit. Please give us a concrete example of exactly what would arise in an Apollo mission plan that would require the platform to be aligned within such a narrow time scale.

Second, the conditions do not apply to the sextant observation. You have no answer for the difference in circumstances.

Third, Worden could restore lightside conditions simply by turning on the cabin floodlights. This is the obvious solution many of us were trying to lead you to.

Now lest anyone think that your attribution of this claim to Worden's authority has any value, let me refer you to your crowing in this post where you remind everyone that your analysis of the Worden statement is yours and yours alone. Sorry, you don't get to claim credit for it for back-patting purposes and then try to tell a different story when things go wrong.

A genuine mission to the moon is one in which the CM pilot could align the platform under all reasonably anticipated contingencies.

Straw man. You're making up new "rules" again.

So it is indeed VERY LOGICAL to ask what Worden's lying is about...

Your claim regarding Worden is an inherent contradiction which you have not yet resolved. You don't even pay attention to your own arguments, much less those of anyone else.

Ho hum. You're simply beating up the same old straw man over and over. No connection whatsoever with reality.

 

[nomuse]

And Apollo 12 was not built to be lightning proof either nomuse....

A lightning strike was not an anticipated contingency nomuse. Thomas Kelly when he designed the LM wasn't told,

A) Have you ever looked at a weather map? NOT planning for lightning would be like not planning to protect the spacecraft from sunlight (It's okay -- we'll only launch on overcast days).

B) Kelly, or anyone else, didn't wake up one morning and say "Hey, I think I'll build spacecraft." He inherited decades of experience in designing and flying aircraft, high altitude balloons, and oh yes, other spacecraft. Not realizing that lightning was part of the design environment, and not knowing how to address it, would be like a NASCAR mechanic not knowing how to work around flat tires.

C) Spacecraft, like aircraft, are already partway there just by their very construction. Ever hear of a Faraday Cage? The remaining trick is also good systems design -- isolation from that metal skin. Which, since aircraft by their nature pick up a static charge (try being around a helicopter during a refueling and you'll notice the intense care to keep the aircraft from grounding itself in a nice fat fuel-igniting spark). Being a spacecraft, parts of it are going to be pushing through atmosphere hard enough to ionize a layer (aka the re-entry plasma). And, oh yes, the spacecraft needed to cross through the VARB and deal with charged particles. A dozen good reasons to isolate the flight electronics from the skin.

No, it doesn't make sense the spacecraft would not have been designed to survive.

But, trumping ALL of the above, is;

D) No spacecraft or aircraft is perfect. Mistakes are made in manufacture. Errors are made by crew. FOD, vibration, lightning, sheep piss...all sorts of things get in there and muck up the systems. You do NOT fly anything with the blase assumption that since you didn't notice anything attacking, the systems must be in perfect condition.

And this goes double for a spacecraft on a billion-dollar mission, out way, way beyond any place where they can pull over and fix a flat.

So the spacecraft is built robust. It is built redundant. And it is built so you can test the critical systems while it is in flight.

Which they did.

The narrative isn't that Houston said "Oh, lightning...let's ignore it; probably didn't do anything." The narrative is that they checked the spacecraft even more carefully than they would have in a less eventful launch. And the majority of mission systems passed diagnostics.

 

[PhantomWolf]

According to the Apollo 11 narrative, the astronauts/Houston, though relatively infrequently, nevertheless regularly, checked to be sure there was no platform drift, and if there was, the platform alignment was said to have been corrected.

The Apollo Guidance Computer does not "know" one way or the other if there is or is not drift. This is the whole point of checking the alignment. An element of the alleged protocol for determining as to whether drift has or has not occurred features the astronauts marking stars, sighting them, and then CONFIRMING THE STARS' IDENTITIES in the context of a platform alignment check by way of pressing a button. The astronaut is the one hitting the button, and in so doing confirms the star as Menkent, or Rigel, or Nunki as in the Collins examples above taken from CARRYING THE FIRE.

My point is that the narrative as presented with reference to these star sightings must be bogus. The AGC has 37 stars in its memory. These stars are sighted and their identities confirmed by the astronauts, not the computer itself, by virtue of the stars' geometric relationships to other stars, groups of stars, the earth, the sun and the moon. A star can ONLY be confirmed/identified in the context of its relation to other celestial objects. A star floating isolated in the cislunar sky is NOT something Collins could identify as Menkent, Nunki, or any one of the other primary navigational stars.

When traveling through cislunar space, around the moon's back side and what not, the star count would vary, assuming any of this were real. There would be times when there would be more stars than one could see from the surface of the earth, and there would be times when the count would be fewer. So the "constellations" would not appear as they do here on earth, not consistently anyway. There would be times wherein any given constellation pattern would become unreadable due to the presence of too many stars, other times unreadable due to there being too few; here a half as many, there a a third as many, next time a fourth as many, not to mention at times a fifth as many, sometimes a jillion stars, sometimes handfuls, and EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN! So how do you find/identify/confirm stars if the constellation patterns are not consistently present, complete and recognizable? Answer, you don't find/identify and confirm the stars, and so you most decidedly do not navigate with this now patently bogus and made up joke of a system.

