Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

[JayUtah]

So these [earth rotations] are the motions generating the shifts in signal. Not great. But we know they are fast enough...

Are they in the right direction, though? What if the Moon is overhead? How does Earth's rotation generate a Doppler shift in a signal emitted from the Moon?

That was one of your homework questions.

The Lick scientists cannot make the moon stop to take a LRRR measurement.

Wow, you really do think the factors that affect laser ranging are what enables your Doppler theory. Just ... wow.

Tedward is right -- you really don't understand at all how Doppler's principle applies. Please stop embarrassing yourself and read a book.

 

[matt.tansy]

that doppler based analysis had advanced to the point where deep space probes like the Ranger craft were locatable to within accuracies of feet from 240,000 miles away

Doppler alone was not capable of that. Ranging signals, radar, and very large dish antennae were required.

You'll read in the Wiki article that as time went on the TRANSIT system provided single-pass accuracy of roughly 200 meters. VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY GOOD.

Meh. I would call it very good but only if on the high seas and not near any hazards to navigation.

one need ONLY RECEIVE THE SATELLITE SIGNALS AND DO NOTHING ELSE BUT MEASURE THE FREQUENCY SHIFTS.

Not quite.

SIMPLY KNOWING THE TRANSMITTING FREQUENCY AND THEN DETERMINING THE FREQUENCY CHANGE YIELDS DATA SUFFICIENT TO DETERMINE THE RECEIVER'S EARTH LOCATION ONCE THE EPHEMERIS OF THE SATELLITES HAVE BEEN WORKED OUT.

Nope.

Once you have your ephemeris, you just turn on your receiver.

And then enter the time and date, your latitude and longitude, geoidal height, and select a heading and speed input. Oh, wait! Make sure the EM Log is energized first. Man, that will really screw up the speed input if the EM Log isn't energized before you select it as the speed source. Whew! That was bad day.

If you wind up receiving at a frequency such and such higher, say 193.76894 Hz higher than the "rest" transmission frequency, then that "shift" will correspond to a location on the earth.

Ha ha ha!!! It will correspond to an infinite number of places on the Earth. The trick is narrowing it down to just one. Simply measuring the Doppler shift once will not do that.

It is also not a point in dispute that by way of large tracking dishes here on earth, the positions of Ranger type lunar probes could be and were determined in real time

Yes, I know. I was the one who told you that.

http://home.earthlink.net/~danielsage17/diana.htm

I would encourage NO ONE to read that. It's horrible! Patrick, how many errors can you find in the first three paragraphs?

In the case of TRANSIT, two locations were given for each reception, knowing your general location allows you to choose between the two and so you get your numbers, submerge your missile carrying sub, align your platforms, and proceed to blast the Soviet music schools with your favorite flavor of compressed tritium.

Man, all you're doing is regurgitating what we've been telling you. The really galling part is you're acting like you're lecturing us, as if you knew this stuff already and we didn't and you're letting us in on the secret, when it's the same stuff WE have been telling you for the last 30 pages. It's quite sickening to read, especially since it took us weeks to pound it into your head.

The rest of your wall'o'text you just copied off the Wikipedia article.

Now the moon does not move very fast, only 2200 miles an hour about the earth give or take.

So the objection that 2000 miles an hour is not fast enough to generate a meaningful doppler shift is not valid.

Oh! My! God!

Doppler shift is only IN the line of sight!!! An object moving away from you will generate a Doppler shift. An object moving around you will NOT generate ANY Doppler shift. I cannot believe you didn't know that!!! Bwahahahahaha!!!

Google it, dude. Google it now!

Oh, man.

P.S. that's a Stundie! The man who presumed to lecture the entire forum about Doppler analysis did not know it can only measure radial velocity.

Also, these same shifts must be taken into account in the LRRR experiments to determine the earth moon distance so precisely.

This is getting absurd. NO!!! It mustn't!

The range is determined by the time delay between transmitting the light and receiving a return signal and correcting for the slight amount the Earth rotated during that delay.


Oh, man. You really don't understand any thing you've read about Doppler shift.

Named after the man who discovered it, by the way, and not used as a unit of measure, so it should be capitalized.

But I shall address using Doppler satellite navigation from multiple transmitters from the Moon and L-4 and L-5. Since those points are orbiting the Earth and very slowly approaching and receding their cones of Doppler shift will be almost perpendicular to their orbital paths. As such they will intersect the Earth as parallel lines all in the same area. To get an accurate fix the cones need to cross as close to perpendicular as possible. NAVSAT allowed that. Moon and L-4/-5 do not.

