ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: Willoughby on February 18, 2016, 07:18:40 PM
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I just wanted to talk about some of the arguments hoaxers make and get the thoughts of some people here. I find that there are a lot of arguments that hoaxers make that are half arguments or just present the same problem for the hoax.
Like, "There are no rover tracks. Explain that". I just want to ask them the same thing based on the premise that the mission was actually faked. Why aren't there any rover tracks? It's a unexplained issue in their theory as well. Never mind the fact that these things are actually explained - I'm just talking about the premise of the arguments presenting the same exact problem for both the real Apollo landing AND the faked mission on a set. Obviously, they don't see the flaw in the logic, but the reality is - if you couldn't explain something IN EITHER context, then how is it evidence that there is only something fishy going on in one of the scenarios? Does anyone understand what I am saying? There are lots and lots of arguments just like this.
The boot print doesn't match the boot. If that's the case, then what did they use to create the boot prints on the fake set? A boot that nobody had access to? They were all standing around, and someone said, "Hey, we need to put boot prints over here. Someone run into the prop room and grab a boot so we can make some prints". "Why don't you just use the shoes you're wearing?". "Nah. We need something from the back". It makes no sense in either scenario why the boot print wouldn't match the boot.
I once argued with someone who wondered how none of the astronauts ever got sick. Thought that was fishy. Well, they didn't get sick while they were faking it either, so how do you explain that?
Then there are the arguments that I call "half arguments" where they can't explain something, and don't explain exactly how it means it is a hoax. A lot of the photography arguments are like this. They imply something can't be explained, but then don't explain how you go from that to "the whole Apollo program was faked". Like, the cross hairs on the photographs and how the overexposure causes the area to bleed over them. Where do you go from there? Assuming there is no explanation for it, they still don't explain how they connect that dot with the hoax dot. All they know is that whatever happened to the photograph that caused this thing they have no explanation for, they DO know that it would not have happened had the mission been real.
I just wanted to vent a little bit. Anyone have any similar arguments you've come across?
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I just wanted to vent a little bit. Anyone have any similar arguments you've come across?
I'd be more curious about whether has any DIFFERENT arguments they've come across, because everything I've seen fits your two categories.
:D
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I just wanted to talk about some of the arguments hoaxers make and get the thoughts of some people here. I find that there are a lot of arguments that hoaxers make that are half arguments or just present the same problem for the hoax.
Like, "There are no rover tracks. Explain that". I just want to ask them the same thing based on the premise that the mission was actually faked. Why aren't there any rover tracks? It's a unexplained issue in their theory as well. Never mind the fact that these things are actually explained - I'm just talking about the premise of the arguments presenting the same exact problem for both the real Apollo landing AND the faked mission on a set. Obviously, they don't see the flaw in the logic, but the reality is - if you couldn't explain something IN EITHER context, then how is it evidence that there is only something fishy going on in one of the scenarios? Does anyone understand what I am saying? There are lots and lots of arguments just like this.
The boot print doesn't match the boot. If that's the case, then what did they use to create the boot prints on the fake set? A boot that nobody had access to? They were all standing around, and someone said, "Hey, we need to put boot prints over here. Someone run into the prop room and grab a boot so we can make some prints". "Why don't you just use the shoes you're wearing?". "Nah. We need something from the back". It makes no sense in either scenario why the boot print wouldn't match the boot.
This one is easy to debunk, all one needs to do is to research the EVA equipment and the over boots that were worn match exactly, not the normal boot bottoms for the suits. They just need a little research instead of claiming "fake"
I once argued with someone who wondered how none of the astronauts ever got sick. Thought that was fishy. Well, they didn't get sick while they were faking it either, so how do you explain that?
But they sometimes got sick, Frank Borman in A8, they had med kits in the capsule, again they need to do research.
Then there are the arguments that I call "half arguments" where they can't explain something, and don't explain exactly how it means it is a hoax. A lot of the photography arguments are like this. They imply something can't be explained, but then don't explain how you go from that to "the whole Apollo program was faked". Like, the cross hairs on the photographs and how the overexposure causes the area to bleed over them. Where do you go from there? Assuming there is no explanation for it, they still don't explain how they connect that dot with the hoax dot. All they know is that whatever happened to the photograph that caused this thing they have no explanation for, they DO know that it would not have happened had the mission been real.
This is best summed up by, I don't know how its done(or I don't understand this), therefore it is fake.
I just wanted to vent a little bit. Anyone have any similar arguments you've come across?
After venting then go get research, or ask questions of guys/girls around here and present the facts. Most of the Apollo nonsense if from lack of understanding science/technology that was developed/used during Apollo. And rest assured most of the hard core won't listen to reason, as they know it all. I have run onto many in the YT channels
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But they sometimes got sick, Frank Borman in A8, they had med kits in the capsule, again they need to do research.
Fred Haise's urinary tract infection also comes to mind, as does Water Schirra's head cold. Damn right they don't do research.
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Do research? They haven't even watched Apollo 13!
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Do research? They haven't even watched Apollo 13!
??? LOL They always know "everything" that most of the rest of the world takes as facts
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My favourite at the moment is those who think that there should have been (a) a 'blast crater' under the LM descent stage, and at the same time (b) 'dust in the footpads'.
The two are contradictory, excepting the minor instance where the dust hit the (slim) lander legs and dropped into the pads. The rest was driven far, far away
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Thank you guys for all the responses. Though, I wanted to take a minute to clear up some confusion. I didn't need explanations for the arguments. I know that the arguments have explanations - and that other arguments are just straw men. The point I was trying to make is that even despite the fact that the arguments have demonstrably accurate explanations, the problem the hoaxers imply exists with the Apollo story is presented identically in the fake story as well - yet they have no problem with that same exact hole (that isn't really a hole) in the fake theory.
