Apollo 12 and the Surveyor 3 Mystery

[ineluki]

Any predictions for July?
- Derek will flounce

Didn't take until July... 

[Obviousman]

My issue is when Derek raised fluid dynamics and the astronauts being engineers, and they should have known something. Yes, that is correct that they were engineers but again we need some context.

The Apollo 12 astronauts did their engineering degrees in the early 1950s. They then became test pilots. They then entered NASA and began training for their missions... in the late 1960s.

Al Bean had said how there was so much to absorb in an Apollo mission that when he went to various functions, he would never remember anyone's name in case it pushed some vital piece of information out of his head.

I've been an air traffic controller, an aircraft navigator, a ship driver and more. At one time I could recite rules, procedures, statistics, etc, off the top of my head.... but when I didn't use a facet of information I had learnt for a few years I became rusty and even forgot it. Sure, I know the basics but some of the detail has gone. I still know my 1-in-60 rule but don't ask me about procedural separation standards. I can still navigate a ship or aircraft but if I have to shoot some stars, I am going to need a refresher.

What is to say the same did not happen to those astronauts?

[smartcooky]

Derek came here with the expectation that he could make his claim, and then it would up to us to disprove it. He does not seem to understand this is not how things work in forums such as this one, that is, forums that are not echo-chambers for conspiracy theorists and cranks pushing pseudo scientific claims.

Once it became clear that to him that he was not going to get his way here, he jumped on the opportunity afforded to him by Jay's error to display his poutrage, and subsequently flounced.....

He further thinks that we haven't seen these sorts of antic before.

[onebigmonkey]

My issue is when Derek raised fluid dynamics and the astronauts being engineers, and they should have known something. Yes, that is correct that they were engineers but again we need some context.

The Apollo 12 astronauts did their engineering degrees in the early 1950s. They then became test pilots. They then entered NASA and began training for their missions... in the late 1960s.

Al Bean had said how there was so much to absorb in an Apollo mission that when he went to various functions, he would never remember anyone's name in case it pushed some vital piece of information out of his head.

I've been an air traffic controller, an aircraft navigator, a ship driver and more. At one time I could recite rules, procedures, statistics, etc, off the top of my head.... but when I didn't use a facet of information I had learnt for a few years I became rusty and even forgot it. Sure, I know the basics but some of the detail has gone. I still know my 1-in-60 rule but don't ask me about procedural separation standards. I can still navigate a ship or aircraft but if I have to shoot some stars, I am going to need a refresher.

What is to say the same did not happen to those astronauts?

I've seen many Apollo astronauts speak about their experiences and have been staggered by the wealth of technical knowledge and detail they retain about their spacecraft. Getting the correct order of events and remembering minor details on the other hand...

[Jason Thompson]

I've seen many Apollo astronauts speak about their experiences and have been staggered by the wealth of technical knowledge and detail they retain about their spacecraft. Getting the correct order of events and remembering minor details on the other hand...

Weird, isn't it? You'd almost think they had all the technical detail about their spacecraft and its operation repeatedly drummed into them through years of training, while memories of events that only happened once are strangely not so coherent...

[bknight]

I've seen many Apollo astronauts speak about their experiences and have been staggered by the wealth of technical knowledge and detail they retain about their spacecraft. Getting the correct order of events and remembering minor details on the other hand...

Weird, isn't it? You'd almost think they had all the technical detail about their spacecraft and its operation repeatedly drummed into them through years of training, while memories of events that only happened once are strangely not so coherent...

I think that is because the training is repetitive and memory "referral" is easy to attain while a one time event may not be as easy, given that they were continually distracted by new and exciting observations.  A new world bombarded their sensory receptors.  One aspect that Derek seems to overlook is his fantasy land of hoax.  Alan had asked for the cuff pads of timeline instructions(with the addition of the Playboy pics thanks to the back up crew) so that they would not forget to do the multitude of task they trained many months.

[Jason Thompson]

One of NASA’s officially recognised records.

Actually the property of Eric Jones and licensed to NASA for distribution.  A very good source, but not an official source.  NASA is not answerable for its content, which is largely crowd-sourced.  Certainly not a primary source.

Thank you for the clarification. I fell into the trap of assuming it was a NASA source because it was on the NASA website, but of course that's the same kind of fallacious thinking made by many hoax believers who assume everything was done by NASA.

It does not take a thick layer to noticeably change the colour of anything, especially if it started as white. Human eyes are very good at distinguishing not white from white.

Especially when the not-white is basaltic regolith, roughly the shade of aged asphalt.

