Apollo 13

[gillianren]

So the kind of thing I'd understand, then.

[Al Johnston]

Equivalent to Dick and Jane.

Pretty much: a series of books for children in the early stages of learning to read, where they move beyond recognising words to put them together in simple stories.

[JayUtah]

So the kind of thing I'd understand, then.

Yes, of course.  But the subtle issue I see is not the simplicity of the answer but it's comprehension and scope.  You've read widely enough in history to understand that the answer to some historical question must often be pieced together from different sources.  We can ask an infinite number of questions about history, but we cannot expect the authors from history to have anticipated all such question forms and provided the answer to all of them helpfully in a set of single, trite messages.  Even if orbital mechanics, spacecraft design, and astrophysics are topics that you understand only simplistically, you can appreciate that no one document, symposium, journal, or reference will necessarily provide the answer to a given question in those fields, such as "How were the Apollo transfer orbits designed to avoid the Van Allen belts?"  You'd appreciate -- especially if told by experts -- that you may have to get pieces of the answer from different sources.

[nomuse]

Conspiracy theorists in a word.

It doesn't matter how small their question is in the broader scheme of things.  It doesn't matter how skewed their view of reality is.  The only answer they will accept is one that directly addresses their specific need within their own skewed frame.

An example might be, "Show me a link that proves so-and-so the ham operator isn't an employee of the government."  Because, of course, not-being-an-employee-of-the-government is the Most Important Thing Ever to said ham and it will be the first thing on his web page, right under his call sign.  It never occurs to the conspiracy theories that neither the ham nor anyone involved in his various social and professional circles cares, and this simply isn't a question that comes up often (if at all) and certainly isn't considered of any import.

Or the OP, demanding that everyone from Dr. Van Allen down recognize that the VARB were nigh-impassible space obstacles that could only be defeated by heroic measures and a cunning plan.  Any document of any sort that doesn't begin, "To keep the astronauts from being killed instantly by the Deadly Radiation, it was necessary..." will be rejected out of hand as not properly addressing ///the question/// their preconception.

[gillianren]

Yes, of course.  But the subtle issue I see is not the simplicity of the answer but it's comprehension and scope.  You've read widely enough in history to understand that the answer to some historical question must often be pieced together from different sources.

Well, yeah, fair enough.  I do tend to think of one of my functions around here as being stepping in to say, "Yeah, your simplified explanation?  Not simple enough, because I still have no idea what you're talking about."  However, I don't expect primary sources to be written so someone who hasn't taken a science class since 1999 (and that was the History of Biology!) can understand them.  I think I've told the story of Why Gillian Doesn't Know Physics a time or two, but even leaving aside the sillier aspects of it, that storied physics class of mine was high school level and during the 1993-94 school year.  Why should primary sources write to my level of understanding, even if all the information about [thing] is in one document?

ETA--Huh.  I initially put "x" in those brackets, but it changed it to a bullet point.  So I guess we can do bullet points?

[ka9q]

The only answer they will accept is the one that directly addresses their specific need within their own skewed frame they know for sure doesn't exist.

There, fixed that for ya.

Consider the firestorm about the "missing" Apollo 11 tapes. Your average Apollo denier had no idea such tapes ever existed until they read about them missing. Even now they haven't a clue what said tapes contained, why they were made, and what we could (and could not) do with them if they still existed.

It helped their appeal, of course, that "missing tapes" that almost surely contained damning evidence were at the center of the last act of the Watergate scandal.


 

[Kiwi]

To sum up: I asked for a contemporaneous (1969 or earlier) mention anywhere about how 'the worst of the VARB would be avoided.' (Several of you made this claim, words to this effect, and no one disagreed.)

The closest you came was in the 1969 Mission Report wherein 'pass rapidly' through the belts was the only mention. This is not 'avoiding the worst of the belts.'

Just for the sake of discussion, let's assume for a moment that the VAB is a howling maelstrom of radioactive death, and that the astronauts had no choice but to fly through it anyway.
** How does this assumption explain the literal tons of technical documentation and testing for every single piece of flown hardware, down to their underpants?
**  How does it affect our understanding of 800+ lbs of rock and soil samples that have been examined by geologists world wide for the last 40 years without one questioning the veracity of the materials?
** And what about the Baysinger recordings http://legacy.jefferson.kctcs.edu/observatory/apollo11/
of the Apollo 11 EVA? [Snip]

Many thanks for that link, ApolloGnomon. I noticed that like so many other hoax-believers when faced with the same, allancw ignored your excellent questions.  Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, huh?

The story is fascinating because of what Larry Baysinger accomplished, but it is of even greater interest to us here at ApolloHoax because he was interested in UFOs back in 1969 ('the "brain" behind the activities of the Louisville UFO Investigations Committee'), and was keen to catch Nasa out should they broadcast an edited version of the astronauts' conversations:--

Baysinger told me that the Apollo lunar eavesdropping project arose because in the late 1960’s he was an amateur radio astronomer with an interest in NASA, in astronomy, in UFOs, and in other such things that were hot topics at a time when America was on the verge of landing its first men on the moon.  He experimented with satellite tracking and capturing pictures of Earth transmitted from weather satellites.  He had some success in these matters – for example, he was able to print out crude images from weather satellites using an impact printer that printed using carbon paper.