Note that most of the MIT guys would have bought in. this is tricky and they would not have readily been fooled. What do the MIT AGC designers know about star variable visibility conditions in cislunar and perilunar space? Less than NOTHING! Sure they load the computer memory with 37 stars, no one at NASA is going to tell them that it hardly makes any sense, and hardly would help if any of this had even remote contact with reality.

The point is that when Collins checks to be sure if the platform is aligned or not aligned in the Apollo 11 narrative, HE, COLLINS, MUST DECIDE, and confirm the stars' identities. How does he know Menkent is Menkent, Rigel Rigel, Nunki Nunki and so forth given that the only way to know stars is to recognize the company they keep? With the earth gone, there would be absolutely no helpful sense of north/south/east/west/up/down. With variable numbers of stars present, too few to recognize a particular star in a constellation on some occasions, too many to recognize a particular star in a constellation on other occasions, how would Collins know anything? Answer......Collins doesn't know anything......

Collins could not reliably identify stars under these circumstances, nor could Armstrong, nor could Aldrin. Star identities could NOT be reliably determined by this less than laughable system PERIOD!, AGC with astronaut. The view of the firmament would be inconsistent, the stellar patterns would be inconsistent, and as such, not recognizable. With regard to identifying stars, everything depends on consistency.

This whole thing is way fake and this is so easy to see now, so so so easy to see.....

You still seem to have no ability to understand even what you are writting. You agree that the checks were made infrequently, but then try and wave that away, but this is the whole point. The spacecraft wasn't going to crash during the 55 minutes it was in the shadow of the moon if the platform wasn'
t realigned during that time.

To do a realignment, the astronuat entered a star in the computer, and the computer positioned the sextant where it believed that star should be. If the Astronaut couldn't tell which star it was because of others appearing in the sextant, or the moon blocking his view of it, he'd go to the next star on the list and so on. That's why they had 37 of them. Even if we accept your claim and if he checked all 37 and couldn't make a determination about any of them, then all he had to do was wait for less then 55 mins and he'd have been out of the moon's shadow and once more able to tell the difference, at which point he could realign the platform then.

Where is the major issue here? Realigning the platform isn't mission critical except before doing burns or making sure that transmission arrays are in position. One you can do before passing into the shadow, and on you can only do when the Earth is visible anyway. You continue to make mountains out of molehills and claim that issues that are far from critical would have been show stoppers. What you are claiming is similar to saying that a surgeon would have to call off the surgery because one of the nurses put the tray of instruments across the otherside of the room instead of next to the table.

 

[Loss Leader]

OK , I respect your view Loss Leader. Take a look at my just previous post. This is one of several arguments I shall submit demonstrating the tale Worden tells about his stars simply cannot be true.

You obviously do not respect my view, because everything else you say shows that you don't even understand it.

I'll say it again: Logically, it is impossible to determine the validity of an argument without external reference. You absolutely cannot determine that Worden made an incorrect statement without external facts.

But you have no such facts. You have only your "common sense" or what you think should be true. This cannot lead to any necessarily true conclusions.

Logically, this is your argument:

1. Jack said that he ate lunch, went to a movie, went to Best Buy, and then was home by 3:00.
2. We all know that lunch is eaten at 12:00 p.m.
3. Going to a movie, with all the previews and getting snacks and everything, cannot take less than two and a half hours.
4. Don't even try to tell me that you can get out of Best Buy in less than an hour.
5. Thus, I have conclusively proven that Jack is definitely lying about having gone to Best Buy. Everything else he said is necessarily true but the Best Buy part of it is necessarily untrue.

Hopefully, you think the above argument has some serious flaws.

Make no mistake however Loss Leader, what Worden says, simply cannot be true.

Make no mistake, you are wrong.

 

[JayUtah]

And Apollo 12 was not built to be lightning proof either nomuse...

Yes it was. You have the statements of the licensed engineers of record, but you've chosen explicitly to disregard it.

Further, I gave you an explanation of how airframes are made impervious to lightning strikes and how the Apollo CSM satisfied that design, as well as a description of the electrical engineering design provisions that made the electrical system robust and self-protective. You have not addressed that.

Thomas Kelly when he designed the LM...

Changing horses. The LM was not at issue in the lightning strike. Nevertheless the condition of the LM was considered in the engineers' report.

...responsible parties would not allow astronauts to fly to the moon in Apollo 12...

[...] no one in his or her right mind would ever chance it.

Begging the question.

Parties known and licensed to be responsible in this field, and legally liable for the correctness of their decisions, indeed certified the spacecraft as spaceworthy, according to procedures and methods previously set out for in-flight validation of the spacecraft.

 

[PhantomWolf]

The atmospheric conditions are "ideal" and one is viewing through scopes which increase the amount of light collected for any given star and so would render a star more visible. For many years, pre Apollo, astronomers have salivated photons over the prospect of parking a big telescope on the moon to be able to take pics, first and foremost, while the scope was in the shade.

Three questions:

What was the largest scope avalible on Earth in 1969?
What was the largest scope Apollo could have taken with them?
Given the sizes, which would have provided the better images for Astronomers?

 

[PhantomWolf]

One can now see in comparing the 2 systems how the Habu system would be reliable, and while the Apollo system could be seen to work for some of the stars some of the time, its performance would clearly be wanting in terms of its consistently being able to provide for accurate sightings.