Example from my own experience: I used to work with a transparent piezoelectric film with a coating of indium tin oxide. That coating was 40 nanometres thick (that's forty millionths of a millimetre, 0.00004mm) and it was easy to distinguish between coated and uncoated film. Further, when we experimented with different thicknesses up to 200nm (0.0002mm) we could visually tell the difference between the different increments of coating thickness. None of these get anywhere near Derek's supposedly invisible one fortieth of a millimetre thickness of dust on Surveyor.

Nonsensical to you is not the same as totally nonsensical.

This is exactly the kind of judgment that has probative value only when made from a position of experience and adjudicated knowledge.  "I don't understand, therefore fraud," is never a convincing argument.

Indeed. There are many things in the world that don't make sense to me, but that's because I haven't taken the time to develop my understanding of the subject such that it does make sense. I don't go dismissing whole swatches of history and science on that basis though.

The concern over corrosive materials had nothing to do with damage to the spacesuit.

The outer layer of the space suit is Beta cloth.  Beta cloth is glass, and almost entirely impervious to chemical erosion.

Indeed, and so Derek has simply made up a situation based on his understanding of the word 'corrosive' with no actual reference to what it applies to. The greatest absurdity comes from the fact that people handle corrosive liquids all the time on Earth using protective things like rubber gloves and those gloves conspicuously don't dissolve in these materials. Even with the gross oversimplified notion of what a spacesuit is held by many hoax believers (a single inflated person-shaped rubber bag), there is still no reason to suppose that any corrosive material such as may be in use in a battery would actually eat its way through.

"Mylar gold foil..."

No such thing.  There was aluminized Mylar and aluminized Kapton.  Describing it as a "foil" and suggesting that blown dust would damage it is pretty hilarious.  Mylar is tough enough in film form that I can hang from it and support my own body weight.  Not quite the same as paint.

And again another hoax believer who thinks he can look at something and deduce its physical properties. It's the old 'cardboard and scotch tape' argument in another form.

[JayUtah]

My issue is when Derek raised fluid dynamics and the astronauts being engineers, and they should have known something. Yes, that is correct that they were engineers but again we need some context.
[...]
Al Bean had said how there was so much to absorb in an Apollo mission that when he went to various functions, he would never remember anyone's name in case it pushed some vital piece of information out of his head.
[...]
Sure, I know the basics but some of the detail has gone. [...]

What is to say the same did not happen to those astronauts?

The reaction from Conrad and Bean is what I would expect as a first-pass, knee-jerk opinion from engineers whose general knowledge might have gone stale in favor of recent, task-specific knowledge.  It was my knee-jerk opinion too, and my knowledge isn't stale.  But I'm sitting in a comfortable, air-conditioned office, not bouncing around on the lunar surface.  At the present, I have little else pressing on my attention; I'm not trying to keep to a tight schedule of exploration.  And unlike the Apollo 12 crew, I'm primed to suspect that the first-order estimation is probably not enough to address the problem.  So no, there's no reason to believe the crew's initial opinion was the authoritative (or even the best) engineering assessment.

Often in fluid dynamics analysis for engineering analysis purposes, the second- and third-order effects are what you're interested in.  Conrad and Bean are naturally considering the first-order flow.  But the minor aspects of fluid flow are often what you're interested in while solving some specific problem.  For example, the stall characteristics of some wing may not be a problem as seen only in the major wing.  But you may need to look at the minor flow around some fairing or collection of features that conspire to create the effect in question out of a minor flow.  Similarly, if we want to consider that the post-impingement DPS plume is responsible for applying dust to Surveyor III, we may need to sit down and think of what the secondary and tertiary effects might be.  That's definitely not something you do while standing on the lunar surface, and indeed maybe not even something you do while the mission is being flown.  It takes careful consideration, and -- these days especially -- detailed and costly digital modeling.

What Bean said above rings true also in regards to the television camera.  One of the problems that never quite got solved during Apollo was the tension between mission planners and crew operations.  Today we would call it "feature creep," the cumulative effect of adding many small, seemingly insignificant tasks and requirements to an already busy schedule.  This was felt most acutely in training.  During training, crew operations tended to follow a priority-oriented plan.  Evidently mission planners believed all the items were being trained on with equal emphasis and success.  Bean didn't get a lot of training on the television setup, and didn't have a real camera to train with.  What astounds us these days, but which was seriously considered for Apollo 11, was to delete the EVA television experience altogether.  The mission was going to be difficult enough without "extra" obligations like minding the TV.  In the larger sense, considering all the mission procedures written around camera and optics maintenance, I think it was David Scott who complained that most of the problems they were constantly having to face with respect to photography could have been solved with lens caps.  That certainly would have solved Bean's problem in a very straightforward, simple way.