 

[abaddon]

<snip wall of text>

There were 16 experimental Transit Launches (not all successful)

There were 32 Transit-Oscar launches, the odd one being Oscar11, which was held back to be modified so that it could perform the dual role of participation in the transit network or perform sat-tracking.

That was followed by the launch of three TID (or TRIAD) versions.

Which was again followed by three Nova versions.

It was only shut down in 1996 with the advent of GPS.

There were at any one time 12 operational satellites in operation, 7 or 8 in use, and the remainder in storage orbits in the event of a failure in one of the active ones.

US subs only put up their UHF antennae for 2 minutes max. It was part of the milspec that the system should be able to fix position in that time.

The system was released for public use in 1967.

The moon is visible for only half a day, why would anyone expend the effort to equip it when a perfectly functional satellite system was available?

You wall of text is misinformed.

 

[JayUtah]

I would encourage NO ONE to read that. It's horrible!

I second that disendorsement. It's atrociously misinformed and just plain wrong.

Man, all you're doing is regurgitating what we've been telling you. The really galling part is you're acting like you're lecturing us, as if you knew this stuff already...

This is what charlatans do. Refutations eventually sink in a little bit. But it's unconscionable for them to admit error or defeat, so they wait a suitable interval and then expound their newly-minted "expertise."

The rest of your wall'o'text you just copied off the Wikipedia article.

Just like his Doppler shift figures were copied out of the link. He made it seem like he'd computed them, but he'd just copied them from someone else. That's why I asked him to compute some fresh, from an actual problem.

Doppler shift is only IN the line of sight!!! [...] I cannot believe you didn't know that!!! Bwahahahahaha!!!

And he's got a homework problem that addresses that, in connection with his claims of tracking Ranger.

Again I refer to Bate. Unlike other celestial mechanics texts that tend to be abstract and somewhat detached from practical techniques, Roger Bate is writing for Air Force cadets -- the ones who will be launching ballistic missiles and tracking inbound and outbound "bogeys." He is the first author (though not the only one) to demystify the patched-conic approach used to architect the translunar trajectories and many modern planetary approaches. And he offers several practical solutions for deriving orbital elements from various kinds of observations, one of them being a series of time-indexed observations of radial velocity.

The range is determined by the time delay between transmitting the light and receiving a return signal and correcting for the slight amount the Earth rotated during that delay.

That's the part he doesn't understand. No matter where the Moon is in its transit of the sky, laser ranging has to account for the Earth's rotation. Even when the Moon is at its zenith. Why? Because theirs is a pointing constraint. It has nothing to do with the Moon's velocity toward or from some point on Earth as an observer at that point experiences a tangential velocity that coincides with the radial.

The Moon at its zenith provides no radial velocity. The motion of the observer turning with the Earth is now at right angles to the radial. As such the pointing constraint is still in force, but there is no radial velocity.

Oh, man. You really don't understand any thing you've read about Doppler shift.

Clearly not. This is a Dunning+Kruger gold mine. He seems to think everything he reads that mentions the word Doppler automatically supports his claims, because he cannot conceive how his notion of the Doppler principle can be wrong.

As I was typing a response to Patrick last night, I happened to have an episode of James Burke's Connections playing, and he demonstrated in that episode the use of the TRANSIT system. His explanation was so very clear in Burke's inimitable style. I wish Patrick would see it.

 

[matt.tansy]

US subs only put up their UHF antennae for 2 minutes max. It was part of the milspec that the system should be able to fix position in that time.

But in practice it never worked. See my long-winded TRANSIT User's Manual post here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=7810412#post7810412

Search for "theoretical minimum time needed".

 

[matt.tansy]

Patrick,

you posted this link in your latest wall'o'text and said

I encourage the curious to check out this web page.

http://home.earthlink.net/~danielsage17/diana.htm

And in particular, I would like to draw the reader's attention to the LOST IN SPACE SECTION. However, reading the whole thing is so worth it. It is a very good brief discussion of some aspects of deep space tracking techniques and some things/details even the most well informed may not be aware of are included in this brief presentation.

To paraphrase Bowman, "My God! It's full of errors!"

Let's see if you can find all the errors in the first 3 paragraphs.

 

[Loss Leader]

As I was typing a response to Patrick last night, I happened to have an episode of James Burke's Connections playing, and he demonstrated in that episode the use of the TRANSIT system. His explanation was so very clear in Burke's inimitable style. I wish Patrick would see it.