All considered, we may quite rightfully view the Apollo system as woefully inadequate given the inherent risks of a trip to the moon and the need for dependable navigation, with accurate star sighting as a feature of dependable navigation.

You are trying to compare apples and oranges. One is in a super-sonic aircraft that should the pilot make a mistake, or the navigation be lost for even a short time could end up as a multi-million dollar, several kilometer long, smear on the ground, while the other is a spacecraft that is following an orbit that is well defined by the gravity of the celestial bodies it is travelling between and around, which on occasion needs to have the alignment of its platform corrected.

These things aren't in any way comparable. Apollo didn't have to worry about slamming into a mountain if its platform alignment was off, unless they were firing the engines. It makes me wonder if you even know what platform alignment is and why it needed correcting. Each of the missions could have happily flown without correcting the platform more than a handful of times. Prior to TLI, prior to LOI, and then once more prior to TEI. That they did it more was to keep it from drifting too far out of alignment and costing fuel to get it back, or on occasion to make sure they didn't lose transmission if the antenna drifted out of alignment.

Unlike with an aircraft, platform aligment drift in a spacecraft is not something that is going to suddenly endanger the mission if it isn't corrected right away, yet you continue to exclaim about how serious it is and that if they couldn't do it at any time it wouldn't have been safe to do at all. You're just plain wrong.

 

[JayUtah]

According to the Apollo 11 narrative, the astronauts/Houston...

No, not Houston. Just the astronauts.

though relatively infrequently [...] checked to be sure there was no platform drift

Thank you for conceding that space navigation requires only infrequent verification of platform alignment. Earlier you insinuated that if Al Worden couldn't align the platform during the 23 minutes he was in full darkness, the guidance system would have been "lost."

The Apollo Guidance Computer does not "know" one way or the other if there is or is not drift.

Correct, hence the inability of an unmanned CSM to fly to the Moon. It would have no way of keeping its guidance platform within the tolerance required for such a mission. Your "unmanned military mission" scenario fails by your own evidence and is therefore rejected.

An element of the alleged protocol for determining as to whether drift has or has not occurred features the astronauts [...] CONFIRMING THE STARS' IDENTITIES in the context of a platform alignment check by way of pressing a button.

No. The mark establishes the star's location after having finely manipulated the sextant's view angle relative to the platform chassis.

I see you've finally read O'Brien's chapter on sextant operation. Will you now retract (1) your insinuation that Collins could have used the sextant to search for the LM without accurate shaft and trunnion angles, and (b) your claim earlier that the AGC itself sighted the stars?

Yes, the entire process assumes that the marked star is actually the one the computer has been told to aim the sextant at. But as we'll see below, your handwaving attempts to play up the alleged inability to correctly identify that star are fairly preposterous.

My point is that the narrative as presented with reference to these star sightings must be bogus.

And my point is that you understand neither the nature of the process nor the factors that affect its success.

As we'll note below, you home in on contrived hypothetical case and suggest that this invalidates the whole process of celestial navigation. Once again, the fallacy of hasty generalization. You invent your one little straw man and posit it to be the dictum simpliciter of the whole problem. I note that this is what your opponents in other threads accuse you of doing, even when it's a topic on which you claim special expertise.

A star floating isolated in the cislunar sky is NOT something Collins could identify as Menkent, Nunki, or any one of the other primary navigational stars.

No. The highlighted portion is where you misrepresent Collins.

Collins mentions two of the reference stars and says that, to him, they were difficult to locate with the naked eye. That is not an admission that all the reference stars were similarly difficult to locate. In fact, Collins is here illustrating the operation of the optical and inertial references. His explanation is irrelevant if the stars he chooses for this example are not more difficult than the others to find.

The point he's trying to make is that the computer almost always knows where the stars should be, in terms of their absolute locations on the celestial sphere, and therefore their expected location relative to the platform, and further where the computer would have to point the sextant relative to the platform in order to see them. If Collins, looking out the window or through the 1X telescope, can't find some of the more obscure ones, he can tell the computer to point the sextant to where they should be. The narrow field of view then brackets the star of interest.

If the platform is aligned properly with the universe, the star in the crosshairs is the one he had a hard time finding. If the platform is slightly misaligned, the star is in the field of view, but not centered. If the platform is wildly misaligned, then the star may be outside the sextant FOV.

In short, Collins is describing the relationship among the sextant, guidance platform, computer, and the universe for the lay reader by saying, "If I can't find a given star, here's how the inertial and optical systems work together to help." You're trying to twist that into saying, "If I can't find some given star manually, I have no way of navigating." That's not what Collins is trying to say at all.

If, in the context of an actual platform alignment, Collins has a hard time finding Nunki, a relatively dim star in the backwaters of the massive Sagittarius constellation, he can always use Vega, the blazing king of the Lyra constellation and one of the vertices of the iconic Summer Triangle. It's on the same side of the spacecraft and bereft of any nearby stars of similar magnitude. It's by far the brightest game in town, in its little neighborhood.

When traveling through cislunar space, around the moon's back side and what not, the star count would vary, assuming any of this were real.

The star count varies here on Earth. If I'm down on the valley floor, the city lights obscure almost all the stars. If I'm up in the mountains or out in the west desert, where I go every year to observe the Perseids, I can see a vast panorama of them including the Milky Way. This does not affect my ability to locate celestial objects.

