why was the usa the only one to go to the moon?

[JayUtah]

...it's clear that not only have you inflated your resume, you've performed a burst test on it --

Excellent.  That just went into my lexicon.

[Jason Thompson]

I am actually getting worried about the number of times you have used this example...

Obviously it's because you are always uppermost in my mind.

[Stout Cortez]

The first hoaxie that mentions Doug Trumbell instead will have my undying admiration.  Still a poor match, but....!

Doug Trumbull, I think. Though I'm not a hoaxie.

[twik]

As I've said several times, from a technical standpoint, it's the navigation problem of lifting off from the moon.  You can go back through my earlier posts about IMU alignment to moon-centered coordinates, and the inability to do so.  My main objection is from both a political and statistical standpoint - the only way to insure a guaranteed 100% success was to fake it.  It was infinitely more valuable to appear to have gone to the moon than it was to have risked going.  What if the astronauts had been stranded on the moon and were forced to sit there until their oxygen ran out?  Imagine how sick this country would have felt listening to their final transmissions down to their last gasp for air.  Imagine the astronauts saying goodbye to their families from the moon, broadcast on live TV.  Image the embarrassment to NASA.  Americans would have said cancel the space program because we can't live through that again.  The entire world would have been listening to the astronauts as they waited to die.  Given those political odds, what to you think Nixon, a career politician enamored with his own image, would have chosen to do?  We got nothing out of going to the moon except national prestige, and political and military advantage, and supposedly a bunch of moon rocks.

Sure. Just like having a space shuttle blow up on national TV would have ended NASA. I mean, imagine the trauma of millions of people watching brave men and women entering the shuttle, and then, in a few minutes, watching pieces rain down. It would devastate both NASA and the administration, with an unsurvivable impact.

Right?

Heck, when the idea for D-Day was floated to General Eisenhower, he shot it down with a laconic, "have you any idea how many people would get killed trying that?"

[JayUtah]

There exists an audio recording of the 13 seconds of Apollo 1 communications between "Fire in the cockpit!" and the cessation of movement within the command module.  While a transcript is available, just try to get access to the audio.  The notion that NASA would have broadcast the Apollo 11 crew's last gasps for air is simply too ludicrous for words.  This is what happens when one's faith in a hoax claim is so strong that reason flies completely out the window.

[nomuse]

The first hoaxie that mentions Doug Trumbell instead will have my undying admiration.  Still a poor match, but....!

Doug Trumbull, I think. Though I'm not a hoaxie.

And there were others, on the magnificent SFX team, but like many hoaxies I am casualty to the name that is easiest to remember.

[twik]

If I get a chance to do my own analysis, and they don't hold up, I'll say so.  I just tried downloading the GIMP editor to analyze the photos , but it hung up this macbook I'm using.  I expect some of the claims may very well not hold up.  If somebody can do an overlay of these two photos, (which normally I could do in 15 seconds, until my laptop got stolen out of my car) then that particular claim will certainly be shot down.  However, it only takes one bogus photo to be found to indicate fakery by NASA, although it wouldn't prove going to the moon or not.

Why is it that so many HBers can't get their computers to work? Even those with patents in software?

[nomuse]

It's those black teams from the CIA constantly hacking into them, making sure the path to the truth remains strewn with obstacles.

They are subtle, they are.  Amateurs might just wipe the hard drive, but the CIA teams are content with jumbling their search history so it takes twenty seconds longer to find the thread they are losing an argument on.

[Andromeda]

There exists an audio recording of the 13 seconds of Apollo 1 communications between "Fire in the cockpit!" and the cessation of movement within the command module.  While a transcript is available, just try to get access to the audio.  The notion that NASA would have broadcast the Apollo 11 crew's last gasps for air is simply too ludicrous for words.  This is what happens when one's faith in a hoax claim is so strong that reason flies completely out the window.

We have it.  It's on the Spacecraft Films Apollo 1 DVD. It's an optional track, but it's all there.

[BazBear]

Why is it that so many HBers can't get their computers to work? Even those with patents in software?

Well at least Alex didn't pull a JW, and claim his computer issues were caused by Jay putting a virus on his computer.

[raven]

Oh God, and that isa real prayer, I am never, ever listening to that.
I watched Challenger explosion a couple years ago on youtube. It was horrible. My brain did a Blue Screen of Death after for quite some time. It still glitches out thinking about it.
As I have said before, now I know what a time traveller feels.

[smartcooky]

As I've said several times, from a technical standpoint, it's the navigation problem of lifting off from the moon.  You can go back through my earlier posts about IMU alignment to moon-centered coordinates, and the inability to do so.  My main objection is from both a political and statistical standpoint - the only way to insure a guaranteed 100% success was to fake it.  It was infinitely more valuable to appear to have gone to the moon than it was to have risked going.  What if the astronauts had been stranded on the moon and were forced to sit there until their oxygen ran out?  Imagine how sick this country would have felt listening to their final transmissions down to their last gasp for air.  Imagine the astronauts saying goodbye to their families from the moon, broadcast on live TV.  Image the embarrassment to NASA.  Americans would have said cancel the space program because we can't live through that again.  The entire world would have been listening to the astronauts as they waited to die.  Given those political odds, what to you think Nixon, a career politician enamored with his own image, would have chosen to do?  We got nothing out of going to the moon except national prestige, and political and military advantage, and supposedly a bunch of moon rocks.

