Moon landing conspiracy theorists - lend me your ears.

[poid]

Obviously not the same model or even type. But it doesn't look like it is anything special.

The Hassleblad's developed for NASA were used in a lot of spacecraft before Apollo. They were used in the Mercury and Gemini missions as well as the earlier Apollo missions (ie Apollo 8). So by the time you get to Apollo 11 NASA and Hassleblad have a lot of data about the shielding and types of film needed.

there was adequate shielding provided by the canisters that contained the film, as well as the coating applied to the camera. The exposures were set because they were predictable, you only needed a couple of broad settings as light conditions dont really vary on the moon. Through the van Allen belts you also have the shielding of the spacecraft to protect the film.

I dont see why this is an issue?

[Buco_73]

I have examined this notion, and in great detail. I did it because when i was growing up i was always told the moon landings were fake, and so i started digging around to confirm this was the case. All the research i did simply confirmed 1000% that Apollo 11 did land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.



The radiation argument is probably the one that gets raised the most in these discussions, but once you look at the numbers involved and the course used by Apollo 11 you see that its just not a big deal. The Van Allen belts are only dangerous for prolonged exposed, not for transitory trips through the belts as was the case with Apollo. The only real radiation danger they were exposed to was if a CME scored a direct hit on the moon. Fortunately that didnt happen and there were no serious CME events during the missions.




If i may, i'll explain to you why I have concluded that the Apollo 11 mission was more difficult to fake than to actually execute. This is just a quick summary of a couple of the main points; i've probably examined every hoax argument there is during my i'm-bored-at-uni days.

There was telemetry that tracked Apollo 11 all the way to the moon. Not only NASA, but also the Russians and HAM radio operators tracked Apollo 11 on its journey. The Russian Luna craft was similarly tracked as it attempted to beat Apollo to the moon, it was unmanned. It crashed on the surface of the moon, and the world knew about it very quickly. There were too many eyes on Apollo 11 for there not to have been a spacecraft that landed on the moon. The Russian cosmonauts wrote a letter shortly after Apollo 11 congratulating the Apollo astronauts. The Russians are firmly convinced that the landing was real.

Honeysuckle Creek and Tidbinbilla as well as Parkes were all involved in some way as well; Parkes transmitted most of the footage from Apollo 11 to NASA in Houston, and there were reporters there watching the pictures come in live form the dish. If the craft wasnt there, you can bet that the Aussies that had the dish aimed at the moon would have cried foul; they even calculated the trajectory of the craft themselves so they could confirm NASA's data.

Not only that, now to have faked the landing you need to have the lunar lander broadcasting images to Parkes, Honeysuckle Creek and Goldstone in the US. There are two ways to have done this:

1) A simultaneous broadcast of video and audio from the Earth to Apollo and back to Earth.

2) Pre-recorded audio and video stored on-board the spacecraft.

You can rule #2 out pretty easily. If NASA was to fake it, you couldnt take the chance of a glitch in your pre-recorded footage ruining the whole thing. PLus it would be rather heavy. So you are broadcasting from Earth to Apollo to Earth again.

Now, on to case 1. Given the video footage of Apollo 11's descent to the moon, the trajectory followed by the spacecraft is the same as that shown on the video. Armstrong, for the last few minutes of the landing, actually flew across the surface of the moon looking for a suitable landing spot. This is something that had never, and has never, been done using a remote or robotic lander. For the trajectory of the Apollo 11 flight to match Armstrong's landing is pretty bloody difficult to fake.

This is further the case since Google has reconstructed the actual landing using LRO footage that they were given to build Google Moon. As it turns out, using the trajectory of Apollo 11 and the imagery of LRO, the reconstruction of the landing matches the Apollo 11 video absolutely exactly. The video hasnt been released yet, but was shown to a CPA dinner recently with Armstrong describing what he did and was thinking during the landing. The chances that NASA knew the moon well enough to construct such an accurate fake landing video that would stand up 40 years later is pretty much zero.

