I asked:
Could you please explain what sort of unmanned spacecraft would be capable of collecting rocks up to 10+ kilograms (including rocks chipped off larger rocks), fragile clods of regolith breccia and 2+ metre long core samples and returning them to Earth, given the total mass of material returned from the Moon is around 380 kilograms? Could you please provide evidence for the development, construction, launch and operation of this/these spacecraft? Could you please explain the existence of photos which show these samples in situ which also show astronauts: as the photos must have been taken on the Moon, then the astronauts must have been there too, working sublimators or not.
Neil Baker replied:
I don't know and you already know I don't have any way to acquire that information.
On reflection I thought this answer to my question deserved a more detailed response than my earlier comment.
With regard to having no way to acquire information about hypothetical unmanned sample retriever missions (USRMs), either they existed or they didn't. If the Apollo missions happened as advertised, then obviously there were no American USRMs. But if, as you seem determined to believe, NASA faked Apollo, then the only possible explanation for the existence of Moon rocks on Earth is USRMs (although the issue of astronauts appearing in photos remains a problem for this theory). As has been pointed out, the mass of Apollo rocks totals more than 1000 times greater than what the USSR retrieved in three USRMs, and this mass includes individual rocks with a mass up to 11.7 kg, core samples up to 2 metres long and fragile clods of regolith breccia.
The spacecraft required to gather this mass of samples of this variety and to return them to Earth would be massive and complex. It suggests that an organisation of massive skill and resources would have been needed to design, build and operate such a spacecraft. The workforce employed on Project Apollo numbered in the hundreds of thousands; the workforce required to design, build and operate this hypothetical UMSR spacecraft would be of the same order. Yet not one person has come forward to say anything; not one leaked document; not one intercepted radio signal.
If Apollo was faked as you maintain, I propose you go looking for the people who designed, built and operated this hypothetical UMSR spacecraft, and come back to us when you have some solid evidence.
I do know that when a moon rock was put on display in my town back when I was a kid in the early seventies, it seemed like practically the whole town came out to look at it. I remember then wondering why NASA had to send us such a small rock about one-half inch x one inch x a quarter-inch.
Your home town got its own Moon rock? How cool is that. I assume the rock didn't stay there for long, and was soon on its way to other towns across the USA.
Now that rock might have looked pretty unimpressive to you at the time, and might be unimpressive to you now. My rough calculations suggest it would have weighed around 3 or 4 grams, out of the roughly 21.5 kilograms of material brought back by Apollo 11. But given the scientific value of the rocks, I think you were doing pretty well to see even that much: ask a planetary scientist and they'll tell you how much you can do with a 3 gram rock from a planet or moon they've never sampled. It's a lot.
Have a look at the number of principal investigators on Apollo 11, as listed in the Apollo 11 press kit:
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/A11_PressKit.pdf (pages 220 and following) - more than 140 (of whom by my count 37 were from outside the USA). Even if the entire haul of Apollo 11 rocks was evenly split up between only those principal investigators, each would get only 150 grams. But we know that some of the material was distributed to foreign countries and for various displays (such as the one which underwhelmed you), and much more was saved for future investigators. So each principal investigator didn't get much at all. Those investigators did a lot with what they got.
Do they have the rocks or not and why didn't they wow us with some big ones? It's not like we didn't pay for them.
Why? To the uneducated they're just rocks. Do you think NASA should have wasted space on its Apollo missions to bring back big honking rocks just to impress people? Don't you think a dozen smaller rocks from a dozen different sites would be more scientifically useful than one big rock from one location?
Sure, sure, the geologists were studying them. But how about now?
Scientists are still studying the Apollo rocks.
This is because there's a lot to learn - tests using devices which hadn't been invented bcak in the 1970s, tests using devices which are more sensitive than similar devices back in the 1970s.
Let's see them now.
Are you sure? Do you have no idea what scientists want to do with rocks? They've been cut into smaller pieces so that a range of tests can be conducted on a single rock.
The geologists must be done by now.
Seriously?
Have a look at
http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/lsc/10003.pdf It's a summary of the scientific findings of
one sample from Apollo 11: 41 scientific papers on that one rock, with the most recent being released in 2001. There were 31 other samples just from Apollo 11 alone. No, the geologists aren't done yet. Nor the physicists. Nor the geochemists. Nor the geophysicists.
And how would I or any other nongeologist specializing in moon rocks know the difference?
I'm not a lunar scientist. I can't tell the difference unless it's explained by an expert. So there are two solutions: either become a lunar scientist, or trust the lunar scientists who've studied these rocks.
They say there are several tell-tale signs a rock is from the Moon and not the Earth: lack of volatile elements and chemicals, evidence of rocks having formed in a low gravity vacuum, evidence of alteration by solar wind and micrometeorites, and lack of evidence of alteration by air or water.
Why would I trust NASA when they refuse to be accountable with any independent oversight? Why do you trust them?
We can trust NASA because NASA isn't the only organisation which examines Moon rocks. Look again at that list of Apollo 11 principal investigators - scientists from West Germany, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Belgium and Finland were on that list, along with plenty of American scientists from outside NASA.
Since then,
any scientist from anywhere in the world can submit a request for an Apollo rock. Here's the link to the relevant page:
http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/sampreq/requests.cfm Note that country of origin isn't an issue; all you have to do is submit a favourable research proposal.
They are part of a government that has repeatedly lied to its Citizens and it's part of a government that probably recently murdered 3000 of its Citizens.
Even if that were true (and I strongly disagree), you don't get to apply guilt by association. People in NASA are guilty of lying
only if you can demonstrate that
they lied. You don't get to accuse all NASA employees of being liars just because, in your opinion, people in some other government agency lied about something. Otherwise, by your standard, your heroes Taguba and Fallon are also liars by virtue of being government employees.
