Daggerstab started the
So, who wants to win 1 million Euro? thread by quoting from
Heiwa’s site, and Heiwa joined in with additional claims. I thought I’d organize some of the claims Heiwa made and assign them some rather arbitrary numbers.
Claim 1:
Heiwa has a million Euros to offer as a prize for his challenge. However,
despite saying the money is “evidently” there, he has failed to provide any evidence to back up this rather extraordinary claim. The consensus is that he does
not have a million Euros to offer and that his claim is therefore
a priori fraudulent, even though no court is any more likely to bother with this than any other random crank claim on the Internet.
2. Heiwa claims the CSM/LM could not carry enough fuel to get into lunar orbit:
2a.
He used the wrong values for the vehicle speeds, and did not account for the change in mass due to propellant burned, claiming that NASA “cannot inform” him of the actual values… after the exact reference for said values had already been provided for him, a number of places. He continued to use wrong numbers as specific references were provided to him (such as
here).
2b. He calculated a certain value for a fixed mass and initial and final speeds. The proper way to do it was demonstrated to him
by ka9q and
by BobB and others. Nevertheless, he keeps insisting that his energy balance equation works by comparing the kinetic energy of the CSM+propellants+LM before the LOI burn to the CSM+remaining propellant+LM after the burn, neglecting (on purpose!) the expelled reaction mass.
”I like energy balances. You study A and B and the difference in energy between A and B”, except that A and B are
different because he is discarding part of the system A to make system B. He
claims this is perfectly OK because “It is gone. Forever.”
Countless explanations that his approach is fundamentally wrong bounce off of him.
Jason Thompson finally illustrates how his approach is clearly broken by the example of a non-propulsive propellant dump. This reduction to the simplest possible case goes right over Heiwa’s head.
3. He is not a conspiracy theorist. (“I am not in conspiracy theories…” “…pls do not call me a conspiracy theorist…”) (At posts linked above and below.) But he believes that Apollo, the ISS, the Shuttle, etc. are all hoaxes perpetrated and covered up by NASA.
4.
“Every change in speed or direction during Moon travel requires energy.” And yet he contradicts this by statements such as below, where changes of speed and direction are caused by the gravitation of the Earth and other bodies.
5.
Earth satellites are possible, but not probes to other planets, “because the gravity of [other bodies] may pull them down at arrival, so they crash before they start orbiting, or they miss… all together
[sic].” He does not support this argument, and of course the gravity of other bodies acts the same way as the gravity of Earth.
6.
He was unaware of how the CSM and LM could change their orientations or translate other than by their main engines. (“At some time on the flight to the Moon the lunar module, LM, was shifted from below the SM to the top of the CM. How it was done is unclear”.) A number of people immediately explained the existence and purpose of the reaction control subsystem (RCS) engines.
6a. Heiwa did also not know what kind of fuel was used by the SPS, and kept on making the error despite repeated corrections
such as this one.
7.
He thought the surface temperature was 150°C during Apollo 11 EVA (wrong), that the astronauts’ boots should have melted at that temperature (wrong), that their visors were made of “glass” (wrong) and should have cracked(wrong).
8.
Heiwa incorrectly identifies the SPS engine as a “P-22KS”, despite having it pointed out to him numerous times that the engine is an
AJ10-137 (manufactured by Aerojet, whom in the interests of full disclosure I should mention is a former employer).
9.
The Shuttle reenters the atmosphere backwards, has no heat shield, and does “loops”. There’s not much to be said about this, except that no one who has even casually read about the Shuttle would make such egregious howlers.
Heiwa kept on repeating this frankly idiotic claim. Then he said it turned around – although he was ignorant of how – but went back to saying it had no heat shield. I guess all those black tiles are for decoration.
10.
Apollo 4 went around the Moon. When this was immediately pointed out to be wrong, Heiwa dodged for a little bit and said that he didn’t believe it actually went around the Moon – an obvious evasion of his mistake in claiming that Apollo 4 was
alleged to have gone around the Moon (wrong).
He finally tried to wave off his error as “No big deal, actually, and nothing to get upset about”.
11.
He claims no spacecraft could return from orbit because they are “thin steel structures” and are heated by turbulence. He keeps repeating the bit about “turbulence” despite multiple explanations provided him about
compressive heating and the role of the stagnation layer in managing heat transfer into the bulk of the heat shield and the vessel structure itself. He called heat shield technology “nonsense” and said
he could not get information from NASA because it was “SECRET!” Detailed documentation of the ablative shielding provided by NASA was immediately provided to him, but as far as I know he never acknowledged it.
12.
No one has ever actually seen the Shuttle or ISS, just some “other satellite”. Of course, Heiwa is completely ignorant of the amateurs who have imaged both in excellent detail, like
this guy and
this guy, not to mention
the radio hams who routinely communicate with ISS crew.
13.
Heiwa does not understand how a spacecraft could be navigated or guided in space, and claims that “nobody, incl… NASA, can explain what systems - manual and or automatic - were used to carry out maneuvers…” This is refuted by a number of posters, including explicit references
such as provided here.
There's much more, but that's enough effort for a partial catalog of Heiwa's errors and inconsistencies. I left out all the silly 12-year-old-level insults he's been generating.
Logged
