So, who wants to win 1 million Euro?

[Glom]

What whim? By definition, he's always right.

[Jason Thompson]

Right, I see Heiwa has been banned again for another seven days for yet again spectacularly failing to grasp the very simple conditions he was asked to follow, but since he directly replied to me i feel obliged to respond, despite these points already having been covered.

I assume you agree that purpose of firing the rocket engine was to slow down? Pls advise.

Yes, that is the purpose of the LOI burn.

It seems ~10 tons of fuel was used for this maneuver. Do you agree? Pls advise.

I agree with the figures from NASA, yes.

According you, had Apollo 11 not fired its rocket, it would still go into Moon orbit and, after half an orbit, Apollo 11 would escape Moon orbit again and return to Earth - free return trajectory. Are you certain? Pls advise.

No, that is not what I said at all. A free return is a single pass behind the Moon, curving round it and heading back towards Earth. There is no entering orbit. It is simply a deflection of the vehicle by the Moon’s gravity. The spacecraft is moving too fast to get captured by the Moon’s gravity but that doesn’t make it immune to its effects. Without slowing down they get swung around the moon. By slowing down they can be captured into orbit. Physics.

Has any meteor arriving close to Earth ever got into Earth orbit and then ... WHOOPS - escaped again out of orbit - a free return?

No, because that is NOT what a free return path actually is. You have had this explained to you over and over again but you just can’t get it, can you?

Small meteors burn up, big meteors crash. Pls explain about free meteor return!

The ones that burn up and crash entered the atmosphere. We’re talking about things that pass by. Have you never grasped what comets do when they swing round past the Sun? 

In my opinion

We don’t care about your opinion, since it is not actually based on any understanding whatsoever.

you could never escape from Moon gravity/orbit unless you applied a new force to your space ship, e.g. by using your rocket engine.

It already has enough momentum to escape the Moon’s gravity. That’s why they had to use the rocket engine to slow down to enter orbit in the first place. How hard is this to grasp?

Moon gravity may change your course, pull you into orbit or pull you so you crash. Probability for a 180° course change is 0.

Please show the proof of that assertion, and the proof that a 180 degree change in course is anything to do with a free-return trajectory. Remember everything is in motion, so going ‘back’ to Earth does not mean turning round and going back to the same point you left from.

In order to win my Challenge - see post #1 - I feel you have to understand these basic questions.

Your challenge is irrelevant. You don’t have the money, and you are not willing to surrender it even if you did have it. Prove me wrong on the first point and we might start taking your challenge seriously. I don’t believe you even have a successful consultancy business. Your website is not a professionally designed and operated website, and you can offer no testimonials from satisfied customers.

Well, before you can even use the SM rocket engine you have to do the famous 180° flip and connect the CM to the LM.

A very straightforward manoeuvre using the RCS system of the CSM, but then you didn’t even know that system existed before you declared the whole thing bunk, did you?

But first you have to get away the LES on top of the CM.

Since the LES has a rocket on it, disposing of it isn’t hard...

Yes, it is correct that I was born 1946 and thus 23 years old when the Apollo 11 hoax took place. I had just graduated from Chalmers University of Technology with an M.Sc degree in naval architecture and marine engineering. Great stuff. To me it was obvious then that the Apollo 11 space ship was 100% unspaceworthy.

Please do feel free to explain how a degree in marine engineering qualifies you to judge the spaceworthiness of the Apollo spacecraft? Please also explain how for four decades you managed to miss all the information we have been providing you with, despite it being widely available for some time.

Yes, the ISS is fake. NASA informs me regularly when the ISS passes above my roof terrace at dusk 5-7 pm (sun below west horizon) in 3-4 minutes and, I agree, something, a light dot, is passing at the given times. I have seen it many times. But the 100 m across ISS is a 400 000 m altitude and cannot be seen by naked eye.

Really? Let’s do some trigonometry, shall we?

