The weather was nice, so I took the weekend off to be out in the desert before it really and truly becomes a desert. Sorry if this is a repeat of the pending arguments our newcomer has posed.
It is suspicious that Neil Armstrong photographed before taking contingency sample
The allegation is that because the lunar surface checklist called for Armstrong to obtain the contingency sample before retrieving the camera and taking pictures, and Armstrong did these steps out of order and never gave an accounting for it, it is a suspicious portion of the Apollo record. The premise given later is that the checklist and astronaut drills should have been considered involiable or at least second-nature, hence Armstrong's behavior is suspicious. That NASA never called him to account for that behavior is allegedly further suspicious.
The premise that checklists and training drills were sacrosanct fails logically because it is a begged question. It fails factually because information was provided that NASA considered no such thing. In fact, information was provided that NASA's belief was actually to the contrary. Hence there is nothing suspicious about Armstrong going "off script."
The premise that Armstrong never accounted for his behavior is factually false. Citations to the appropriate debriefing were provided.
This claim seems to be abandoned without being withdrawn or conceded.
There exists a trove of documents to be declassified and made available in 2026, and they will shed unfavorable light on Apollo's authenticity
The allegation is that Lyndon Johnson classified such documents, that they will be declassified in the year given, and that they relate at least in part to Apollo.
None of these premises was substantiated by any form of evidence. They remain speculation. The proponent seems to recognize this and although he characterizes his belief as speculation, he does return to that statement of belief quite often. If it is to be considered a premise to or background for some other claim, it must be substantiated in all three elements (existence, subject matter, and release date).
Function of Apollo guidance system
The proponent made specific claims about how Apollo's guidance system worked. Specifically the claim was that it updated the state vector by integrating acceleration to arrive at velocity, the integrating velocity to arrive at position. A correction was given, specifically that due to the design of the Apollo guidance platform, acceleration during powered flight was reckoned outside the computer and presented to the software as velocity.
The proponent pressed the issue and changed the argument to be allegedly one of how those quantities relate abstractly in Newtonian physics. This is a correct assessment of Newtonian physics, but it is still incorrect to imply that the AGC implements the abstract model verbatim. In fact this is a common mistake made by people who try to understand production hardware based on cursory examination of the underlying basic principles.
The relevance of this claim to Apollo would seem to be that the prevailing discussion of Apollo here at JREF recently has emphasized the guidance system as a fertile ground for claims that it could not or did not work.
The propenent appears to be continuing to ignore his original claim in favor of trying to foist the straw man as "indisputable fact" that his critics must respect. We await commentary on the original claim.
Effect of "radiation" on Apollo 15 first-edition covers
It was proposed that the stamps Apollo 15 exposed to the space environment should, if authentic, exhibit observable properties. The proponent was asked several questions regarding this methodology, during which questioning he either ignored the questions, answered that he did not know how it work, or made answers that got wrong some basic scientific facts such as the nature of the radiation allegedly involved, its strength and other physical properties, and its expected or likely effect.
The proponent offered an experiment he said would validate the hypothesis, but refused to explain exactly how. He conducted the experiment anyway and reported the results, but has not explained how this constitutes any sort of valid scientific methodology to vet the method he propose to use to test the Apollo 15 stamps for authenticity. Nor does he explain how or why he would have access to those specimens.
This claim seems to be a going concern, but the proponent seem uninterested in critics' concerns and questions.
