The Little Dude From the Moon at TAM 8
July 16th, 2010
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Having returned from Las Vegas and The Amazing Meeting, an annual conference on skepticism hosted by the James Randi Educational Foundaton, I’ve been very eager to start posting about my experiences at the meeting. Unfortunately, I’ve been fairly busy, as apparently going to Las Vegas for a week tends to result in a lot of work piling up. In general, the meeting was attended by mainstream skeptics, who may not agree on everything but tended to agree on well proven things, like the fact that the US Apollo program did indeed send men to the moon and back.
This was not quite 100%, however, as at least one conspiracy-obsessed heckler did attend, and attempted repeatedly to heckle Phil Plait and Adam Savage. Jarrah White is about as committed to the belief that the Apollo moon landings were faked as one can be. He’s already produced (at last count) 393 Youtube videos on the subject – all of them absolutely stunning in their lack of technical and scientific knowledge.
I recognized White’s voice from the videos as soon as he got up to question Adam Savage. That snooty, nasal, sharp whine with an Australian accent was hard not to recognize, especially as I’ve seen plenty of his videos before. Apparently he came all the way from Australia to try to get up in the face of those who he considers the conspirators behind the faked moon landing
His behavior was about as strange as one might expect. I was concerned initially that he might try to rush the stage or do something else completely crazy – after all, Apollo conspiracy theorists have been known to physically threaten astronauts and do all manner of other crazy things. I alerted the staff and security to his background to be on the safe side, but luckily he didn’t try anything too violent.
Instead, he repeatedly insisted that he get a sit-down interview with Phil Plait. Phil was quite civil, and informed him that to get scheduled interview time he would need to register as press. The Amazing Meeting does not have very exclusive standards for who is given press status – bloggers and podcasters can easily get it. When he was asked for his information on this topic, he repeatedly made a scene about not wanting to reveal his background. I’m not sure how things worked out, but eventually he got a press pass and thus could get his interview. Unfortunately for him, Phil Plait decided to decline the request. After rudely interrupting Phil, who was trying to converse with others at the conference, the Little Dude from the Moon finally started yelling at Phil that he thought his answers were dishonest and he was a liar. Phil said something about how he didn’t believe he could say anything that would change the Little Dude’s mind and that if the Little Dude felt that way, he was not interested in sitting down for an interview.
I’m just glad that no punches were thrown. As he came from Australia, it seemed a reasonable concern that he would not want to make such a trip without getting in at least one dramatic moment or big confrontation. I did challenge him openly to a debate. He never responded to this. Surprised? In fact, I only saw him around on the first day of the three-day event. No word on whether he left early or went into hiding or what.
He has also already posted at least one video from the event:
It should be noted that Adam Savage is not an absolute expert on this topic. There is actually a greater context to this. Phil Plait may have been able to answer this, but Jarrah managed to burn that bridge a long time ago.
Debunking his ridiculous claim:
There are several intentionally-placed laser reflectors on the surface of the moon. The US Apollo program left laser reflectors at the sites of Apollo-11, Apollo-14 and Apollo-15. The Apollo-15 reflector is the largest, with almost twice the surface area of those placed by Apollo-11 and Apollo-14. The Soviet Lunokhod-1 and Lunokhod-2 lunar lander also carried similar, although smaller laser reflectors.
But are these required to get a laser beam return from the moon?
Technically the answer is no. With a powerful enough laser and a sensitive and large enough telescope, it is possible, though extremely difficult, to detect the photons from a laser being reflected back from the moon. The surface of the moon is not exactly super-reflective, but it’s also not a perfect absorber of photons. However, the reflectors still provide a much stronger return than the surface of the moon ever would.
Several attempts were made to detect laser light reflected off the moon in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. In 1962, a team at MIT finally managed to detect photons reflected off the moon by a laser. The laser they used was a pulsed ruby system, aimed through a twelve inch telescope. By the standards of the day, this was a very powerful laser. In order to detect the return, a 48 inch telescope was coupled to an array of photomultiplier tubes, cooled in liquid nitrogen to increase their sensitivity. Not long after this, the Soviet Union conducted a series of similar experiments with pulsed lasers and telescopes.
While these experiments were considered successful, the return signal was only barely detectable. A more successful method of bouncing signals off the moon had been done using modified radar equipment. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, microwave transmitters powerful enough to send a signal to the moon and detect the return signal became available and a series of experiments were conducted by the US, UK and Soviet Union. As far as radio reflectors go, the moon is far less than ideal. The total path loss from a moon returned signal is generally over 250 decibels.
Today, Moon-bounce or “EME” communications, for Earth-Moon-Earth remains popular in the amateur radio community. Part of the reason for its popularity is that it is very very difficult to get reliable returns from signals reflected off the moon, thus making it a badge of honor to do so. Amateurs who engage in EME use extremely large, high gain antenna arrays to pull in even the vanishingly weak signals returned from the moon. Even despite these efforts, EME communications is usually limited to CW or other narrow band modulation methods. Voice communications, though possible, are extremely difficult to maintain via EME.
