Author Topic: What's Sam Colby been up to?  (Read 17597 times)

Offline Everett

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What's Sam Colby been up to?
« on: October 03, 2013, 07:06:14 PM »
Well, first things first, his old sites are apparently down, but he has a new site. Some highlights:

Most of it has been around for years. He still is claiming that the real rovers used pneumatic tires (wrong), they would have exploded on the moon (wrong), and that all the pictures online were changed by NASA, and he still has a copy of a picture with a rover with rubber tires on the moon (put up or shut up).

He claims that the huge gantry at Langley was used to fake the landings. As has been covered here before, the claims about staff at Langley being 'sworn to secrecy' are wrong, and the gantry is next to a public highway. One of the pictures on his own website shows said highway clearly in the background. He also helpfully provides a period color picture that shows the gantry is painted in bright red and white stripes.  ::)

He then claims that the simulated lunar landscape below was used to fake the landings. He provides a quote that even out of context doesn't support his argument, The thing is, his own pictures show it as looking completely fake, and nothing like any of the real footage. He also has the plaster of paris mockup of the moon which, well, doesn't actually look exactly like the moon. There are noticeable differences in the pictures he provides to show they look identical.

On the plus side, he's actually changed some arguments after being corrected. It's now the Apollo 1 fire, not the Apollo 7 fire. He now knows that the 'conical space capsule' is the command module, and dropped the part about the heat shield being in the way. (he still claims the parachutes were in the way)

On his NASA Facts page, it seems he's actually discovered something. He bases a large part of the page on a chart showing that Apollo 12 took half as long to get to the moon as the other missions. It shows total duration as being 143 hours, which, since it's the same as Apollo 13 directly below it, I suspect was just a misprint in his source. It's not encouraging that he says the data in the chart came from two different sources. He then spends the rest of the page discovering that apparently, some NASA webpage actually listed dates that are off by a few days, and not consistent, for photos taken on Apollo 16. I can't check the page myself, government shutdown and all.

Not only that, but he's actually managed to discover that Johnston would have had to been the one who planned the fake landings, not Nixon. (Progress, I guess.)

His FACTS page has a few howlers as well, as does the rest of the site. He claims that spacecraft travel between planets 'by a series of ever increasing orbits' (correct for ion engines, wrong for everything else), and that's way it takes 66 hours for the shuttle to reach the ISS (funny).

He says that the Saturn V only puts 3% of it's mass in earth orbit, as if that means something, then moves on as if he'd made a point. That's how rockets work, and by math shows closer to 4%, including the roughly half-fuled S-IVB. He actually tires to claim as evidence his observation that a plastic model kit of a Saturn V doesn't have the word 'moon' on the box. ::)
Oh looky, he says that with no wind on the moon, what blew the dust off the top of the rocks, since there was no dust on them? (There wasn't any wind to blow them on the rocks in the first place. The answer's staring you in the face, Colby.)

Otherwise, let's see:
Uses Uri Geller as an authority? Check.
Fails to understand thermodynamics? Check.
Computer chips not invented, and comparing to a lunar landing game? Check.
Not understanding the difference between short term and long term missions when it comes to radiation? Check.
Classified files due to be declassified in 2026? Check.
NASA still can't get a rocket to take off and land vertically? Check.
Still claims the J-mission LM was unchanged? Check.
LEM? Not check. Yay, he figured out there's no E in it!
This one's interesting, he says not a single picture taken on the lunar surface has a picture of the earth in it. That's odd, there have been a few of them linked to from this very forum I recall seeing.
Bizarre political story occupying a full page, involving the CIA, about why the moon landing were hoaxed to prove the were? Check.    Also, hippie drugs were a CIA plot.
Mars rovers are faked for the same motive as the moon landings (see above)? Check. (and why would they have to fake them anyway? He says that Apollo was faked because of radiation, but that wouldn't apply to unmanned probes.)
Complains that Apollo mission didn't take new astronauts along for transferring experience, then in the very next paragraph complains that they sent astronauts to the moon who had never been in space before? Check.

No class? Check.

He says anyone who believes in the moon landing must be "essentially green." What does that even mean?
He also mocks the optimism of those who believed that Apollo was the beginning of sustained, increasing exploration and colonization of space. That one was painful to read.

Link, for anyone who's interested.
http://nasascam.atspace.co.uk/

Offline Glom

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #1 on: October 04, 2013, 01:30:36 AM »
He got rid of the conical space capsule bit? That was pure gold.

Offline Daggerstab

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #2 on: October 04, 2013, 11:29:08 AM »
Wasn't his old site on Geocities? If so, it may be recoverable - there are websites that mirror Geocities. For the sake of nostalgia, I guess. :)

Offline DataCable

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #3 on: October 04, 2013, 04:30:22 PM »
Gee, he doesn't seem to have the page any more comparing Apollo 17 landscapes of the Taurus-Littrow valley from different locations, pointing out the identical features, proving that it was all just a static backdrop... except that those features are shifted around a bit from one shot to the next... y'know, like they might be in a real 3-D landscape... what with parallax and all.
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Offline Everett

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #4 on: October 04, 2013, 04:46:32 PM »
BINGO!!