Variation in star count alone is insufficient to discount the ability to navigate. Your premise commits the fallacy of limited scope, and is therefore rejected.

There would be times wherein any given constellation pattern would become unreadable due to the presence of too many stars...

Begging the question.

I have no problem identifying constellations as star count varies. And I'm only an amateur astronomer. The Apollo astronauts were trained in planetariums to become better-than-average astronomers. You cite individual isolated examples of difficulty in locating stars, but you again hastily generalize that to say that all stellar navigation was impossible. The premise is rejected.

Note that most of the MIT guys would have bought in. This is tricky and they would not have readily been fooled.

So here you claim that the MIT Draper lab was full of smart people. And then in the next sentence below you say that they were too stupid to realize that stars of different relative magnitudes might have different visibility depending on circumstances.

Really? You're actually going to float that contradiction as part of your argument?

What do the MIT AGC designers know about star variable visibility conditions in cislunar and perilunar space? Less than NOTHING!

Begging the question yet again. Your straw man "requires" MIT people to be ignorant, ergo they must be ignorant. The question-begging premise is rejected.

You apparently know about Frank O'Brien's book. Now you need to go scare up Eldon Hall's book, where you'll find that MIT's Draper lab was chosen to develop Apollo's guidance system because they were the undisputed experts in inertial guidance systems using optical stellar fixes as a backup. Apollo's weren't the only ones that existed. And I'm surprised that your obsession over ICBM's hasn't led you to some others.

In addition your premise commits the fallacy of limited scope and is therefore rejected.

...no one at NASA is going to tell them that it hardly makes any sense

It's a good thing that MIT's expertise didn't depend on NASA's. Just the opposite, in fact. NASA needed MIT's expertise. Fallacy of inverse causation (cum hoc), and the premise is rejected.

The point is that when Collins checks to be sure if the platform is aligned or not aligned in the Apollo 11 narrative, HE, COLLINS, MUST...

[whole lot of hysterical handwaving snipped]

how would Collins know anything? Answer......Collins doesn't know anything...

You leave out the part where Collins claims to have navigated successfully to and from the Moon. If you're going to cite him as an authority on the details of how that's done, then you are highly dishonest when you omit his authority on whether or not it was nevertheless possible to do.

Congratulations on having dismembered your straw man. Now let's look at the real world.

You note above, correctly, that platform checks were done infrequently. You imply above, correctly, that only in few cases did these checks require correction. The "verify more often than you correct" procedure is meant to assure that platform drift is unlikely to cause the reference stars to drift out of the FOV. When that condition is made to prevail, it is unnecessary to locate the reference stars first with the naked eye.

You wrongly suggest that the difference in naked-eye visibility affects how the sextant is used. That violates a well-known principle of restricted fields of view, such as in telescopes. Further, you make a big deal out of recognizing stars in context, but there is only a very narrow context available anyway through the sextant. The point is to recognize the star through the sextant. Everything else is largely irrelevant.

Three star sightings typically occur in the alignment check and correction procedure. The only constraint is that the greater the angular separation among them, the more accurate the reading. However, because of the geometric degrees of freedom, only two sights are strictly necessary. This is intended first to refine the solution, and second to allow the navigator to misidentify one of the stars.

However that's not as likely to happen as you make it out to be. Out of an overabundance of caution, far more reference stars were provided in the computer than would be practically necessary. The reference stars cover a substantial expanse of the celestial sphere, spread out geometrically. The pilot only has to find two or three of them, out of the dozen in the hemisphere visible from the sextant side of the ship.

And if for any reason the platform has drifted more than a couple of degrees, and if the navigator cannot manipulate the sextant field of view to find the reference star, then there is always the coarse alignment procedure, which is performed anyway when the IMU is turned on after periods of disuse. That's accurate enough to put the stars back in the FOV.

And if the coarse alignment procedure fails, there is the cage-and-restart procedure that "homes" the stable member.

And if all that fails, there is the other guidance system that uses a completely different kind of inertial reference.

Collins could not reliably identify stars under these circumstances...

False. Collins says two of his reference stars were more difficult than the others to locate by the naked eye, which he uses to illustrate for layman's use the operation of the optical and inertial references. You try to parlay that statement into a completely unrealistic straw man of celestial navigation.

...nor could Armstrong, nor could Aldrin.

Assumes facts not in evidence. Rejected.

Star identities could NOT be reliably determined by this less than laughable system PERIOD!

Straw man. You cite Al Worden's case (which is clearly anomalous and has a built-in solution) and Micheal Collins' example (which is an irrelevant transposition). You are not describing navigation as a whole. The premise is therefore rejected as a hasty generalization.

The view of the firmament would be inconsistent, the stellar patterns would be inconsistent, and as such, not recognizable.

Assumes that the view through the sextant is analogous to the view according to the naked eye, which is the commonality in your cases in evidence. It has been explained to you why that does not hold. Since you've been directed to that explanation three times, I conclude you have no answer for it. As such, the premise is rejected.

This whole thing is way fake and this is so easy to see now, so so so easy to see.....

Of course it's "easy to see" when you don't even have a passing familiarity with reality, and you ignore everything that doesn't fit your preconceived belief, and you remain uninformed regarding the underlying sciences.

