Apollo-gist / Virtual Apollo

[Evan Burton]

Actually it was the website author, not Duane, who has the problem - but I can see why there is confusion; because of the reference being given on the last part of the series of threads.

[Len Colby]

Steve .... Foolish you is right .... Why is it you always feel the need to accuse those you disagree with , as attempting to be deceptive in some way ?

If I were attempting to plaigerize someone elses work (something as a song writer I find particularly repulsive by the way ) I would have changed the title of the article , the wording , and not included the web site link at the completion of the article .

I often use other people's work to make points about how NASA faked the manned moon missions .. but I can assure you that I would never claim anyone else's work as my own .

Duane, Steve was right. You had no basis for assuming that anyone who read any of the other 4 tediously long parts of the article would read the 5th. YOU should have added the link to each one to make it clear a) you weren't the author and what your source was.

"If I were attempting to plaigerize someone elses work...I would have changed the title of the article , the wording "

I'm not accusing you of anything either (other than sloppiness) but this part of your defense makes little sense, plagiarism is normally done to save time and work rewording the entire article would have been very time consuming, changing the title while relatively effortless would have been ineffectual. Thus suspicion that you were claiming the work as your own was not unreasonable. But since you did indeed add the link at the end of one of the five posts I'll assume that not doing so on the other four was indeed an oversight.

”Why is it you always feel the need to accuse those you disagree with , as attempting to be deceptive in some way ? "

More than a bit ironic coming from you, why do YOU so often resort to such tactics?

EDIT - to turn off the 'emoticons' which changed my "" into a smiley face

Edited January 8, 2007 by Len Colby

[Evan Burton]

I should return to one technical question that I am sure has occurred to many reading this: the functional capabilities of the LEM. I will not cite a bunch of interpretive numbers about thrust and escape velocities here, nor quibble about burn times. Assuming that enough fuel could have been taken along, the stated thrust of the engine on the descent stage (44,500 newtons, or 10,000 lbs., throttle-controlled for maneuvering as necessary to 1/10th of that) should have been able to land the craft safely. An engine of about 1/3rd that thrust on the ascent stage might have been enough to fling the capsule back up to lunar orbit to rejoin the Command Module. Just for the sake of the argument, let's stipulate that both pieces of hardware were adequate. But there was virtually no leeway, and no redundancy at all, in those engines. They worked completely, or you died

This part is actually correct. There was no redundancy. It was a simple mechanical valve, and the designers felt very confident it would work (it had never failed in testing). The fuels were what is known as hypergolic fuels - they reacted on contact. This was not a situation where you needed an ignition source, or correct mixing, etc. When they came in contact, they reacted and thrust was produced.

[Evan Burton]

(deleted - dupe post)

Edited January 8, 2007 by Evan Burton

[Evan Burton]

Pressed for assurances that everything was A-OK, the scientists admitted that the best odds they could predict for total equipment reliability, given that several factors had to be speculations, were less-than-even. The odds of mission success were much higher, if one took the reasonable stance that most things would not go wrong, so overall it looked good to go. The politicians wanted worst-case figures of even money or better, and they weren't getting them. The PR value lay in portraying the trip as a harrowing adventure, a battle for the Future won by brilliance and dedication...and by the USA, of course. But no one wanted there to be any chance of losing any astronauts. This particular mission (the first landing), arguably the most flat-out dangerous thing in Space attempted to that date, had to be made safer than any previous manned mission had been. That was not certifiable.

Let's look at this in a little more detail, because it blends truth with fiction so that the result appears to be something it is not.

There was risk. There were things that could go wrong. The chance of success, however, was certainly better than 50/50; if that had been the case they would NOT have launched (NASA mandated a 99.99% reliability on equipment). Nevertheless, things could go wrong, and on the first lunar landing mission their might be situations never before encountered (and there were - more later). Because of this, the flight plan had GO / NO GO steps built into it. At critical stages of the landing, certain criteria had to be met; if they were not met, then it was an automatic NO GO / abort. Safety was the PRIME concern.

Firstly there were COMMS problems, most importantly the flow of spacecraft telemetry data to Mission Control. No data, no land. Spacecraft re-orientation and a change of antenna gave an acceptable solution.

