Just so you understand where I am coming from let me explain.
Very little of this explanation addresses the followup questions from your previous answer. In fact, it just drifts farther into nostalgic irrelevancy.
Spaceflight engineering was not on that list because it was at best in its infancy.
That would come as a great surprise to the American and Soviet industries who were putting the finishing touches on the second generation of manned spacecraft as you wrote. However, it is good of you finally to confirm that your paper discussing space engineering did not benefit from any actual study of the subject.
While you personally may not have studied very much of it, those who attended engineering schools in the early 1960s -- the Golden Age of aerospace -- learned quite a lot of it. And those of us who attended engineering schools subsequently learned quite a lot of how Apollo was created, and then we built upon it. So you may want to consider that your non-expertise is not probative on the subject of Apollo's feasibility.
I was 19 at the time...
At what time, excatly? Your paper refers to the lunar orbit rendezvous mission profile, which was not selected until the spring of 1962. Hence you could have written about it in 1963, but not in 1960 or 1961 when you would have been 19.
Keep in mind that you're still claiming this paper got you a degree, and its position within your overall claims to expertise is still quite vague. You've already insinuated that St Andrews is in the habit of awarding degrees for work in which neither the student nor the professor is proficient. After how many years of study does your
alma mater grant degrees?
He was very much of the old school...
Yet somehow he forgot to teach you that Kepler and Newton were the fathers of the study of planetary motion, not Arthur C Clarke. I find it difficult to believe that an old-school natural philosophy professor at a prestigious university never once mentioned Newton's
Principia -- you know, the
iconic, monumental, game-changing, founding work of natural philosophy.
Instead, you tell us, your "math classes" focused on the work of a then contemporary science fiction author who contributed nothing to the field. And somehow, amid all this "new" science, you didn't pay much attention to the single most monumental application of physics the species has witnessed to date: the attempt to land a man on another world.
He didn’t know the answers and of course now we know that NASA didn’t know either.
Non sequitur. As I demonstrated, NASA
did in fact know them. You were simply unaware of them, and now you allege your professor was too. There is no need to tarnish the memory of Prof. Allen with your sins. You have reproduced what you now confess was a paper written in ignorance of the facts. You reproduce it now 50 years later with absolutely no revision or any consideration that it has been amply proven false by prior, contemporary, or subsequent achievements.
You can be forgiven as a 19- or 21-year-old college student for writing a paper on a subject you knew nothing about. There is little forgiveness for holding it up a generation later and claiming expertise on the basis of it. And no forgiveness for suggesting that the world's scientific community entertains any doubt on the authenticity of Apollo.
