With great respect, I hope you will understand when I say that what you've written here, and in your Post #144, offers absolutely no proof, certainly to a lay-person, that man has actually walked on the Moon, UNLESS, of course, it can be shown without any doubt that the ALSEP packages could only be transmitting data from the surface of the Moon or that there are indeed redundant ALSEP packages sitting on the surface of the Moon, AND that it would be impossible to deploy the ALSEP packages from an un-manned mission. Can those all be shown, without any doubt, to be the case?
The ALSEP experiments were specifically designed to be transported aboard the LM and deployed by hand. Each of the five (A12, 14, 15, 16, 17) ALSEPs required removal from the LM, removal of the heat source from its transportation cask, carrying to the deployment site, and unpacking, connecting, arming, fueling of the generator, and deployment of individual experiments up to tens of meters from the central station - some configurations spanned roughly the length of a (U.S.) football field. Collectively, these operations required dexterity and mobility beyond the capability of robotics of the day. In any case, the deployment process was diligently rehearsed, documented, and photographed during the actual deployments.
If you wish to propose that the ALSEPs could have been robotically deployed, it is incumbent upon you to provide the following:
- specific evidence of a technology that could have deployed the systems on the Moon, or evidence of an entirely different set of ALSEPs that could have been deployed with the robotics of the day;
- evidence that the photodocumentation of the actual deployments was faked;
- specific evidence of a secret program of construction, integration, and launch of the separate spacecraft which took the "real" ALSEPs to the Moon.
If you cannot provide such evidence, there is no reason to entertain such a notion; it's simply wishful thinking.
As for whether "ALSEP packages could only be transmitting data from the surface of the Moon": the signals from the ALSEP units were collected from tracking stations worldwide, including Spain, Chile, and Australia. Such signals cannot be faked by orbiting spacecraft. As for whether there are "indeed redundant ALSEP packages sitting on the surface of the Moon", signals were collected from five different ALSEP units, which are distinguishable by telemetry identification, pointing angles on the receiving antenna, and unique downlink frequencies.
If you wish to dispute that such signals were actually received, you must provide specific evidence that the station operators faked getting telemetry from the Moon for roughly eight years - the time from the first deployment of the A12 ALSEP in late '69 to the time all five were shut down in late '77. (That does not include the brief operation of the solar-powered A11 EASEP, which only lasted a few weeks.) You would also need to explain in reasonable detail why the international scientific community has accepted the ALSEP data as genuine, and provide specific evidence for a program to fake ALSEP data for 8 years, and explain why not one of the personnel involved in fake ALSEP development and operations has blown the whistle. If you cannot, the historical and scientific record stands as the only reasonable - and supported - explanation.
Is any of this "proof"? I've participated in such arguments before. There's no absolute proof, even if I flew you to the Moon and drove you around the ALSEPs. I
could have planted them there right before our voyage (and made them "look old"); everyone connected with the program
could have been lying, all the selenologists and astrophysicists who looked at the data
could be incompetent and/or lying, there
could have been a secret program to build alternate ALSEPs and launch them without anybody noticing, we could have gone decades without
anybody blowing the whistle - even in their wills; all the personnel at the tracking stations
could have been lying all this time, etc.
It boils down to how committed you are to keeping your doubt about the subject alive. Frankly, I can't prove to you that
I exist. But the issue isn't whether five ALSEP systems were deployed by hand on the Moon "without a doubt". It's whether this can be shown beyond a
reasonable doubt. I've given you ways in which you can indeed demonstrate a reasonable doubt, but if you wish to do so you have a lot of work to do.
Reverting to your Post #144, I find your comment regarding heavy nuclei bombardment very interesting:
This phenomenon (or general radiation, if different) was certainly cited in Dark Moon as: "one of the biggest show stoppers in mankind's exploration of the Universe" (as apparently quoted by an 'expert' at the Defence and Research Agency, UK). I'd be interested to hear your take on the implications of his phenomenon, not in relation to a potential manned mission to Mars, but in relation to the Apollo lunar landings.
Not addressed to me, but I hope you don't mind me chiming in.
Cosmic radiation was a relatively minor factor for the short-duration Apollo missions. It's damaging, certainly, but the amounts received during roughly two weeks in space were tolerable. (Airline crew received enhanced CR doses, too - at lower rates but over longer durations than Apollo crews.) Similarly for the charged-particle dosages received during the very brief transits through the Van Allen belts. (Shuttle and ISS crews routinely transit a low-hanging bit of the VABs, but the intensities are lower and the shielding generally better.) The real radiation threat to Apollo missions came from solar proton events (SPEs) generated during solar "storms". The protection against these was in part statistical (i.e., there was a low probability of a significant event during a mission) and in part operational (upon detection of an event, the crew would retreat to the CM and place the SM between the crew module and the Sun).
And part of it came down to the fact that people were simply willing to take a certain amount of risk for what was perceived to be an enormous gain (yes, I share that perception). That particular approach won't work for a Mars mission, because the much longer durations make the occurrence of major SPEs a virtual certainty during the mission. Better (read: more mass and more $$$) shielding will be a requirement.
