Dr. Smith said:

You really have to be stupid to believe NASA, and that is exactly what they are banking on. It would be impossible to reverse-land the LEM using rocket technology. Remember, rockets are propelling you forward–not backward. Duplicate this on earth.

You can’t. The LEM obviously is not large enough to store the rocket fuel needed to blast off and rondevous with the mother ship. Shame on all of you NASA guys.

((snicker))

Rockets propel you in the direction opposite of where they are pointing. That’s why the LEM had its rockets pointing downwards, to slow it on its way down and to lift it back up again. As for the size issue – didn’t they end up having to design the landing gear to be detatchable to solve that very issue?

        john grisson said:

ok guys you make good sence its just if you watch some of the footage on youtube it looks so fake take a look at lunarcy:fun with apollo 201 or the apollo fairy tale or lunarcy:reach for the stars or apollo astronots get lucy and many more and all the facts and figures don’t mean a thing

Okay, against my better judgement i searched out and viewed those videos. It’s a montage of crappy music and images of various NASA simulations and training exercises, like the 1/6 G harness training, various incarnations of the Lunar Module Simulator that they tried out between 1960 and 1969, a few shots from known simulations of the landings (which were admittedly staged, such as the one CBS news made to show viewers what they were planning on doing). There are a few clips totally out of context and a few of the classic images we’ve seen “OMG WIRES” when the extended PLSS antenna flashes or the constant talk of no stars by people who don’t understand the whole concept of ambient light.

Operation paperclip was a the post world-war II intelligence program to assess Nazi technology and to capture examples of useful technology along with blueprints, schematics and so on. The technical intelligence program has long since been mostly declassified. The US boxed up and carted away dozens of V-2 rockets, Me-262 jet fighters, V-1 cruise missiles, Panzer tanks etc etc. The Soviets had their own such program. Also the top German scientists were generally recruited to work on the continued development of their respective technologies. The best known would be Werner Von Braun.

This is no secret. The first rocket used by the Mercury program was the Redstone. Redstone also was modified to produce the Juno and Jupiter II rockets that carried the first US satellites. The Redstone was a scalled-up V-2 in its basic design.

The war forced both sides to come up with a lot of new technology. In the case of the allies it included microwave radar, some of the first computer systems, the atomic bomb, the nuclear reactor, numerous advances in flight control and others. In the case of the Axis powers the advances included synthetic fuel, jet engine development, rocketry and several others.

The Nazi background of Von Braun and some others who developed the rockets of the US is well known. It’s something NASA generally doesn’t like to spend a lot of time talking about, but it’s no secret.

Right…

and

        DV82XL said:

I’ve come to believe there really is such a thing as American self-hatred and nowhere is it more apparent than the moon landing deniers. The U.S.A., like all great nation-empires, has some skeletons in the closet it is true. In fact most small nations have periods in their history that they are not proud of, yet it seems only in America does a sizable and vocal fraction assume the very worst of everything and anything that their country has accomplished.

I’m perplexed by the self-loathing as well as someone who has lived in the US and continues to work there frequently, I have nothing against the country, but I don’t even see why that matters. If there are those who have a political view of self-hatred of the US or all western democratic nations and everything that Caucasians and Europeans have ever done (Bruce) then that doesn’t change the facts of the matter. The US went to the moon. Get over it. It’s history. It’s fact. Even the Soviets, who didn’t generally like the US or enjoy seeing the US accomplish something big admitted it.

Look, I sure don’t like the Soviet Union or what it stood for or did, but they sent the first satellite up and put the first man in orbit and I’m not going to pretend that isn’t so. Maybe I’d rather it were the US or Canada or maybe I’d rather it were me working in my garage doing it, but that’s not so!

