Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[JayUtah]

I think you may be missing what Vixen actually meant. To be perfectly clear, she was referring to a communication system reliant on any of numerous small often brightly colored South American characin fishes often bred in tropical aquariums.

Her source doesn't even say TETRA or Tetra or anything like that. This is Bart Sibrel's joint, which others picked up on. Sibrel knows about as much as @Vixen does about satellites. The link provided a few pages back is a very thorough summary and debunking of it.

TETR stands for TEst and TRaining. It's a program. As part of that program, a number of Earth-orbiting satellites were launched and operated. TETR-A was the first of them, which actually deorbited long before Apollo 11. That was followed by TETR-B, TETR-C, TETR-D, and so forth.

It's almost as if Vixen is deliberately trying to see how many mistakes she can cram into her posts to drive engagement. Maybe we'll get to 300 pages by the end of the weekend.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

At this point it's obviously a put-on. No one is accidentally that clueless.

Pig ignorance at that scale is very seldom accidental, and natural stupidity is very seldom the reason for it.

What we have been seeing is artificial stupidity. It takes a lot of effort to become so clueless.

The choice was made, years ago it seems, to become clueless.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Your page is not even in the right book. Or library. You simply have no apparent clue how radio communications work.


None.

None was needed. None would have helped. There is an antenna on the Moon. It's pointing at Earth. There is an antenna on Earth. It's pointing at the Moon. Radio waves go between these two antennas because they are pointed at each other.

It really is that simple.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

In Vixenworld^TM light doesn't travel in straight lines.

Perhaps it bends around her for some reason?

 

[P.J. Denyer]

I'm now beginning to think I may have to revisit Adam Duritz's lyrics to Recovering The Satellites, as he may have been trying to tell us something.

Not to mention investigating why the Mad Professor called his Protection version Radiation Ruling The Nation.

This is going deeper and deeper. Were Duritz and the Professor on to something?

The Hooters have also done some very good research work on the subject.

 

[JayUtah]

Likewise the magnitude of your camera lens is another factor. (Think how binoculars and telescopes work.)

If a telescope or microscope says it magnifies by, say, 50X, then yes you can absolutely say that things look 50 times bigger or closer. That's literally what that number means.

In addition, if stars are 30% brighter you can't just assume ah, let's adjust the setting by same.

That's exactly what you can assume when the setting is the shutter speed. Part of scientific literacy is knowing when the simple answer is, in every respect, the right answer because the physics is that simple.

This odd ramble does seem to indicate you are entirely unfamiliar with what the f-stop expression of a camera's lens aperture actually means. It's not an abstract value where "yes but this lens goes up to f11" is a meaningless Spinal Tap brag.

She didn't specify what she meant by "magnitude of a camera lens," which is nonsensical on its face. I took it to mean magnification factor since she's talking about telescopes and binoculars.

F-stop is a good example of a nonlinear scale. It's a log₂ scale. Each tick left or right from some setting is either half as much or twice as much light. When we say, "Underexpose by one stop," we're saying "Let in only half as much light." -1 stop (on the logarithmic scale) = 2^-1 (=0.5) times the light.

The label we use is a fraction, f/5.6 means "an aperture whose diameter is the focal length of the lens divided by 5.6." The bigger the denominator, the smaller the opening and the less light it lets in. The next stop smaller is f/8, which works out to a circle with half the surface area, therefore half the light. We leave it labeled as a fraction of the focal length because the focal length also affects how much total light comes into the lens. This lets us compare settings between different lenses.

The same works for shutter speeds. Going from 1/250 to 1/500 or 1/125 is the equivalent of letting in half as much light or twice the light respectively. We leave the labels as raw time because seconds are seconds no matter what lens you're using. The conventional values we set for shutter speed are contrived to conform to log₂ behavior.

 

[Foster Zygote]

In addition, if stars are 30% brighter you can't just assume ah, let's adjust the setting by same.

That's exactly what you can assume when the setting is the shutter speed. Part of scientific literacy is knowing when the simple answer is, in every respect, the right answer because the physics is that simple.

Most ridiculous is that Vixen is claiming that stellar photography requiring, at minimum, tens of seconds can be achieved with equal results in 1/125 second simply by increasing the photon flux by 30%.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Conspiracy theorists object that it would be too hard/impossible to determine where the positions of the moon, sun and planets would be relative to the celestial sphere at a certain time simply because they don't personally know how to do it, and the idea that anyone else knows how to competently do something that they don't is anathema to them.