The angle subtended by a 100 m object at 400,000 m distance is the inverse sine of 100/400,000 (or the inverse tangent: when the difference between the opposite side of the triangle and the other two sides is on the order of 4000 times, there is no significant difference between the lengths of the other two sides). That works out to be about 52 arcseconds.

The resolving power of the human eye is about 60 acrseconds, so it would appear to be below the ability of the naked eye to detect. Except of course that it’s a pretty damn bright object. Jupiter ranges in angular size from about 20 to 50 arcseconds in diameter. Not only can I see that with my naked eye, it is one of the brightest things in the sky. No star in the sky resolves to more than a fraction of an arcsecond, yet I don’t need any optical aids to see stars in the sky. Do you?

Photos of it being the ISS published are fake.

Prove it. And keep in mind that proof has to satisfy those of us who know people who have actually done what you claim to be impossible.

The ISS is fake because you cannot get down from it alive.

You really do work at being obtuse and unteachable, don’t you? The way heat shields work has been explained over and over again. You’ve been shown the material, you’ve been shown the papers describing the research that went into developing heat shields, and you must surely have seen some of the amazing insulating materials where people can put a blowtorch on one side and their hand on the other without ill effect. Which bit of your brain has a loose connection that doesn’t allow you to see how that stuff works or even exists?

I have worked in the heavy industry for 45 years and for that you have to be clever.

Depends where in the industry you worked, really. Bill Kaysing worked in the aerospace industry but that didn’t make him an expert on rocketry.  I still have significant doubts about your professional claims here, since you are unwilling (and I assume unable) to substantiate any of them. The EMSA has never heard of you, which is odd for someone who claims to have several decades’ experience as a European maritime safety consultant. Your ‘company’ address on your website appears to be your own home, which is not in and of itself suspect, but there seems to be no record of your company actually existing at all, and you can’t point to anyone who is a past customer of yours. Furthermore your ‘company website’ is frankly nothing of the kind. It;’s just page after page of conspiracy theory claptrap, with NOTHING about the service you actually offer or any list of past achievements or testimonials. You don’t stand out as a professional safety consultant at all. If you want to earn money, your website is a very strange way of going about it.

You are, in short, a fraud, and I suspect you are trolling. You desperately want to get your ‘banned at Apollohoax’ badge of honour so you can crow about it on other fora. It’s just a shame that your posts here make it so clear what you are trying to do. I wonder how anyone would react if they saw your behaviour here while they were looking for a maritime safety consultant....

[cjameshuff]

Small meteors burn up, big meteors crash.

Interesting that Heiwa accepts that large meteors can get through the atmosphere, since if you consistently apply his reasoning, this is just as impossible...doubling the mass of the meteor doubles the kinetic energy, so there's always enough energy involved to destroy the meteor, no matter how big.

[Zakalwe]

Interesting that Heiwa accepts that large meteors can get through the atmosphere, since if you consistently apply his reasoning, this is just as impossible...doubling the mass of the meteor doubles the kinetic energy, so there's always enough energy involved to destroy the meteor, no matter how big.

The two important words are in bold.
He isn't consistent and he doesn't have much reasoning.

[sts60]

Moon gravity may change your course, pull you into orbit or pull you so you crash.

You are contradicting yourself.  Earlier, you said

Every change in speed or direction during Moon travel requires energy...

So you contradicted your initial statement.  But it gets better.

You had also said

... it is evidently possible to shoot up satellites of all kind from Earth in all directions, e.g. orbiting Earth.
Problem is to get them into orbit around the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn because the gravity of the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn may pull them down at arrival, so they crash before they start orbiting, or they miss the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn all together. You can try to use the Sun gravity to maneuvre but it is difficult...

Of course, in between "crash" and "miss all together" is "orbit" - in fact, an infinite variety of orbits.  This is a necessary result of your claim, because a complete "miss" means the vehicle has greater than escape speed for the target body and passes by it, never to return - and a "crash" means that the vehicle has less than escape speed, and is therefore gravitationally bound to it.   Since you accept that satellites can orbit the Earth, you implicitly admit the existence of such a set of solutions - you can't avoid it.