Your wish is my command.

 

[PhantomWolf]

Loss Leader, they need the Saturn V to push the LM into space. THE LM IS IS IS IS THE UNMANNED MILITARY PLATFORM.....

Your whole senario fails at step number 1: "would Hollywood think it would work in a script?"

Honestly, your idea makes less sense than Avatar did. If you want to put a radio signal in the sky to use for tracking, why put it on the moon? The moon is only visible for 50% of the day, that means if it's not visible your tracking system won't work. Opps. Surely the better idea is to put such satelites in Geostationary orbits so they are there and visible all the time.

Now I know you're going to say "But the closer they are the easier they are to take out" and this is rubbish, the physics to hit a transmitting platform on the moon is identical to hitting something in orbit, it just takes longer to get to it, and in the case of a Soviet attack, they could have just launched "another" one of their Luna probes and "accidently" crashed into the US transmitter before attacking.

It also doesn't make sense why you would land 6 of these in different places about the moon. The receiver you need to tell those 6 signals apart is larger than your submarine! (Nor does it explain Apollo 8, 10, or 13)

Next, why go to all the trouble of building a massive rocket to launch other ships that were designed to be operated by people, and needed to be operated by people at very important times, only to get them rebuilt secretly to do an entirely different job and work automatically, when you could have just designed a purpose-built machine to do the job and launched and landed it as they did Surveyor? They already had ships capable of softlanding and transmitting from the moon, and they already had the rockets to get them there. Why spend a huge amount of money faking a moonlanding when you don't have too?

And that brings up the final absudity. Why try and hide it at all? If they did do what you are suggesting and succeeded, then the fact the platform would be transmitting beyond when it was supposed to for the mission would be entirely obvious to anyone listening in, like the Soviets! There would be no point in trying to fake the landing because the Soviets would have figured it out and then figured what its real purpose was anyway, even if one of their many spies didn't tell them directly. The whole sham would have been completely useless for hiding the transmitters from the Soviets, so what would have been the point?

So in the end the whole idea stinks so much that even Hollywood wouldn't touch it. There are better tracking systems availible that are no more vulnerable, but visible 24/7. No Saturns were needed, no LMs were needed, it would have been better to build for purpose rather than to retrofit the equipment, and none of it would have fooled the Soviets anyway. So what's the point?

 

[matt.tansy]

Here is a graphical explanation why transmitters on the Moon and L-4/5 will not provide a fix. In this example the Doppler cones are plotted as measured by an observer with the Moon on his meridian (i.e. the Moon is due south) and very high in the sky. This is how the cones developed by the Moon's and L-4/5's Doppler shift would intersect the surface of the Earth. It doesn't matter if the Moon/L-4/5 are approaching or receding because they do so very slowly and the shape of the cones will not appreciably be any different than this example. You will be somewhere on that 200~300 mile line where the three cones are touching. A 200~300 mile long line is not a fix. You're no doubt somewhere in the middle of that confluence but you have absolutely no way of telling where no better than NAVSAT, celestial, LORAN-C, OMEGA, bathymetric, or Heck, dead reckoning after a week without a fix, could tell you.

The same principle applies everywhere else on the planet: the cones will fall upon each other in a long coinciding line or curve.

 

[SpitfireIX]

I've just caught up on this thread after a couple of months away. I have a couple of questions for you, Patrick.

First, if the moon landings are as transparently fake as you say they are, why didn't NASA come up with a better cover story?

Second, along those same lines, why didn't the Soviets notice the landings were fake and blow the whistle?

@JayUtah: A belated welcome to JREF, Jay. It's great to finally have you "on board" (hehe).

 

[Patrick1000]

You obviously have not read my posts and so will make this one short...

Your whole senario fails at step number 1: "would Hollywood think it would work in a script?"

Honestly, your idea makes less sense than Avatar did. If you want to put a radio signal in the sky to use for tracking, why put it on the moon? The moon is only visible for 50% of the day, that means if it's not visible your tracking system won't work. Opps. Surely the better idea is to put such satelites in Geostationary orbits so they are there and visible all the time.

Now I know you're going to say "But the closer they are the easier they are to take out" and this is rubbish, the physics to hit a transmitting platform on the moon is identical to hitting something in orbit, it just takes longer to get to it, and in the case of a Soviet attack, they could have just launched "another" one of their Luna probes and "accidently" crashed into the US transmitter before attacking.