Since you claim your arguments are logical, I've given you a running account of the fallacies you've committed. Please feel free to explain how you can fall into those fallacies and yet claim your arguments are logical.

 

[Patrick1000]

Godel Russell and Armstrong, A Gedankenexperiment Not For the Faint Of Heart....

You still seem to have no ability to understand even what you are writting. You agree that the checks were made infrequently, but then try and wave that away, but this is the whole point. The spacecraft wasn't going to crash during the 55 minutes it was in the shadow of the moon if the platform wasn'
t realigned during that time.

To do a realignment, the astronuat entered a star in the computer, and the computer positioned the sextant where it believed that star should be. If the Astronaut couldn't tell which star it was because of others appearing in the sextant, or the moon blocking his view of it, he'd go to the next star on the list and so on. That's why they had 37 of them. Even if we accept your claim and if he checked all 37 and couldn't make a determination about any of them, then all he had to do was wait for less then 55 mins and he'd have been out of the moon's shadow and once more able to tell the difference, at which point he could realign the platform then.

Where is the major issue here? Realigning the platform isn't mission critical except before doing burns or making sure that transmission arrays are in position. One you can do before passing into the shadow, and on you can only do when the Earth is visible anyway. You continue to make mountains out of molehills and claim that issues that are far from critical would have been show stoppers. What you are claiming is similar to saying that a surgeon would have to call off the surgery because one of the nurses put the tray of instruments across the otherside of the room instead of next to the table.

Godel Russell and Armstrong, A Gedankenexperiment Not For the Faint Of Heart

Take three deep breaths and then pour yourself a favorite libation phantomwolf. What I am about to disclose, elucidate, will rock your world like nothing has in 25 years. That is no exaggeration.

Apollo is about to be eviscerated once and for all. I'll proceed by way of an introductory "thought experiment".

I will demonstrate why it makes no sense whatsoever to employ as a check for Apollo ship attitude/orientation and platform alignment, a protocol that depends upon the very system being checked to take/make the relevant measurements. In short, the AGC's alleged navigational system is fatally flawed conceptually/logistically in that the measurements it takes to verify the ship's attitude and inertial platform status are self referential, and therefore, the measurements, the star sightings with their attendant angle observations are nothing less than meaningless/worthless. For those not familiar with Russell and Godel, fear not, this will make astonishingly good sense nevertheless. I shall proceed.

Let's imagine ourselves to be with Armstrong/Collins/Aldrin in cislunar space. We are called upon by ground control to do some star sightings in order to verify/check the inertial platform alignment and the ship attitude. Say the platform has drifted off one half of one degree in the X accelerometer direction. Now let us imagine that the conditions are such that in addition to the 37 relatively bright stars cataloged/coded and stored in the AGC memory, another two dozen are also visible if sought by way of engaging the optics available, the scanning scope and/or sextant. The ground tells us to sight Menkent, and as was the case with Collins' account in his book CARRYING THE FIRE, we find Menkent is not easy to find. As such, we, along with Collins/Armstrong/Aldrin ask the sextant for help. It points to where it thinks Menkent should be, and there we find not one but three stars, all roughly of the same brightness as best we can tell. The stars are more or less faint as stars have been for the entire journey.

Which star should we choose? The one right smack dab in the middle of the sextant's field is the AGC's best guess in a sense. It is perhaps not the brightest, though that is somewhat difficult to tell. All three are relatively dim as is the case when we read accounts by astronauts in the case of their trying to describe for us situations in which they have previously tried to sight stars for attitude checks/platform alignments and so forth. In addition to the star right in the middle of the sextant field, there is another that is a bit above the centered star. This one appears a little brighter than the other two, but not much. There is a third star to the right and below the other two, and this star cannot be discounted as that which we seek. We have no way of knowing this at the time of these goings on as described, but it is the upper star, the one above the other two, and the one perhaps just a touch brighter that is really Menkent.

We cannot employ the AGC itself to confirm which star is the correct star, which star is Menkent, as that is exactly what we are investigating, if the AGC's current sense as to platform alignment specifics/details is correct. We cannot use the AGC's data to check its own accuracy. We need something INDEPENDENT OF THE AGC SYSTEM TO CHECK THE ATTITUDE AND PLATFORM ALIGNMENT. We want to know if the star right in the center of the field is Menkent. That is what the computer is telling us and the astronauts. Should we pick that one central one, even though the one above might be a little brighter? If we do, we would be wrong as the platform has drifted 0.5 degrees in the X direction. If we mark that star and then realign the platform now 0.5% X direction out of whack, the next burn we make is gonna's take us to Jupiter. Bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point phantomwolf.

The ground cannot help us decide on the correct choice. There are no constellations to help. We only see the 37 navigational stars "known" to the computer plus two dozen more. We my friends are in DEEP SPACE _ _ _ _.

There is no counter that can salvage this attack upon the AGC ship attitude check/platform adjustment/check/alignment protocol. This one example demonstrates with great clarity that we are expected to believe attitude checks/platform alignments could be carried out by the very same system that is to be checked and corrected for. It's more than a bit like establishing one's own credibility by writing one's own evaluation. Such a report of course would be meaningless.

This ridiculous set up would be bound to bring a smile to pacifist Bertrand Russell's face. A self referential Waterloo for Apollo, now for once in his life, the self referential disaster works in Russell's favor and exposes the Apollo AGC as no guidance system at all, and Apollo as the military operation it was and now can never claim to otherwise be.

