Half arguments and problems for the hoax

[smartcooky]

But when we're citing the number of people who worked on Apollo, not all those people were engineers.  As I understand it, we're including everyone.  The guys who built the buildings.  The people who manufactured the screws and bolts and rivets.  The people who made the mission patches.  The janitors.  The people who provided the food.  The people who worked in the plants where they made Mylar and so forth.  A lot of people whose jobs required no real technical knowledge beyond any required to do a job they might be doing for a strip mall or an auto parts manufacturer next.  Now, they knew they did their jobs.  They knew they did their jobs well.  And, since I believe Apollo was a (qualified) success (after all, there's 13!), they did their jobs right.  But would someone on the screw assemblyline know that the screw was being installed into x craft for y reason to produce z result on the Moon?  It seems unlikely to me.  Could the file clerk necessarily read the blueprints and what have you being filed?  Maybe.  Maybe that's a person who would know if something were wrong.  But what about the guy at the print shop producing the manual?
 

Keep in mind that there are also people who were not necessarily aerospace or mechanical engineers, who had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of any of the technical details regardng Apollo hardware, and some of whom were not even in the USA at the time, who could still have tumbled to what was going on if NASA had tried to fake it. For example, the technical staff at the DSN sites at..

Goldstone... Barstow CA, USA
Tidbinbilla ACT, Australia
Robledo de Chavela, Madrid, Spain

They tracked Apollo all the way to and from the moon. If the lunar surface sequences were staged on earth, the time delays and transmission content would be off and these people would spot it easily.

Similarly, the staff at Jodrell bank, England, were nothing to do with NASA or Apollo, yet their tracking of Apollo 11 landing on the moon is irrefutable proof that it took place. They were able to track the LM as it descended. When Armstrong stopped the descent after he spotted the boulder field and took manual control of the LM to overfly it, Jodrell bank picked that up with the doppler shift.

[sts60]

There had to be a reason it wouldn't work.  No matter what the reason, the ground station personnel would have known they didn't land.  The people who were in charge of whatever part wouldn't have worked would have known, as well as many of the people they dealt with.  The flight controllers (including the backroom folks) would have known.  The scientists who looked at the lunar samples and the ALSEP data - years of it - would have known. 

And that's for a minimum reason, like it turned out the landing gear would fail if they touched down with more than 0.01 m/s lateral speed. 

And there'd still be the problem of maintaining the fake in the face of other countries going to the Moon.

[Count Zero]

One af the many mistakes that hoax believers make is that they assume that the odds of performing an actual manned moon-landing would be likely to fail, but that executing a hoax would somehow be automatically successful.

This makes no sense.  Flying to the Moon is an engineering problem with known (or knowable) equipment requirements.  You need large, multi-stage rockets, a guidance system that can navigate there & back, a vehicle that can land and take off, and life support systems to keep your crew alive.  You can also send unmanned probes to measure the environment between here & there to help define your craft.  All of these can be built & tested in a methodical, step-by-step process. 

Everything is in the open.  Nobody has to be looking over their shoulder or dealing with attacks of conscience .  If they fail, the root causes can be found & fixed and they can try again.  No honor is lost because everyone knows it is damn difficult.  Even if the government decides it's not worth the cost to continue and pulls the plug, everyone knows it was a good try and at least we learned a lot in the effort.

On the other hand, one slip-up when perpetuating a hoax - one turncoat, one leaked document, one communications gaffe (you can't know who will be listening, or with what equipment), one special effect that's less than perfect - and you are the center of a national disgrace for all time.  America's credibility is shot and very senior officials in the government will be convicted of felony fraud and go to prison for years.  Don't forget that the secret has to be kept for all time:  No matter when it's found out, it will still be a world-wide public-relations storm that would make Iraqi WMDs look like an absent-minded goof.  It doesn't matter how old you are, you can still be put on trial.

For those who think we faked-it to show-up the Soviets, do you really think that an administration that couldn't cover-up a 3rd-rate hotel burglary could keep this secret from the KGB?  Do you think that America's mortal enemy would not use this as the ultimate proof before the entire world of capitalism's perfidity and corruption?

Don't forget  that, as far as we knew, the Soviets were also going to land on the Moon, whether we made it or not.  They didn't cancel their program until 1976.  If we faked it and they did it for real, then who has the technological upper hand?

Any way you look at it, faking it would be more risky and less likely to succeed - with more dire cost to the nation in the event of failure - than actually digging-in, doing the work and going for real.