It also doesn't make sense why you would land 6 of these in different places about the moon. The receiver you need to tell those 6 signals apart is larger than your submarine! (Nor does it explain Apollo 8, 10, or 13)

Next, why go to all the trouble of building a massive rocket to launch other ships that were designed to be operated by people, and needed to be operated by people at very important times, only to get them rebuilt secretly to do an entirely different job and work automatically, when you could have just designed a purpose-built machine to do the job and launched and landed it as they did Surveyor? They already had ships capable of softlanding and transmitting from the moon, and they already had the rockets to get them there. Why spend a huge amount of money faking a moonlanding when you don't have too?

And that brings up the final absudity. Why try and hide it at all? If they did do what you are suggesting and succeeded, then the fact the platform would be transmitting beyond when it was supposed to for the mission would be entirely obvious to anyone listening in, like the Soviets! There would be no point in trying to fake the landing because the Soviets would have figured it out and then figured what its real purpose was anyway, even if one of their many spies didn't tell them directly. The whole sham would have been completely useless for hiding the transmitters from the Soviets, so what would have been the point?

So in the end the whole idea stinks so much that even Hollywood wouldn't touch it. There are better tracking systems availible that are no more vulnerable, but visible 24/7. No Saturns were needed, no LMs were needed, it would have been better to build for purpose rather than to retrofit the equipment, and none of it would have fooled the Soviets anyway. So what's the point?

You obviously have so NOT NOT NOT NOT read my posts Phantomwolf and so I will make this one short...

I have stated very clearly on multiple occasions, including upon the occasion of my last post, that Apollo associated/NASA associated military equipment, including equipment for my SUPER HIGH ORBITING TRANSIT TYPE SYSTEM, would be and indeed IS, MUST BE TODAY, located not only upon the moon, but also at lunar libration points 4 and 5. In this way, 270 degrees of the earth's surface would be covered by high orbiting equipment positioned at very stable and unreachable posts for 3/4 s of the day, 18 hours. One could place an instrument at libration point 5, an unstable, non Trojan post, and cover the backside of the earth(6 hours) with periodic adjustments of this libration point 5 satellite that would tend to drift, or perhaps better still, simply cover the backside 6 hours with a constellation of lower orbiting satellites as well.


Note how my constellation of satellites could be employed with regard to VERY LONG BASE INTERFEROMETRY(VLBI) techniques as well Phantomwolf, and I will go ahead and remind all "Lost Bird" readers that the ALSEPs indeed were employed in VERY LONG BASED INTERFEROMETRY "testing" to begin with. What is going on here is not even funny less than obvious. It's gotten to the point where one could argue the whole thing is as obvious and as acknowledgeable as a simple infantryman. By that I mean, the need for the equipment given the circumstances pushes one to see it, satellites at libration points, instrumented moon, as less and less and less exotic, and by this point in my investigation, simply garden variety. Of course!!!!! Apollo was military, of course!!!!! the moon was instrumented, of course!!!! there are military satellites parked above our heads on this very December day at libration points.........

Take a look at your own materials on VLBI Phantomwolf, as I said, I'll be tying that one into the Apollo ruse with my next strike from 240,000 miles out.........

 

[abaddon]

But in practice it never worked. See my long-winded TRANSIT User's Manual post here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=7810412#post7810412

Search for "theoretical minimum time needed".

Maybe, but I lack the will to expend more time on Patrick's notions.

After all, he is a doctor, with no training in the relevant disciplines by his own admission.

 

[Patrick1000]

Small error in my favor.....

I just realized that if one has satellites parked at earth-moon libration points 4 and 5, one has access to 300 degrees worth of the earth line of sight wise, 5/6 of the whole ball, not 270 degrees. As such, when taking this error to the favor of my view into account, one finds only 60 degrees, 1/6 of earth needs coverage from the backside to provide 24/7 coverage of the planet. My constellation of satellites watching satellites and doing other things from 240,000 miles out would need even less backside "conventional"/relatively high orbiting coverage to provide the military with important ranging, reconnaissance, surveillance, tracking, targeting services lunar day in and earth day out.

 

[Patrick1000]

Of course the Soviets know, they won the bloody race......