According to your own words, it must be possible for a spacecraft to enter orbit around another celestial body.

Congratulations!  First you contradicted your own claim, and then you debunked yourself rather neatly.

Edited to add: This is what happens when you don't know what you are talking about, and simply make up stuff.


Added missing "you"s

[sts60]

Yes, the ISS is fake. NASA informs me regularly when the ISS passes above my roof terrace at dusk 5-7 pm (sun below west horizon) in 3-4 minutes and, I agree, something, a light dot, is passing at the given times. I have seen it many times. But the 100 m across ISS is a 400 000 m altitude and cannot be seen by naked eye. I have tried with binocular w/o success. Telescope? Doubt it. Object moves too quickly.

Spectacularly wrong.  A little research - nay, a moment's Googling - would have shown you how silly this claim is.

I own a very cheap (less than US$200) telescope, which has computerized mount which can slew at 4 deg/sec.  A trivial bit of trignometry shows that the ISS moves across the sky at about 1.3 degrees/second.  So of course it doesn't move "too quickly" for amateur telescopes.

And, of course, you can buy telescopes that will track satellites right out of the box.

Don't you ever get embarrassed by making such silly, manifestly wrong claims?

Photos of it being the ISS published are fake.

Simple denial is not an argument.  You can stick your fingers in your ears, close your eyes, and shout "la la la" all you want, but the fact is that people have imaged the ISS and Shuttle in orbit, and described how they did it in detail.  So your assertion that ISS photos are faked is rejected. 

We have wondered what it can be. Some unmanned superdrone at 50 000 m altitude?

First, the record for sustained flight by a winged aircraft is about 30,000 m.  So you're way off - again.

Second, let's take a look at what the observed rate of angular motion of the ISS would mean for a vehicle moving at 50000 m. 

1.3 degrees/sec = .023 radians/sec.  The linear motion is then that angular rate * the distance from the observer, or .023 s^-1 * 50,000 m = 1150 m/s or 4140 km/h - much faster than an SR-71, the speed record-holder for any airbreathing aircraft.

Do you ever think before you post?  At all?

The ISS is fake because you cannot get down from it alive.

Your inability to understand aerobraking and ablative shielding, even when they are explained to you, is nobody's problem but your own.  Reflexive disbelief is not an argument.  Your claim that "you cannot get down from it alive" is rejected.

Try to win my Challenge - see post #1.

Your "challenge" is fraudulent.   You do not have a million Euros to offer. 

I agree some people are pretty dumb. I have worked in the heavy industry for 45 years and for that you have to be clever.

I don't know if you are dumb, but in regards to anything connected with space flight, or simple things like energy balances, or even just doing some simple research, you are manifestly incompetent.  Many examples have already been cited.  I also do not accept that longevity implies cleverness; lots of people have long, mediocre careers.  But I don't care about your maritime history; you're talking about aerospace, and you don't know what you're talking about.

What about you?

I actually work in the field in which you are blundering about making silly mistakes, and have been for over twenty years, and will be for a long time to come.  I actually work on the things you claim are impossible, or of the existence of which you are entirely ignorant. 

Imagine if I told you that a ship's boilers were for the purpose of lifting the ship above the water on a carpet of steam and pushing it along by jets of steam, and that I had no idea of the existence of things like propellers or rudders.  You would rightly recognize that I had no idea what I was talking about.  Your claims about aerospace are at least that ridiculous.

Maybe I saw this thing being tested in  the sky - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57563829-235/space-station-to-test-$17-million-inflatable-room/

The referenced item is to be attached to the ISS in orbit.  You just cited a reference which contradicts you.  Congratulations.

[gillianren]

Seriously, why don't people ever get the difference between "stupid" and "ignorant"?  I like to think that we can all agree that I am not stupid, but I am profoundly ignorant of orbital mechanics--not to mention quite a lot of other things.  There is no shame in ignorance, only willful ignorance.  Stupidity can't be helped.

