Oh, that's priceless! You don't need to be a rocket scientist to do rocket science. That's another Stundie.
First, why did you phrase it so dishonestly? You didn't answer the question I asked. You proceeded to justify your implied answer to it with another bald-faced assertion. You couldn't bring yourself to actually write the words, "I have no training or experience in aerospace engineering," even though that would have been the truth.
And why are you so terrified of that truth? Because you know that no one buys your "common sense is enough" claim -- even you. When I turned the tables on you in another thread, you fell headlong into the rhetorical trap: you insisted that common sense wasn't enough to dispute things you had expertise in. And to cement your hypocrisy, you yourself quote experts such as Frank O'Brien precisely because you believe that such expertise is necessary to establish a proper understanding of the relevant facts.
My question was asked in the context of ICBM testing. Your rewriting of it to "any of this," and the attendant laundry list of prior claims, constitutes a straw-man expansion of scope. Yes, there are some things you have brought up in your 7-month odyssey of error that aren't related to engineering. But most are, and that was the context of my question. You are unqualified to dispute achievements in aerospace engineering. Admit it and own it, or the world will spank you over it every time.
So you admit that expertise is necessary, you admit that common sense doesn't tell you everything you need to know, and you admit you don't have the proper expertise. That leaves you pretty far out in the cold, Patrick. Given these admissions, how can you maintain that everyone but you is wrong? Isn't it more likely that the uninformed loner is the one who is wrong?
Easy, there. One "must" is enough. Yes, we test missiles. And the procedures for testing missiles is rocket science.
No, it prevents nuclear warheads from being exploded. Nothing in any test ban treaty prevents testing delivery systems with non-functioning warheads -- or more often, instrument packages.
To the degree of confidence afforded us by the means we choose to test, yes.
You haven't proven that they're phony, only that you don't understand them because you lack the appropriate training and expertise. Further, you haven't shown that the expenditures attributed to any of the manned space programs are inappropriate, although you committed some pretty amusing errors in your attempt to do so.
Straw man. You may not arbitrarily invent requirements that the operators of the system do not assume. The judgment of how accurate and reliable a rocket needs to be in order to satisfy its mission is rocket science.
Loss Leader, this is what I was getting at when you and I and others discussed deduction (i.e., argumentation) versus observation. Despite the factual information available regarding how nuclear missiles are tested, Patrick has instead constructed a line of reasoning intended to show how they "must" be tested instead. Do you see in this example how an argument for a conclusion that ought to be true is weaker than an observation of what else is instead seen to be true? Yes, his argument is flawed, but that's my point.
To the point now, Patrick, I and several others have asked how Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and STS missions would effectively test nuclear missile technology. We want specifics, and we aren't getting any from you so far. Designing adequately faithful tests of rocket systems is exactly rocket science, and is in fact one of the more demanding aspects of the licensed profession.
But if you're repeating your previous pattern, you don't have the specifics yet. You've already drawn your conclusion, and now you're frantically looking for quotes you can mine to selectively support your pre-existing belief. You admit this is how you've worked in the past, and you seem proud of doing it that way -- wrong as it can possibly be. We might even see one of those cases where you wait three weeks and then sneak back into this particular point by regurgitating what others have told you in rebuttal, pretending that you knew it all along and are now instructing the reader.
They are not facts or certainties. They are simply your beliefs, which you haven't been able to prove are any stronger than uninformed personal belief even after 130+ pages of going round and round in circles.
And can you honestly sit there and tell the world that a proper evaluation of these incidents is not rocket science? If that's not rocket science then what is?
Evaluating flight test anomalies is rocket science. I took you through each one in detail, giving you the engineer's perspective on it. You simply ignored all of it and insisted that your uninformed judgment alone was superior. Why do you think the world will not rightly interpret your claim as ignorance on your part?
I assume no pun was intended there. Yes, we've been over all these points ad nauseam because you respect no knowledge but your own, limited as it is. In the real world this debate would have been over in an hour when the proponent realized he didn't have sufficient understanding. But in your Dunning-Kruger kingdom, all you think you have to do to prove your belief is to state it and restate it. You don't get what it means to prove something.
First, you're not a doctor. The attending physician has impeccable credentials and has given his opinion. Your disputation of it amounts to nothing more than insisting he's wrong.
Second, you're not a flight director. The decision whether to continue a mission in the face of illness is not a medical decision alone. There are other issues at stake, and you lack the proper judgment to satisfice them. What you personally would have done differently is utterly irrelevant to the authenticity of the missions.
Third, you can't decide what you should have done. At first you told us that the flight should have been aborted immediately, and that this was the only acceptable solution. Then that "infallible" conclusion was quietly forgotten as you asserted that they should have "fixed the toilet." And that's where the discussion lies: you were invited to give a proper aerospace engineering evaluation of the details of your proposal, and you have fled from it. You simply wave your hands and say the engineers should somehow have done something differently, and the fact that they didn't is somehow more "infallible" proof of fraud.