Going back to the one argument about how nobody got sick. Despite the fact that it isn't true (that wasn't my point), the person making this argument - or pointing out this "hole" in the Apollo story - never recognizes that they've created the same hole in their own theory. That was the point I was trying to make. Perhaps it's not appropriate for this site? If so, I apologize. I was just making an observation; not asking for explanations for these arguments.
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My favourite at the moment is those who think that there should have been (a) a 'blast crater' under the LM descent stage, and at the same time (b) 'dust in the footpads'.
The two are contradictory, excepting the minor instance where the dust hit the (slim) lander legs and dropped into the pads. The rest was driven far, far away
Yes, I have seen these two made by the same person many times. Even ignoring the fact that they are contradictory, I don't know how they accept that they are the only ones who have figured this out. It takes a special kind of oblivion I think. Even more so, they would have to assume that NASA hired retarded monkeys to set up the stage sets for them to have overlooked as many things as they assert have been overlooked - when of course, in reality nothing has been overlooked. Their expectations are just wrong. I've said that many times, and it never sinks in for them. Other than the types of arguments I talked about in my OP, the rest of the arguments can be attributed to false/uneducated expectations.
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I find it good to ask 'If there should be a blast crater, why isn't there one? Why didn't the set builders . . . .add one?' I have yet to get any kind of response worthy of the word.
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I have yet to get any kind of response worthy of the word.
I think I posted this before, but it I still think it's a nice spoof of how the fake must have been done
http://web.archive.org/web/20030507134511/www.frabjous.org/writing/moon-hoax.html
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Do research? They haven't even watched Apollo 13!
Hypothetical Hoaxer:
"Hey, I'm not watching a twelfth sequel, just because Hollywood's writers can't come up with something new."
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I agree that an awful lot of "anomaly spotting" results in anomalies that would be just as odd in a faked mission as a real one.
Right now on Cosmoquest they have someone going on about how in one photo the leg of the lander looks very large, and the astronaut looks very small. While most commentators have contented themselves by explaining how "large = close, small = far away," one person did point out that if this were the result of a fake, it would mean that the hoaxers had, for some reason, created a giant lander leg just for that photo, and what would be the point of that?
I can only think that the photo-anomalists have never taken photos of their own, and have no idea how perspective, lighting, film speed and distance can make a difference between the scene you perceive in your mind, and what shows up on the screen or developed film.
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Did the debunkers on Cosmoquest break out the Father Ted clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS12p0Zqlt0) yet?
Edit: Yes, they did! ;D
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I agree that an awful lot of "anomaly spotting" results in anomalies that would be just as odd in a faked mission as a real one.
Right now on Cosmoquest they have someone going on about how in one photo the leg of the lander looks very large, and the astronaut looks very small. While most commentators have contented themselves by explaining how "large = close, small = far away," one person did point out that if this were the result of a fake, it would mean that the hoaxers had, for some reason, created a giant lander leg just for that photo, and what would be the point of that?
I can only think that the photo-anomalists have never taken photos of their own, and have no idea how perspective, lighting, film speed and distance can make a difference between the scene you perceive in your mind, and what shows up on the screen or developed film.
Could you provide link to the thread, please?
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The 'no stars' claim is the ultimate example of this absurdity. But when pressed as to why NASA didn't simply include stars in the 'backdrop', HB's respond that NASA didn't know which stars would be visible from the Moon! NASA, an organisation with access to pretty much all the world's astronomers.
Ultimately though, they will always wave away any discrepancy as 'whistleblowers' (who, by this point. must consist of most of NASA's employees) or the product of NASA's combined stupidity/arrogance.
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I agree that an awful lot of "anomaly spotting" results in anomalies that would be just as odd in a faked mission as a real one.
Right now on Cosmoquest they have someone going on about how in one photo the leg of the lander looks very large, and the astronaut looks very small. While most commentators have contented themselves by explaining how "large = close, small = far away," one person did point out that if this were the result of a fake, it would mean that the hoaxers had, for some reason, created a giant lander leg just for that photo, and what would be the point of that?
I can only think that the photo-anomalists have never taken photos of their own, and have no idea how perspective, lighting, film speed and distance can make a difference between the scene you perceive in your mind, and what shows up on the screen or developed film.
Could you provide link to the thread, please?
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?160202-Doubting-Thomas-moon-thread (http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?160202-Doubting-Thomas-moon-thread)
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The 'no stars' claim is the ultimate example of this absurdity. But when pressed as to why NASA didn't simply include stars in the 'backdrop', HB's respond that NASA didn't know which stars would be visible from the Moon! NASA, an organisation with access to pretty much all the world's astronomers.
The further idiocy, of course, was that NASA couldn't then just put random stars on, because the viewers at home would be able to tell the stars were in the wrong place. Which NASA itself couldn't do.
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The 'no stars' claim is the ultimate example of this absurdity. But when pressed as to why NASA didn't simply include stars in the 'backdrop', HB's respond that NASA didn't know which stars would be visible from the Moon! NASA, an organisation with access to pretty much all the world's astronomers.
The further idiocy, of course, was that NASA couldn't then just put random stars on, because the viewers at home would be able to tell the stars were in the wrong place. Which NASA itself couldn't do.
The comment by brother Kaysing was so quick that anyone that might be on the fence, could say yes, that's true. Instead of stopping and thinking have I ever taken a photo in a lighted place on Earth and had the stars visible and/or with the brightness of the sun would dimmer objects (stars) be visible?
ETA:
This is one of the really bad about the Fox mocumentary, that is almost no opposing views were presented to start the debunking right on the original program.