You keep trying to tell us this and we keep telling you that you are wrong

Why not read the words of the ACTUAL people who were responsible for getting the LM off the moon at the right time for LOR

H. David Reed, flight dynamics officer (FIDO), Green Team, Mission Control:
My job was to come in prior to ascent, find out where they landed, and use that information to compute their launch time. Then we'd upload that to the crew. When I called the tracking people, the guy at the other end of the line said, "Dave, take your pick. I've got five different landing sites." He said: We know where the lunar module thinks it landed, where the backup guidance system thinks it landed, where the radars on the ground tracked them, where we targeted them, and now we've got the geologists saying a different location.

I took my headset off, which is what you do if you don't want anybody to hear what you are about to say, and told Gene Kranz, "We have a problem: We do not know where the hell they are." There was only one way to figure that out. The capcom woke Buzz Aldrin one rev early to do a rendezvous radar check. Because I knew where the command module was and I had the vectors that allowed me to translate back down to the surface, I could find out where the lunar module was. They were off another 5 miles from anything that we had.

Bruce McCandless, astronaut (CAPCOM), Green Team, Mission Control:
In the meantime, Mike Collins in the command module orbiting overhead was tasked to use a telescope to try to locate the lunar module. Poor guy never really got any sleep for trying to find it.

Hugh Blair-Smith, software engineer for the Apollo guidance computer, MIT Instrumentation Laboratory:
The lunar orbit rendezvous wasn't that different from what the Geminis did in Earth orbit. But it was more nerve-wracking because if it didn't work, where everybody would be left was not going to be very good for them. Deciding to do the lunar orbit rendezvous, to put the pieces back together to come home, took big, big balls. But they did it because everything else had much bigger problems.

In order to dock with the command/service module, the lunar module executed a series of burns--including two behind the moon--in a complex sequence lasting nearly 4 hours.

You can read more here;

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/4318496

[gillianren]

I can add "Kubrick as a person" to the list of things HBs know nothing about.  (Leaving aside that I did give fairly detailed requirements for what I would accept as "how to fake the footage," and "Kubrick did it" doesn't even begin to cover it.)  I mean, for one thing, the dialogue would have been much hokier if Kubrick had directed.  He was a brilliant filmmaker with one of the best eyes in the business, but the man had a tin ear for plot and dialogue.  Yes, the lenses for Barry Lyndon were great, but they unfortunately resulted in Barry Lyndon.  Though I guess it's not his fault the studio insisted on box-office draw and noted bad actor Ryan O'Neal as his lead!

First, Kubrick, as alluded to, would not have gone where NASA wanted him to direct.  If NASA wanted Kubrick to direct, the Apollo footage would have been filmed where Kubrick was.  Let Coppola and Stone and whoever traipse about Southeast Asia to film their Vietnam epics.  Kubrick is by-Gods going to film where it's convenient for him!  The studio could force a casting choice on Kubrick, but they couldn't make him move.

Second, Buzz would have punched him at some point.  Seriously.  The way Kubrick directed would have driven him crazy.  Kubrick was known for doing sometimes literally hundreds of takes, trying to drive all emotion out of his actors.  He got takes the way he wanted, and he felt the only way to do that was to be a slave driver.  He emotionally abused poor, miscast Shelley Duvall to make her act the way he felt her character should in The Shining.  Frankly, I've always been surprised that Jack Nicholson didn't punch him.

Third, as pointed out repeatedly, the Apollo footage would have looked much different if Kubrick had done it, in that it actually would have met audience expectations of what it "should" look like.  And that's layman's expectations.  Even Kubrick knew that various things in 2001 were wrong--though he didn't know all of them--but he knew that it was what the audience thought they should look like.  All the things that look strange because they aren't what things look like on Earth would look more like what they look like on Earth.

Fourth, not even Kubrick can control dust.  Though Gods know he tried.  It isn't merely a matter of the astronauts and the large things.  The way dust moves in the footage looks like dust in 1/6 gravity and vacuum.  The fakest looking scene in Apollo 13 is when Tom-Hanks-as-Jim-Lovell is imagining standing on the Moon, because the Vomit Comet was of no use to Ron Howard there.  As a layman, albeit a slightly more educated one, I can spot the flaws.  That scene is very short.  Some of the Apollo footage is several uninterrupted hours, and it doesn't have those flaws anywhere.

Oh, and I'm never listening to the Apollo 1 audio, either--and the Safire speech always makes me tear up.

[Mag40]

"They were off another 5 miles from anything that we had."

That can't be right

[Jason Thompson]

Indeed the audio is on the DVD. From the sleeve notes written by Mark Gray on the DVD:

...I discovered the complete spacecraft communications audio was not resitricted.

...

My initial thought was that we would not include it in this set.

As I listened to the material myself, the Apollo 1 fire was transformed from a historical event into a human tragedy with definable features.

...

We included the audio because it is part of the story of Apollo 1, and space flight is a dangerous business. The conquest of space has already cost several human lives, and will doubtless cost more. This cost in precious treasure should be faced directly, and as the mission of Spacecraft Films has been to present the history of space exploration in as real a manner as possible, I felt this record should be included. Since one cannot "look away from a sound" we have also provided an edited version of this material should you wish to refrain from hearing the very short but disturbing last transmission.

I've listened to it. It's a very... strange experience. The result is that, as Mark says in his DVD sleeve notes, Apollo 1 has become much more than an account of some deaths in the space program to me.