Finally, you have no explanation for why NASA couldn't get this right. With legions of flight surgeons on the insider payroll, why couldn't the come up with an illness that is plausible to you?
Regarding the laser, you were asked to compute its visual magnitude. Many engineers can do this, but you simply pretended the question was never asked. The apparent brightness of the laser affects your expectation that it should have been seen, but you refuse to provide the proof. Therefore we reject your claim.
This did, however, lead to a rather amusing sidetrack in which it was revealed that you thought only the CAPCOM could hear the crew! How's that "common sense" working for you now?
The astronauts report being able or unable to see various stars under different circumstances, just like any other star observer. You selectively report the astronauts' experience. And, like all the other laymen conspiracy theorists, you want to distill the issue of star visibility down to a simple rule with which you can beat the astronauts over the head, regardless of whether it's scientifically valid. Since all who observe stars for any reason cite various factors affecting their ability to do so, the astronauts' report is consistent with the general understanding of the task.
You've made so many contradictory claims under the umbrella of this point that I hardly know where to start. For someone who claims to be infallible, you seem to change your mind a lot.
Much of it boils down to one outlying bit of documentary evidence claiming that Lick Observatory was accidentally given the true coordinates of the landed LM. You place inappropriate emphasis on this account given long after the fact, and essentially disregard the stronger contemporary document evidence. Manufacturing a catastrophic dilemma is not proof.
Then at some point you claimed Eagle couldn't rendezvous properly with the CSM unless its terrestrial coordinates were precisely known, therefore the "lost" LM had to be fiction. You revealed a comically simplistic understanding of what orbital rendezvous actually entails. And predictably you manufactured a whole bunch of "constraints" that simply didn't apply.
You even revisited that claim in a different form, talking about out-of-plane errors. And that reminds us that you were asked to show some expertise in orbital mechanics, which applies to your claims of problematic terminal guidance for the LM. And predictably you refused to be tested. You explicitly rejected the notion that you should need to demonstrate any actual skill, despite the fact that orbital mechanics is the aerospace engineer's bread and butter.
Along the way you demonstrated an almost complete lack of understanding for how guidance and control systems actually work. I and others have explained to you in depth how they work, and how they would have worked for Apollo under the circumstances that Apollo 11 documented. You brush all that aside and thump your chest with more claims of infallibility.
You even amusingly assert that Ranger and Surveyor guidance dictates the parameters that apply to Apollo, despite lengthy and repeated analysis from an engineering and orbital mechanics standpoint. Do you really think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the difference in methods and limitations?
At the heart of your claim lies the difference between knowing the LM's location to some tolerance for flight operations, and knowing the LM's location to a different tolerance for scientific and historical purposes. You constantly conflate the two, applying the requirements, limits, and techniques from one to the other. When you stand in front of the AIAA do you really think they'll let you gloss over all those details?
At only one time did the astronauts report any difficulty checking the platform alignment by means of the attached optics: when Apollo 13 was surrounded by debris. At all other times, at 4-8 hour intervals, the astronauts reported no difficulty in getting a stellar fix. The sextant is testable on Earth, and the designer of the sextant (and the father of the science that derived it) verified the astronauts' ability to use it properly. You selectively quote the astronauts on this point.
The AGC and LGC contained a computerized star chart. Final identification of the stars was the task of the human pilot, therefore the computer component of the eventual solution did not need to be as robust as in other similar systems.
A proper assessment of guidance platform alignment contingencies, and their associated criticality ratings, can only be done by a suitably trained engineer. The layman's opinion -- i.e., your opinion -- is irrelevant. You asserted that the crew would need to align the platform at a moment's notice and spun your wheels considerably trying to prove the utter necessity of frequent and timely star fixes. Those of us who know how inertial guidance works are pretty much laughing at you.
And you remain unaware that the Apollo spacecraft were not designed to require constant inertial guidance. You cite irrelevant experience from ships and airplanes. The IMU itself was not even a C-1 item, and it nevertheless had a backup -- the SCS -- which is entirely absent in your thinking.
And of course the world is still awaiting the answer to whether you have operated any INS-guided vehicle, or have any experience in astronavigation. Clearly you don't want to admit that you have not, while many here in this forum have extensive practical experience with those machines and techniques. Why this concerted program of hiding your shortcomings from the audience? Could it be that you want the strength of your argument to be judged not on what you bring to the table, but what you can merely pretend to bring to the table?
Your personal judgment of how astronauts should act is arrogant, presumptuous, and irrelevant. But like your mentors Jarrah White and Bart Sibrel, you can't resist taking that personal pot-shot against the crews. You personally detest the Apollo astronauts, and this bias is becoming more and more evident in your writings.
I don't for one minute believe that kindness motivates your refusal to give evidence that the Apollo crews are as unintelligent as you claim. You've called them vile names for seven months and impugned practically every aspect of their careers and personality for your own aggrandizement. I will therefore demand objective proof for this claim, or a retraction. What you propose to call charity on your part, I call cowardice.