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Then there are the arguments that I call "half arguments" where they can't explain something, and don't explain exactly how it means it is a hoax. A lot of the photography arguments are like this. They imply something can't be explained, but then don't explain how you go from that to "the whole Apollo program was faked". Like, the cross hairs on the photographs and how the overexposure causes the area to bleed over them. Where do you go from there? Assuming there is no explanation for it, they still don't explain how they connect that dot with the hoax dot. All they know is that whatever happened to the photograph that caused this thing they have no explanation for, they DO know that it would not have happened had the mission been real.
This is best summed up by, I don't know how its done(or I don't understand this), therefore it is fake.
Its known as the "Giorgio Tsoukalos Gambit"...
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/JREF/Giorgio-IDK-Fake.png) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/JREF/Giorgio-IDU-Fake.png) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/JREF/Giorgio-ICE-Fake.png)
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This is one of the really bad about the Fox mocumentary,.......
I like the term Fauxumentary. ;D
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The whistleblowers handwave itself fails because it assumes NASA didn't have any oversight over the production process. They just allegedly told these special and visual effects people to make the most convincing and large scale effects of their life, lie to the general public and not even be able to take credit for it, and NASA didn't have some trusted scientists and engineers to go over the produced material? And if all these people, including those on oversight, were so guilty about faking it as to add these details that, if truly evidence of a hoax, would be incredibly obvious, why haven't anyone come forward?
Where's Apollo's 'Deep Throat'?
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The 'no stars' claim is the ultimate example of this absurdity. But when pressed as to why NASA didn't simply include stars in the 'backdrop', HB's respond that NASA didn't know which stars would be visible from the Moon! NASA, an organisation with access to pretty much all the world's astronomers.
Ultimately though, they will always wave away any discrepancy as 'whistleblowers' (who, by this point. must consist of most of NASA's employees) or the product of NASA's combined stupidity/arrogance.
The "no stars" claims are really easy to logically debunk, but are hardly ever accepted by the hoaxers.
If NASA didn't know which stars would be visible from the moon, then why would it have mattered which stars they decided to "make visible"? If NASA didn't know, who would have known the difference?
If the hoaxers are convinced that it would have been easy to tell that the stars were wrong, then who would be able to tell? The general public? Some astronomer somewhere? If Bob, the astronomer, would have been able to easily tell that stars which should have been visible from the moon were not visible on the photographs (and vice versa) or stars did not appear where they were supposed to appear, then the logical course of action would be to employ Bob, the astronomer, to place the stars in the fake photos, right? Is this too much logic?
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Besides, NASA did take photos of stars, both in Far UV and in longer exposure visible light, so the whole argument still unravels from yet another angle.
It's gotten to the point even conspiracy theorists try to distance themselves from the claim, calling it a 'strawman' allegedly invented by the debunkers, sorry, NASA shills, but that's easy to debunk by linking to Kaysing's book on Google Books and other founding documents of the Apollo hoax claims.
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This is one of the really bad about the Fox mocumentary,.......
I like the term Fauxumentary. ;D
Since "mockumentary" has a specific meaning, it's certainly more accurate here.
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This is one of the really bad about the Fox mocumentary,.......
I like the term Fauxumentary. ;D
Just be careful how you pronounce the first two syllables. :D
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It's gotten to the point even conspiracy theorists try to distance themselves from the claim, calling it a 'strawman' allegedly invented by the debunkers, sorry, NASA shills, but that's easy to debunk by linking to Kaysing's book on Google Books and other founding documents of the Apollo hoax claims.
I think I remember someone, it might have been Dr. Socks, claiming that Kaysing was a government disinfo agent.
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The "whistleblower" notion ignores the most obvious source for whistleblowers: the managers, scientists, engineers, and technicians who actually made Apollo happen. I've worked with some of them. The idea that they would stand for that sort of crap is laughable, and shows how completely hoax believers are removed from the reality of Apollo in particular and aerospace in general.
They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing. Such a profoundly silly claim also demonstrates the HBs' disconnect from reality.
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Thank you guys for all the responses. Though, I wanted to take a minute to clear up some confusion. I didn't need explanations for the arguments. I know that the arguments have explanations - and that other arguments are just straw men. The point I was trying to make is that even despite the fact that the arguments have demonstrably accurate explanations, the problem the hoaxers imply exists with the Apollo story is presented identically in the fake story as well - yet they have no problem with that same exact hole (that isn't really a hole) in the fake theory.
Yes, I've observed this many times in HB arguments. Often it will be something like, "this photo is fake because (insert silly reason here) is impossible." That leads to the question, "then how was the fake photo taken?" If the photo shows X, and if X is impossible, then that's a problem regardless of which side of the argument you're on. If true, then X would be just as impossible to achieve in a photo taken in a studio on Earth as it would be in one taken on the Moon. Of course the answer is always that there's nothing wrong with the photo; it's the HB's flawed and naïve understanding of what the photo should show.
I'm sure there are many examples, but one that comes to mine is an old argument (not sure who originated it) about this photo:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS11-40-5961
The argument is that the astronaut's shadow should point to his position at the bottom center of the image. If the landings were fake, then one must presume that the photos were taken by a photographer moving about a fake Moon set in a studio somewhere on Earth. If the photo shows something that is allegedly impossible, then how did that photographer manage to capture the image?
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The "whistleblower" notion ignores the most obvious source for whistleblowers: the managers, scientists, engineers, and technicians who actually made Apollo happen. I've worked with some of them. The idea that they would stand for that sort of crap is laughable, and shows how completely hoax believers are removed from the reality of Apollo in particular and aerospace in general.
They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing. Such a profoundly silly claim also demonstrates the HBs' disconnect from reality.
Yes, they claim that only a handful of people were in on it, yet obliviously involve every past, present and future expert when they claim that the radiation in the VAB would have fried them.