Lastly, consider that you have a very clear process of successful testing of the various craft, of man orbiting the moon before Apollo 11, and even the beginnings of the descent stage, and there is no reason to believe that it was hoaxed. Its not like NASA built a rocket and miraculously hit the moon in one go. It was all very well planned and executed, with a huge Russian-shaped driving force behind the project. All in all, it was just easier to put a man on the moon than to fake it.

I just suggest you avoid the hoaxer websites and youtube videos and look at the NASA technical papers, look at the data gathered, the comparisons between moon rock and Russian soil samples and hell even visit the Kennedy Space Center. If you look at the all the underlying science stuff and ignore the people talking crap and trying to confuse others you'll see pretty clearly that there was no hoax, its just the greatest achievement so far in human history.

Thank you very much, very interesting stuff.
"The video hasnt been released yet" do you have any idea when and where it will be available. Would be very interesting too watch.
My issue is not that they never landed, it's just the timing of it. And that it was portrayed to be so elegant.

[Do the safety dance.]

Buco it seems you have made your mind up about what has happened, and are looking for things to back up your conclusion, rather than looking at the facts and coming to a conclusion based on those facts.

[Buco_73]

fuck me, you're touchy.

Not being a smartass (or a RRC, or whatever), but have you seen the Peter Kuran doc (Atomic Filmmakers) mentioned in this article

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/14atom.html

It's almost more interesting that the "Trinity and Beyond" movie that it is the DVD extra for. They basically say that there was nothing particularly fancy about the equipment they were using, apart from some of it being high speed cameras.

Say what you have to say like a normal person, not twist my words and make up shit.

[Soopy]

http://www.google.com/moon/

That's awesome.

[Negative Ghostrider]

Boots + moon dust = grey. That shit clung to everything and looking closely you can see it has started to work it's way up his leg past the ankle.

That plus the one getting out of the lander is shot in shadow and the other in direct sunlight. Colours on film do weird shit depending on how they are lit

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0924191552.htm

ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2008) — The Apollo Moon missions of 1969-1972 all share a dirty secret. “The major issue the Apollo astronauts pointed out was dust, dust, dust,” says Professor Larry Taylor, Director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee. Fine as flour and rough as sandpaper, Moon dust caused ‘lunar hay fever,’ problems with space suits, and dust storms in the crew cabin upon returning to space.

The trouble with moon dust stems from the strange properties of lunar soil. The powdery grey dirt is formed by micrometeorite impacts which pulverize local rocks into fine particles. The energy from these collisions melts the dirt into vapor that cools and condenses on soil particles, coating them in a glassy shell.

These particles can wreak havoc on space suits and other equipment. During the Apollo 17 mission, for example, crewmembers Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Gene Cernan had trouble moving their arms during moonwalks because dust had gummed up the joints. “The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on Jack’s boot,” Taylor says.

To make matters worse, lunar dust suffers from a terrible case of static cling. UV rays drive electrons out of lunar dust by day, while the solar wind bombards it with electrons by night. Cleaning the resulting charged particles with wet-wipes only makes them cling harder to camera lenses and helmet visors. Mian Abbas of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will discuss electrostatic charging on the moon and how dust circulates in lunar skies.

Luckily, lunar dust is also susceptible to magnets. Tiny specks of metallic iron (Fe0) are embedded in each dust particle’s glassy shell. Taylor has designed a magnetic filter to pull dust from the air, as well as a “dust sucker” that uses magnets in place of a vacuum. He has also discovered that microwaves melt lunar soil in less time than it takes to boil a cup of tea. He envisions a vehicle that could microwave lunar surfaces into roads and landing pads as it drives, and a device to melt soil over lunar modules to provide insulation against space radiation. The heating process can also produce oxygen for breathing.