The purpose of the reflectors:
The reason that reflectors were left on the moon was not simply to make it easier to get a return from laser light, but also to provide a single fixed reflector that could be accurately referenced from the earth. While range-finding to the moon by radio or laser can provide a fairly good idea of the distance from the earth to the moon, the precision is hampered by the fact that the moon is not a regular surface. If the light is returned from the bottom of a crater, it may have to travel hundreds of meters further than if it is returned from the lunar highlands. By using the laser reflectors, the distance to the moon can be measured with millimeter precision.
The laser reflector experiments continue to be utilized today and have provided a great deal of fundamental data about the moon, the orbital dynamics of the earth and moon. Not only has distance been measured with extreme precision, but it now is known that the moon is spiraling away from the earth at the rate of about 38 millimeters per year. The measurement of distance is precise enough to verify orbital predictions made by Einstein’s theory of Relativity. Range-finding has also allowed for extremely precise measurements of the earth’s orbital stability as well as measuring even the slightest wobble in the moon’s orbit.
How the reflectors verify the moon landings:
In addition to the volumes of other evidence that proves that, yes, human beings did go to the moon, the reflectors continue to be detectable and continue to be useful for scientific purposes. While the surface of the moon may be reflective enough to allow for laser light measurements to be made, the reflectors are orders of magnitude more reflective. The difference is very obvious when the moon is scanned with laser optics.
When the beam from a laser at the McDonald Observatory reaches the lunar surface, it is about 6.5 kilometers in diameter. If this beam is focused on a random part of the moon, so few photons are reflected back that they generally cannot be detected by the equipment being used. However, when the beam is aimed at one of the reflectors, a very solid, strong reflection is detected. When measurements are made, the observatory occasionally does not hit the reflector on the first attempt, and must scan a small area of the moon until it acquires the target. When it does, it is obvious. There is no doubt that these sites are unique in their ability to reflect back light, even if the rest of the moon does have some very limited reflectiveness.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Amazing Meeting, Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Good Science, History, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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July 17th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
[...] The Little Dude from the Moon at TAM 8 from Depleted Cranium: “At least one conspiracy-obsessed heckler did attend, and attempted repeatedly to heckle Phil Plait and Adam Savage. Jarrah White is about as committed to the belief that the Apollo moon landings were faked as one can be. He’s already produced (at last count) 393 YouTube videos on the subject — all of them absolutely stunning in thir lack of technical and scientific knowledge.” [...]
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July 17th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
even if I dont believe in this conspiracytheory but the reflectors on the moon are no real argument in this debate. they could have been brought there by an unmanned spacecraft
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July 17th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Matt said:
I’ve read it was something like four hours. Although it would depend on how you define the Van Allen Belts, because like so many things, there’s not a single hard bright line where you can say it starts and starts – it’s more like it tapers in and out and actually there are multiple belts. They’re can be roughly divided into the inner and outer Van Allen Belts, with the inner ones being the ones with fairly strong radiation. The outer belts are larger but the radiation is considerably less intense.
so really, when you come down to it, they spent a few hours in the belts as a whole, but only a small portion of that within the portion of the belts that is intense. The rest being in the very mild part.
Humans are exposed to the edges of the Van Allen Belts on other occasions. They dip down to a lower altitude at the South Atlantic Anomaly and may fluctuate with solar activity. The ISS and shuttle commonly graze high radiation areas when they are at their apogee.
It’s really not a huge amount of radiation though.
BTW: the highest radiation exposed during an Apollo mission was Apollo-14, which had a total radiation dose of 2.85 REM. This was much higher than the others due to solar activity. This is the total amount for the ten day mission.
To add some context to this:
A full chest CT scan is typically one REM. If a person is brought into the hospital from something like a car accident and doctors believe they may have injuries to multiple parts of their body, they may well call for multiple levels of CT scans of various parts of their chest, back, head and pelvis. All together, they could easily exceed the dose the Apollo-14 astronauts got.
When I was a little kid I fell off a sled and got a concussion. I hurt my nose pretty bad and the doctors were afraid I might have broken it or even fractured my skull. As I was a little kid, they didn’t want to rely entirely on my accounts of what hurt and what seemed broken. I was given a full battery of x-rays, head to toe with closeup detailed x-rays taken of my head and nose from multiple directions. This was not a CT-scan, but rather one of those old beast film-based machines. They went through several plates, as I remember.
I’m not sure how much radiation I took, but I bet it was a pretty significant proportion of what many of the Apollo astronauts got. And, believe it or not, I’m not dead.
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July 17th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
dnfyngng said:
Actually I think they were aimed by the Apollo moonwalkers. They are not all the same and they had some special features if I recall. Keep in mind that we are talking about 1960s techonology here. Some kid could probably build a mood exploring rover in his garage today. The total memory of the LEM computer was 1024 bits (1K). Even if you do not beleive in the LEM the computer was real and exists it was used to create the first fly by wire systems.
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July 17th, 2010 at 11:32 pm
Uhm, Australian bashing?