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The "whistleblower" notion ignores the most obvious source for whistleblowers: the managers, scientists, engineers, and technicians who actually made Apollo happen. I've worked with some of them. The idea that they would stand for that sort of crap is laughable, and shows how completely hoax believers are removed from the reality of Apollo in particular and aerospace in general.
They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing. Such a profoundly silly claim also demonstrates the HBs' disconnect from reality.
Yes, they claim that only a handful of people were in on it, yet obliviously involve every past, present and future expert when they claim that the radiation in the VAB would have fried them.
Not really pertinent, but when I read this post, for about 10 seconds, I wondered just what radiation hazard would be present in the Vehicle Assembly Building.
D'oh!
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The "whistleblower" notion ignores the most obvious source for whistleblowers: the managers, scientists, engineers, and technicians who actually made Apollo happen. I've worked with some of them. The idea that they would stand for that sort of crap is laughable, and shows how completely hoax believers are removed from the reality of Apollo in particular and aerospace in general.
They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing. Such a profoundly silly claim also demonstrates the HBs' disconnect from reality.
Yes, they claim that only a handful of people were in on it, yet obliviously involve every past, present and future expert when they claim that the radiation in the VAB would have fried them.
Not really pertinent, but when I read this post, for about 10 seconds, I wondered just what radiation hazard would be present in the Vehicle Assembly Building.
D'oh!
HA!
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The "whistleblower" notion ignores the most obvious source for whistleblowers: the managers, scientists, engineers, and technicians who actually made Apollo happen. I've worked with some of them. The idea that they would stand for that sort of crap is laughable, and shows how completely hoax believers are removed from the reality of Apollo in particular and aerospace in general.
They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing. Such a profoundly silly claim also demonstrates the HBs' disconnect from reality.
Yes, they claim that only a handful of people were in on it, yet obliviously involve every past, present and future expert when they claim that the radiation in the VAB would have fried them.
Not really pertinent, but when I read this post, for about 10 seconds, I wondered just what radiation hazard would be present in the Vehicle Assembly Building.
D'oh!
When it's obvious it was Vandenberg Air Base intended, ;)
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They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing.
This is one of the more infuriating claims, and it has become rather popular lately.
It certainly belies a complete ignorance of how engineers, scientists and technicians think, work and communicate. And it goes without saying that it's a particularly nasty insult to their intelligence.
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They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing.
This is one of the more infuriating claims, and it has become rather popular lately.
It certainly belies a complete ignorance of how engineers, scientists and technicians think, work and communicate. And it goes without saying that it's a particularly nasty insult to their intelligence.
And how do you isolate those "in the know" from those who are not?
Every engineer who worked on any aspect of Apollo would have needed to be "in the know" because if they weren't, they would spot the bit of engineering that they know would not work and the game would be up.
Its a fairly established fact that as more people are added to a group that know a secret, the chances of that secret getting out increases dramatically... Watergate is a good example, only about a dozen people new about the break-in when it happened in June 1972. By September, the world knew about it. Even worse was the Lewinsky scandal... only two people knew about it... President Clinton and the woman he was bonking, yet it still got out within a year of the affair.
The HBs would have us believe that NASA and the US Government, with many times the number of people involved in Watergate or the Lewinsky scandal, who would have need to be "in the know", have somehow been able to keep a lid on "da twoof" for almost 47 years!!! This doesn't just strain credulity to the limit, it strains it beyond breaking point...it is simply impossible!
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They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing.
This is one of the more infuriating claims, and it has become rather popular lately.
It certainly belies a complete ignorance of how engineers, scientists and technicians think, work and communicate. And it goes without saying that it's a particularly nasty insult to their intelligence.
And how do you isolate those "in the know" from those who are not?
Every engineer who worked on any aspect of Apollo would have needed to be "in the know" because if they weren't, they would spot the bit of engineering that they know would not work and the game would be up.
Its a fairly established fact that as more people are added to a group that know a secret, the chances of that secret getting out increases dramatically... Watergate is a good example, only about a dozen people new about the break-in when it happened in June 1972. By September, the world knew about it. Even worse was the Lewinsky scandal... only two people knew about it... President Clinton and the woman he was bonking, yet it still got out within a year of the affair.
The HBs would have us believe that NASA and the US Government, with many times the number of people involved in Watergate or the Lewinsky scandal, who would have need to be "in the know", have somehow been able to keep a lid on "da twoof" for almost 47 years!!! This doesn't just strain credulity to the limit, it strains it beyond breaking point...it is simply impossible!
In addition to the time involved, there have been no "death bed confessionals", and we are getting older> :(
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The "whistleblower" notion ignores the most obvious source for whistleblowers: the managers, scientists, engineers, and technicians who actually made Apollo happen. I've worked with some of them. The idea that they would stand for that sort of crap is laughable, and shows how completely hoax believers are removed from the reality of Apollo in particular and aerospace in general.
They sometimes try to get around this by saying only a handful of people were really in on it, and everyone else just thought they were working on the real thing. Such a profoundly silly claim also demonstrates the HBs' disconnect from reality.
Yes, they claim that only a handful of people were in on it, yet obliviously involve every past, present and future expert when they claim that the radiation in the VAB would have fried them.
Not really pertinent, but when I read this post, for about 10 seconds, I wondered just what radiation hazard would be present in the Vehicle Assembly Building.
D'oh!
When it's obvious it was Vandenberg Air Base intended, ;)
But that would have been VBG (or KVBG). Clearly an intentional mistake by a whistleblower!
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Where's Apollo's 'Deep Throat'?
Isn't that Kaysing, the NASA engineer with inside knowlegde? Three lies for the price of one...
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Where's Apollo's 'Deep Throat'?
Isn't that Kaysing, the NASA engineer with inside knowlegde? Three lies for the price of one...
Kaysing WAS NOT AN ENGINEER he had a degree in English IIRC.