But the same specks of iron that could make moon dust manageable also pose a potential threat to human health, according to Bonnie Cooper at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Those tiny blebs of pure iron we see on the surface of lunar grains are likely to be released from the outside edges of the particle in the lungs and enter the bloodstream,” she says. Preliminary studies suggest that the inhalation of lunar dust may pose a health hazard, possibly including iron toxicity. Members of NASA’s Lunar Airborne Dust Toxicity Advisory Group, Cooper, Taylor, and colleagues are studying how moon dust affects the respiratory system. They plan to set a lunar dust exposure standard by 2010, in time for NASA engineers to design a safer and cleaner trip to the Moon.



"Brought to you by the artist formally known as Pist-N-Broke. Some 14 year old hacked my account and changed my user name. I don't mind, it is a pretty cool user name."

[MickyD]

Say what you have to say like a normal person, not twist my words and make up shit.

apart from my (admittedly) smart-ass comment about the nuclear test cameras, I'd say I have been.

[poid]

Thank you very much, very interesting stuff.
"The video hasnt been released yet" do you have any idea when and where it will be available. Would be very interesting too watch.
My issue is not that they never landed, it's just the timing of it. And that it was portrayed to be so elegant.

not sure mate, i'm keeping an eye on it myself.

Maybe its just whole propaganda around the thing that has you going, i can see that rubbing people the wrong way.

On timing, yeah it was an amazing achievement in a short space of time. To how this is possible, you can look to psychological phenomena. Its pretty well established that the stronger the goal and motivation the more likely you are to achieve it. Apollo demonstrates this brilliantly.

At the time, the US had been humiliated in space. Sputnik was a huge blow to the American psyche, so was Laika, and so was Gargarin. The uS had to respond, and in big fashion. Kennedy announced to the world that the uS would land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade. Ok, thats a start. But the reinforcement was that Kennedy was then killed, and NASA took it upon themselves to make it happen. Apollo 1 ensured that the didnt do it in a half-arsed way; they re-engineered the Apollo craft at that point and fixed a lot of errors.

But even then it was not without faults; the landing was almost aborted because of computer errors. One of the necessary in-space burns was done early and on the cusp of being too early. It wasnt quite as elegant as the story is told, it was a bit messy and seat-of-the-pants at times.

[Buco_73]

Buco it seems you have made your mind up about what has happened, and are looking for things to back up your conclusion, rather than looking at the facts and coming to a conclusion based on those facts.

I can see where you are coming from, but I like to explore things even if others see it is black and white. It is my nature. I believe nothing I hear and only half of what I can see, I know it is a cliche. That is how I learn more about things I knew nothing about. Hey there is nothing to say that by the time all my questions are answered that my opinion won't change. That is the nature of the beast. But till then this is where I'm at.
Take it or leave it bitches......

There would be no fun if I wasn't like this.

[poid]

BTW if you want a good read about the Aussie involvement, check this out:

http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/

its very long but worth it if you are into Apollo. And i forgot to say earlier that the feed to the ABC here was direct from Parkes without going through NASA at all. Aussies saw the landing a teenie tiny bit before anyone else cos of the extra delay for the rest of the world having to get the images through Houston

[darwinschops]

poid to the rescue again. good read.

i had watched a doco (as poid and bill said) about the manual landing. if you take it at face vale, which i do, these men performed a magnificently heroic task. they should be revered for their amazing achievements.

and whenever i tend to think of the denial, i like to think of aldrin smacking that guy in the face. skepticism is a good thing, but keep moving down the slide and eventually you'll get to the point where you deny all of your senses. i think to deny the moon landings at all is right on the end of it but even the evidence for the first landing's so incontrovertible you'd be brave or stupid to try argue against it for too long.

[Buco_73]

not sure mate, i'm keeping an eye on it myself.

Maybe its just whole propaganda around the thing that has you going, i can see that rubbing people the wrong way.

On timing, yeah it was an amazing achievement in a short space of time. To how this is possible, you can look to psychological phenomena. Its pretty well established that the stronger the goal and motivation the more likely you are to achieve it. Apollo demonstrates this brilliantly.

