Author Topic: Some doubts.  (Read 25070 times)

Offline Halcyon Dayz, FCD

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #15 on: June 23, 2015, 01:54:51 PM »
Is it possible that USA could have bribed Russia with grain shipments to keep the conspiracy?
That would be like handing over a very sharp knife aimed straight at your own jugular to your worst enemy.
IOW either suicidal or extremely stupid.

Also, the USSR was enjoying record harvests during the Apollo years: LINK.
How could they even have known they would need to buy grain (having to pay in gold and hard currency) on the world market in the future.

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It rots the mind and blackens the heart.

Offline Abaddon

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #16 on: June 23, 2015, 01:59:02 PM »
Soo much thanks guys, I really needed this explanations.
But I have one final doubt:
Could the soviets know it was faked but they could not tell it to the world because they are isolated from the rest or because they were losing and nobody wanted to hear them about the landings?
Alexei Leonov, Soviet Cosmonaut and first man to walk in space calls hoax believers ignorant. (only 1:35)


Offline Luke Pemberton

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #17 on: June 23, 2015, 02:01:36 PM »
Could the soviets know it was faked but they could not tell it to the world because they are isolated from the rest or because they were losing and nobody wanted to hear them about the landings?

...or the more plausible narrative. It was real and the Soviets accepted the events reported by NASA as they had tracked the Apollo craft themselves. I was rather beaten to this reply by Allan F and gwiz (as usual). However, I'd say that if it was hoaxed and the USSR knew, then they would have called foul straight away.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people – Sir Isaac Newton.

A polar orbit would also bypass the SAA - Tim Finch

Offline BertieSlack

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #18 on: June 23, 2015, 04:58:06 PM »
Is it possible that USA could have bribed Russia with grain shipments to keep the conspiracy?


The Soviet Union began importing American grain in 1972 - three years after they lost the Space Race. These weren't bribes - the Soviets had to pay for the grain. The USSR had to deplete their foreign currency reserves to make these trades, thus weakening their international position. The trades were advantageous for the Nixon administration in another way as well - they solved the problem of over-supply in the U.S domestic market and kept prices steady for American farmers in an election year (it's part of U.S election strategy 101 - don't tick off the farm lobby). So the grain shipments were good domestically & internationally for Nixon and bad internationally for the Soviets. This is hardly the USSR asking for hush money or Nixon having a gun held to his head, is it?

It's a myth that Soviet citizens were starving at that time, and that the grain shipments prevented famine. They had enough food. But they wanted to expand their domestic meat industry. By importing grain, they could free up foodstuffs for animal feed. The Soviet Union had been increasing grain imports from various sources since the early 1960s. Soviet citizens wanted more than borscht every day.

But let's say hypothetically that the U.S was bribing the USSR to stay quiet in the 1970s. By the 1980s, after the U.S imposed a trade embargo in 1979 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, and dear old Ronnie Reagan ramping up Cold War tensions with his Star Wars program and 'evil empire' rhetoric and improvements in Soviet domestic grain production - surely the Soviets could've called them out then?

The Soviets sent their congratulations in 1969, despite the pain of propaganda defeat. They had the means and motive to expose any hoax. When the Soviet file archive was opened in 1989 after the fall of communism, there was nothing in there that suggested they had any doubts about the authenticity of Apollo. They could have sent their own unmanned lander to Tranquillity Base the next week if they'd wanted to (and NASA knew that too, so why risk a hoax that could be instantly busted?) But the Soviets were more interested in claiming (falsely) that they hadn't lost the race to the moon because they'd never been in the race and had been concentrating all along on orbiting space stations. Their files showed otherwise.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2015, 05:08:33 PM by BertieSlack »

Offline ka9q

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #19 on: June 23, 2015, 05:38:29 PM »
The US space program, starting with the first satellite launch, forms a well documented chain of events that led up to the Apollo 11 landing.  This includes.

Explorer 1 which detected the Van Allen Belts
The Mercury program
The Gemini program
The Surveyor program
And The Lunar Orbiter program

Offline Luke Pemberton

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #20 on: June 23, 2015, 06:27:33 PM »
Thank you BertieSlack, I enjoyed reading your analysis of the grain to the Soviets. I thought it was clear, concise and compelling. I learned something new today... again!
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people – Sir Isaac Newton.

A polar orbit would also bypass the SAA - Tim Finch

Offline darren r

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #21 on: June 23, 2015, 06:59:19 PM »
Thank you BertieSlack, I enjoyed reading your analysis of the grain to the Soviets. I thought it was clear, concise and compelling. I learned something new today... again!

Totally agree. Four years after Apollo 11 and they had to pay for it - doesn't sound much like a bribe to me!
" I went to the God D**n Moon!" Byng Gordon, 8th man on the Moon.

Offline Gazpar

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #22 on: June 23, 2015, 08:28:17 PM »
What do you think about aulis? is it legit? It has lots of content about the photos anomalies

Offline nomuse

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #23 on: June 23, 2015, 08:34:59 PM »
What do you think about aulis? is it legit? It has lots of content about the photos anomalies

Aulis is a lot of fun. Even idiots like me can figure out where Jack went wrong -- usually with a little geometry. One of my favorite "challenges" from Aulis was a pair of pictures showing three elements (as I recall, flag, LM, and high antenna). From a distance, so they basically form a line. In one picture, the flag is the inside element. In another, the outside element. The challenge; is this geometrically possible, or is Jack correct that someone re-arranged the "set pieces" in the middle of shooting?

