Well first I want to say that given this thread is 7 pages in only about 7 hours, it just shows how much more popular Apollo is than 9/11, lol.
Second, I'm not going to bother quoting exactly because I can't be fragged going back through 7 pages for the exact quotes, and I'm not planning to do a deep debunk of most things because they have already been brought up. So....
The Van Allen Belts.
Unlike the Electromagnetic Radiation of an X-Ray, the Van Allen Belts consist of high speed particles. Particles can be stopped by various things, though Metal is one of the worse to do it however as it created an electromagnetic braking radiation. Low density metals are good, and so are high density polymers and water. Beta radiation, such as the protons and elections of the VA Belts, can be stopped by as little as 10cm of the appropriate material.
The Apollo CM was not just made of a thin sheet of Aluminium but was actually a very thick walled craft. The thin pressure hulls were on the LM, (Note here that it is LM, not LEM. The "Excursion" was removed from the Landing Module's name almost as soon as it was thought off, and LEM is nowadays used almost exclusively by the Hoax Proponents and their Followers) and the crew was never in the LM while passing through the VA Belts. However besides the pressure hull, the LM had a large amount of thermal blanketing on the outside and internal walls and insulation to protect the pressure hull from the astronauts.
The CM had thick walls made up of sheets of low density Aluminium metal and thick layers of material matting for insulation. This matting worked very effectively against the particle radiation of the belts and didn't produce the breaking radiation.
Finally, even large doses of radiation are not necessarily fatal. I watched a documentary a few months back where the crew walked into the control room at Chernobyl, one of the most radioactive parts of the plant. Chernobyl was still operating for years after the accident with people working there quite easily (though not in that control room.) As long as the exposure time is short, then the damage is easy to repair. The Apollo Crews received a total exposure level of about a Year's worth of radiation in 10 days. A significant amount yes, but well below the danger level. The ISS and shuttle crews receive far more on their trips.
Microchips and Computing Power
As has been pointed out, the Microchip was invented in
1959, an entire decade before Apollo. Also as has been pointed out, a computer running a landing simulation has to be able to run the operating system, the graphics, simulate the physics and land the craft. The Apollo Computer had to just had to turn a bunch of thrusters on and off and point the nozzle in the right direction. How hard is that?
Not only that, but most of its programming was on ROM, not like today's computers that use RAM. Since the computer was only designed to run one programme, that programme could be hardcoded onto a chip rather then uploading it into volatile memory. All the RAM was used for was for temporary storage of numbers in calculations. How much memory do you need for that?
Next, all the really hard stuff was calculated on the ground with huge mainframe computers at Mission Control and the results of those calculations uploaded to the AGC. It didn't have to crunch be numbers it just needed the results so it could run them through the hardcoded programmes to know where to point the nozzle. How much computing power do you need for that?
Finally, not a lot of computing power was needed because it had two of the most sophisticated computers out there onboard, the brains inside the crew. (Three if we're talking the CM.) The Project Mercury flights were all conducted without a flight computer, Project Gemini being the first top have one, and even some of it's missions were completed without the computer. During Buzz Aldrin's flight on Gemini XII, the flight computer failed, and they did the docking with Buzz using a Sextant and his eyes after calculating the docking in his head. Just because people rely on calculators and computers for everything nowadays, doesn't mean it was always the case. During WWI and II plenty of crews flew bomber missions over enemy airspace without any electronic navigation, and did so very successfully. Computers aren't needed, they just make things easier.
Footage of them Faking the Mission.
The claim here varies depending on who you listen too. Sibrel started out by claiming that they used a round window or a cut-out to make the round window. Percy claims that it was a Transparency. In more recent time, Sibrel has followed on this line of thinking.
Problems with the claim:
1) The Earth rotates slightly throughout the filming showing it is not a static object, but not enough for them to have been in Low Earth Orbit.
2) The weather patterns change between each of the three broadcasts, but remain consistent during each broadcast, something that would be impossible if taken from low earth orbit.
3) In the second broadcast (which the HP's conveniently ignore) the Camera switches windows, zooming out on the earth first, showing the window, then moving to a second window and focusing back in on the Earth.
4) Most of the so called "secret footage" was part of the 1969 Apollo 11 live telecast
5) Sibrel gets the date of the Broadcast wrong.
I have more on this particular scene on
my webpage
Temperature In Space.