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Where's Apollo's 'Deep Throat'?
Isn't that Kaysing, the NASA engineer with inside knowlegde? Three lies for the price of one...
Kaysing WAS NOT AN ENGINEER he had a degree in English IIRC.
Ahem! I...er...think that was (part of) Ineluki's point.
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Every engineer who worked on any aspect of Apollo would have needed to be "in the know" because if they weren't, they would spot the bit of engineering that they know would not work and the game would be up.
The alternative to that, as proposed by HBs when confronted with the problem of the huge number of people who would be likely to blow the secret, is to say that only top level managers were 'in on it' and the shop floor guys were not. This fails for the simple reason that if none of your engineers are in the know they will do their jobs and actually build working hardware, thereby removing the need for faking it anyway.
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Yeah, and those guys sieving all the sand and dumping it in a massive studio set with the life-sized model LM would never have batted an eyelid, seeing is they weren't in the know...
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Where's Apollo's 'Deep Throat'?
Isn't that Kaysing, the NASA engineer with inside knowlegde? Three lies for the price of one...
Kaysing WAS NOT AN ENGINEER he had a degree in English IIRC.
Ahem! I...er...think that was (part of) Ineluki's point.
LOL, yes I believe that was what I quoted, but I may have made a mistake. It certainly wouldn't be the first nor the last. :)
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Every engineer who worked on any aspect of Apollo would have needed to be "in the know" because if they weren't, they would spot the bit of engineering that they know would not work and the game would be up.
The alternative to that, as proposed by HBs when confronted with the problem of the huge number of people who would be likely to blow the secret, is to say that only top level managers were 'in on it' and the shop floor guys were not. This fails for the simple reason that if none of your engineers are in the know they will do their jobs and actually build working hardware, thereby removing the need for faking it anyway.
Very true and this reminds me of the British video of the people discussing a "Fake" mission and the woman indicates that no they need to build a massive rocket!
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Yeah, and those guys sieving all the sand and dumping it in a massive studio set with the life-sized model LM would never have batted an eyelid, seeing is they weren't in the know...
And a LRV to drive around the massive set.
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I do believe a lot of the people who worked on Apollo wouldn't have known if what they were doing was part of a hoax or not, and it would not have taken more than a few hundred people tops to fake it. (Since, after all, you don't need the props to work on the same level!) Now, "a lot of the people" still leaves us with probably a couple hundred thousand who would have known, and it isn't possible to make Apollo with current technology, but still.
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I do believe a lot of the people who worked on Apollo wouldn't have known if what they were doing was part of a hoax or not, and it would not have taken more than a few hundred people tops to fake it. (Since, after all, you don't need the props to work on the same level!) Now, "a lot of the people" still leaves us with probably a couple hundred thousand who would have known, and it isn't possible to make Apollo with current technology, but still.
That's great, but until such time that you provide SUPPORT for the claim that the program was compartmentalized, the claim will remain nothing more than your personal baseless speculation.
So, you think a few hundred people can keep a secret? Give me an example of when a few hundred people have successfully kept a secret. I'm sorry. That's unfair. You can't possibly do that because if you could, obviously the secret keeping wouldn't have been successful. Yet, you have no problem implying that this is going on right now. Do you have any names of any of these hundreds of people? Any at all? What about the radiation claim? Do you endorse the claim that the radiation would have killed them as well? Because that involves every past, present and future expert in cosmic radiation. There's a few more hundred right there.
If the people building the infrastructure, modules, rockets, etc. didn't know that what they were working on was going to be faked, then they would have assumed they were putting a man on the moon. These are not factory workers. They are brilliant physicists, engineers, astronomers, etc. What you are suggesting would have produced hardware capable of the task which they thought they were working on. So....why was it necessary to fake the missions? Are you suggesting that these people who built the machines would not have known whether or not they were up to the job which they thought they were making them for? Are the that incompetent?
"you don't need the props to work on the same level" - what do you mean by this?
It isn't possible to make Apollo with current technology? What technology did Apollo have that doesn't exist today? Be specific. It is true that there is no HARDWARE a la Apollo that can land a man on the moon today. Why would there be? Do you think that they constructed 10 landers before they landed on the moon and we have extra ones lying around? Did we wastefully build more Saturn V rockets than we needed? What are you talking about? There isn't any hardware to land men on the moon because there is no mission to land men on the moon. You are implying that the hardware doesn't exist because we can't produce the hardware. It's nonsense. We don't NEED the hardware because we're not going to the moon. Isn't this common sense?
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I think you misunderstand gillianren. She's on the side of reality.
But I also disagree with her, because there was so much hardware that had to interface with other parts, that Team A needed insight in Team B and C and D and E to do their own job - and team E needed A, B, C, D, F, G H to talk to too. The navigation system team needed to talk to the computer team, the propulsion team, the environmental system team, the power supply team, and so on.
And if a Navigation system guy noticed that the propulsion system team wasn't doing their job, he'd ask some very pointed questions. You can't compartmentalize such a interdependent project - especially not when the press was crawling all over at the same time.
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It's hard to see anything "on the side of reality" about hoaxing the landings with any amount of people.
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I think you misunderstand gillianren. She's on the side of reality.
But I also disagree with her, because there was so much hardware that had to interface with other parts, that Team A needed insight in Team B and C and D and E to do their own job - and team E needed A, B, C, D, F, G H to talk to too. The navigation system team needed to talk to the computer team, the propulsion team, the environmental system team, the power supply team, and so on.
And if a Navigation system guy noticed that the propulsion system team wasn't doing their job, he'd ask some very pointed questions. You can't compartmentalize such a interdependent project - especially not when the press was crawling all over at the same time.