Then came the well-known 1201 and 1202 computer alarms. This meant that the LM computer was being over-whelmed with requirements to process data, and it could not cope. This appeared to be a NO-GO situation, but the expert on hand, a (then) young man named Steve Bales had come across this during the simulations. During the simulation, he had recommended an ABORT because of this. In the simulation debrief, it was explained that it was not an ABORT unless the alarms were continuous. He told the Flight Director that they were GO unless the alarms were continuous (another example of the various expert Flight Controllers that provided advice to the Flight Director). The problem turned out to be a procedural error in the checklist; the computer was trying to analyse landing data while at the same time compute rendezvous data with the CSM.

The last one was the landing position. This had been chosen in advance, based on surveys of the lunar surface conducted by orbital probes and Apollo 8 and 10. After LM pitchover, when the astronauts could begin to see where they were going to land, Armstrong noted that the programmed waypoints were appearing slightly earlier than had been planned. This meant that the LM would 'land long', i.e. land PAST its programmed landing point. When Armstrong saw the terrain in which the LM computer was planning to take them, he took over manual control and looked for a clear landing site. He flew past the original landing area, and with Buzz Aldrin giving him updates on height / velocity / fuel remaining before a mandatory abort, he found a clear area on which to land the LM safely.

This was NOT part of a show; it was NOT a 'near disaster' - it was a validation of the selection of test pilots, a validation of the training, confirmation that people could adapt to situations that were not necessarily foreseen.

(I could also bring up the AFTER-landing checklist. Within seconds of confirming that Apollo 11 was on the surface, Mission Control began to run the STAY / NO STAY checklist. If things were doubtful, they could almost immediately launch from the surface and rendezvous safely with the CSM. Kennedy's challenge would have still been met.)

Edited January 8, 2007 by Evan Burton

[Duane Daman]

Evan ... I see that you are having a difficult time in attempting to refute the evidence in this article about nasa's phony Apollo photos and other lies .... but at least you are giving it the old college try !

It amazes me how blind some people are when it comes to refusing to see what is right before their very own eyes .... Like with the phony, faked 'moon' photos for instance .... I believe that would be called denial ... and denial is a place where you and everyone who thinks like you will stay , until the truth of nasa's massive deception, known as the Apollo Program , comes to light .

By the way , posting those threads from the UM site was a very unnecessary thing to do ... It's the same ridiculous tactics that were used by Steve Ulman when he posted my threads from the WOS and accused me of being a tag team with Jack .... I really expected more from you than those type of silly tactics .... Doing that only shows how desperate you are to hold on to your illusion about Apollo by trying to discredit me .

[Evan Burton]

Evan ... I see that you are having a difficult time in attempting to refute the evidence in this article about nasa's phony Apollo photos and other lies .... but at least you are giving it the old college try !

I don't know - I think I am doing a fair job of it. Besides, I don't write it for you; I write it so lurkers and those unfamiliar with Apollo can see through some of these bullxxxx claims, and get them to investigate the claims themselves.

By the way , posting those threads from the UM site was a very unnecessary thing to do ... It's the same ridiculous tactics that were used by Steve Ulman when he posted my threads from the WOS and accused me of being a tag team with Jack .... I really expected more from you than those type of silly tactics .... Doing that only shows how desperate you are to hold on to your illusion about Apollo by trying to discredit me .

See my reply about this on the thread where it occurred.

[Evan Burton]

Evan ... I see that you are having a difficult time in attempting to refute the evidence in this article about nasa's phony Apollo photos and other lies .... but at least you are giving it the old college try !

I don't know - I think I am doing a fair job of it. Besides, I don't write it for you; I write it so lurkers and those unfamiliar with Apollo can see through some of these bullxxxx claims, and get them to investigate the claims themselves.

By the way , posting those threads from the UM site was a very unnecessary thing to do ... It's the same ridiculous tactics that were used by Steve Ulman when he posted my threads from the WOS and accused me of being a tag team with Jack .... I really expected more from you than those type of silly tactics .... Doing that only shows how desperate you are to hold on to your illusion about Apollo by trying to discredit me .

See my reply about this on the thread where it occurred.

[Evan Burton]

You cannot find anyone familiar with photography who can offer any credible explanation for the weird anomalies and inferior quality of the photos and videos.

A pretty unsupportable claim seeing as how photographic experts continually say exactly the opposite. Read some of the Apollo threads on this board for more information.

Please also note how there is a claim of "...inferior quality..." with respect to the images; this will become important later.