Put quite simple, space cannot have a temperature. Temperature is a measure of the vibration of molecules, the greater the vibration, the higher the temperature. Without particles, there is no temperature. Since a vacuum is defined as a lack of particles, there is by definition no temperature.
So what about the thermometer? A thermometer doesn't show you the temperature of its surroundings,
it shows you the temperature of the Thermometer. I underlined that to make sure you understand it. When you place a Thermometer in dark space, it will radiate away its heat until its temperature hits about 3K (about -270°C.) This isn't the Temperature of Space, it is the temperature of an object in space. Can you understand the difference? Hopefully because we're going in deeper.
The 3K reading is what you get when your are nowhere near a star. Now if you get close to a star, like our sun, then you get more than just the CMB radiation and so the temperature of your object goes up. Space still has no temperature, but your thermometer will rise because it is warming up. This is why the Moon's surface doesn't have a Temperature of -270°C, but rather
varies from -150°C to 150°C over a time period of 28 days. Note here that the temperature is
NOT 150°C in the light and -150°C in the shade. These are maximum and minimum temperatures throughout the Lunar day. It takes time for the Temperature to rise from -150°C to get to 150°C, it's not instant.
During the later missions, the ground reached around 80-90°C during the final EVA, rather hot to touch with your bare hand, but far colder that a frying pan which you can lift up by its handle. In the same way you can pick up an frying pan by the handle, or touch the outside of your oven while the roast is cooking, the Astronaut's suits insulated them from the ground's temperature.
An interesting tale here. One of the Astronauts accidentally touched a sample that had been sitting in the shade of the LM for a while, and had cooled, after they got it inside. It was so cold it gave him a frost burn. Also on Apollo 12, Bean and Conrad commented on being able to just feel the heat of the RTG through their gloves, and that that was far hotter then the lunar surface ever got.
The PLSS and Air Con.
Because the Astronauts were in suits that were insulated against the heat, their own body heat would build up inside the suits, and so they needed to be cooled. This was done via two methods. The first was a water weave garment that ran a series of water filled tubes over their body allowing the body to warm the water and in doing so remove excess heat. The water was then pumped through a heat exchanger and recycled. The water from the heat exchanger was slowly pushed through a porous nickel plate and sublimed into the vacuum of space. This system was highly effective, and is still used by the Space Shuttle and ISS crews to this day, as well as being used as part of the cooling systems for those two craft (it was also used on the Apollo Craft for cooling.) The second way to cool was by cooling the oxygen in the suit. This was removed about the waist, the CO
2[ scrubbed, more oxygen added to return it to the 3 psi partial pressure of the suit, then it was feed through the same heat exchanger as the water, and finally pumped back into the suit via the back of the helmet. (This helped to prevent misting, a problem that had plagued Gemini.) To operate the system, the Astronaut had a level on the bottom of the PLSS that he could set into one of three positions, low, intermediate, or high. This lever operated a valve that controlled the rate the water was feed to the subliminator and thus how fast the astronaut was cooled.
The Battery in the PLSS had very little to do, it had to run a pump and a fan and a few other little electronic parts for up to 9 hours (Sorry
Gumboot[/url], but only Apollo 11 were out for 2 1/1 hours, the later 'J' missions were outside for nearly to 8 hours at a time, however they had the extended PLSS system which had an increased oxygen and water supply), that was it, and the batteries were replaced on each EVA along with topping up the water and oxygen tanks. Are you going to try and claim that there was no battery available in 1969 that would have lasted 9 hours?
More on the PLSS can be found on my Apollo 9 page
No-one died on the Missions, but the Shuttle has suffered Fatal accidents.
The Apollo missions were far from trouble free, nearly every successful mission was dogged by some fault that could have resulted in the mission being failed, and in one case (Apollo 13) the accident was very close to fatal. However, there were only 11 manned Apollo missions (not including the three Spacelab or the joint Apollo-Soyuz missions.) The Space Shuttle has had 116 missions at current count. The first Fatal accident on the Shuttle was sts-51L, over 4 times the number of Apollo flights. Add to that that the Shuttle is a far more complex machine that the Apollo capsules and that its launch configuration (which is what lead to both accidents) is totally different, you are comparing Apples and Crowbars.
For more on Accident and incidents of the Apollo Programme, see my Apollo 13 page
I think that covers most of it, but I'm sure there'll be more.