Others require different degrees of creative problem-solving. Tracing shadows towards a light source, for instance. Comparing field of views. Doing a quick overlay and comparison to see if two backgrounds are actually "identical," or if there is indeed a perspective shift between them.

Offline grmcdorman

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #24 on: June 23, 2015, 08:45:45 PM »
To expand on nomuse's response, Aulis is not valid. As implied by the response, it's full of errors, logical fallacies, and just plain hogwash. JayUtah's site dissects some of the more egregious claims.

Offline Gazpar

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #25 on: June 23, 2015, 09:25:03 PM »
To expand on nomuse's response, Aulis is not valid. As implied by the response, it's full of errors, logical fallacies, and just plain hogwash. JayUtah's site dissects some of the more egregious claims.
I dont understand why hoaxers relay so much on that site. All they sources come from there

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #26 on: June 23, 2015, 09:52:52 PM »
I dont understand why hoaxers relay so much on that site. All they sources come from there.

At first glance it seems reasonably scientific and dispassionate.  But to those skilled in the relevant fields, it's quite a pack of lies.  The authors are not at all reliable researchers and have no relevant qualifications.  David Percy is a credentialled photographer, but he has no qualifications in the analysis of photographs.  Mary Bennett is simply a self-proclaimed psychic.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline JayUtah

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #27 on: June 23, 2015, 10:17:33 PM »
Does this evidence prove the hoax?

Of course not, which is to say "prove the hoax" would entail actually discovering a hoax, not merely inferring or supposing a hoax because some other evidence didn't add up.  That part of the argument is basic logic and reasoning.  Lack of evidence for one thing does not automatically prove some other affirmative claim.

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Missing lunar rocks
Like any valuable curated item, lunar samples attract loss and theft as well as fraudulent claims of ownership or sale.  Most of the samples in question are quite small.  The total mass of retrieved lunar samples is around 400 kg.  I'm not sure how stories of loss, theft, recovery, or third-party fraud constitute proof in any way that the missions were hoaxed.  Could you flesh out that line of reasoning?

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Missing telemetry data
This argument presumes that NASA should have curated the tapes in the certain way the conspiracy theorists impose.  That imposition is based on erroneous notions such as the telemetry tapes being the "original" records of the mission, especially of the television coverage.  The process of converting the embedded television signal to a standard signal, such that it could be playable by ordinary video equipment, was accomplished "on the fly" during the mission by highly specialized, custom-built equipment.  The telemetry tapes were retained temporarily only against the possibility that such an on-the-fly conversion would have failed.  Reading the tapes themselves requires large, finicky equipment, only one example of which has survived.  While the telemetry tapes are the original recordings, they are not the primary source of data, nor an especially useful source.  Only in very recent years have new techniques arisen to glean more from them than the original plan called for.

They are also very large.  Each tape is the size of a trash-can lid and records only 15 minutes worth of telemetry.  They are very expensive and very bulky to store.  And in the early 1970s they were also quite rare.  Memorex, the company that supplied the original tapes, used whale oil in the binder.  With the advent of the Endangered Species Act, they were called upon to find a more environmentally responsible method.  They were not able to do it in time, and NASA was forced to re-use Apollo tapes for ongoing missions.  They did not explicitly use the Apollo 11 tapes, but the tapes were not labeled in a way that made it easy for technicians to identify them in time.

In short, the claim that NASA somehow intentionally destroyed the original records of Apollo 11 is ludicrous.  The telemetry tapes themselves were useful only so that data could be extracted from them later, which was done.  The data they contained is safe.  The telemetry recordings themselves are a red herring.

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What does this means?
It means if you spent a year in space outside the Van Allen belts, you could be expected to absorb a certain amount of normal space radiation, in addition to possibly enduring one of half a dozen or so major solar events that occur.  However, for a short two-week mission the normal level of radiation is suitably attenuated by the spacecraft, which provides around 7 g cm-2 of shielding.  No major solar events occurred during any of the Apollo missions.  The information on that page is true, but it is not applicable to Apollo.

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Is from some guy named Jay Weidner, is he trustworthy?

No.

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Is it possible that USA could have bribed Russia with grain shipments to keep the conspiracy?

Only if you accept the most tenuous of quid pro quo claims, and believe that international blackmail lasts forever.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline sts60

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #28 on: June 24, 2015, 12:18:40 AM »
Hi, Gazpar.  Welcome to the board.

Hi guys, I believe the landing happened...
Which one?  Do you mean the Apollo manned lunar landings?  There were six of them.  There were also three manned circumlunar missions (two planned, one aborted landing mission). 

Does this evidence prove the hoax?
No.  The first few don't support a hoax claim at all.  The last one is just some random person making up stuff, which is basically the story for everything else on that web site.

Online raven

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Re: Some doubts.
« Reply #29 on: June 24, 2015, 12:46:33 AM »
Another problem with the grain claim is that, even if it would work, why didn't they squeal when the US did the opposite and imposed an embargo of grain under Carter? As for the isolation theory, the USSR was a freaking superpower. This wasn't  some stain on a map of a country. As isolated as they kept its citizens, it still held huge influence as a world power. If the Soviet Union said the US faked the moon landings and backed it up with facts, the world would listen.