I sure as hell don’t like a thing about the Nazis but I have to admit they invented the first spacecraft (if you consider a sub-orbital ballistic missile to quality). That’s just the truth. They were miles ahead of the world with jet engines too. I might hate their guts, but that’s just reality. That’s just the way it is!

        john grisson said:

well you guys know more than me i just heard that ussr did’nt have world wide tracking at that time unlike u.s which had tracking around the globe

They would not have needed a global network. The lunar missions were, at one time or another, detectable from almost any location. For example, Apollo-11 was received by Goldstone California and stations in Australia when it was conducting the EVA, but during the period where it was on the way to the moon and entering lunar orbit, it was tracked by Madrid. Apollo missions were also tracked by stations at Ascension Island, Madagascar, Guam and other locations. When you’re flying to the moon, you need worldwide tracking stations because the moon doesn’t stay over one area.

For their part, the Soviets had a variety of stations that could receive from spacecraft. Many were located in their own territory (remember, they were the largest single country in the world). Stations existed from Kazakhstan, through Siberia and all the way to East Germany.

They also had several mobile tracking assets including observation aircraft and ships. Here’s one of the larger ones:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/DN-SN-90-01052.JPEG

Remember, there was more than one Apollo mission that went to the moon, or at least lunar orbit. Apollo 8 and Apollo 10-17 all went to at least lunar orbit. They would have only had to detect something suspicious in one of those missions to raise a red flag.

Those were the Judica-Cordiglia brothers. They did manage to receive signals from some early satellites and their tracking was better than most amateurs, but the claims of ‘phantom cosmonauts’ are exaggerated. There’s no evidence that they ever detected anything other than a stray radio signal from a teresterial source.

Some of the most dramatic claims turned out to be extreme misstranslations. One says things like “I’m burning, I’m burning” and “I will reenter” but a group of native Russian speakers were hired to reinterperate that and they heard nothing like that in the recording.

The “Simulations” on the newscasts with the audio were used during the landing. There was no television for that. The television broadcast started after they had landed and deployed the S-band directional antenna.

You can listen to the whole events in the recordings. There is no video when they touch down and do their various checks. About a half hour after the landing, Neil Armstrong exists the hatch and pulls down the MESA assembly, which contained the television camera. Buzz Aldrin flips on the television circuit breaker and the video begins.

You are seeing a flare of light off of the PLSS antenna.

The lunar ascent engine was powered by a combination of dinitrogen tetroxide and Aerozine-50 (a combination of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine) This is a type of hypergolic rocket engine. it’s very reliable and fairly simple. The reaction does not produce a very bright or visible flame. Note here in a Titan-2 launch the flame is barely visible: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/titan/g9/images/031019titan2launch2.jpg

The Apollo lunar module had a much smaller engine and in a vacuum, it would disperse the flame faster. Plus, the moon during daylight is extremely bright. It’s hard to get the impression from the photos, because the cameras were adjusted for that, but with direct sun illumination, it was very bright. This is why the astronauts almost always had their visors down.

Between the bright light, the vacuum conditions, the engine bell and the hydrazine fuel, the flame would be nearly invisible. Yes, flames can be invisible. I’ve seen plenty of them, such as when you burn pure hydrogen. All you can see is the convection shimmer of the air. You have to just about turn out all the lights to see anything more than that.

The whole thing with launching – it’s not as difficult with no air resistance and less gravity, especially with the small and lightweight lunar ascent stage.

If they failed to get into the proper orbit or something, there was a contingency plan for this. The command module had enough reserve fuel onboard that it could go to a lower altitude or change its orbital plain by several degrees to meet the LM.

Cost. National priorities. Politics.

but that aside i read an article about the russians covering up a lot of things of their own and two italian brothers who were hams tracked some of the russian missions that even nasa did’nt have the frequencies of?that aside the footage of the apollo 11 was not broadcast live only sound and a simulation from cbn was seen and yes i am old enough to remember it.but the main thing that bothers me if they truely went why is some of the footage quite clearly fake i have seen so many clips where you can see they are on wires 100% and then theres the way the lem blasts of from the surface with no sign of an engine and this has to reach an orbit of around 100miles and dock with a craft doing 4000mph it all seems a bit far fetched and hard to belive if they could do that 40years ago why have they not been back and have no plans? I recall on the day of the landings the head of the apollo project on tv saying by the end of the century we will have a man on mars.

        john grisson said:

you go into a lot of detail but don’t forget the ussr used to send the u.s the info to track their unmanned moon probes after the u.s called them liars on the first 1 but u.s did’nt give the russians any of their info?all that nasa had to do was somehow fool the radio hams which would’nt be that hard,the men went up into orbit and read from a planned script the moon landing was pre filmed easily they had simulators with the same projection of the moon as we saw and mission control had been doing full scale sims for years even with the 1202 and 1201 alarm call and talking to the naughts in the simulated lem nasa even had a giant moon ball and closer parts of the moon laid out with a track and a vehicle with the same shape window as the lem!

Actually, I recall reading that the US did provide some tracking data to the USSR for Apollo-11 on the off chance that there was a danger of a collission with Luna 15.

Anyway, they certainly didn’t need to provide any data. The general data was all public. The dates for launch and landing were publicly disclosed. The aproximate location of the missions landing areas was known as well and much of the orbital data was in the press kit.

NASA doesn’t generally keep things seceret like the military does. Apollo was never really classified to any extent.

Even if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t matter. It’s kinda hard to miss something like the launch of a Saturn-V.

The Soviets could track US launches with extreme precision all the way to the TLI phase using radar. They had an extensive space radar system which was intended primarily for ICBM tracking and detection, but also could track any major launch.

Beyond that they also had optical tracking. They had (and the Russians still do have) a number of large military telescope complexes for this purpose. See here: http://englishrussia.com/?p=2292

And NO.. you couldn’t fake it with a satellite. Not unless that satellite was in the same place as the moon. The spacecraft were tracked by a number of stations and in all cases the signal was precisely tracked to the moon. Satellites don’t stay in one place. Even geostationary ones don’t – they just stay in the same place relative to the earth. The moon orbits at a rate and in a position unique to its orbital period and plane.

Even if somehow you could magically get a satellite to hang in the air directly between the tracking station and the moon, you’d need a real lot of them. The signal was tracked by Honeysuckle Creek, Tibitha, Carnavon and Parkes Observatory in Australia. It was also tracked in Goldstone California, Guam and on other missions in Madrid and on UK assets.

There were also dozens of semi-official and unofficial tracking efforts, many of which were sophisticated enough to measure things like the vector to the spacecraft to within a fraction of an arcsecond, the speed based on the Doppler shift, the relative signal strength etc etc. Some were hams. Some were professional communications techs and everything in between.

Uh.. it would have been impossible to fake without sending a probe to the moon to do it. Different locations all had vectors pointing to the moon. You can’t do that with a low orbiting satellite.

You’re not correct about the frequencies. All the missions had a primary downlink using an S-band transmitter, or in the case of the latter missions, two S-band systems, with one dedicated for video downlinking. Apollo-17 used the RCA Lunar Television Camera. This was the best quality TV camera used during the missions. It had video quality comparable to broadcast tv but accomplished this using less bandwidth by using a field-sequential color system and specialized circuitry that made for a very effecient signal.

It had a dedicated transmitter, but it’s not easy to receive signals from the moon, especially when they’re transmitted from a portable system like that, which had a collapsible dish and a battery power supply.

The major tracking stations like Goldstone had huge high gain dishes. Goldstone had a 100 foot diameter main Apollo tracking antenna and extremely high quality amplifiers and feedhorns to pick up the signal.

One thing that I should note as far as picking up the signal by hams or other amateurs: It’s not necessarily that difficult to detect the signal – to detect the carrier and perhaps get some intermittent data off of it. However, television reception requires a very good solid signal and a low signal to noise ratio.

With a modest dish, like an amateur might build, you could quite easily tell the signal was there and perhaps even pick up a few words of the communication through the static, but you’d have a very hard time getting a TV picture.

There were some third parties with very good equipment though. For example, researchers and workers at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK independently tracked and received data from the Apollo-11 mission and some other missions. They were not an official part of the tracking network, they did it on their own time, after work, just for the fun of it.