These interests and efforts led to the idea that he might independently verify the information that NASA had been providing about the Apollo program.  Could he get unedited, unfiltered information about the Apollo 11 landing by eavesdropping on the radio signals transmitted from the lunar surface?  And could he find out things that NASA did not want the public to know about?

And he found that what he recorded was the same as went out to the public:--

I asked Baysinger whether he found anything that NASA edited out – comments about things going wrong, the astronauts being loose with their language, or exclamations about meeting aliens!  He said no – absolutely everything was transmitted to the public on TV.  In fact he said, “that was kind of disappointing”.  Part of the idea of this project was to hear the unedited “real story”, and it turned out there was nothing edited out.[iv]  Indeed, Rutherford’s story (click here for hi-resolution version which you can read) makes no mention of hearing anything unusual.

[darren r]

I asked Baysinger whether he found anything that NASA edited out – comments about things going wrong, the astronauts being loose with their language, or exclamations about meeting aliens!  He said no – absolutely everything was transmitted to the public on TV.  In fact he said, “that was kind of disappointing”.  Part of the idea of this project was to hear the unedited “real story”, and it turned out there was nothing edited out.[iv]  Indeed, Rutherford’s story (click here for hi-resolution version which you can read) makes no mention of hearing anything unusual.

To be honest, I'm surprised no HB has used this as evidence for the hoax : "What, NASA expects us to believe that these Air Force and Navy guys never swore or said a word out of turn? Obviously the transmissions were pre-recorded and broadcast from satellites or remotely-controlled ships!" (or something).

Of course, now I've pointed that out....

[Chew]

"Obviously the transmissions were pre-recorded and broadcast from satellites or remotely-controlled ships!" (or something).

They have claimed that.

[raven]

Someone (Phil Webb I believe) did the math and to  pre-record the transmissions (ignoring that there is several instances where the chatter involved events that happened that NASA would have had no control over, like talking about the weather, see 07 05 38 54) using the tape formats of the time would require a bigger craft than the CSM.

[ka9q]

I assume he meant the video transmissions. Tapes of the audio transmissions would have been bulky but not out of the question.

Until the late 1970s, the standard video tape format was 2" quad. A single reel weighed maybe 10 kg and held an hour of video. Though smaller units were just beginning to appear, the most common machine to play it was the size of a large china hutch, weighed considerably more, and required 3-phase AC power and a compressed air supply.

[raven]

I assume he meant the video transmissions. Tapes of the audio transmissions would have been bulky but not out of the question.

Even if so, though I think he meant all the radio, data and telemetry as well, ( I am looking for the video to verify that) that doesn't remove the 'live' quality of the transmissions.

[ka9q]

It would have been exceptionally difficult to fool the ground station operators.

The PM transponders were 'phase coherent'. In "1-way" mode without an uplink, a local oscillator generated the nominal downlink frequency so the ground received frequency would depend on both Doppler and oscillator drift. When an uplink was received, the transponder automatically locked on and transmitted at exactly 240/221 times the received uplink frequency. This changeover was very obvious to the station operators, who aways observed it during station handover. Any difference between the expected and actual frequency was entirely due to Doppler, which directly indicated range-rate. This Doppler was integrated and used to update the range measurement.

To initially calibrate this range at the beginning of a pass, the ground turned on a PN (pseudo noise) ranging signal that was turned around by the transponder. The PN signal degraded the overall signal-to-noise ratio so it was turned off as soon as the range was acquired. It didn't have to be used again until the next handover unless lock was momentarily broken.

Only one ground station could transmit at a time, but any number could listen. Being in different locations they'd hear different Doppler shifts.

To even have a chance of fooling the ground operators you'd need real spacecraft with real transponders that worked like this. But several of their functions were manually controlled by the astronauts on request from the ground, e.g., antenna switching, selecting wide/medium/narrow beamwidth for the CSM high gain antenna, manually or automatically pointing the CSM and LM high gain antennas, enabling or blocking the path from the uplink command receiver to the computer, and enabling PN ranging turnaround only when it was actually needed to prevent noise from being retransmitted. On occasion things wouldn't work right (the CSM high gain antennas frequently misbehaved) and troubleshooting required voice conversations with the crew.

Usually the Capcom relayed the ground's requests, but on a few occasions the ground station operators spoke directly with the astronauts, e.g., when the link between the station and Houston was broken. For obvious reasons this wasn't carried by the TV networks, but the ground stations made their own recordings.

[Zakalwe]

So Allancw hasn't been on the boards since 21st October. It's funny, isn't it? How the ones that bleat on about others having closed minds actually seem impervious to opening their own minds?

[Daggerstab]

Is he "A.C. Weisbecker" on YouTube?

Anyone wanting to be amazed/aggravated by where our tax dollars go, try apollohoax.net then look up my thread, 'allancw.' Hundreds of man hours (and tax dollars), it appears, went into defending the official Apollo story against my little assault... Why would all these 'educated' professionals take the time and effort if they were not getting paid?

That's a very limited view on human motivations. Who's paying him to spread anti-Apollo propaganda, then? The KGB?

Also, "hundreds of hours"? Whut?

And seriously, prefacing one's shill accusations with bitching about taxes? That's turning into self-parody. To quote Tim Minchin, "A pigeonhole starts to form and it's immediately filled with pigeon..."