[sts60]

Finally, Heiwa, your recent posts (before getting yourself suspended again for inability to follow forum rules) were largely non-responsive to the long but not complete lists of errors I already posted.

When you come back from your latest suspension, please address these other problems with your claims.  I am particularly, but by no means solely, interested in your egregiously wrong claim that Apollo ablative materials were "SECRET!"

----

Also, here is a little exercise for you to address your completely broken idea of energy balances (item #2b in my list referenced above).  You like ships, so:

A vessel with a mass (excluding cargo) of 10,000 kg is carrying 1000 kg of cargo on the deck and moving at 10 m/s - nice round numbers.  At time t the precariously-balanced and unsecured cargo tips overboard; nothing else changes.

The kinetic energy of the ship+cargo just before is 1/2 * 11000 kg * (10m/s)² = 550,000 J.

The instant after, the kinetic energy of the ship is 500,000 J.

According to your approach, the cargo is "gone" and is no longer included in the accounting; thus according to you the ship must have expended fifty thousand joules of energy in that instant.   How did it do that, exactly? 

This is just a recapitulation of the simplest possible exercise (non-propulsive propellant dump) already presented to you by Jason Thompson, which you failed to grasp.  It shows that your method gives nonsense answers, because it is simply wrong.  Maybe by putting the example in salt water, you might finally get it; let's see if you're capable of doing so.

[Zakalwe]

Please don't post personal information (like home addresses) about another person in the forum. I know it's on Heiwa's website, but it's not the kind of thing that should be shared here. - LunarOrbit

Please accept my apologies. I did think before posting it and decided to go ahead. I had assumed that the fact that Heiwa had posted the information on his own web-page that it was an acceptable risk as it was clearly in the public domain.
I clearly got that bit wrong, and I apologise to Lunar Orbit and to Heiwa.

[Noldi400]

Note that the above is the trajectory as viewed from a stationary Earth perspective.  If we view it from a stationary Moon perspective we can see that the trajectory is NOT deflected 180 degrees by the Moon.  Below is a lunar-centric view of a free return trajectory (click on image to enlarge).  The blue disk at the top is Earth’s position a TEI and the blue disk at the bottom is Earth’s position at entry interface.  The Moon is the gray disk at the origin of the axes.  The trajectory in the vicinity of the Moon is hyperbolic.

Thank you for this diagram - I had always wondered about that apparent 180^o turn. My math is weak but I didn't see how that was a possible para- or hyperbolic trajectory.

Heiwa, please take note: If there's something about Apollo you don't think is possible, assume the fault is with your understanding until proven otherwise.

[JayUtah]

So of course it doesn't move "too quickly" for amateur telescopes.

Sheesh I have a catalogue here in my office for a tracking sextant from Photosonics that will slew an 800-lb. telescope at 60 degrees per second.  That's enough to cause serious injury to you if you're in its way.

I actually work in the field in which you are blundering about making silly mistakes, and have been for over twenty years, and will be for a long time to come.  I actually work on the things you claim are impossible, or of the existence of which you are entirely ignorant.

Ditto, ditto, ditto, and ditto.

Anders seems to have so demonized the aerospace industry, and to have so far removed himself from its theory and practice, that he is incapable of seeing its practitioners as anything other than the silly caricatures he imagines.  Hence his retreat to the walled garden where he can pontificate unhindered.

Your claims about aerospace are at least that ridiculous.

Endorsed.  This is not a matter of a few esoteric principles that only a few in the high priesthood of engineering would understand, but a matter of fairly common knowledge in a vast industry that thousands of ordinary people participate in.

[Bob B.]

Thank you for this diagram - I had always wondered about that apparent 180^o turn. My math is weak but I didn't see how that was a possible para- or hyperbolic trajectory.