Wow, that took a lot more cards then I expected. The 'C rock,' 'just asking questions,' and 'in my opinion' were killers. And that was using almost the whole website. Did we scare off all the HB's from this forum? None of them ever show up any more, that's no fun at all.

Offline darren r

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #5 on: October 04, 2013, 05:15:26 PM »
Has anyone ever claimed they could 'see the flag through my telescope'?
" I went to the God D**n Moon!" Byng Gordon, 8th man on the Moon.

Offline raven

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #6 on: October 04, 2013, 07:18:48 PM »
Has anyone ever claimed they could 'see the flag through my telescope'?
I actually have seen some apparent Apollo Nutters claim at least that large telescopes should be able to see it.

Offline smartcooky

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #7 on: October 04, 2013, 08:49:24 PM »
Has anyone ever claimed they could 'see the flag through my telescope'?
I actually have seen some apparent Apollo Nutters claim at least that large telescopes should be able to see it.

R = 11.6 / D (subject to the limitations of Nyquist's Theorem)

This means that a telescope the size of Hubble has a resolution of about 0.1 of an arc-second. At the distance of the moon, that is about the size of a football stadium (not just the field, the whole stadium)

To resolve the flag, even as a just a dot, the resolution would need to be about 200 times better, or about 0.0005 of an arc second. The mirror would need to be about 2.3km in diameter.
If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong.

Offline raven

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #8 on: October 04, 2013, 09:28:20 PM »
Oh, I certainly know this. I am just saying I have seen the claim made by people who apparently agree with the Apollo record.

Offline Glom

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #9 on: October 04, 2013, 11:38:18 PM »
Has anyone ever claimed they could 'see the flag through my telescope'?
I actually have seen some apparent Apollo Nutters claim at least that large telescopes should be able to see it.

R = 11.6 / D (subject to the limitations of Nyquist's Theorem)

This means that a telescope the size of Hubble has a resolution of about 0.1 of an arc-second. At the distance of the moon, that is about the size of a football stadium (not just the field, the whole stadium)

To resolve the flag, even as a just a dot, the resolution would need to be about 200 times better, or about 0.0005 of an arc second. The mirror would need to be about 2.3km in diameter.

I think you mean the Raleigh criterion. Nyquist is about sampling rate IIRC.

Offline qt

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #10 on: October 05, 2013, 01:13:47 AM »
Wow, that took a lot more cards then I expected. The 'C rock,' 'just asking questions,' and 'in my opinion' were killers. And that was using almost the whole website. Did we scare off all the HB's from this forum? None of them ever show up any more, that's no fun at all.

Is that your work?  Very nice.  If you're taking suggestions, though, I'd replace the LEM/LM one with the C rock.  I think giving people gruff over terminology is a bit feeble.  If we comb through posts by the other side of the argument, I'm sure we'll find typos, statements that some thing "weighs" X kilograms, references to President "Johnston", and the like.  Do these things discredit them?  Also, "if I ran the zoo" arguments about how a hoax would have been done seem to be commonplace, so I don't know that I'd go with that one.

« Last Edit: October 05, 2013, 01:15:32 AM by qt »

Offline Chew

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #11 on: October 05, 2013, 01:42:58 AM »
All the conspiracy websites refer to the LM as the LEM. It's a dead-giveaway where they got their information.

The idea of the bingo card is to cover the most-used arguments. The C-rock is on it.

Offline qt

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #12 on: October 05, 2013, 03:27:08 AM »
All the conspiracy websites refer to the LM as the LEM. It's a dead-giveaway where they got their information.

I can't find it at the moment, but I seem to recall someone here (or maybe the old version of here) mentioning that one of the astronauts even used the term LEM.

The idea of the bingo card is to cover the most-used arguments. The C-rock is on it.

Are we looking at the same bingo card?

Offline Allan F

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #13 on: October 05, 2013, 06:15:56 AM »
If I understand it correctly, the bingocard is generated from a pool of hoax-ideas, each time you click on it. So the bingocards are different - which makes sense, otherwise everybody would win at the same time.
Well, it is like this: The truth doesn't need insults. Insults are the refuge of a darkened mind, a mind that refuses to open and see. Foul language can't outcompete knowledge. And knowledge is the result of education. Education is the result of the wish to know more, not less.

Offline smartcooky

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Re: What's Sam Colby been up to?
« Reply #14 on: October 05, 2013, 06:49:25 AM »
I think you mean the Raleigh criterion. Nyquist is about sampling rate IIRC.

No I do mean Nyquist's Theorem as I was using Hubble as an example. It, like any other remote telescope these days, converts analog to digital for signal transmission. Due to factors involving interference patterns and the wavelength range of visible light, the smallest resolvable object is about twice the theoretical resolution.

http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/definition/Nyquist-Theorem
If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong.