Truth Revealed!

[Space Cowboy]

Hi, all. My first post, and I haven't even explored too many of the threads. The Subject Line is to get your attention, but here's my conundrum. Recently, we made new friends. Really nice people. Met them through our sons in grade school. We've had a couple of adventures with them, and they really are good people. Suddenly, though, out of nowhere, the Dad declares that NASA slipped up with the Orion test flight. When asked why it was sent up unmanned, the NASA spokesman explained that they didn't want to risk astronauts lives, not knowing if the shielding in the Orion capsule was capable of withstanding deep space radiation. Well, if NASA had actually gone to the Moon, they'd know all that, wouldn't they? Well, wouldn't they!?!? He and his lovely wife went on to talk about the Great Hoax. For instance, and the one I went 'Uh-oh' on, is the cameras on the Moon, showing the first step on the Moon, and then the lander blasting off. The camera equipment at the time required a huge amount of gear, and broadcasting from the moon would have required even more power. How could they have packed all that gear into that little landing capsule. Broadcasting with the power supply in the capsule would be a challenge, but a stand alone unit? Impossible!

Now, I was in high school when we landed on the Moon. I remember poring over every scrap of information in the newspapers, on television, I remember Uncle Wally showing the arm fold down with the camera on the mock up module, that would broadcast the First Step. I built the model of the Apollo capsule with the landing module. I probably read the article on how they broadcasted the launch of the landing module from the Moon's surface, and I couldn't sit through Capricorn I, low budget science fiction, but now I need a refresher. I don't even know if I'll challenge these folks, but can you point me in the direction of articles that would debunk these two immediate claims, the radiation and the cameras. Honestly, I'm so ignorant of the cannons of the Moon Landing Hoax that I don't even know enough to ask questions.

All Help Greatly Appreciated,

[Allan F]

One of the items you need to look into is the size of the antenna used to receive the transmissions. 40-meter dishes collect a lot of signal. Now, please consider the Voyager 1 spacecraft BEYOND Uranus which has only an ailing RTG for power - we still talk to it and get data from it. That's a lot father than the moon and only a tiny fraction of the transmission power available.

[Allan F]

http://honeysucklecreek.net/index.html

http://www.braeunig.us/space/index.htm

[Luckmeister]

Welcome to the forum. I would visit Jay Windley's Clavius site at http://www.clavius.org/ (he posts as Jay Utah here). Spend some time there and take notes -- there's a wealth of debunking info there. And of course ask questions here. Jay and other Apollo experts post here regularly. I hope you will have more patience with your new friends than I sometimes exhibit when encountering hoax believers offline.

[Zakalwe]

.... Well, if NASA had actually gone to the Moon, they'd know all that, wouldn't they? Well, wouldn't they!?!? He and his lovely wife went on to talk about the Great Hoax.
The camera equipment at the time required a huge amount of gear, and broadcasting from the moon would have required even more power. How could they have packed all that gear into that little landing capsule. Broadcasting with the power supply in the capsule would be a challenge, but a stand alone unit? Impossible!

They are using the logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, that is argument from ignorance. "I don't know how X,Y or Z was accomplished or could possibly be accomplished, therefore it could not have been accomplished". It's amazing that in the present day, with the world's knowledge nothing more than a Wikipedia search away, that people choose to display such wilful ignorance.

A good way of demonstrating this is to place some everyday item in front of them (say, a TV remote control). Ask if they can describe, in detail, how it works. How the batteries store the electrical power in chemical form, how the infra-red LED emits a wavelength of light invisible to our eyes, how the circuitry takes the movement of a button changes that energy into an electrical signal which is then encoded and transmitted and so on. Would they also take the view that just because they cannot describe how a remote-control or a mobile (cell) phone works that it patently does not work? Of course they wouldn't, and they would view anyone that proposed such a view as being a wee bit whacko.  Which is pretty much how anyone with more than a few working brain cells would describe their view on the Moon landing hoax belief-system.

[smartcooky]

If you want to know about how lunar broadcasts were accomplished, there is an excellent book available on Amazon.com called "Live TV from the Moon" by Dwight Steven-Boniecki.

http://www.amazon.com/Live-Apogee-Books-Space-Series/dp/1926592166

Better still, the author is a regular poster here (under the username "dwight").

This forum has many members who are among other things, actual spacecraft engineers, aircraft engineers, physicists, mathematicians and technicians; real people who have worked on and been involved in real spaceflight projects from Inmarsat to the Space Shuttle and Orion.

This site is the go-to place to get first hand knowledge from people who are qualified to "walk the walk and talk the talk" unlike those places such as GLP and Infowars that are rife with uneducated keyboard warriors who only think they know what they are talking about. Quite a number of these Hoax Believers have been here and pretty much been shown up as the lightweights they are. They have generally been sent packing in short order with their tails tucked firmly between their legs.

[Bob B.]

Hello, Space Cowboy.  Welcome to the forum.

I strongly recommend Jay Windley's website that Luckmeister directed you to.  Jay is likely the foremost authority on these hoax claims.  His site is well written and very informative.  I have my own website on the topic, though it's a bit outdated.  Much of what I cover in my site has been so thoroughly debunked that the newest generation of hoax promoters don't even believe it anymore.

You specifically mentioned radiation.  This is probably the one biggest issue that the conspiracy theorists cling to.  Space radiation is a complex subject, and whether or not it is dangerous depends on many factors.  When NASA or some other expert talks about the dangers of space radiation, they are almost certainly referring to some context other than Apollo-like missions.  For example, a long-duration trip to Mars is very different than a short-duration trip to the Moon.  Just because somebody says radiation is a problem in one instance doesn't mean that it is in another.  In the case of Apollo, the radiation problem was easily mitigated by the trajectories used, the shielding of the spacecraft, and the short duration of the flights.

I recently wrote an article in which I offer a detailed analysis of the radiation problem as it relates to Apollo and the Van Allen Belts.  It is rather technical and may be way more than you are interested in, but I think I've demonstrated quite conclusively that the radiation doses received by the Apollo astronauts were insignificant and of no danger.  If you have any specific questions I would be happy to elaborate.
 

[ka9q]

For instance, and the one I went 'Uh-oh' on, is the cameras on the Moon, showing the first step on the Moon, and then the lander blasting off. The camera equipment at the time required a huge amount of gear, and broadcasting from the moon would have required even more power. How could they have packed all that gear into that little landing capsule. Broadcasting with the power supply in the capsule would be a challenge, but a stand alone unit? Impossible!

Why do you say that?

You're making a quantitative argument, i.e., a "huge" amount of gear, a power supply that is "too small", etc. Quantitative arguments must always be backed up with mathematical calculations.

I am an electrical engineer. My professional experience includes radio communications, and I have been very active on the side in space communications, including the design and implementation of six operational systems. Three are earth orbiting satellites, three more are deep space missions operating over distances considerably farther than the moon.

I have extensively studied the Apollo communications system and I can show you my calculations that closely match its actual performance. Where are yours that say otherwise?

I was 12 years old when Apollo 11 landed. I was as fascinated by its communications as I was by the fact that we had humans on the moon. That led first to becoming a radio ham, then getting electrical engineering degrees and entering a rewarding engineering career in the communications industry. Had I assumed at the time that it was all fake, none of this would have happened. Instead I said "that's amazing!". It strongly motivated me to find out how it all worked, and I'm happy it did.

[Bob B.]

When asked why it was sent up unmanned, the NASA spokesman explained that they didn't want to risk astronauts lives, not knowing if the shielding in the Orion capsule was capable of withstanding deep space radiation.

I have no idea what the NASA spokesman said, but that explanation sounds like a bunch of BS to me.  Radiation had nothing to do with why the mission was unmanned.  It was just a routine test flight of a spacecraft that is still in development and not yet ready to carry a crew.  Radiation would be the least of the concerns that a crew would face.

However, this doesn't mean that radiation isn't a concern for future manned Orion flights.  Realize though that Orion is being designed to carry out very different missions than what Apollo flew.  Orion is intended to facilitate exploration of asteroids and Mars.  These will be very long duration flights that present a very different radiation problem than anything previously flown.  It is simply not valid to take anything said about radiation as it relates to Orion and apply that to Apollo.

If the spokesman did speak about "deep space" radiation, then he was clearly referring to a situation other than the immediate test flight (which completed just a few low orbits of Earth).  I suspect your friends misunderstood what the spokesman was talking about, or the spokesman did a very poor job of explaining himself by conflating two different issues.
 

[ka9q]

When asked why it was sent up unmanned, the NASA spokesman explained that they didn't want to risk astronauts lives, not knowing if the shielding in the Orion capsule was capable of withstanding deep space radiation.

There were several very good reasons for sending the first Orion capsule up unmanned.

The purpose of any such test is to determine your safety margins by stressing, as far as possible, the systems beyond the conditions expected in a routine flight. Sometimes there's just no other way to find them. For example, the Boeing 777 was designed almost entirely on computers, and it's important to validate those computer models. So they tested a real wing by loading it until it actually broke. They did this before risking a human crew in an actual test flight.

The recent Orion test flight was very similar to the first flight of the Apollo/Saturn V combination, Apollo 4 in 1967 (which was also unmanned). A major objective of both flights was to subject their heat shields to the stresses of a simulated lunar return. (Orion only simulated 80% of a lunar return because of the limitations of its Delta IV launch vehicle.) Apollo and Orion engineers were pretty confident that their capsules would survive. They did, but both generations of engineers had the wisdom to test their understanding before risking any human lives, just to be sure.

Even by 1967 the Van Allen belts had become a relatively minor issue; we already had many measurements from both unmanned and manned spacecraft, and now we have another 50 years of observations. We know what they're like. So does every other company and country around the world that sends rockets and satellites into space. (And there are a lot of them.)

But today's electronics are far more sophisticated than those of Apollo, so they're considerably more susceptible to radiation upsets. (This is the only way Apollo electronics were actually superior). You can mitigate radiation effects through careful design, and to test them the recent Orion mission actively sought out considerably more radiation than would be encountered on a typical lunar mission. They came through with flying colors, but again, why risk a crew the very first time when it's unnecessary?

A final reason for the lack of a crew on the recent Orion test flight is that the vehicle was simply not ready for one. The launch escape rocket was an inert dummy, so a crew could not have been rescued from a launch failure. There was no life support system to keep a crew alive, no service module to supply them with oxygen, and no cabin displays and controls for a crew to operate. Apollo also flew many incomplete, unmanned "boilerplate" capsules to test various systems before the capsules themselves were ready to carry crews.

[Ranb]

Suddenly, though, out of nowhere, the Dad declares that NASA slipped up with the Orion test flight. When asked why it was sent up unmanned, the NASA spokesman explained that they didn't want to risk astronauts lives, not knowing if the shielding in the Orion capsule was capable of withstanding deep space radiation.

It has been my experience that when a person forms an opinion then uses only certain explanations or other dubious evidence to support it, they actually know little or nothing about the topic.

You might want to ask if he knows what radiation levels in space actually are.  If he does, then he would be the first HB'er I've seen that does.

The camera equipment at the time required a huge amount of gear, and broadcasting from the moon would have required even more power.

Ask him if he has any idea how much power is required and why?

Asking these questions might be the same as challenging his intellect (or lack thereof) so you might be losing a friend.

Ranb

[Bob B.]

By the way, this should be in "The Hoax Theory" forum.

[Echnaton]

NASA slipped up with the Orion test flight. When asked why it was sent up unmanned, the NASA spokesman explained that they didn't want to risk astronauts lives, not knowing if the shielding in the Orion capsule was capable of withstanding deep space radiation.

First of all, don't take his word for that.  Ask him for a reference to the "spokesman?"  I bet he can't do more than say he saw it on TV.  If so that is the end of the discussion, because your friend will likely just defer any questions you have to his "expert" that he cannot present. 

Second, all capsules are test launched uncrewed.  Part of the Orion capsule was to test the heat shield, an item that needs to be properly tested before crewed missions can be flown.  Also, IIRC the launch rocket was not man rated. 

[JayUtah]

I had intended to participate in this thread much earlier, and now it's growing.  Thanks to all who recommended my site -- yes, I think most of the hoax questions are answered there.

Ka9q is your go-to guy on radio communications, link budgets, and all the juicy details that explain why you can transmit from the Moon with a small-wattage transmitter and a small antenna and still pick it up all the way back on Earth.  Having receiving antennas the size of a football field has a lot to do with that.

Bob knows a lot about the trajectories and spacecraft dynamics.  You should read his stuff, even if it's initially too technical.  You'll find that the people here are quite willing (even excited) to entertain questions on the subjects they cover.  And what all of that should tell you is that there is plenty in Apollo for trained professionals to study.  If it were just some big hoax, the literal thousands upon thousands of qualified space engineers who have studied it since would surely have found something wrong with it by now.

As for Orion, it's true that was just a boilerplate.  I almost bought an old Apollo boilerplate capsule when NASA sold them off several years ago.  When the bid hit $200,000 I had to bow out.  But the point, which has already been belabored, is that the flight plan here had nothing to do with humans and radiation.  And until we have more context, we can't really comment on what the "NASA spokesman" may have said or meant.  There was a fair amount of media discussion about testing Orion's heat shield -- and that should surely be done unmanned for this new heat-shield design -- so maybe somewhere in the retelling that tidbit got mistaken for radiation shielding instead.

[ka9q]

I would be very interested if somebody (Bob?) could plot the Orion trajectory relative to the Van Allen belt models. The apogee climb took place over southeast South America and the South Atlantic, i.e., it looks like it flew right into the South Atlantic Anomaly, where the inner belt is easiest to reach because it comes closest to earth. The altitude at which Orion encountered peak radiation was roughly consistent with the peak density of the hottest (>100 MeV) protons in the inner belt; this is below the peak density of lower energy protons that are presumably stopped by the spacecraft structure.

All this tells me they actively sought out a hotter portion of the inner VAB to test their electronics. This is not a trajectory you would take with a human crew. For one thing, it didn't go anywhere near the moon.