Of course, the moon faking theories are so tired and refuted so many times at this point, one wonders what the point of even continuing the debate is.

Regardless, the LRO pictures are awesome.

        drjim said:

This was recently a hot topic on the AMSAT email reflector. Several of the Hams out here in California who did this posted that they tracked the radio transmissions from the CSM as it went to, and orbited, the Moon. The Doppler shift was as expected, as was the time delay to be expected from a spacecraft at that distance.
Of course the loonies will say that it was a tape recorder onboard the CSM, and the messages were scripted such that they sounded “real”.
I just find it hard to believe that NASA, a civilian agency, with tens of thousands of employees, could have kept it a “secret” all these years.
Geez….even “Deep Throat” finally came out and admitted who he was.

If you consider the effort to fake the landing – send up an unmanned CSM with a tape player playing out and all perfectly times (even using the clunky recording equipment of the late 1960’s). Then you need a robotic mission to the moon to plant the laser reflector. You need to do this all somehow in a way reliable enough not to give it away and you need to do it all automatically, because transmissions to the spacecraft might be detected. (either that or you hide your control transmissions with encryption and somehow put them on odd frequencies or something so nobody notices).

So this massive project with automated, unmanned spacecraft and tape recorders and players and staged video and fake transmissions to and from mission control must be done.

At some point, does it become easier to actually go to the moon then to go to all this extreme technical effort with spacecraft to fake it?

If you have to send up all kinds of robotic, automated tape-playing, transmitting space craft, then why not make it easier and just put three guys in them instead?

I know people also received the signals from the spacecraft. They couldn’t actually decode the tv or anything, but they detected the signal was there.

I imagine that a lot of people with better telescopes and radio receivers probably did better. It was there for all to see, so if it were the Russians or just some college astronomy professor with access to a descent observatory telescope, then surely they could do some rudimentary tracking.

It just seems to me that between optical tracking and radio reception, plus the laser reflectors and even tracking the rocket by radar or whatever means may have been used, there is too much to it to fake. It would be too difficult to simulate all that with decoys.

That is just one reason I find this moon landing hoax thing so tired. I don’t know the motivation if it is anti-Americanism or anti-West or just looking for attention or whatever the case is. It is factually supported that the missions went there and that is the long and short of it.

If you look at the history of spaceflight, you see the big risk comes from the basic failures you can have. Things like oxygen tanks bursting or engines failing or heat sheilds or somehow having a leak in the spacecraft. These things can kill you right away or lead to being unable to get home.

It’s funny, but you see this in lots of places. Something like radiation gets people very scared and therefore gets a lot of attention. For example, consider installing antennas and servicing wireless communications. If you ask someone what the danger is going to be from that they’ll probably say RF radiation. It gets the most attention. It is not. The biggest danger in the field of work (by far) is simple falling. Just normal, mundane, straight forward examples of someone losing their grip and not having a good harness or of a ladder not being properly stable. A worker falls and ends up dead or injured. This is sadly not all that uncommon. On the other hand, an RF injury is almost unheard of. So why so much more attention on one issue than the other?

        Chuck P. said:

The real plan for a solar flare during Apollo was actually to play the odds. Actually it was to not launch during anticipated solar flares.
They did their best to forcast solar activity prior to launch. The missions were of short enough duration (<2 weeks or so) that the odds were pretty good that you wouldn’t have one during a mission.
A solar flare did occur during one mission (I believe it was Apollo 17) but it was pretty minor.

I know they did do their best to forcase the solar flares and I think if they did have one, they should have still had a few hours warning before it got there. The missions were short but if they did enough of them (and hadn’t candled after just a few) then they would have had a good chance of eventually having it happen just by luck.

You can only play the odds so long so I am sure they had some kind of contingency plan.

I think the bigger issue will come if we have a manned base on the moon where astronauts are there for weeks at a time or more. Then if that happens, there will surely be a circumstance to deal with a solar flare and possibly not a minor one. Also, on a mission to mars, there’s a descent chance.

I don’t think this needs to be a deal breaker. I mean if you can have descent sheidling then yes, there will be some radiation dose, but it will not be severe and I think in general we’re way more cautious about radiation then need be. Even if astronauts get a little radiation sick from a bad incident, I don’t think that needs to be a death sentence, when everyone seems to think these days. It seems common wisdom is that getting a big dose of radiation will limit you to a lifetime of disability and an early death from cancer. I don’t think that’s true, based on the data we have. Certainly there are doses of radiation that can have negative impact on your health, but if you look at it historically where people have received such doses, many are able to recover and be perfectly healthy afterward.

        drbuzz0 said:

…There was a plan for dealing with a big solar flare or sunstorm during the Apollo project, by the way. It was to cut short any EVA’s or lunar surface time and get the astronauts back to the command module. They would sit in the CM while the service module was pointed toward the sun, thus giving maximum shielding in the direction of most of the radiation.

They would have returned to earth using a burn of the CSM engine to expedite the trip to something like a day and a half.

It was felt that using this contingency, the radiation exposure to the astronauts would be somewhat higher than desirable, but not acutely dangerous.

The real plan for a solar flare during Apollo was actually to play the odds. Actually it was to not launch during anticipated solar flares.
They did their best to forcast solar activity prior to launch. The missions were of short enough duration (<2 weeks or so) that the odds were pretty good that you wouldn’t have one during a mission.
A solar flare did occur during one mission (I believe it was Apollo 17) but it was pretty minor.