If she's on the side of reality, then I did indeed misunderstand her. I've gone back and re-read the comment, and I still can't interpret it that way though even knowing that! It still doesn't change the fact that this method of "compartmentalization" would have produced working hardware which makes a fake unnecessary, but maybe she agrees with that. What you say regarding the type of communication necessary logically debunks the claim that it "could have" been done without them knowing.
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Gillianren is most definitely not an HB and while I don't presume to speak on her behalf I suspect she meant 'fake Apollo with current technology' not 'make' it. I could be wrong, of course.
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Indeed, Gillianren has been a staunch defender of Apollo authenticity for many years.
I think in her defense she's referring to a practical compartmentalization that arises simply from a single person not being able to comprehend the whole project in all it's detail. You're either a "high-level" person with broad perspective, or you're a "low-level" person with focused subject-matter expertise on, say, the cabin heat exchanger. These folks wouldn't necessarily know about propulsion or navigation.
But in any large project engineers still have to confer across functional disciplines for integration, even at the low level. At a certain point enough "low-level" people would have to represent, collectively speaking, a suitable knowledge of the overall project. Further, Apollo was expressly uncompartmentalized. We have both anecdotal and documentary evidence of aggressive familiarization and cross-training among project engineers.
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Do you agree with her that "it would not have taken more than a few hundred people tops to fake it" because I contend it can't be faked with any number of people.
Hard can't, as in not physically possible, even it they wanted to.
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Gillianren is most definitely not an HB and while I don't presume to speak on her behalf I suspect she meant 'fake Apollo with current technology' not 'make' it. I could be wrong, of course.
I also assumed "make" was supposed to be "fake". :)
Of course, if they were going to fake it, why make it such a big, distributed project at all? Claim its being done in top secret/classified environments by a handful of geniuses. I mean, if its all impossible anyway, its not like anyone else will know how to do it better.
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Taking devil's advocate, if there was some problem or problems that were so esoteric only a small number of people either knew of them or needed to know of them, and that was so intractable as to make a landing impossible, then, yes, it is possible the Apollo Program might have compartmentalized that dangerous knowledge.
However. First, to actively produce the fake landings would require a surprising number of people with specialist knowledge. Second, there are seemingly intractable problems in achieving that fakery. Thirdly, such a void -- something that completely blocks manned space travel (to the Moon, beyond the VARB, at all...pick your limit) -- is very unlikely in the first place, and if maintained as a secret, would leave a visible black hole, a place where suddenly and mysteriously data stops being available and questions are shunted aside.
But all of this hardly describes the Hoax Believer scenario. Every candidate I have ever seen them put forward as this "intractable problem known only to the top brass" is in reality something that's taught at university level. If that. It's really, really, really hard to compartmentalize the dangerous knowledge that sublimation doesn't happen in a vacuum, or that Newton's Third Law doesn't work!
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But in any large project engineers still have to confer across functional disciplines for integration, even at the low level.
Was it a failure to do this in one instance that led to non-interchangeable lithium hydride canisters being employed in the LM and CM? I have to believe that had a systems integration specialist spotted that early enough he would have moved to have it changed.
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... sublimation doesn't happen in a vacuum
...and try telling that to a comet!!!
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You could have a limited number of people not realizing that the Apollo project wouldn't have been successful.
You'd still have to have a vast number of people working on the "shadow Apollo," creating all the technology to fake it. They'd have to have known they were working on a fake, because their stuff had to work.
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We have both anecdotal and documentary evidence of aggressive familiarization and cross-training among project engineers.
If only to sit together and eat in the company cafeteria.
Engineers love to talk shop even outside formal work settings. Or at least I do. And every engineer I've ever worked with. Much to the consternation of our significant others and non-engineer friends.
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I did indeed mean "fake."
Look, the filming of a movie, even an incredibly complex one, only takes a few hundred people. Count the credits the next time you see a blockbuster. So with my eliminations from the people who worked for Apollo, we have not added the same number of people.
I believe all the engineers would have known. Obviously, the astronauts would have known. A lot of people who made the fiddly bits. At least half the people involved, hands down, vastly more than it would take to fake Apollo, even if I believed Apollo were possible to fake. Which it wasn't then and isn't now.
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?
The number of people who worked on Apollo is vast. However, I do not believe that every last one of them had the knowledge to be certain that what they did was the way it was for a vital engineering reason. If you're told that producing rolls of Kapton is important for the Moon landing, that doesn't mean you know enough to understand anything more than maybe the properties of Kapton.
Actually, I'm reminded of an old joke. A pilgrim comes across the site of a cathedral being built. He stands in awe, then goes over to a woodcarver. "What are you doing?" he asks.
"I am building a scaffold, which will help support the stones until the mortar sets."
He asks the same question of a quarryman, who says, "I am carving the great stones that will form the walls. They must be very precise in order to fit together properly."
Then, he asks the question of a little old lady sweeping out the construction site. She says, "I am building a cathedral to the glory of God."
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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.
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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.
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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')
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Do tell.
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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...".
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Is your Apollo knowledge just an accumulation over the years or are there certain sources you continually reference?
Both. This is my profession, and I learned it at the hands of Apollo engineers. In a broader sense, the literature commonly makes reference to techniques developed in Gemini and Apollo, and lately STS.
In a narrower sense, there is no one singular work I refer to. My printed technical library regarding Apollo spans some 3-4 feet of shelf space. My digital library amounts probably to the better part of a terabyte. That said, start with the Apollo press kits. Then move on to the science and mission reports, both preliminary and full. These can be obtained in print from Apogee. Then tackle the ALSJ, which will probably take you until summer to digest. The Apollo News Record reports are next, followed by the operational handbooks for the LM, CSM, and Saturn V and the annotated mission flight plans. For specific subject matters, try the NASA technical reports servers, paying special attention to the experience reports.
