Truth Revealed!

[Luke Pemberton]

Ka9q is your go-to guy on radio communications, link budgets, and all the juicy details that explain why you can transmit from the Moon with a small-wattage transmitter and a small antenna and still pick it up all the way back on Earth.  Having receiving antennas the size of a football field has a lot to do with that.

Bob knows a lot about the trajectories and spacecraft dynamics.  You should read his stuff, even if it's initially too technical.  You'll find that the people here are quite willing (even excited) to entertain questions on the subjects they cover.  And what all of that should tell you is that there is plenty in Apollo for trained professionals to study.  If it were just some big hoax, the literal thousands upon thousands of qualified space engineers who have studied it since would surely have found something wrong with it by now.
instead.

Dwight is an expert on TV from the moon, as well as TV from orbit in general. sts60 is an aerospace engineer. There are a lot of people here who are not engineers, but have studied Apollo and the science of the Apollo missions. They can talk in great depth about the missions. I doubt that you will find a question that cannot be answered. I have learned a huge amount about Apollo from these boards.

[dwight]

IIRC ka9q did a calculation of the power requirements for the LCRU uplink from the J missions. His results matched those as provided by NASA, RCA, and Bellcomm. And welcome to the board, Space Cowboy. I'll try and answer where possible, suffice to say, the power requirements of the Apollo 11 TV camera where not that large (thus the r&d to get that camera within the requirements set in 1963-4). As the color TV was sequential color, no additional power or bandwidth was required for it. A clear line of sight 11W signal was more than adequate for the receiving stations to acquire. The ground equipment did all the work on the signal, including preamp, noise reduction (from Apollo 16 onwards) and global distribution. It all checked out.

[ka9q]

They are using the logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, that is argument from ignorance. "I don't know how X,Y or Z was accomplished or could possibly be accomplished, therefore it could not have been accomplished".

I think it's the closely related argument from incredulity:

Argument from incredulity/Lack of imagination

Arguments from incredulity take the form:

    P is too incredible (or: I cannot imagine how P could possibly be true); therefore P must be false.
    I cannot imagine how P could possibly be false; therefore P must be true.

These arguments are similar to arguments from ignorance in that they too ignore and do not properly eliminate the possibility that something can be both incredible and still be true, or appear to be obvious and yet still be false.

[Bob B.]

I would be very interested if somebody (Bob?) could plot the Orion trajectory relative to the Van Allen belt models.

I might be able to provide a plot if I can find more information about the orbit.  I hadn't really paid all that much attention to the Orion test so I don't know many details.

The apogee climb took place over southeast South America and the South Atlantic, i.e., it looks like it flew right into the South Atlantic Anomaly, where the inner belt is easiest to reach because it comes closest to earth. The altitude at which Orion encountered peak radiation was roughly consistent with the peak density of the hottest (>100 MeV) protons in the inner belt; this is below the peak density of lower energy protons that are presumably stopped by the spacecraft structure.

All this tells me they actively sought out a hotter portion of the inner VAB to test their electronics. This is not a trajectory you would take with a human crew. For one thing, it didn't go anywhere near the moon.

I was not aware they did that.  I suppose it's possible Space Cowboy's friend heard something about this and misunderstood its meaning.  Of course Orion would have be an unmanned test even if is didn't fly this trajectory.

[ka9q]

This should help. From the Seesat-L mailing list:

Scrubbed for today (4 Dec 2014).  New elements for 5 Dec launch attempt.

Based on 5 Dec 2014 @ 12:05 UTC launch

Valid from 5 Dec 2014 12:22:39 to 5 Dec 2014 14:00:26
EFT-1 Elset #1 00:00:00 Launch Delay
1 99000U 14100A   14339.51572917 -.00000000  00000-0 -00000-4 0  0
2 99000 028.8000 076.9055 0509717 149.6600 356.5000 15.15120000000010

Valid from 5 Dec 2014 14:05:09 to 5 Dec 2014 16:20:28
EFT-1 Elset #2 00:00:00 Launch Delay
1 99001U 14100A   14339.58690972 -.00000000  00000-0 -00000-4 0 00020
2 99001 028.8000 076.2466 3154860 140.3900 021.9900 09.73703000000020
 

Daryl

[onebigmonkey]

Orion was looking at radiation data, as discussed briefly in this article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30234625

[Space Cowboy]

Thank you, all. I haven't seen my Hoax couple since I first posted, but I came across several articles that fit my bill. I am well-armed, for a layman, to argue back, if i can do it diplomatically. Again, Thank you, and Happy New Year.

[JayUtah]

Orion was looking at radiation data, as discussed briefly in this article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30234625

That's helpful.  I had heard from third-party commentators that radiation survivability was to be tested, but I couldn't find any details.  A smoke test of the avionics seems appropriate, but I was unable to determine whether any new avionics radiation hardening approaches had been part of Orion's design.  Rad-hard electronics these days are straightforward, as we use such avionics packages in a variety of consumer spacefaring.  Unless some aspect (packaging, density, systemic complexity) of Orion's avionics design merited special testing, a smoke test would be sufficient.

That kind of testing would reveal very little about the entire Orion spacecraft's ability to attenuate radiation.  Rad-hard electronics incorporate the shielding into their individual enclosures.  Hence the survivability of the contents of those enclosures is utterly unrelated to, say, the attenuation afforded the crew cabin.  Attenuation for biomedical purposes appears not to have been studied on this mission.

Thanks for checking back in, Space Cowboy, and I hope we're able to continue helping you out.

[cjameshuff]

Even if the Orion had been ready to handle a crew, the Delta IV it was launched on isn't even man-rated. Orion is intended to use the SLS for its manned missions, and the SLS isn't going to fly with a crewed Orion until 2021 at the earliest.

[gwiz]

According to the current edition of "Spaceflight":

The radiation environment experienced by Orion on EFT-1 is much harsher than was encountered by any previous cislunar Apollo flight and which will be encountered by [later Orion missions which] will exit the Van Allen belts much faster than [EFT-1] and, like previous Moon-bound Apollo missions, may 'loft' above the denser regions of the toroidal belts.

[ka9q]

Sure, they say that now. But we still know the belts are an impenetrable barrier to human space flight!