They are only transparent if one "reads the narrative" in detail, with an open mind and with great attention. It is plain as day given the contradictions, but how many people know the Lick Observatory Scientists knew exactly where the Eagle was on the night of the landing while the people in Houston were looking for the LM on maps?, know FIDO H.David Reed hadn't a clue as to where the bird was when he stepped into the office on the morning of 07/21/1969? know the location of the Eagle was still the $64,000 question per the CapCom/Houston and astronauts themselves during the return ride home, this more than a day after the Lick Observatory scientists have been given the EXACT!!! landing site coordinates? know there was infectious diarrhea, per NASA's own account of Borman's Apollo 8 illness, floating about in the command module environment and not only did they do nothing to fix the problem, ensure this did not happen on Apollo 9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17, but when Borman wrote an account of events in a LIFE Magazine article upon his "return to east", he unbelievably said he actually took Secanol a 2nd time on board the CM in cislunar space, as an experiment to see if it would make him sick again? Atypical gram negative pneumonia anyone? Got a respirator in theta tin can? Can any of those clowns intubate their companions? This is a flat out ludicrous JOKE!!!!!!

I trust I need not go on with this, it does tend to be rather unsettling, does it not? Best to deny NASA's own internally incoherent story and enjoyy the sub-lackluster performance of our pretend cislunar thespians.

The Soviets do notice and notice plenty. They are instrumenting the moon and libration points too. What do you think they were doing out there, taking pictures for the pure scientific fun of it all? I don't think so?

I've just caught up on this thread after a couple of months away. I have a couple of questions for you, Patrick.

First, if the moon landings are as transparently fake as you say they are, why didn't NASA come up with a better cover story?

Second, along those same lines, why didn't the Soviets notice the landings were fake and blow the whistle?

@JayUtah: A belated welcome to JREF, Jay. It's great to finally have you "on board" (hehe).

 

[Garrison]

Patrick instead of simply reiterating the same claims how about some hard evidence? Blueprints, photos, witness statements, anything that would show this scheme of yours has a shred of reality.

 

[abaddon]

I just realized that if one has satellites parked at earth-moon libration points 4 and 5, one has access to 300 degrees worth of the earth line of sight wise, 5/6 of the whole ball, not 270 degrees. As such, when taking this error to the favor of my view into account, one finds only 60 degrees, 1/6 of earth needs coverage from the backside to provide 24/7 coverage of the planet. My constellation of satellites watching satellites and doing other things from 240,000 miles out would need even less backside "conventional"/relatively high orbiting coverage to provide the military with important ranging, reconnaissance, surveillance, tracking, targeting services lunar day in and earth day out.

You have yet to provide any evidence that such a thing exists.

So far, it is all in your imagination. Do you have any evidence?

 

[Garrison]

The Soviets do notice and notice plenty. They are instrumenting the moon and libration points too. What do you think they were doing out there, taking pictures for the pure scientific fun of it all? I don't think so?

Ignoring your ressurrection of the Soviet Union perhaps you could tell us how the Russians and the US have maintained this capability since the Russians haven't sent any probes to the moon in decades and the US didn't land anything between Apollo and LCROSS(which was a crash rather than a landing and does rather put paid to the notion that hardware on the moon couldn't be taken out)? And please give some detail in doing so, launchers, hardware specs, witnesses, third party detection of all this hardware you claim is out there, something that isn't just the same old claims reasserted.

 

[LSSBB]

The Soviets do notice and notice plenty. They are instrumenting the moon and libration points too. What do you think they were doing out there, taking pictures for the pure scientific fun of it all? I don't think so?

Who are these Soviets you speak of that are operating nowadays? Do they have a website?

 

[Tomblvd]

They are only transparent if...(snip out the uninformative bits....

Patrick, how about answering Jay's "homework" questions?

 

[JayUtah]

You obviously have so NOT NOT NOT NOT read my posts...

No, Patrick. You don't get to make this complaint. You have ignored countless statements over the past months.

When Loss Leader took you to task for not answering my simple question, you repented and indicated your willingness to answer questions. You asked me to provide some that were pertinent to your claims.

I have done so.

I have asked you half a dozen or so new, relevant questions to test your knowledge of the sciences behind your theory. In deference to your desire to pick and choose among simple and challenging questions, mine range from those you can answer in seconds without even thinking (if you know the material) to those that will require substantial (but rewarding) computation. In other words, I have coddled you and removed any reasonable objection you might raise to being asked to demonstrate competence.

In the time after these questions appeared, you have made several posts in which you largely just repeat your tired claims without providing proof. You clearly have time to pay attention to this thread.

At this point I must conclude that the only reason you won't acknowledge or address those questions is fear. The world is waiting and watching to see if you will put your money where your mouth is.

Nervous yet?