If at any time you get lost, fall back to such books as Chariots for Apollo, the various works of Chaiken, Murray, and Cox, and of course our own "dwight," who has written the standard work on television in space. By far the best repository of visual information is spacecraftfilms.com. The executive producer, Mark Gray, occasionally posts here. Pay whatever price he is currently asking; he works tirelessly to preserve and restore the visual record of space flight.
And as usual, thanks for the compliments.
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Is your Apollo knowledge just an accumulation over the years or are there certain sources you continually reference?
Both. This is my profession, and I learned it at the hands of Apollo engineers. In a broader sense, the literature commonly makes reference to techniques developed in Gemini and Apollo, and lately STS.
In a narrower sense, there is no one singular work I refer to. My printed technical library regarding Apollo spans some 3-4 feet of shelf space. My digital library amounts probably to the better part of a terabyte. That said, start with the Apollo press kits. Then move on to the science and mission reports, both preliminary and full. These can be obtained in print from Apogee. Then tackle the ALSJ, which will probably take you until summer to digest. The Apollo News Record reports are next, followed by the operational handbooks for the LM, CSM, and Saturn V and the annotated mission flight plans. For specific subject matters, try the NASA technical reports servers, paying special attention to the experience reports.
If at any time you get lost, fall back to such books as Chariots for Apollo, the various works of Chaiken, Murray, and Cox, and of course our own "dwight," who has written the standard work on television in space. By far the best repository of visual information is spacecraftfilms.com. The executive producer, Mark Gray, occasionally posts here. Pay whatever price he is currently asking; he works tirelessly to preserve and restore the visual record of space flight.
And as usual, thanks for the compliments.
Wow! What a guy, man! Thank you for taking the time for this. Printing it now!
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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...".
Careful! There's a big difference between Jay's meaning of probable enough, and your probably enough. What I gather he means is that the need for LM lifeboat mode wasn't considered likely to arise, or at least not likely enough to warrant changes to the filters. One letter can make a difference in technical matters.
Jay mentioned the Apollo Press Reports -- I can supply a word-processed copy of the Apollo 11 press report which can be a little more useful than the PDF of the original, though it would pay to have that too. PM me with email address if you want a copy. The same applies to other members.
Have you looked at Jay's website Clavius? It has more of his Apollo knowledge and includes a superb and easy-to-follow explanation of why the Apollo 11 lunar TV was of such poor quality:--
http://www.clavius.org/tvqual.html
Many of the other reports he mentioned can be obtained from the ALSJ:--
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html
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That's just a bone-head mistake on my part. I understood what he meant. It was just a typo.
Oh yeah, I've gone through clavius; I had no idea it was his site. It's a great site!
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Indeed, one can't change just the LiOH filters. If you've owned more than one car you have probably experienced both kinds of filters that were used on Apollo. The CM used linear pass-through filters. The air goes in one end and comes out the other sans carbon dioxide.. Most modern cars use this mode for their air filters. Within the frame, the filter material is fanfolded to maximize surface area.
The LM used annular filters, like the circular ones in older cars. Air is taken in around the entire circumference and then extracted from the middle, at right angles to the plane of the circle. There's no difference in effect, but there's a difference in the geometric arrangement of piping fans, and filter chamber (which must be accessible for change-outs). To make the filters interchangeable would require quite a lot of redesign.
That's balanced against the probability of the CSM becoming uninhabitable, yet still navigable. That's a narrow slice of contingency, even if you're running those numbers after Apollo 13.
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But Apollo 13 gave the press something to report other than the "routine" landings on the moon, two at that point in time.
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So do I take it the difficulty of the Apollo 13 filter adaptor was more than getting a square peg to fit in a round hole...that it also had to direct the air properly for the filter to work well?
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And they found a workaround using on-board materials, so compromising the engineering for an unlikely fail-safe ended up not being necessary.
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So do I take it the difficulty of the Apollo 13 filter adaptor was more than getting a square peg to fit in a round hole...that it also had to direct the air properly for the filter to work well?
Indeed. Luckily the ECS had fittings for suit hoses, since it could be used to scrub air in the suit circuit.
It's not hard to find pictures of the CM filter. It's just a square box with the front and back square faces open to pass air. Because of how the suit fittings had to be valved through the ECS to rig this up, the crew had to figure out how to suck air through the filter, into a suit hose, and then into the ECS. That is, the hose worked by suction in this arrangement.
Once you see what you need to do, this is actually easily within the realm of the home MacGuyver. You really don't need much engineering knowledge, just practical know-how. And of course, the ability to use only what you have on hand. You can leave one face of the CM filter open and draw cabin air in through it. The trick is to adapt the other face of the filter to a hose that's going to suck air. This was done using one of the many plastic bags used to pack equipment for the flight. You just tape it around the perimeter to seal it to the edge.
Then you make a hole in the bag just big enough for the hose and tape the hose into it. But when you turn on the LM fans (which are prodigious), they'll suck the plastic up against the outlet face of the filter. That's no good because then only the portion of the filter right in front of the hose gets used. So you modify your adapter to allow a rigid structural piece that makes a "tent" out of the bag and holds it away from the face. For this they used the thick paper cover of the flight plan.
Starting over, you tape one edge of the paper to one edge of the filter, and then the other edge of the paper to the opposite edge of the filter. This makes a little Quonset hut over the downstream (outlet) side of the filter. Then you tape the plastic bag around it to make the airseal. You attach the hose to the bag as before, although obviously along the ends of the dome created by the paper.
You need a physical filter. That is, what we've been calling a "filter" all along is the lithium hydroxide canister that removes carbon dioxide. It doesn't really function as a particulate air filter, and you need one of those somewhere between the inlet and the fans because the fans and other parts of the ECS fit with very narrow tolerances. Particles that make it through the canister can foul the fans, and that's dangerous since the ECS is not crew-serviceable. So you wad up a sock (preferably clean) and slip it into the hose.
