Armstrong intimates that he saw no stars or planets in cislunar space, whereas Aldrin states that he saw 'millions of stars'. How could this be?
It's because cherry-picking quotes and trying to manufacture a dilemma out of them has never been a particularly honest or productive way to approach history. As has been belabored, your new argument is based upon the wrong-headed presumption of narrative consistency, aided by your having ripped each of these statements torn and bleeding from any meaningful context. Your answer is as it has always been: whether stars are seen by people in space depends on a number of factors that vary greatly from situation to situation. There is no One True Answer that covers everyone's experience in all situations, so don't expect your critics to agree that there should be. Logically speaking, you've foisted a straw man and then tried to disembowel it using a false dilemma.
The Armstrong quote is from a 1970 television interview on Sir Patrick Moore's famous program
The Sky at Night. Here is a fuller context:
Sir Patrick Moore: Mr. Armstrong, I do realize that when you were on the Moon you had very little time for gazing upwards. But could you tell us something about what the sky actually looks like: the Sun, the Earth, the stars (if any), and so on?"
Neil Armstrong: The sky is a deep black, uh, when viewed from the Moon as it is when viewed from cislunar space -- the space between the Earth and the Moon. The, uh, the Earth is the only visible object, other than the Sun, that can be seen, although there have been some reports of seeing planets -- I myself did not see planets from the surface but I suspect they might be visible.
Why do the conspiracy theorists cut off poor Armstrong in mid-sentence like that? Probably because the rest of his statement completely undermines their false dilemma: Armstrong clearly states that other crews had different viewing experiences and that he doesn't have a problem with that. This is the essence of cherry-picking, and it's a very dishonest practice.
Also you misquote him. Although he mentions "cislunar space," he was clearly asked -- and has clearly given an an answer -- about viewing conditions from the Moon's surface. As you may be aware, the presence of a brightly-lit lunar surface significantly impairs one's ability to see faint objects such as stars whereas in cislunar space (i.e., from within the spacecraft) one can arrange to limit one's field of view, such as through the navigation optics, to shut out extraneous light sources.
This is what the crews of later missions did. When I spoke with the Apollo 14 LM crew individually, Ed Mitchell said that he could see stars from the lunar surface only if he walked into the shadow of the LM so as to eliminate the scatter and glare through his helmet visor, and crane his head upward for long enough to shut out the light from the surface and allow his eyes to adjust. Given the precautions one must take, it is not surprising to me that Armstrong failed to see any stars during his brief and busy EVA while other crews who spent more time and were allowed such leisure activities obtained better observations.
Moving on to Aldrin, you first have to contend with the fact that
Magnificent Desolation was overtly co-authored by Ken Abrahams. So your obvious problem with using popular literature as a source is proving that it's really Aldrin's observation at that point and not Abraham's interpolation.
Magnificent Desolation is mostly about Aldrin's life after NASA, so only the first couple of chapters deal with his astronaut's career. Chapter 1, from which your quote emerges, is largely fluff that tries to put the Apollo missions in an historical and political context. In fact, it's a rather dry narrative bereft of much emotional detail, and as such could have been abstracted from any of the already-existing descriptions of the Apollo 11 mission. Some of the language in the first three chapters, in fact, closely mirrors the post-flight debriefing. Plus there are a few technical errors. Hence it is unlikely that Abrahams had to interview Aldrin much, if at all, for the mission narratives and merely prepared them himself from existing source, peppering them with pleasant English to taste. There is no more personal insight in the first couple of chapters than in any of the dozens of other books written about the Apollo 11 mission, based on prior crew interviews. Hence it's more likely that the "dotted with millions of stars" is Abraham's embellishment than that it represents an actual reported observation from Aldrin.
Here is the paragraph in question:
On the way to the moon, we slept only about five hours each night. Our excitement and adrenaline made sleep elusive; besides, our schedule was full of tasks and preparations. We constantly monitored our progress, and fired small guidance rockets to check and correct our course. We also sent back live television broadcasts to give people on Earth a glimpse of our activities inside the spacecraft, such as making a ham-spread sandwich with the bread floating in zero gravity. We had to coordinate our times with Houston, since there was really no telling day from night in space. The sun was always shining, yet the sky around us was a constant black blanket dotted with millions of stars. One thing was certain: with each passing hour, the Earth was growing smaller and the moon was getting larger when we looked out our windows.
What is remarkable about this is that any of the regulars here could have penned a similar (and, in Gillianren's case, probably better) paragraph using only publicly available information about the Apollo 11 mission. In fact the entire chapter is written that way -- a dispassionate summary of the Apollo mission as a whole. Only if I were doing it, I would not have written it to imply that firing "small guidance rockets" would have had the ability to "check" the spacecraft's course. "Correct," yes, as stated, but the author here (almost certainly Abrahams) is writing basic background, not detailed observations. He already made one inconsequential mistake in the paragraph. Why not another? As I said above, there is practically no Aldrin-specific insight in this chapter.