 

[Ranb]

The atmospheric conditions are "ideal" and one is viewing through scopes which increase the amount of light collected for any given star and so would render a star more visible. For many years, pre Apollo, astronomers have salivated photons over the prospect of parking a big telescope on the moon to be able to take pics, first and foremost, while the scope was in the shade.

You are avoiding direct answers to my questions. While the lack of atmosphere can improve viewing conditions, you say nothing about the quality of the optics on Earth and on Apollo. So why can we expect better views from Apollo compared to the view through a telescope on the Earth?

Worden himself said that he could not find his 37 navigational stars while flying through the simulated dark side during the Apollo 15 simulated Mission....He was adamant. Take a look at the video for yourself.

As such, those constellations, of which those 37 stars are members, could not be identified by astronaut Al Worden.

We may further claim with utter unmitigated metaphysical certainty based on astronaut Worden's enlightening statement, that given his inability to identify these stars, the inertial platform could not have been realigned were that to have been required any time during a trip through the "dark side" of the moon during the simulated Apollo 15 Mission.

On a simulated mission? What about an actual one? And you are sure this was not a simulation problem why? Got a link for this video? Given the serious lack of information you are providing, I can not agree to anything you claim at this time.

Ranb

 

[JayUtah]

Well I can't prove it in a rigorous sense frenat......, but I can do a dang good job approximating rigor.

Stundie.

...the relevance in one's studying the Blackbird system with regard to making some type of determination of the Apollo system's credibility is more than obvious.

"The relevance in studying apples in order to learn about oranges is more than obvious."

No, Patrick. These are two special-purpose systems designed for two considerably different applications. You don't get to say that one is invalid simply because it isn't like the other.

The point here is that the star finding capabilities are much better for a bird like the real Habu than for a pretended Eagle.

And the rebuttal to that point is that ANS and PGNS are solving entirely different problems. Just because each machine had an inertial component and an optical component doesn't mean you should consider them putatively equivalent.

The Habu uses important clues, earth latitude and longitude, yaw, roll sun location, and star brightness considerations to hunt for and find stars.

Correct, which is one of the reasons the SR-71 system is allowed to attempt to track stars automatically: it has more information to work with than Apollo.

Airplane guidance is about terrestrial latitude and longitude. Position in two conceptual dimensions, not orientation in three. The ANS system is fed information about its orientation from other sources, including the inertial component of the guidance system, and from sources such as gravitational roll indicators and gyroscopic and magnetic compasses that simply have no analogue in space flight.

The AGC allegedly knew its location to a fair degree of precision...

You mean attitude. You still haven't figured out even the elementary concepts in celestial navigation. You made this mistake back at Apollohoax, and you're still making it.

You haven't grasped that the SR-71 and the Apollo applications are solving entirely different problems.

The "weather", star visibility, is very much an unknown in the Apollo case.

No.

If the Habu computer is looking for Menkent and cannot find it, it will search for another star automatically based on the relevant variables as described.

And because of the difference in the essential nature of the problem, and the constraints in the system, that task is very much easier for ANS to attempt automatically. However, it is not guaranteed to succeed. And if it does not succeed, the mission may be aborted because the ANS is a critical system while the PGNS is not.

...it stands to reason the [SR-71] bird will find 2 stars as it looks over what amounts to a FAMILIAR GEOMETRICALLY UNDERSTANDABLE AND SO DECIPHERABLE FIELD OF STARS. This is not true in the Apollo case.

No, the SR-71 does not determine star identity based on an analysis of constellations or nearby stars or any other formulation of the overall picture of the sky.

Its star catalog is formulated identically to that of Apollo, with right ascension and declination. Based on various cues, the automatic system looks for a star in the computed position. But in the case of the SR-71 if no star is found, and if that failure continues for the entire star catalog, the system simply gives up. There is no manual means to calibrate the star tracker, nor any fallback except inertial-only navigation.

In the Apollo case, the pilot may employ several secondary means to remediate the sextant/AGC situation. On the one hand he has the duty to sight the stars manually. On the other hand he has the ability to sight the stars manually.

In the Apollo case there allegedly are NO CONSTELLATIONS per the astronauts themselves...

No, that is your misrepresentation.

Sometimes there would be too many stars if operating in dark side conditions...

No, that does not affect navigation.

Remember, Apollo needs the astronaut to confirm the star's identity. This is not the case with the Habu.

Correct. There was no way for the SR-71's RSO to help ANS. It either managed to obtain a star lock or it did not. If the stellar navigation component of the system did not function, the airplane required the inertial navigation system to work. If that failed, the SR-71 mission was aborted (Graham, op. cit., p. 67). In contrast, the Apollo system was designed so that its inertial reference was not always needed and could be powered down.

It hasn't dawned on you yet that the SR-71's star tracker only works if the inertial system is also working within a certain tolerance. Hence you haven't realized that it's actually a more brittle system.

...area of space where the light from Rigel should be, so the computer thinks, how can they be sure which is which, if there now are 3 stars right there

Name the three stars within 1.6 degrees of arc of Rigel that have comparable apparent magnitude to it.

...one plainly sees the Habu ANS to be a sensible system, while the Apollo system must be imaginary.