[JayUtah]

Thank you for the clarification. I fell into the trap of assuming it was a NASA source because it was on the NASA website, but of course that's the same kind of fallacious thinking made by many hoax believers who assume everything was done by NASA.

Well, David Percy even tried to claim the feature film Apollo 13 was an official NASA source because it had been made with their cooperation.  I know the ALSJ is not an official NASA source because I've contributed to it.  And I don't work for NASA and never have.  So if that's how it acquires content, you can't grant it NASA authorship.  In any case, statements of ownership, authorship, and the license terms are on the site itself.  It's not as if we have to guess or deduce what they are.  Granted the ALSJ probably the single most useful record of the Apollo missions available on the web.  But it's neither comprehensive nor official.

....I don't go dismissing whole swatches of history and science on that basis though.

...and arrogantly conclude that the only possible resolution of your conundrum must be to accuse people you know little about of wholesale criminal malfeasance.

And again another hoax believer who thinks he can look at something and deduce its physical properties.

The aluminized film that gets reported as "gold foil" is considerably thinner than the stuff I commonly use.  But it's about the same look and feel as a chip bag (crisp packet).  Except Kapton is significantly stronger than the substrate on food packages, per unit mass.  And more elastic.  It doesn't seem likely at all to me to be pitted by impact from entrained particles.  And as we're all fond of pointing out, the post-impingement plume passes under the footpads.  By the time the footpads are on the ground, the exhaust has stopped.

Conversely, the paint on Surveyor III was chosen for its optico-thermal properties, not its strength as a coating.  Sometimes we apply epoxy coatings on airplanes and some portions of spacecraft because we want mechanical and chemical protection.  But paint designed to have the proper thermal behavior is not guaranteed to have all the desirable mechanical behavior.  Although I don't have any examples of it on hand, there's no reason to suppose a rigid coating would behave the same as a flexible film under aerosol abrasion.  The argument that if pitting and chipping from sandblasting occurred on Surveyor, it should also have happened on the Intrepid landing gear, is pure supposition with no rational basis.

[smartcooky]

Thank you for the clarification. I fell into the trap of assuming it was a NASA source because it was on the NASA website, but of course that's the same kind of fallacious thinking made by many hoax believers who assume everything was done by NASA.

Yup.

Over on ISF, we've been dealing with one of those "rockets don't work in a vacuum" idiots who thinks that the Rocket Equation and all the physics regarding rockets is NASA fakery because they all appear on NASA's website.

Go figure!

[bknight]

Thank you for the clarification. I fell into the trap of assuming it was a NASA source because it was on the NASA website, but of course that's the same kind of fallacious thinking made by many hoax believers who assume everything was done by NASA.

Yup.

Over on ISF, we've been dealing with one of those "rockets don't work in a vacuum" idiots who thinks that the Rocket Equation and all the physics regarding rockets is NASA fakery because they all appear on NASA's website.

Go figure!

Where did that go?  I thought the whole thing must have been "blown away". 

[Allan F]

I've been discussing with an individual, who think the pressure on the surface of the moon is minus two billion PSI. Because he has seen a figure stating the pressure is 10e-12 torr. He thinks the minus-sign in front of the exponent means the resulting number is negative 10e12 torr. Could not explain to him, the difference between negative pressure and negative pressure differential.

Also, he thinks the LM didn't have enough battery capacity, even though he didn't know HOW MUCH battery capacity was available and also didn't know how much power was needed and used. I told him the J-mission LMs had battery capacity equal to two tonnes of lead-acid car batteries. Still wasn't "enough" even though he didn't know the consumption.

[onebigmonkey]

Thank you for the clarification. I fell into the trap of assuming it was a NASA source because it was on the NASA website, but of course that's the same kind of fallacious thinking made by many hoax believers who assume everything was done by NASA.

Yup.

Over on ISF, we've been dealing with one of those "rockets don't work in a vacuum" idiots who thinks that the Rocket Equation and all the physics regarding rockets is NASA fakery because they all appear on NASA's website.

Go figure!

That guy's clickbaiting all over the place. The vacuum is between his ears.

[Peter B]

I am going to contact my publisher and request their legal department advise me on this.