You, who post anonymously, and refuse to submit to any test of your claimed knowledge and skills, and have committed the most comical of elementary errors, have no basis calling into question the skills and qualifications of people whose accomplishments are prominently validated in public. These gentlemen earned advanced academic degrees in challenging fields before becoming astronauts, and distinguished themselves in other ways.
In the final analysis your argument against the proficiency of the Apollo astronauts boils down to -- once again -- begging the question. You just say to read their books and agree with you. How many Apollo astronauts have you personally met and worked with? I want actual names.
It is now time for you to put up or shut up.
And on what grounds do you maintain that the judgment to continue the mission under the documented circumstances is not rocket science? Can there be anything more suited to rocket science than the evaluation of a potential mission failure in a rocket? Your arrogance in denying this requisite expertise is frankly astonishing. The fully qualified rocket scientists and licensed engineers-of-record supplied their analysis on the record, but you simply brush it aside as "what the perps would naturally say."
In true layman fashion, you trot out irrelevant examples that seem to be superficially related. You handwave and bluster. But in the end, I explained in detail how lightning resistance is achieved in an airframe and how the Apollo spacecraft specifically achieved it. You have been presented with that detailed engineering analysis, but you have explicitly said you will not pay attention to it, with no further comment. How does that not qualify as simply putting your head in the sand and denying reality?
And finally, you have yet to explain how bringing the astronauts home immediately with potentially broken parachutes would have been any safer for them, and more valuable to the taxpayer, than first letting them go to the Moon and transmit back data and observations?
You provide no proof that Alan Bean's actions were intentional. They would just need to be in your scenario, so you circularly reason that they were. This is why you have no credibility.
I think it's hilarious that you point to a few isolated instances where expected photography was not provided and assert that this must be to keep evidence from piling up against Apollo. But you neglect that these are isolated islets in a veritable ocean of photographic evidence that would otherwise be subject to your suspicions. Formally this is the fallacy of limited scope -- your explanation doesn't apply to all the pertinent evidence.
You mean you can't think of any way. That's because developing feasible and faithful test programs is rocket science, and you don't have any experience in that. When your argument is structured, "It must be X because I've eliminated all the other possibilities," your ignorance of the field from which those possibilities would have to arise does fatal damage to your argument.
Nor, as I've written above, have you been able to describe how exactly these programs would test nuclear deterrant effectively. As I said, I was once an engineering contractor for the agency directly tasked with ensuring the viability and safety of our nuclear deterrant. That agency employs rocket scientists. Why do you think they would do that if rocket science is not a requirement, as you claim?
First, Apollo had stated military objectives: Project Chapel Bell, which has now been largely revealed to be an experiment in over-the-horizon radar tracking. NASA had no problem listing it as a classified military objective in the flight plans, mission reports, etc. That's what so silly about your overall claim. You say the general public would crap a brick if they found out Apollo was a military operation, therefore it had to be kept secret at all costs. But the actual military objectives of Apollo have been published since the mid-1960s and known about in detail for the past 5 years or so. So we have already seen how NASA handles its military obligations, and it bears no resemblance to what you say was done.
Second, none of those geodesy tasks would work for Apollo. Properly qualified engineers and operators have explained to you just why not, but you ignore them and merely continue to insist that the universe must operate as you envision it. Even you finally had to admit that your theory wouldn't work without a flotilla of artificial satellites which, in the final analysis, do the job themselves.
And you know this. Why else would you assiduously avoid my questions testing your knowledge of Doppler principles? You begged Loss Leader to let me test you on relevant questions. Then when the test came, despite my having directed your attention to it several times, you fled from it. You know very well that you're asking people to accept your judgment on the viability of the Moon for military purposes. And you know very well that your judgment is disputed by all the experts, and therefore fighting for its life. So it would be unacceptable for you to fail a test of the understanding you know must lie behind that judgment in order for it to be of any proof value.
In fact, even acknowledging the presence of the test would admit that there is knowledge out there that you don't have, can't be synthesized from intuition, and which has provably right and wrong answers. That terrifies you because you can't weasel out of a wrong answer in engineering.
Proof? You haven't provided any proof in this post -- just claims. That's the point: you don't know the difference between a proposition and the proof for it. You have no clue how proof is attained. This is why you keep begging the question and making circular arguments.
This post contains a list of your personal beliefs, not the proof for them. You obviously recognize the need to prove them individually, because you have attempted to do so. But you don't recognize when your argument fails, and so you often "prove" them simply by repeating them and insisting that it can be no other way. Your belief in something is not proof of it. Get over it.
I'm pretty much through with you. Your incessant puerile rants don't even qualify as a battle of wits, much less a learned discussion of the achievements of space engineering. You are thoroughly clueless, and discussion of any kind with you is an arduous chore.