No. The trained engineer sees two systems engineered for two very different applications and given two very different levels of criticality in the overall system and mission plan. You provide no basis for assuming they should employ identical principles at all levels of scrutiny.

Yet another straw man.

One can now see in comparing the 2 systems how the Habu system would be reliable, and while the Apollo system could be seen to work for some of the stars some of the time...

No. You grossly misrepresent and exaggerate the factors that apply to the Apollo guidance procedure.

All considered, we may quite rightfully view the Apollo system as woefully inadequate...

Nope. The Apollo system allows for the pilot to creatively solve guidance problems, removes the critical reliance on the primary navigation system, and provides a number of fallbacks not considered in the SR-71. The ANS instead is a critical, brittle black box. It either works or it doesn't.

We conclude with unmitigated metaphysical certainty that Apollo is fraudulent.

Appeal all you want to "metaphysical certainty." I'll continue to rely on my engineering training and expertise.

 

[ArmillarySphere]

At my parent's place, the skies are clear enough that the constellations often vanish into a sea of stars. The Milky Way seems bright enough to read by.

However, using the setting circles of my scope, I have no trouble finding any star I want to see, or better yet, my dad's little go-to Celestron scope. I like the manual method, because the exercise it gives my grey cells.

Just because the stars seem difficult to identify when you're looking at half the sky doesn't mean the same will hold true when you only have a few arcminutes to search.

 

[Loss Leader]

We cannot employ the AGC itself to confirm which star is the correct star, which star is Menkent, as that is exactly what we are investigating,

No, you are not investigating which star is Menkent. You are investigating the ship's attitude. If there were some problem identifying Menkent through the sextant, there are 36 other stars to choose from. You simply scroll through the stars until you find one that has nothing else confusing in the viewfinder.

And if that doesn't work, you switch to one of the other methods of determining orientation.

And if that doesn't work, you just wait half an hour and try again.

This ridiculous set up would be bound to bring a smile to pacifist Bertrand Russell's face. A self referential Waterloo for Apollo, now for once in his life, the self referential disaster works in Russell's favor and exposes the Apollo AGC as no guidance system at all, and Apollo as the military operation it was and now can never claim to otherwise be.

I like when people decide that dead celebrities would have agreed with them. Incidentally, you've managed to shoehorn in the logical error of Appeal to Authority. I'm not certain if there's an error in reasoning that you've missed.

In any case, here's something Bertrand Russell actually did say:

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt."

Imagine that.

 

[JayUtah]

Apollo is about to be eviscerated once and for all. I'll proceed by way of an introductory "thought experiment".

Everything you've done up to now has been a "though experiment" because it bears little if any resemblance to real life.

You simply don't understand how spacecraft navigation works, and you keep coming up with amusing little straw men that have nothing to do with the problem.

In short, the AGC's alleged navigational system is fatally flawed conceptually/logistically in that the measurements it takes to verify the ship's attitude and inertial platform status are self referential...

No, because the human is there to provide the adaptation and intelligence.

In contrast, the SR-71's navigation system, that you stand up as the example of a correct solution, requires the inertial portion of the system to seed the optical portion before the latter can work at all. And the latter has no manual mode or fallback. Hence if the inertial navigation system cannot bootstrap the optics, then it alone is responsible for flying the mission. And if it is determined to be too far off, the mission is scrubbed for there is no backup.

Unlike the SR-71, Apollo has an entirely separate backup guidance system, which is becoming conspicuously absent in all your musings. It has been mentioned several times, and you have yet to show how it figures at all into your gloom-and-doom predictions for Apollo.

For those not familiar with Russell and Godel, fear not...

For those not familiar with Charles Stark Draper, fear lots.

Say the platform has drifted off one half of one degree in the X accelerometer direction.

It doesn't work like that. It's a general linear algebra model.

The ground tells us to sight Menkent...

That's not Mission Control's decision.

But as long as we're on that point, the spacecraft would have been out of radio contact with Earth during the time you say Al Worden would have been unable to identify the navigation stars. How is Mission Control going to tell the pilot which star to use if they can't talk to him?

See, you just make up new rules. You certainly don't check to see whether they're actual Apollo mission rules or constraints. But here you illustrate that you don't even check to see if your "rules" are consistent or logical. You're just making up rules for the sole purpose of accusing Apollo of breaking them.

and there we find not one but three stars, all roughly of the same brightness as best we can tell.

Choose any of the stars in the AGC catalogue and show that there exists a star of comparable magnitude within 1.5 degrees of it.

Come on. I dare you.

If we do, we would be wrong as the platform has drifted 0.5 degrees in the X direction. If we mark that star and then realign the platform now 0.5% X direction out of whack

That's why a minimum of two and ideally three star sights are necessary to align the platform. As I mentioned, the alignment is not complete until all the degrees of freedom are accounted for (and typically then some).

There is no counter that can salvage this attack upon the AGC ship attitude check/platform adjustment/check/alignment protocol.

Correction: none that you know of. Ponder that statement.

 

[matt.tansy]

There is no counter that can salvage this attack upon the AGC ship attitude check/platform adjustment/check/alignment protocol.

Nothing except the fact that everything you just wrote was wrong.

Euler Angles. Google It.