And being married to a lawyer, I can tell you what their answer will be.  A retraction of an error with substantial evidence of its being innocent (i.e., two very similar books), immediately and conspicuously published, is dispositive disproof of malice.  Since you aspire to be a public figure, actual malice is an essential element to the tort.  In some jurisdictions in the United States, before you can claim defamation, you must ask for and be denied a retraction.  In this case a full and frank retraction was provided to you unconditionally without demand.  Your refusal to accept it estops many causes of action.  And should I prevail in court, your prior refusal could very well entitle me to recover my legal fees from you.

Further, the transcript of your activity here -- which I'm sure you'll provide unedited and in full to your publisher -- will contain the following

Well, it really is bizarre. The more I am criticized and insulted on the forums, the more people are emailing me and pre-ordering my book.

So by all means, please continue criticizing, ridiculing, and attempting to discredit me. Doing so can only add to the interest in my book.

And you never know, some people might even be tempted to take a look at my fiction!

This suggests you don't actually believe you're being defamed on this and other forums, and that you in fact welcome such activity as would tend to discredit, defame, or malign you.  Absent actual malice, you can't recover punitive damages.  The only thing you can recover for now is actual monetary loss.  But since by your own admission, you believe the adverse attention improves your sales (both fiction and non-fiction), you just estopped that claim as well.

There's also a bit in here somewhere about you not caring whether you get attention or not, but I can't be arsed presently to look for it.  Be sure to show that to your publisher.

So, to everyone else: I will not be posting again until this matter is settled.

Give me the name and number of your publishing company's legal department.  I'll phone them myself and we can get this settled today.

Oh wow, I'm honoured to be in such august company.

Over at UM, back on 7 May, Derek posted this in response to a post I made here:

I'll answer your questions shortly. In the meanwhile, I took a look at Apollohoax. I noticed you wrote: "Over at UM, a poster by the name of Derek Willis has announced his belief in the faking of Apollo 12." Not only is that is a misrepresentation, it is potentially defamatory. I explained in my first post on this subject that I wrote my articles based on what John Kelly told me. My intention was to find out if the anomalies he described could be explained by other means than claiming Apollo 11, 12 and 17 were faked. So, basically, you are presenting me as a conspiracy theorist, and consequently making an unbiased response to what I have to say essentially impossible. Is that really the best way to conduct this sort of debate?

https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/327357-belief-in-apollo-hoax-conspiracy-could-grow/?page=12&tab=comments#comment-6731911

[onebigmonkey]

Over at UM, back on 7 May, Derek posted this in response to a post I made here:

I'll answer your questions shortly. In the meanwhile, I took a look at Apollohoax. I noticed you wrote: "Over at UM, a poster by the name of Derek Willis has announced his belief in the faking of Apollo 12." Not only is that is a misrepresentation, it is potentially defamatory. I explained in my first post on this subject that I wrote my articles based on what John Kelly told me. My intention was to find out if the anomalies he described could be explained by other means than claiming Apollo 11, 12 and 17 were faked. So, basically, you are presenting me as a conspiracy theorist, and consequently making an unbiased response to what I have to say essentially impossible. Is that really the best way to conduct this sort of debate?

https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/327357-belief-in-apollo-hoax-conspiracy-could-grow/?page=12&tab=comments#comment-6731911

Wow - just how dishonest can Mr Derek be? When he says he know someone who has shown him some of proof of moon landing fakery that isn't some sort of conspiracy theory?

When he says this in his article:

The logical conclusion drawn from these findings is that the Apollo 12 mission was itself entirely fabricated.

He isn't claiming some sort of conspiracy?

When he says this:

The answers to these questions add credence to claims that the Apollo missions were faked, and as we will see, strongly suggest that persons unknown – ‘whistle-blowers’ – planted evidence to draw attention to the deception.

There somehow isn't a conspiracy involved?

When he presents what he describes as

a plausible means by which the Surveyor 3 components were presented to the scientific community and to the public as having been returned from the Moon by the Apollo 12 astronauts

in order to hide their non-lunar origin he isn't presenting evidence of a conspiracy?

He's writing a book called "Faking Apollo" (not, "Faking Apollo?") and he isn't claiming a conspiracy to hide a faked series of missions?

You claimed to be here, Derek, to have your questions answered. You have shown no interest in the answers you were given. You have avoided answering specific points about your article and resorted to the standard pouting lip boohoo poor me everyone's being horrid victim stance we've seen many times before. Get over yourself.

Oh and Derek, if you're still in touch with your lawyers, my personal view is that your story about being shown evidence from a former Hughes Corporation employee is a complete fabrication.