The issue of moon rocks is purely a matter for debate. By that I mean I could just as well take either position.
I could take either position on the existence of unicorns.. That doesn't make both positions equally rational, or equally defensible.
If I accept the govt's assertion that the moon landings were real, I would use the same arguments as you.
Totally wrong. Do you take a badminton birdie to a chess match?
We DON'T accept a "government assertion." What we use as a starting point is a DESCRIPTION of an activity, as made by a government entity, which we then analyze for consistency and plausibility.
Which is to say; the starting point isn't "NASA says it was so, therefore..." The starting point is, instead, "NASA claims they used a hypergolic fuel mixture with a specific impulse of 310 seconds." And then the question is, "is this consistent with the performance of known propellants? Does this provide sufficient delta-V given the described mass ration of the spacecraft?" and so on.
Your assumption is wrong, your belief about the framework of the debate is wrong, your understanding of the psychology of the members of this board is wrong, and the latter is so wrong you obviously haven't bothered to read any of the posting history here. And that -- to waltz into an established board and begin arguing without understanding the history of that board -- is the act of a fool or a troll.
However, given the number of lies and cover-ups engaged in by the govt, i.e., JFK, etc., I assert that the moon landings were fake. I also assert that the Soviet Union lied about bringing back their moon rocks and that they only had rocks from Antarctica, or Siberia, if anything. It's safe to say the Russians were adept at political propaganda and would not have hesitated to lie about it. So maybe there are no rocks that were brought back from the moon. But if the govt gives a geologist a rock and says it's from the moon, the geologist will assume it's from the moon, having nothing to go on to prove otherwise.
There is no space here to follow your Gish Horse off in this new direction, but you are wrong and it can be and has been illustrated at length. There are web pages by qualified geologists explaining how what they know is entirely different from what you think they know. I mean, really -- you think the entire field of geology has nothing more to go on than comparing one rock to another that looks similar? I mean, really?
Moon rocks from Antarctica could be reconditioned to appear to have come from the moon.
With a hand wave like that you could reach cruising altitude in a few minutes.
No university researcher would cast doubt on the moon rocks as that would make them lose their funding. Also, the leading scientific theory is that the moon is just a chunk of the earth that was blasted off a few billion years ago, so the composition of the moon rocks would be the same as earthly material. Scientists would not be backing that theory if the alleged moon rocks were different in composition from rocks found on earth.
And here you just regurgitate your previous claim, showing no evidence of having researched or even thought about it in the interim, much less,
actually read any of the posts in reply.I cast doubt on the lunar ascent for several reasons.
Why? One reason isn't good enough? Or is it that you want an easy fall-back position for when it becomes clear that the first reason you propose is untenable? A diffused argument is not a better argument. And a scatter-shot of half-made, poorly-defended claims is hardly the act of an engineer.
One being is that there is no record of the LM being tested for ascent or descent on earth (that I know of.) They could have used a helium balloon to simulate 1/6 gravity. The only video I've seen was Armstrong parachuting to safety after losing control of the LLTV. And, regardless, the LLTV was not a LM. I think NASA simply would not have attempted a moon landing with an untested LM, let alone have it work flawlessly 6 times. I guess you could say the ascent was mathematically possible, but there are some grave problems with navigation to overcome. First, you don't know exactly where you are on the moon due to the manual landing, and the fact that the moon had never been surveyed (no one had been there to do one) meaning there could be no IMU update to moon coordinates. That leaves radar and optics (star finder) for navigation. The star finder was useless on the moon (my assertion) because the astronauts claimed they couldn't see stars with the naked eye. That means they had to rely on radar to rendezvous with a speeding bullet. Getting to the exact orbit would be extremely difficult because the LM IMU did not have the inertial coordinates for the moon, they only had earth coordinates, and rough one's at that due to the gyro drift rate. They wouldn't even have a gyro-compass to get a bearing before liftoff. No theodolite bearing. How do you lift off from an unknown location with an unknown bearing? A Kalman filter takes time to settle out. While sitting on the moon, the moon is rotating, and that rotation is is being fed into the gyros. You can't just land on the moon and take off 2.5 hours later and get into a perfect orbit. You could argue that they used dead reckoning and mid-course corrections in flight and flew to the dark side of the moon and used the star finder, but that's just smoke and mirrors. The least documented part of the mission, and the most complicated by far, is the rendezvous. Note that before every space shuttle mission (and every rocket launch) a very careful IMU alignment was done to earth coordinates. They don't just rely on radar to get to the ISS.
This is just a mish-mosh. You have much to learn about how to present a point with clarity and brevity.
All of these asides and maybes don't strengthen your argument -- they just make it less clear. And your paraphrase of what has been explained to you (you obviously haven't read any of the documentation provided), is so completely bizarre as to bear no resemblance to any space flight, ever.
None of this is definitive proof against a lunar ascent, but it explains the unlikelihood. But there's no way for anyone to prove anything. The retro-reflectors don't prove anything. You only get a couple photons back from a laser burst according to UCSD. You can slant an experiment to show anything you want. Everything is hearsay. NASA controls all of the information. The missions were infinitely easier to fake than conduct for real, and faking guaranteed 100% success, including faking Apollo 13 to make it look like everything wasn't a success. No one can deny the govt had the means and the motive to fake it.
Ridiculous. You think the only experiments ever performed on the LRRR are to confirm that they exist? And the various independent observatories across dozens of nations are all willing to fake their results and spend YEARS on a fake set of experiments just on the off-chance of defending the reality of the Apollo Program against some internet weirdos who think Hubble could read a license plate off the Lunar Rover and that the VARB would cause astronauts to instantly burst into flames?
Regarding an AULIS pic I put up, after some graphic analysis I have come to the conclusion that the claim is unsubstantiated by the photos.
http://aulis.com/imagesfurther%20/compositevalley.jpg
Amazing.
I went through Aulis a year or two ago, and it took me an average of five minutes a "study" to debunk each. (The average was dragged down by the one or two where I actually had to drag out a topo map or make a diagram of where things were in relation to each other).