(Originally posted on ATS, where I'm known as 'Saint Exupery')

[nomuse]

Heh. Believing someone might throw together a hoax, meaning it to only address the knowledge of the time, is one thing. Assuming that this slipshod production (which is how everything the Hoax Believers present ends up characterizing it) is somehow still working, propped up behind the scenes or no, decades later...

How long a run did Piltdown Man have, after all? It fit the expectations of the day and was almost certainly done by an insider who knew those expectations very well. And even on the day it had detractors. It was blown long ago, of course, but our current understanding of hominid evolution and our current dating and other analysis techniques make it look, well, sad. Really really obvious and sad.

As an aside to another aside earlier in this thread, I was musing about that last weekend. At my company, the warehouse guys, the assemblers, maintenance...sure, we all talk a little shop but basically during our lunches and breaks we talk about anything other than work.

The engineers all talk about work. They are doing what they love, and they show it (one of the told me his dream was to die at his desk.)

[Willoughby]

I did indeed mean "fake."

First of all, I apologize for misunderstand you.  I think the "can't make Apollo today" comment is what was throwing me!

I still don't think it would have worked even considering what you say.  You'd still have a few hundred people who would need to know (at least).  For starters, how exactly would they have approached these people and what assurances could they have possibly had that every last one of them would go along with it?  What would be the odds that there would not have been a single person among them who adamantly and morally objected to it?  That one person is someone who knows they are going to fake it.  Someone who knows - and is morally objected to it.  Why didn't that person speak out?  I know your only claim here is that this sort of compartmentalization would have succeeded (even though in the grand scheme of things, there are other reasons it could not have been faked), but I still have to disagree with you on this one.  I just can't fathom that they could ask several hundred people to do this, and there wasn't a single honest soul among them. 

And even if they all were inherently dishonest people who had no problems lying to the world for the rest of their lives, I still don't think 20 people could keep a secret - much less 2 or 300. 

[gillianren]

How long a run did Piltdown Man have, after all? It fit the expectations of the day and was almost certainly done by an insider who knew those expectations very well. And even on the day it had detractors. It was blown long ago, of course, but our current understanding of hominid evolution and our current dating and other analysis techniques make it look, well, sad. Really really obvious and sad.

The interesting thing about Piltdown Man is that we still don't actually know who perpetrated it.  In that sense, it's a well-kept conspiracy.  In literally any other?  No.  It appealed, in several senses, to a certain British national pride; after all, if Piltdown Man were real, humans did not emerge from Africa but from the green and pleasant land of England.  And yet almost immediately, there were detractors, and the more actual study got put into Piltdown, the more obvious the hoax was.  And, pivotally, the more foolish the people who believed in it.

I did indeed mean "fake."

First of all, I apologize for misunderstand you.  I think the "can't make Apollo today" comment is what was throwing me!

I still don't think it would have worked even considering what you say.  You'd still have a few hundred people who would need to know (at least).  For starters, how exactly would they have approached these people and what assurances could they have possibly had that every last one of them would go along with it?  What would be the odds that there would not have been a single person among them who adamantly and morally objected to it?  That one person is someone who knows they are going to fake it.  Someone who knows - and is morally objected to it.  Why didn't that person speak out?  I know your only claim here is that this sort of compartmentalization would have succeeded (even though in the grand scheme of things, there are other reasons it could not have been faked), but I still have to disagree with you on this one.  I just can't fathom that they could ask several hundred people to do this, and there wasn't a single honest soul among them. 

And even if they all were inherently dishonest people who had no problems lying to the world for the rest of their lives, I still don't think 20 people could keep a secret - much less 2 or 300.

I don't believe Apollo was faked.  I don't believe it was possible to fake Apollo.  I don't believe compartmentalization could have succeeded.  I just think the "400,000 people who would have known" figure is inflated.

[Count Zero]

I don't believe Apollo was faked.  I don't believe it was possible to fake Apollo.  I don't believe compartmentalization could have succeeded.  I just think the "400,000 people who would have known" figure is inflated.

I agree completely.  That number has always chafed me.  The actual number required would still have been preposterously high for the secret to have been kept (thousands, maybe tens of thousands), but no where near the hundreds of thousands. 

Massively over-inflated numbers do not do credit to anyone's argument, whether it's Hoax Believers bleating about a "searing radiation hell" or Apollo Defenders claiming "400,000 would have known".

[Willoughby]

I don't believe Apollo was faked.  I don't believe it was possible to fake Apollo.  I don't believe compartmentalization could have succeeded.  I just think the "400,000 people who would have known" figure is inflated.