At the time, the US had been humiliated in space. Sputnik was a huge blow to the American psyche, so was Laika, and so was Gargarin. The uS had to respond, and in big fashion. Kennedy announced to the world that the uS would land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade. Ok, thats a start. But the reinforcement was that Kennedy was then killed, and NASA took it upon themselves to make it happen. Apollo 1 ensured that the didnt do it in a half-arsed way; they re-engineered the Apollo craft at that point and fixed a lot of errors.

But even then it was not without faults; the landing was almost aborted because of computer errors. One of the necessary in-space burns was done early and on the cusp of being too early. It wasnt quite as elegant as the story is told, it was a bit messy and seat-of-the-pants at times.

I have read so much on the subject, watched docos, it fascinates me to no end. The whole psychological aspect of it all was such a big thing at the time. The whole nation was hanging on by their teeth and holding their breaths during the mission.
That's the thing about how the story was told and the reality of it all that has discredited the event a little for me. The real landing and the public version of the landing.
I still have a few questions I need to find answers too in time.

[Buco_73]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0924191552.htm

ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2008) — The Apollo Moon missions of 1969-1972 all share a dirty secret. “The major issue the Apollo astronauts pointed out was dust, dust, dust,” says Professor Larry Taylor, Director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee. Fine as flour and rough as sandpaper, Moon dust caused ‘lunar hay fever,’ problems with space suits, and dust storms in the crew cabin upon returning to space.

The trouble with moon dust stems from the strange properties of lunar soil. The powdery grey dirt is formed by micrometeorite impacts which pulverize local rocks into fine particles. The energy from these collisions melts the dirt into vapor that cools and condenses on soil particles, coating them in a glassy shell.

These particles can wreak havoc on space suits and other equipment. During the Apollo 17 mission, for example, crewmembers Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Gene Cernan had trouble moving their arms during moonwalks because dust had gummed up the joints. “The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on Jack’s boot,” Taylor says.

To make matters worse, lunar dust suffers from a terrible case of static cling. UV rays drive electrons out of lunar dust by day, while the solar wind bombards it with electrons by night. Cleaning the resulting charged particles with wet-wipes only makes them cling harder to camera lenses and helmet visors. Mian Abbas of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will discuss electrostatic charging on the moon and how dust circulates in lunar skies.

Luckily, lunar dust is also susceptible to magnets. Tiny specks of metallic iron (Fe0) are embedded in each dust particle’s glassy shell. Taylor has designed a magnetic filter to pull dust from the air, as well as a “dust sucker” that uses magnets in place of a vacuum. He has also discovered that microwaves melt lunar soil in less time than it takes to boil a cup of tea. He envisions a vehicle that could microwave lunar surfaces into roads and landing pads as it drives, and a device to melt soil over lunar modules to provide insulation against space radiation. The heating process can also produce oxygen for breathing.

But the same specks of iron that could make moon dust manageable also pose a potential threat to human health, according to Bonnie Cooper at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Those tiny blebs of pure iron we see on the surface of lunar grains are likely to be released from the outside edges of the particle in the lungs and enter the bloodstream,” she says. Preliminary studies suggest that the inhalation of lunar dust may pose a health hazard, possibly including iron toxicity. Members of NASA’s Lunar Airborne Dust Toxicity Advisory Group, Cooper, Taylor, and colleagues are studying how moon dust affects the respiratory system. They plan to set a lunar dust exposure standard by 2010, in time for NASA engineers to design a safer and cleaner trip to the Moon.



"Brought to you by the artist formally known as Pist-N-Broke. Some 14 year old hacked my account and changed my user name. I don't mind, it is a pretty cool user name."

That is very interesting.

[Buco_73]

BTW if you want a good read about the Aussie involvement, check this out:

http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/

its very long but worth it if you are into Apollo. And i forgot to say earlier that the feed to the ABC here was direct from Parkes without going through NASA at all. Aussies saw the landing a teenie tiny bit before anyone else cos of the extra delay for the rest of the world having to get the images through Houston

I read this a while ago, interesting stuff.

[Buco_73]

LOL

http://www.lunarregistry.com/