I had the same trouble.  I didn't doubt it was possible, but was having trouble visualizing exactly what was happening during the lunar encounter.  To help me understand, I created a three-body simulation and worked with it until I got a free-return trajectory.  It is from this simulation that I was able to produce the diagrams that I've posted in this thread.  After seeing the animation and the lunar-centric view, it became apparent what was really happening.  From the Moon's perspective, the encounter looks much different than the figure-8 trajectory generally depicted in diagrams.  If you think of the Moon as moving toward the 12:00 position on a clock, the spacecraft approaches from about the 11:00 position, swings around the 3:00 position, and then departs in the 7:00 direction.

[Zakalwe]

So of course it doesn't move "too quickly" for amateur telescopes.

Sheesh I have a catalogue here in my office for a tracking sextant from Photosonics that will slew an 800-lb. telescope at 60 degrees per second.  That's enough to cause serious injury to you if you're in its way.

Indeed.

Here's an ASA DDM85 mount chucking a 24 inch Newtonian about without breaking into a sweat.

The DDM 85 is top-end amateur stuff (€11,000), to be fair. My mount is a Skywatcher EQ6 which is far more affordable and it can achieve 3.5 °/sec, which is more than ample to track the ISS across the sky.

Heiwa: Are you now going to retract this ridiculous claim?

Telescope? Doubt it. Object moves too quickly. Photos of it being the ISS published are fake.

Don't forget that I have a €1M challenge too...

If you care to follow his detailed video then you too could try this for yourself (I bet YOU €1M that you will not try this). Or are you trying to tell me that he is lying? Your assumption that it can't be done is pretty amazing as it means that you are saying that my experience is incorrect. That is a pretty staggering claim to make.....

[JayUtah]

Others have picked clean Heiwa's latest offering, but there's a good point I want to make.

According you, had Apollo 11 not fired its rocket, it would still go into Moon orbit and, after half an orbit, Apollo 11 would escape Moon orbit again and return to Earth - free return trajectory. Are you certain? Pls advise.

Has any meteor arriving close to Earth ever got into Earth orbit and then ... WHOOPS - escaped again out of orbit - a free return? Small meteors burn up, big meteors crash. Pls explain about free meteor return!

In my opinion you could never escape from Moon gravity/orbit unless you applied a new force to your space ship, e.g. by using your rocket engine. Moon gravity may change your course, pull you into orbit or pull you so you crash. Probability for a 180° course change is 0.

One of the hardest parts of disputing a conspiracy theory is trying to figure out what wrong-headed idea the conspiracist is arguing and how it might possibly have gotten into his head (e.g., from popular literature, intuition, some obscure source).  You, Anders, seem to have a childishly simplistic concept of orbits as a closed, roughly circular path.  You cannot demonstrate any proper knowledge of how orbits work, and I'm sure that none of your schooling or your claimed experience as a maritime safety specialist gave you the proper expertise in orbital mechanics.  It is difficult to know where to begin to correct you when you have such a fundamentally flawed understanding of the basics and your ego keeps you from being teachable.  But that's what's wrong here.  You have an intuitively-derived concrete understanding of one kind of orbit, and are unable to think of it in any more abstract terms.

The free-return trajectory is not a spontaneous entry into some circular or elliptical lunar orbit ("go into Moon orbit").  It does not require an equally spontaneous exit from that parking orbit onto a new path ("escape Moon orbit again").  You're trying to force the idea of a generalized orbital solution into your simplistic notion of "orbit" as a closed circular/elliptical path around a body.

"Moon gravity changing your course" is exactly orbital mechanics.  You need to read a real book on the subject or otherwise learn to conceive of all celestial motion as a product of celestial mechanics, and thus of all unaccelerated spacecraft trajectories as celestial motion -- especially the cases involving more than two bodies.  If I had to guess (and I do), you seem to be thinking of spaceships as if they were little different from oceangoing vessels.  There is no useful similarity.