[Evan Burton]

During the Apollo era you could inexpensively order your very own custom Apollo photo from lavishly printed catalogs displaying thumbnail versions, too. Comparison of some of those privately ordered prints, said by NASA to have been made from early-generation working negatives ( the originals were positive transparencies, like slides) showed that occasionally people who ordered the same catalog number received a slightly different picture . That would seem to indicate that there were additional pictures taken that were not logged in the public records, or that all the public images were cropped from larger originals, or both.

Again, a mixture of truth & fiction. Yes, you could order prints from NASA (and still can). BTW, this also puts paid to claims that images are not released to the public; ALL Apollo images are publically available and have been since the missions were flown.

The problem here is a claim that people received slightly different pictures. I know it's annoying for me to do this, but is there any actual evidence of this? Thousands of people ordered those prints, and many of them still have those prints. Space buffs would order the prints for their collections, and even on occassion get them signed by the astronauts. They would compare prints with other collectors. Some of these original prints - relatively valuable now - even go up for auction. Yet under the scrutiny of collectors who examine such artifacts (for such reasons as quality, authenticity, etc), no-one has encountered this "different picture" problem.

[Evan Burton]

Scenario One:

Everything presented to the public about the Apollo missions was accurate and fundamentally complete. There may have been some additional concerns and experiments that were held secret for a variety of reasons, including national security (it was the Cold War era, after all) and public relations, but basically what you saw was what really happened.

At last! Common sense!

If one starts with that position, it becomes extremely difficult to then explain why there would be so many problems with the photo evidence. Why did it take years for any significant number of pictures to be released? It would seem more effective to have released enormous amounts of them, to maximize the PR value of the program. The Soviet Union was exploring the Moon with robot probes at the same time, including "scoop and return" missions that shot samples back for analysis, so we weren't hiding anything from them.

Oh dear... back to the misinformation. Enormous amounts of the images were released; ALL the images were available to anyone who wanted to order them. Naturally the best of them - those most appealing or visually stunning - were given the most exposure. After all, which has the best "PR" value:

This?

Or this?

That?

Or this?

[Duane Daman]

During the Apollo era you could inexpensively order your very own custom Apollo photo from lavishly printed catalogs displaying thumbnail versions, too. Comparison of some of those privately ordered prints, said by NASA to have been made from early-generation working negatives ( the originals were positive transparencies, like slides) showed that occasionally people who ordered the same catalog number received a slightly different picture . That would seem to indicate that there were additional pictures taken that were not logged in the public records, or that all the public images were cropped from larger originals, or both.

Again, a mixture of truth & fiction. Yes, you could order prints from NASA (and still can). BTW, this also puts paid to claims that images are not released to the public; ALL Apollo images are publically available and have been since the missions were flown.

The problem here is a claim that people received slightly different pictures. I know it's annoying for me to do this, but is there any actual evidence of this? Thousands of people ordered those prints, and many of them still have those prints. Space buffs would order the prints for their collections, and even on occassion get them signed by the astronauts. They would compare prints with other collectors. Some of these original prints - relatively valuable now - even go up for auction. Yet under the scrutiny of collectors who examine such artifacts (for such reasons as quality, authenticity, etc), no-one has encountered this "different picture" problem.

Evan ... I realize that's it's probably one of your many jobs as a devoted nasa defender and alleged fellow fly boy to 'debunk' the conspiracy information , but does the American military / industrial complex's arm really extend as far out as the Australian Air Force ? .... You military boys really do stick together when it comes to defending nasa's lies about landing manned missions on the moon , don't you ? .... I do hope you get some monetary compensation for all of your time consuming hard work in posting so much nasa misinformation .

You want to talk about switched Apollo photos ? ....Okay , how about this ... The Apollo photos which are featured in Charles Hawkins book , 'How America Faked the Moon Landings' , are no longer available on the Apollo Image Gallery or on any other nasa web site .... And the few photos that do remain which showed various different anomalies in them , have obviously been altered since his book was released ..... Not even the Wayback Machine web site is able to find these original Apollo photographs .... Hawkins found things in the Apollo 'moon' photos such as paper drinking cups, wildlife, a small statue of the god Apollo sitting on a rock , and clues written in the 'moondust' like the words ... F A K E .... and also some of the names and initials of some of the set decorators ... Yet when you try to find these photos on the nasa sites now they have either been pulled or the anomalies in them have been photoshopped out of the pictures ... So please don't pretend that nasa hasn't and doesn't still pull and switch their phony Apollo photos and constantly change the photo ID numbers on them also , because this crap is still going on today .