Once again, I'm sorry I misunderstood you.  The bold print was unnecessary, but I understand your reason for feeling like you needed it.  I'm new here.  I don't know you at all, and it's certainly my fault for jumping to the conclusion, but until this last comment, it was not clear to me what you were trying to say.  It just seemed like you were making a case that the compartmentalization method theoretically could have worked.  I wasn't suggesting that you thought it DID work.  What is this site for if not for the conversation we are having right now?  Once again, I'm sorry, but "I just think the 400,000 figure was inflated.  That's all" would have sufficed.  I already knew you didn't believe Apollo was faked, hence the reason for my apology - which started my last comment.  I'll apologize once more.  I'm sorry. 

[smartcooky]

one communications gaffe (you can't know who will be listening, or with what equipment)

I'll bet you a pound to to pinch of dog turd that NO-ONE in NASA expected a Louisville, KY Ham Radio operator would be listening in directly to Neil and Buzz's spacesuit radios during the lunar EVA

[nomuse]

We here know of a lot of the modern knowledge and techniques a faked Apollo Program would have had to somehow anticipate. But worth re-iterating a few of them just for discussion.

Lunar Geology, also Origins of the Moon, Formation of Craters. Apollo flew before any lunar meteorites were recovered, and had to of course anticipate that mineralogy. As I understand it, theories of origin were roughly split between primary accretion disk and later capture, with fission trailing far behind. Like Piltdown, it is more likely a conspiracy would have placed a safe bet and made their fake consistent with one of the front-runners. And craters? I know Barringer was writing around that time and there were a few people still muttering about volcanoes. I don't know how mainstream any of the alternate theories were by the time of launch, though!

The VARB. We've sent more and more stuff out there and mapped them (and modeled them) better and better. And we've made discoveries. So far, however, none of the discoveries have been against the trends the Apollo Program claimed to have experienced.

Lunar geography. Satellite studies, radar height maps, better telescopic observations even, and somehow the most detailed maps still line up with the detail revealed in photographs taken on (or near) the surface.

Data analysis. We can tear apart, digitally dissect and re-construct electronic records from Apollo (as well as physical hardware returned to Earth, and of course the geological samples). Could someone in 1969 have predicted the digital revolution and the ability to go right down to and (practically speaking) even slightly through the grain to reveal anything that the film-makers of the time might have thought was "good enough?"

This is the other problem of the hundred people. How many hundreds, thousands, more would have to remain employed, in ever-growing numbers, to keep the conspiracy hidden today?

[gillianren]

I don't believe Apollo was faked.  I don't believe it was possible to fake Apollo.  I don't believe compartmentalization could have succeeded.  I just think the "400,000 people who would have known" figure is inflated.

Once again, I'm sorry I misunderstood you.  The bold print was unnecessary, but I understand your reason for feeling like you needed it.  I'm new here.  I don't know you at all, and it's certainly my fault for jumping to the conclusion, but until this last comment, it was not clear to me what you were trying to say.  It just seemed like you were making a case that the compartmentalization method theoretically could have worked.  I wasn't suggesting that you thought it DID work.  What is this site for if not for the conversation we are having right now?  Once again, I'm sorry, but "I just think the 400,000 figure was inflated.  That's all" would have sufficed.  I already knew you didn't believe Apollo was faked, hence the reason for my apology - which started my last comment.  I'll apologize once more.  I'm sorry. 

I've had people who've known me online for ten years or more, who have argued side-by-side with me against HBs, misunderstand this recently.  The bold is as much for them as anyone else.

[Willoughby]

I've had people who've known me online for ten years or more, who have argued side-by-side with me against HBs, misunderstand this recently.  The bold is as much for them as anyone else.

Fair enough.

[JayUtah]

I have to believe that had a systems integration specialist spotted that early enough he would have moved to have it changed.

The LM lifeboat scenario just wasn't considered probable enough to mandate the necessary design changes.  The respective ECS systems had much more pressing design goals: chiefly mass, volume, and power consumption constraints.  The linear-versus-annular flows through each filter were aimed at optimizing for those things, not interoperability.  It's not just square-versus-round.

[Glom]

Do tell.

[Willoughby]

The LM lifeboat scenario just wasn't considered probable enough to mandate the necessary design changes.  The respective ECS systems had much more pressing design goals: chiefly mass, volume, and power consumption constraints.  The linear-versus-annular flows through each filter were aimed at optimizing for those things, not interoperability.  It's not just square-versus-round.

Is your Apollo knowledge just an accumulation over the years or are there certain sources you continually reference?  If it's the latter, would you share where you get your information?  I'm impressed with you consistently having detailed knowledge on this - and I want some.  I've read what I can find, but I have nowhere near the detailed knowledge that you have to know something like "the LM lifeboat scenario wasn't considered probably enough...".