This is gonna blow your mind, maaaan! The initial plan was to shut off the guidance and navigation systems en route to and from the Moon. Borman said he wanted to keep it up. Some guidance wizard (from MIT, I believe) wrote a 28 point memo on all the reasons it was safe to power it down but finished his memo with this classic line: "But if it was me going to the moon I'd leave it on."

 

[PhantomWolf]

Let's imagine ourselves to be with Armstrong/Collins/Aldrin in cislunar space. We are called upon by ground control to do some star sightings in order to verify/check the inertial platform alignment and the ship attitude. Say the platform has drifted off one half of one degree in the X accelerometer direction. Now let us imagine that the conditions are such that in addition to the 37 relatively bright stars cataloged/coded and stored in the AGC memory, another two dozen are also visible if sought by way of engaging the optics available, the scanning scope and/or sextant. The ground tells us to sight Menkent, and as was the case with Collins' account in his book CARRYING THE FIRE, we find Menkent is not easy to find. As such, we, along with Collins/Armstrong/Aldrin ask the sextant for help. It points to where it thinks Menkent should be, and there we find not one but three stars, all roughly of the same brightness as best we can tell. The stars are more or less faint as stars have been for the entire journey.

Which star should we choose? The one right smack dab in the middle of the sextant's field is the AGC's best guess in a sense. It is perhaps not the brightest, though that is somewhat difficult to tell. All three are relatively dim as is the case when we read accounts by astronauts in the case of their trying to describe for us situations in which they have previously tried to sight stars for attitude checks/platform alignments and so forth. In addition to the star right in the middle of the sextant field, there is another that is a bit above the centered star. This one appears a little brighter than the other two, but not much. There is a third star to the right and below the other two, and this star cannot be discounted as that which we seek. We have no way of knowing this at the time of these goings on as described, but it is the upper star, the one above the other two, and the one perhaps just a touch brighter that is really Menkent.

We cannot employ the AGC itself to confirm which star is the correct star, which star is Menkent, as that is exactly what we are investigating, if the AGC's current sense as to platform alignment specifics/details is correct. We cannot use the AGC's data to check its own accuracy. We need something INDEPENDENT OF THE AGC SYSTEM TO CHECK THE ATTITUDE AND PLATFORM ALIGNMENT. We want to know if the star right in the center of the field is Menkent. That is what the computer is telling us and the astronauts. Should we pick that one central one, even though the one above might be a little brighter? If we do, we would be wrong as the platform has drifted 0.5 degrees in the X direction. If we mark that star and then realign the platform now 0.5% X direction out of whack, the next burn we make is gonna's take us to Jupiter. Bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point phantomwolf.

The ground cannot help us decide on the correct choice. There are no constellations to help. We only see the 37 navigational stars "known" to the computer plus two dozen more. We my friends are in DEEP SPACE _ _ _ _.

There is no counter that can salvage this attack upon the AGC ship attitude check/platform adjustment/check/alignment protocol. This one example demonstrates with great clarity that we are expected to believe attitude checks/platform alignments could be carried out by the very same system that is to be checked and corrected for. It's more than a bit like establishing one's own credibility by writing one's own evaluation. Such a report of course would be meaningless.

The only meaningless thing is your waffle above. First mistake, as Jay pointed out, they didn't look for the stars manually and then call up the sextant if they couldn't find them, they used the sextant firstm, and could have looked looked manually if the star wasn't there.

Second mistake, I'll let Loss leader say it, he did it so well...

No, you are not investigating which star is Menkent. You are investigating the ship's attitude. If there were some problem identifying Menkent through the sextant, there are 36 other stars to choose from. You simply scroll through the stars until you find one that has nothing else confusing in the viewfinder.

And if that doesn't work, you switch to one of the other methods of determining orientation.

And if that doesn't work, you just wait half an hour and try again.

What part of this did you not understand? With 36 Stars to choice from you probably can see a good 1/3 of those from one side of the ship meaning at least 12 stars to choice from to get readings, without rotating the ship to try the others, and you only have to locate three. Most of them were the brightest stars in their part of the sky and so would have been easy to tell through the optics, even if not by the naked eye.

Having lived in the country most of my life I have to agree with others as they say that there are nights where the sky is just fill of stars and it's harder to see the constellations, but through a telescope you can always find the ones you want.

Different conditions create different ability to see the stars. For example, we had a beautiful star gazing night here last night. I was at a friends place that was up and back from the street and in the dark the stars were magnificent, with the Pleiades just being visible and Orion standing out brilliantly, meaning even the non-star watchers in the group commented on it. By the time I got home we were in amongst the street lights and the Pleiades were no longer visible, and Orion was dimmer, with only the brightest stars visible. Had I driven out to my mum's place and let my eyes adjust I'd have not only been able to see the Pleiades in all their glory with the naked eye, but I would have been able to see the milkyway and far more besides, including the large and small Magellanic Clouds. This change is what stars can be seen doesn't change that a knowledgable astronomer, amatuer or not, can tell the brighter constellation stars from the dimmer ones, and when you have a telescope of optics that becomes even clearer.

You really have no idea what you are talking about about here, and really need to stop. Remember what Confucius probably didn't say.... "Man who stands in bull crap should be careful not to put foot in mouth." Sage advice for you. Read what Jay and others are trying to tell you. They are correct, you aren't. Learn from it and become a better person.