I'd love to know what a geologist would have done differently than Armstrong.
Crash the LM.
And how would "describing every single movement in detail" made things safer?
...or cure the notion that the Moon is "completely unknown." It's not unknown. We know, for example, that there's a vacuum. And the vacuum that's a meter off the surface of the Moon is the same vacuum that's 200 km above the Earth's surface, in which several astronauts by that time had demonstrated the ability to work and for their suits to protect them. No need to describe in detail verbally what vacuum is like on the lunar surface. Ditto thermal issues, radiation issues, and so forth. All those were knowns by the time Apollo 11 flew. All you can really cite is diminished gravity. From the engineering standpoint, that's the only thing it's truly hard to simulate exactly in a different environment. And lo and behold, the crew described in detail what it was like to move in diminished gravity with the full EMU. The full splendor of the problem wasn't entirely known, but by no means was it entirely
unknown. And let's not forget that Armstrong was initially tethered to the LM, presumably so he could be hauled up in an emergency. He untethered once it became apparent that mobility wasn't going to present unexpected difficulty.
This is how engineers break down a complex problem like safe mobility on the Moon. Comments like those from Gaia illustrate why he shouldn't be charged with solving those kinds of problems.
Typical narcissistic conspiracist.
I'm glad someone broached that. I'm often sympathetic to "If I Ran the Zoo" arguments. I reject them, of course, as evidence of a hoax. But probative value aside, many of them are not especially ill-intentioned, and a few are defensibly reasoned from from a layman's point of view. Which is to say they aren't always absurdly unreasonable, from a certain point of view. Keep in mind that television on the lunar surface for Apollo 11 wasn't always a given, for example. A lot of people at NASA were legitimately trying to run the zoo differently, and for good reasons. And fairings over the SM RCS isn't an unreasonable expectation, for another example, if you don't know all the engineering details. In a less contentious context you'd want to reward people for thinking through problems and asking questions, even if it's from an incomplete picture of the facts. Sadly when they deploy it as a pro-hoax argument in the forum, it has to be rebutted. And often that takes the form of inviting them to examine their assumptions, which in turn might mean facing up to not being as smart as they thought they were. That's sometimes hard even for honest people.
The most difficult is when the suggestion is nominally reasonable. "They should have..." and yes, doing that was possible -- but it just didn't happen. They could have, but they just didn't. Or they didn't have to, but they did anyway. The logical error here is the
non sequitur to the notion of a hoax. But when the other arguments and rebuttals take the form of, "They should have _____," followed by, "No, here's why it doesn't make sense to _____," then a new rebuttal of the form ,"Okay, they could have _____ but didn't; so what?" seems anticlimactic and unpersuasive.
Then at the other end of the spectrum are the narcissists. With or without appropriate knowledge and expertise, they are simply unwilling to even consider the notion that what they think ought to have happened or not happened may not be the way it was. Or the way it should have been. Or even a particularly smart or possible way to do ti. It's certainly annoying when they entrench themselves in their expectations. But it's downright insulting when they come up with such howlers for what they think should have been done. It rarely bears any rational relationship to exploring space or building a program to do that. Gaia is a geologist, so "naturally" a geologist should be the first one on the Moon -- not just for scientific value, but because to do otherwise is "crazy and dangerous." Dangerous? That presumes quite a lot about what the typical geologist should be expected to know about the lunar environment -- and how to operate the equipment needed to get there. It's hard to remain civil among those who believe that they and they alone know what to do, and that those others who demonstrated they could and did know what to do should automatically be suspect instead. That's just straight-up narcissism.
I think it's more human nature than we give it credit for. I see that particular narcissism as congruent with its milder form of "customers from hell." I think we've all had them, or heard of them -- people who hire experts to do things they cannot do, and then second-guess and micromanage the subsequent process.