You must think of navigating to the Moon as a three-body problem, or at least a restricted three-body problem.  You cannot model it as a ship sailing to a destination along some straight-line course and then "entering port" (i.e., attaining a parking orbit).  Every spacecraft in space is in some kind of orbit at all times while it's flying.  There is no unaccelerated path a spacecraft can follow that cannot be described by orbital mechanics.  The translunar trajectory would be a long-period highly eccentric closed orbit around Earth but for the Moon's timely arrival near its apogee.  Similarly a free-return trajectory could be a long-period eccentric orbit around the Moon, but for the effect of the nearby Earth.  A translunar trajectory is an orbit defined principally by three masses:  the Earth, the Moon, and the spacecraft.  So is a free-return trajectory.

You wrongly conceive of "Moon orbit" as a rigidly defined domain of activity.  As such you can conceive of entry into and exit out of this domain as an accelerated maneuver.  There is no such thing as "Moon orbit" as you've tacitly defined it.  All manner of paths can exist, governed solely by momentum and gravitation, and very few of them are circular or comfortably elliptical.

Your meteor question reveals the same wrong-headed notion of an orbit.  A meteor on a close encounter with Earth does not "enter Earth orbit" and then leave it again, as if it were an imaginary fenced-off area of space around Earth, with clearly demarcated boundaries between zones of different dymamics.  Rather, it's in an orbit the whole time even when only marginally affected by Earth's gravity.  As it approaches Earth and is more affected by Earth's gravity, it's still in an orbit.  As it skirts past its perigee and sails off in a new direction, it's still in an orbit.  Not every object that has a close orbital encounter with Earth comes close enough to meet atmosphere.  Of those that do, not all either burn up or crash.  If you had any sort of meaningful grasp of astronomy, you'd realize that the study of Earth-grazing objects has a pretty vast data set associated with it, as well as some pretty compelling footage.

You can't conceive of the free-return trajectory or any other useful orbital maneuver because you have only a comical, grade-school notion of what an orbit is and how it's described.  Most people, when faced with something outside their knowledge, will investigate the possibility that their knowledge needs to be expanded.  You, on the other hand, possess an ego that will not accept the proposition that there's something out there other people know, but you don't.  Therefore anything that doesn't fit your childish preconception must "obviously" be invented or unreal.  When your simplistic notions are revealed for what they are, you retreat to claims of expertise.  They do not save you from being just plain wrong.

In order to win my Challenge - see post #1 - I feel you have to understand these basic questions.

"These basic questions" are, in this case, just a recitation of your fundamental misunderstanding of the relevant sciences.  You refuse to consider that your "basic questions" are exactly what you're getting wrong.  You've set up your non-existent prize as a tautology:  in order to be eligible for the prize, we have to stipulate that you're correct on the exact points we propose to prove you're wrong about.  You beg a million-euro question, so no one takes you seriously.

[Echnaton]

Thank you for this diagram - I had always wondered about that apparent 180^o turn. My math is weak but I didn't see how that was a possible para- or hyperbolic trajectory.

I had the same trouble.  I didn't doubt it was possible, but was having trouble visualizing exactly what was happening during the lunar encounter.  To help me understand, I created a three-body simulation and worked with it until I got a free-return trajectory.  It is from this simulation that I was able to produce the diagrams that I've posted in this thread.  After seeing the animation and the lunar-centric view, it became apparent what was really happening.  From the Moon's perspective, the encounter looks much different than the figure-8 trajectory generally depicted in diagrams.  If you think of the Moon as moving toward the 12:00 position on a clock, the spacecraft approaches from about the 11:00 position, swings around the 3:00 position, and then departs in the 7:00 direction.

The diagram was very helpful to me as well.  I spent some time looking at it visualizing the approach as it would be seen from a telescope from different locations.  It seems to me, that from the surface of the moon facing the earth, a free return flight would approximate the geocentric view of a figure 8.  Then I imagined a position above the moons north pole that maintained a stellar alignment.  That is the position that you use and that observer it would see the luna-centric hyperbolic flight path just as you plotted it.

Thanks.