So, who wants to win 1 million Euro?

[gwiz]

Imagine that! A whole or half silica cube with a diameter that bounces light!

You wonder what he has on the back of his car or pushbike.

[cjameshuff]

He has added a picture (AS09-20-3064)

Quite apart from his intended purpose, that's a rather good picture for illustrating the way the CM surface materials vary in appearance under differences in lighting, angle, and surroundings.

[gillianren]

Two points.

One, "it looks impossible!" is meaningless.  Unless you can show that it is impossible, what it looks like doesn't matter.

Two, there are medieval mirrors that still reflect.  Oh, perhaps not as well as they used to, but you know, they've had centuries of interaction with air degrading them.  The reflectors on the Moon?  Not so much.

[JayUtah]

And far from forgetting to tell anyone, photographs of them were published in popular magazines and newspapers a few days after they returned.

Indeed, including in the December 1969 National Geographic, of which I own a pristine copy (with the phonorecord "Sounds from Space" still intact).

Dear God, please keep me away from any boats he's had anything to do with.

That's just the thing.  We can grant him some sympathy for being a fish out of water, so to speak, when talking about space.  But in fact, from what I've read, professional mariners consider him just as much of a nut case when he talks about ship safety.

[raven]

The Life Magazine for August 8, linked to in your site, onebigmonkey, also shows and labels it.
Unrelated, but hilarious in hindsight is the title of the article in the same issue, "Everybody Lives at the Watergate."

[Sus_pilot]

And far from forgetting to tell anyone, photographs of them were published in popular magazines and newspapers a few days after they returned.

Indeed, including in the December 1969 National Geographic, of which I own a pristine copy (with the phonorecord "Sounds from Space" still intact).

Wow.  I am jealous of that one, Jay!

[sts60]

...However, in 1969 they forgot to tell anybody about it...

Aside from, you know, writing it up in the press kit?

What an amazingly incompetent person.

[Chew]

Can you, e.g. explain re-entry. You are aboard the famous International Space Station, ISS, that according NASA is orbiting Earth every 90 minutes at 400 000 m altitude (almost vacuum) at 7 200 m/s velocity and you want to go down to Earth. It means you have to go down 400 000 m and slow down from 7 200 m/s to 0 m/s speed. How to do it?

Do you jump into a little capsule with a little rocket engine to slow you down? Yes, apparently you do that and the result is that you arrive at 120 000 m altitude but that the velocity then has increased to 9 000 m/s as some potential energy of the capsule has become kinetic energy = greater velocity. It is like diving from the 10 m board. It gets faster the closer you get to the water.

At 120 000 m altitude there is a thin atmosphere with nitrogene and oxygene atoms that you collide with and ... MAGIC ... suddenly you slow down to 100 m/s (at say 5 000 m altitude) and deploy a parachute and land. In a desert in Kazakstan. Where nobody lives. In the middle of nowhere!

Imagine that - you slow down from 9 000 m/s to 100 m/s just by colliding with atoms. But why don't you slow down to 0 m/s by colliding with atoms? Let me ask a stupid question or two? Why do you need a parachute at the end? What is wrong with colliding with atoms to the end?

This was nominated for a Stundie and it is the clear leader in the voting.

What is it about hoax believers that gives them the clear edge in the Stundies?

[cjameshuff]

Amusingly, he just silently vanished from his CosmoQuest thread shortly after getting the same answers from largely the same people and a few new ones, including a multiple approaches to his favorite fuel consumption problem.

[dwight]

Superheroes tend to do that. Save the world from itself one moment and then they're off to fight another bad guy.

[smartcooky]

Can you, e.g. explain re-entry. You are aboard the famous International Space Station, ISS, that according NASA is orbiting Earth every 90 minutes at 400 000 m altitude (almost vacuum) at 7 200 m/s velocity and you want to go down to Earth. It means you have to go down 400 000 m and slow down from 7 200 m/s to 0 m/s speed. How to do it?

Do you jump into a little capsule with a little rocket engine to slow you down? Yes, apparently you do that and the result is that you arrive at 120 000 m altitude but that the velocity then has increased to 9 000 m/s as some potential energy of the capsule has become kinetic energy = greater velocity. It is like diving from the 10 m board. It gets faster the closer you get to the water.

At 120 000 m altitude there is a thin atmosphere with nitrogene and oxygene atoms that you collide with and ... MAGIC ... suddenly you slow down to 100 m/s (at say 5 000 m altitude) and deploy a parachute and land. In a desert in Kazakstan. Where nobody lives. In the middle of nowhere!

Imagine that - you slow down from 9 000 m/s to 100 m/s just by colliding with atoms. But why don't you slow down to 0 m/s by colliding with atoms? Let me ask a stupid question or two? Why do you need a parachute at the end? What is wrong with colliding with atoms to the end?

This was nominated for a Stundie and it is the clear leader in the voting.

What is it about hoax believers that gives them the clear edge in the Stundies?

Did anyone suggest that they test their theory by jumping off the nearest cliff or high-rise building?



EDIT:

IMO, these two are both fully deserving of honourable mention!

No. 5. What an awesome kitchen this guy has with his own vacuum oven......wait what recipe calls for that?

Hammer and feather shows another proof moon mission was a fake, because no feather can bare environment of a 250F as is on moon under sun light. Heat up your oven to even 200F, place a feather in it and mesure its duration before melt down or ignition, i suppose it should be below 10sec. p.s I dont mention rubber bottom shoes all appolonists warred

No. 16: On the moon oxygen goes all contrary and acts like it has an atomic mass of 4.002602 ± 0.000002 u. Hopefully it is just a phase.

Another damn good question is why the **** did their voices not sound high pitch because of gravity? Ever huff helium? It makes your voice high pitch because it weighs less. Wouldn't that mean oxygen on the moon would weigh less therefor making their voices higher pitched?

[ka9q]

Of course he got it totally wrong; it's the molecular mass and temperature of the gas, not its weight in a gravitational field, that affects the speed of sound and thereby the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract and the properties of speech. But I have to give him credit for actually trying...

[Jason Thompson]

No. 5. What an awesome kitchen this guy has with his own vacuum oven......wait what recipe calls for that?

Hammer and feather shows another proof moon mission was a fake, because no feather can bare environment of a 250F as is on moon under sun light. Heat up your oven to even 200F, place a feather in it and mesure its duration before melt down or ignition, i suppose it should be below 10sec. p.s I dont mention rubber bottom shoes all appolonists warred

Oh if only I could be bothered to respond to him and point out two things:

1: That is such a simple experiment that he could do it himself, so one wonders why he doesn't.

2: If he did, he'd note the same result I did when I did exactly what he proposed some years ago (and described on the old board in a relevant thread). Specifically, the result of baking two feathers in an oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit was....

... absolutely nothing happened to them.

[JayUtah]

Did anyone suggest that they test their theory by jumping off the nearest cliff or high-rise building?

That way they would win both the Stundie Award and the Darwin Award.

[Valis]

Oh if only I could be bothered to respond to him and point out two things:

1: That is such a simple experiment that he could do it himself, so one wonders why he doesn't.

2: If he did, he'd note the same result I did when I did exactly what he proposed some years ago (and described on the old board in a relevant thread). Specifically, the result of baking two feathers in an oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit was....

... absolutely nothing happened to them.

While it's good to do the experiment (flawed as it may be) yourself, the result is not surprising, as keratins usually have melting points above 150 °C. Check the temps available for hair curling irons; I've not seen my wife's hair melt or ignite when she's used temperatures way past 200 °F.