It's more incoherent than that. The entire "They didn't fake the stars because they'd get caught faking them in the wrong positions" assumes that it would be *easy* to determine where the astronauts should be relative to the celestial sphere. CTers then miss the obvious point that anybody who knows where the stars are supposed to be could also simply be hired to *put* them there in the photos.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Your page is not even in the right book. Or library. You simply have no apparent clue how radio communications work.

Not even a good grade of crayon, but keeping within the lines should count for something, yes?

 

[JayUtah]

The other thing I should emphasize about the TETR-A part of the story is that the hoax claimants typically say the TETR satellites were used to spoof signals from the Moon so that ground stations (both NASA-affiliated and third-party) would point their dishes skyward and think they're getting signals from the Moon when they were really getting signals relayed from Earth up to the TETR satellite and back down again, "from the Moon." When I say Bart Sibrel knows about as much as @Vixen about how satellites and orbits work, this is kind of what I mean. Obviously that wouldn't work with the low-orbiting TETR satellites (80-90 minute orbits). And yes, it was possible for satellite watchers to know where the TETR satellites actually were.

The link I mentioned explains the details of the TETR missions with respect to the Apollo missions. To use them to train for tracking and communications, the smaller dishes at the ground stations were used because they were the only ones that could slew fast enough to track them for long enough. The larger dishes at Honeysuckle Creek, Goldstone, Parkes, etc. can only be trained on targets that aren't moving very fast in the sky. You can talk to a TETR satellite with the large dishes only for 30 seconds or so while the satellite is low on the horizon and exhibits only slight angular movement.

But Vixen seems to have gotten it into her head that a TETR satellite was (or should have been) the "geopositioned" Moon-orbiting satellite inexplicably needed in order to transmit signals between the Earth and the Moon. This is a novel and compoundingly silly invocation of the TETR-A satellite claim. Apparently if we say that no, the TETR-A satellites were not being used to transmit television down to Earth, that means no transmissions were possible. That whole claim is just fractally wrong.

 

[MostlyHarmless]

I have to say this has been the best Apollo Hoax thread in a long time. I mean, the OP has no clue, it's great. And of course we have Jay and all the other minds on this board!

I always learn from these threads, it's not my favorite in my 20 something years here, but it's the best in a long time!

Thanks everybody! (even vixen, I guess)

 

[Reformed Offlian]

heh heh. She said "do do"

 

[threadworm]

Her source doesn't even say TETRA or Tetra or anything like that. This is Bart Sibrel's joint, which others picked up on. Sibrel knows about as much as @Vixen does about satellites. The link provided a few pages back is a very thorough summary and debunking of it.

TETR stands for TEst and TRaining. It's a program. As part of that program, a number of Earth-orbiting satellites were launched and operated. TETR-A was the first of them, which actually deorbited long before Apollo 11. That was followed by TETR-B, TETR-C, TETR-D, and so forth.

It's almost as if Vixen is deliberately trying to see how many mistakes she can cram into her posts to drive engagement. Maybe we'll get to 300 pages by the end of the weekend.

Your comments made me look again at this page, and I realised I'd made an error in terms of the orbital inclination values. I'd assumed they were done from north, rather than the equator, so TETR orbits were indeed very similar to Apollo's Earth Parking Orbits whereas I had assumed they were more polar in nature. Interesting to note studies on orbital decay of TETR-D, which shows that these satellites were of great interest to people outside the Manned Spaceflight Network.

Your main point stands: Sibrel, and the rest of the Apollo grifters, have latched on to it as some sort of explanation, and people not prepared to look into it more carefully just swallow it whole. I've also made this point to hoax adherents many times: even if what you are claiming is possible, there is no evidence that it was actually done.

 

[Foster Zygote]

 Your comments made me look again at this page, and I realised I'd made an error in terms of the orbital inclination values. I'd assumed they were done from north, rather than the equator, so TETR orbits were indeed very similar to Apollo's Earth Parking Orbits whereas I had assumed they were more polar in nature. Interesting to note studies on orbital decay of TETR-D, which shows that these satellites were of great interest to people outside the Manned Spaceflight Network.

Your main point stands: Sibrel, and the rest of the Apollo grifters, have latched on to it as some sort of explanation, and people not prepared to look into it more carefully just swallow it whole. I've also made this point to hoax adherents many times: even if what you are claiming is possible, there is no evidence that it was actually done.

Waaaaaay back on page 13, I showed clear evidence of Sibrel's deliberate deception. (Although I miss remembered the creator as Percy, so I'll fix it in the quote.