That's pretty much it. You turn on the circulating fan and it sucks air through the LiOH canister into the tented bag, into the hose through the sock, and into the rest of the system that removes odors, adds fresh oxygen, and (were the electrical systems operating normally) heats or cools the cabin air to a tolerable temperature.
When one canister is saturated, you just tape a fresh one onto the front of the assembly you already have. It doesn't matter that air gets sucked through saturated canisters; you just need a fresh one somewhere along the line and a means of making sure all the cabin air is forced to pass through it.
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And they found a workaround using on-board materials, so compromising the engineering for an unlikely fail-safe ended up not being necessary.
Taking Apollo 13 into account, a redesign still would not have been the best solution. Better simply to provide additional canisters so that either spacecraft's ECS can support the crew for the whole mission, or provide an engineered and tested version of the Apollo 13 adapter. If you were starting over with a new set of spacecraft, then you could, if you wanted, stipulate in the design requirements how you wanted to provide redundancy or other means of reliability for different ECS systems.
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Taking Apollo 13 into account, a redesign still would not have been the best solution. Better simply to provide additional canisters so that either spacecraft's ECS can support the crew for the whole mission, or provide an engineered and tested version of the Apollo 13 adapter. If you were starting over with a new set of spacecraft, then you could, if you wanted, stipulate in the design requirements how you wanted to provide redundancy or other means of reliability for different ECS systems.
Do you know what the decision with Constellation's Orion and Altair would have been, or was it cancelled before it got to that point?
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Do you know what the decision with Constellation's Orion and Altair would have been, or was it cancelled before it got to that point?
I don't know what they were planning to do.
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Do you know what the decision with Constellation's Orion and Altair would have been, or was it cancelled before it got to that point?
I don't know what they were planning to do.
An honest answer from an honest man. Thank you, you are much appreciated for taking the time to do so. :)
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At least Orion will fly sometime in the 20's. It has been a long time to go back further than LEO.
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Well, to be pedantic about it, Orion has already flown on EFT-1, and beyond low Earth orbit.
And will fly around the Moon, if all goes... well, we'll see if 2018 holds.
But, yeah, it will be good to see people go that far.
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Well, to be pedantic about it, Orion has already flown on EFT-1, and beyond low Earth orbit.
And will fly around the Moon, if all goes... well, we'll see if 2018 holds.
But, yeah, it will be good to see people go that far.
No matter what language or accent they use, I'd love to see people on the moon again. The 16mm footage is about the best moving images we got so far of the moon, but modern HD would be gorgeous!
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Well, to be pedantic about it, Orion has already flown on EFT-1, and beyond low Earth orbit.
And will fly around the Moon, if all goes... well, we'll see if 2018 holds.
But, yeah, it will be good to see people go that far.
Yes that is what I was meaning, manned missions. I am looking forward to the unmanned mission scheduled for 2018, unless something(s) occur to delay it longer.
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I was watching one of my Xmas presents yesterday -
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00264GAZM?keywords=sky%20at%20night%20apollo%2011%20night%20to%20remember&qid=1456696974&ref_=sr_1_fkmr0_1&sr=8-1-fkmr0
It has what seems to be unedited footage of the Apollo 11 landing and a sizeable chunk of the EVA, all of which seems to be 'as broadcast' on the night. Good ol' BBC.
So if anyone wants some genuine footage to counter the messed-with, edited, second-hand stuff that Team Hoax thrives on, this might be a good place to start.
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Well, to be pedantic about it, Orion has already flown on EFT-1, and beyond low Earth orbit.
And will fly around the Moon, if all goes... well, we'll see if 2018 holds.
But, yeah, it will be good to see people go that far.
Yes that is what I was meaning, manned missions. I am looking forward to the unmanned mission scheduled for 2018, unless something(s) occur to delay it longer.
That bothers me a little, the fact that they want to send Orion to the moon unmanned first before sending a manned mission. You just know what The Stupidati will say...
"Aha! NASA claims to have put men on the moon 6 times, nearly 50 years ago, and now when they finally do go, no astronots will be board. This just proves what we've been saying all along; the van Allen belts are a searing radiation hell and NASA don't know how to deal with it."
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That bothers me a little, the fact that they want to send Orion to the moon unmanned first before sending a manned mission. You just know what The Stupidati will say...
"Aha! NASA claims to have put men on the moon 6 times, nearly 50 years ago, and now when they finally do go, no astronots will be board. This just proves what we've been saying all along; the van Allen belts are a searing radiation hell and NASA don't know how to deal with it."
That may be true, however it is a testing phase mission checking out the systems. NASA doesn't consider the CT arguments in their actions. But I agree with your assessment.
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Eh, the Saturn V and CSM were both sent into the Van Allen belts with Apollo 4. New vehicle with a new, longer term mission and new hardware (including new electronics that are more susceptible to radiation compared to Apollo). Whatever the ignorants think, doing unmanned testing makes perfect sense.
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Eh, the Saturn V and CSM were both sent into the Van Allen belts with Apollo 4. New vehicle with a new, longer term mission and new hardware (including new electronics that are more susceptible to radiation compared to Apollo). Whatever the ignorants think, doing unmanned testing makes perfect sense.
I know that, and you know that and I expect everyone here (other that our "friends") will know that, but do you really expect The Stupidati to actually do some research?
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I know that, and you know that and I expect everyone here (other that our "friends") will know that, but do you really expect The Stupidati to actually do some research?
Well, there's the rub, because if they did do research, they wouldn't be The Stupidati, unless they're hoax mongers, who I define as those, such Bart SIbrel and David Percy, who are willing to lie and make knowingly false claims in order to push whatever product they're selling.