[Matthew Lewis]

Because Hawkins couldn't have possibly made the fakes himself.

You do realize that that is another explanation right? That he made it all up just to sell a book? Don't you think things like papercups, wildlife, and writing in the dust would have been noticed a lot sooner?

[Evan Burton]

Scenario Two:

There were no manned missions to the Moon. It was technically and / or environmentally impossible to do it, so the astronauts sat in Earth orbit and waited in one module while the other traveled to the Moon under remote control. This allowed staged events like the mid-course "urine dump" (viewed by ground telescopes) and the relay of radio and TV signals from the vicinity of the Moon for verisimilitude. Additional unheralded (and unmanned) launches sent the flags, mirrors and microwave reflectors that were supposedly left on the Moon by the astronauts. Footage of the lunar surface excursions was shot in advance at the Langley test facility and other studios, to be relayed at appropriate times. Rock samples were contrived from irradiated terrestrial minerals and a collection of meteorites.

That scenario does offer an explanation for the fake images. It also covers the controversies about radiation, etc.- by taking them for granted. It is less successful in supporting theory-internal questions, like where exactly the astronauts were lurking for the duration of the faked missions. The same ground observations that viewed the infamous urine dump might have noticed that the CSM was in fact only the much smaller LEM section, if the astronauts were remaining in the Command module in Earth orbit. Perhaps a separate craft was parked in orbit ahead of time for them to use, but it would have had to have been an exact duplicate of the mission one, unless one is willing to complicate the logistics to the point of sending the whole unmanned CSM to the Moon and back, ditching the LEM along the way, so the astronauts could reenter the Command module for the splashdown. It is easier in many ways to propose that the crew somehow slipped out of the craft just before the launch, never leaving Earth at all. Then they could have been dropped from a plane, perhaps, in their capsule, to be "recovered" at the end of the "mission". Of course, if through some horrible accident the Saturn V had exploded during the televised launch, they would then have needed to be killed. Since any chicanery would have required the cooperation of the astronauts to some degree, it is unlikely they could have been coerced into accepting that level of potentially terminal jeopardy. The rebuttal to that problem with Scenario Two would have to involve mind control... It would need to be proposed that the astronauts were implanted with fabricated "screen memories" of their trip to the Moon, like the victims of the team on the old Mission Impossible TV show. In such a delusional state, they would never have been aware of the true situation anyway.

A number of problems with this scenario:

- A spacecraft in Earth orbit would have been noticed. The Soviets or even various international astronomers would have seen the CSM as it tracked across the sky.

- Lunar samples CAN NOT be reproduced on Earth. Lunar meteorites were not identified as such until after the Apollo missions. See here for more information on lunar samples and lunar meteorites.

- It's impossible for the astronauts to have been "slipped in" to the CM after splashdown; the earlier missions had the splashdown sequence from parachute deployment onwards broadcast live. The astronauts were seen getting out of the CM.

- Robotic deployment of the various sensors on the lunar surface is so unlikely as to be impossible for all practical purposes. Compare the laser reflectors left by the Soviet robotic missions to the ones left by Apollo; the Soviet ones were far less usuable because they were not accurately aligned - unlike the Apollo LRRRs which were aligned by hand. A number of the experiments left on the lunar surface had to be aligned by hand, have supports fixed into the surface, etc.

- Mind control? Oh, pul-eeze!

- Scientific analysis concludes that the Apollo footage matches the behaviour expected in an airless, 1/6G environment. You need to be able to recreate that airless / low-G environment on a stage for that part of the scenario to be possible. Considering the range that was visible on the film footage, that stage would need to be enormous. The vacuum chamber used for Apollo testing (the largest in the world, I think - but am not sure) was only 45 feet in diameter and about 50 feet tall - insufficient to "fake" the lunar surface scenes that were witnessed.

[Evan Burton]

Evan ... I realize that's it's probably one of your many jobs as a devoted nasa defender and alleged fellow fly boy to 'debunk' the conspiracy information , but does the American military / industrial complex's arm really extend as far out as the Australian Air Force ? .... You military boys really do stick together when it comes to defending nasa's lies about landing manned missions on the moon , don't you ? .... I do hope you get some monetary compensation for all of your time consuming hard work in posting so much nasa misinformation .

I'm Australian NAVY, not RAAF. Just another one of your many mistakes.