Bart Sibrel is a lying sack of ◊◊◊◊ and this 4½ minute video proves it.


David Percy, in his equally clownish Was it Only a Paper Moon?, also showed a bit of RCA GCTA video showing one of the J-Mission astronauts hopping on the moon, then he sped it up to what he claimed was the "original speed" and says it looks just like someone jumping in earth gravity. And it does look like it could be someone moving in 1g - for that couple second clip he showed. But someone else took the original TV video that clip is taken from and sped up a much longer part of it by the same rate as Percy, and it's undeniably clear that it can't be normal movement in earth gravity, as it looks as unnatural as any other video of people moving about at a much faster than normal playback speed.

There's no way in Hell he didn't deliberately edit those TV broadcasts to fit a narrative that he knows is a lie. He's a grifter who, like Sibrel, figured out he could earn a decent profit by selling ◊◊◊◊ sandwiches as long as he labeled them "FOR SMART PEOPLE ONLY!".

 

[Foster Zygote]

...but only if the whole shebang had been filmed in advance as a training simulation. They'd need to 'get rid' of the Nevada/Arizona sky above.

I expect it would have been far more challenging to "get rid" of the Nevada/Arizona ground. My parents lived in the Mojave Valley in Arizona for about fifteen years. I know what the desert in Nevada and Arizona look like. Here are some typical examples:



And here's the moon, as seen from Apollo 15 and 17 respectively:

AS15-87-11748

AS-17-134-20408

 

[Mojo]

I did. You claimed that you were "citing HJP "Douglas" Arnold, who worked with Kodak in the UK 1966 - 74 during Apollo", but you failed to provide an actual citation. That's is what is being talked about here.

Please provide the citation.

Come on, Vixen, give us the citation. Have you forgotten saying "All of my comments are sourced, unless I state 'IMV'"?

 

[Steve]

Come on, Vixen, give us the citation. Have you forgotten saying "All of my comments are sourced, unless I state 'IMV'"?

Vixen's eidetic memory never allows her to forget anything.

Imagine what it would be like to have every trivial life event floating around in the ol' memory banks. I suspect the filing system would quickly become corrupted.

 

[JayUtah]

Your comments made me look again at this page, and I realised I'd made an error in terms of the orbital inclination values. I'd assumed they were done from north, rather than the equator, so TETR orbits were indeed very similar to Apollo's Earth Parking Orbits whereas I had assumed they were more polar in nature.

Right, inclinations are reckoned from the equator. The direction of the tilt is reckoned from the First Point of Aries.

You need your training orbits to be close to Apollo parking orbits because while the ship is in low Earth orbit you need to be close enough to its ground track for the ship not to be over the horizon. While the Apollo ships were in parking orbit, prior to heading out for the Moon, they had to be tracked with the 9-meter dishes that could slew fast enough. And those had to be along the expected ground track. Since the ones not mounted on ships were permanent installations and not transportable, that's where you need the satellite you're training on to be in a particular orbit similar to the Apollo parking orbits.

In Sibrel's alternate scenario, though, the CSM just staying in Earth orbit the whole time. The ship was real. The launch was real. The splashdown and recovery was real. But the missions all just stayed in Earth orbit. He has a whole cherry-pick about this using dishonestly edited television footage. So the ground crews tracking the CSM in LEO were doing what they did in training with the TETR satellites. You don't need a TETR satellite to mimc the CSM for this part, because the CSM is already doing that job. In the Sibrel scenario the TETR satellite was supposed to mimic the CSM on its way to the Moon. The only way you can pretend to be a Moon-bound spaceship and still obey orbital mechanics is to go to the Moon. None of the TETR satellites did that. So why does it have to be a TETR satellite, especially? If you're going to speculate the existence of a Moon-bound uncrewed relay, why use the name of a satellite system that was already known about, and known not to do what you say it's doing?

To me it sounds like someone just latched onto a name for which some history (however irrelevant) could be found and then made up a whole lot of impossible nonsense about it.

 

[EHocking]

I expect it would have been far more challenging to "get rid" of the Nevada/Arizona ground. My parents lived in the Mojave Valley in Arizona for about fifteen years. I know what the desert in Nevada and Arizona look like. Here are some typical examples:
View attachment 73657
View attachment 73658

And here's the moon, as seen from Apollo 15 and 17 respectively:
View attachment 73659
AS15-87-11748
View attachment 73660
AS-17-134-20408

Obviously faked. None of those photos show stars in the sky.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

People really do have too much time on their hands these days.