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July 18th, 2010 at 12:21 am
Perhaps some form of narcissism is the driving motivator for this little dude. When one puts that much time and effort into attracting attention, the issue the claim to be so concerned about takes the back seat and it is all about the self-importance he feels from his efforts.
His worst fear would be that people would just ignore him and not pay attention, so his game would be over if he gave his opposition so much as an inch. Whether the attention is negative or positive makes little difference to him, in his mind he is an expert authority on…something. There are quite a few politicians that fit this profile. A person who is this full of himself is incapable of objectivity. They belong in a therapist’s chair and they don’t even know it.
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July 18th, 2010 at 1:10 am
Edward Fulam said:
I doubt it. It’s true that the technicians who first recieved the transmissions from Apollo 11 on the moon were Australian, but Jarrah White is Australian himself, so I don’t think he’s making these loony claims just to bash Australians.
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July 18th, 2010 at 1:17 am
Edward Fulam said:
Because I mention he is Australian and has an Australian accent? He does! I mean, that’s what he is! His voice is distinctly Australian, although not in a manly sense like Paul Hogan.. He’s a whiny little bitch, albeit an Australian one.
I’m not trying to single out the country. I mean, for we have plenty of whiny little bitches in the US.
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July 18th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Ehum, the 65 MSv/day is supposed to be 65 mSv/day.
Silly me, just nine orders of magnitude wrong there, nothing to worry about…
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July 18th, 2010 at 10:00 pm
In the early days of the space race, the Van Allen Belts turned out to be a the big killjoy. When they discovered them, suddenly scientists had to admit that it was possible humans would be trapped on this planet forever and that travel to the moon and mars was dead.
Notice how this whole aptitude changed as soon as they started talking about the Apollo project. They practically pretended it had never been said.
Your numbers for radiation exposure would permit a person to go to the moon and back, if they are true. If the apollo-14 astronauts did get less than 3 rem then that’s fine, but do you see the circular logic here? You assume nasa is telling the truth to begin with on the numbers that the astronauts received when you don’t even have proof they went. Your radiation numbers come from nasa. Of course nasa will not say that the numbers were high enough to kill.
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July 18th, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Roger said:
See that’s seems to be the problem with you dummies as a class: you seem to think that science is carved in stone, and once something is said, it remains true regardless. What was known about the Van Allen belts, at the time they were discovered, was modified as new information came to light. Of course, these incremental gains in knowledge didn’t get covered in the popular press. “Man Trapped on Earth” sells magazines, “Better Measurements of Van Allen Belt Radiation” only gets published in journals.
Maybe you should look at things like this a bit more closely, before accusing everyone of telling lies.
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July 18th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Roger said:
In the early days of space exploration, a lot was being thrown back and forth about what the possibilities and limitations of human space flight would be. When Sputnik was first launched, some were afraid that LEO altitudes would be so full of tiny meteorite debris that it would make it impossible to orbit a satellite. Before any living thing was sent to space, many feared that the circulatory system would not work properly in zero G. It was also feared that it was possible that a human would become so unbalanced and dizzy they could not even keep their eyes focused on an item and would be incapable of preforming tasks.
This sounds funny now, but remember, nobody had any experience with this stuff or the slightest idea what to expect.
The Van Allen belts were discovered by the US satellite Explorer-1. The satellite provided very sparse data back. It did not have a data tape recorder so it could only provide data when it was within range of a receiving station. It had a simple omnidirectional geiger-muller tube that was initially intended to detect cosmic rays. It was discovered that there was a lot of radiation detected at higher altitudes in the orbit. From this it was inferred that there was a belt of radiation around the earth.
Yes, there was speculation that this could be too strong for humans to venture into or past. However, the initial measurements were VERY rough and also only measured a small portion of the belts. There was fear that higher altitudes would see much stronger radiation.
Of course, these fears, like fears of the circulatory system not working in space were put to rest as more data was collected on subsequent missions.
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July 18th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
Interesting discussion, but Roger is wrong on several things.
It seems that scientists really need to watch their words and even if they do they can be missquoted and missused. To the day he died, James Van Allen always argued that he never stated that the belts were strong enough to be lethal to humans who tried to leave earth. He never said that as a fact. What he did say on the topic, when the belts were first discovered was that they MIGHT stand in the way of human space flight and they MIGHT NOT. He said that with the data they had at the time, they couldn’t tell, but that it was a possibility that the radiation might be insurmountable to space flight.
So yes, it was a reasonable concern, until better measurements were made. That’s all Dr. Van Allen ever said. Also, when that data did come from both US and Russian satellites that were sent up to take better surveys, he again refined the statement.
This is really damn annoying. People love to take statements out of context and bastardize them to fit their own agenda.
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July 18th, 2010 at 10:29 pm
So if it was all faked why didn’t the Russians say so? They tracked the missions on radar and monitored US radio messages. It would be very simple to Direction Find to see that messages were orgninating in space. Ham Radio operators did this as well. The commie bears did not claim fraud – even though that would have suited them. They knew it was real.
These wacky claims are just a way of making yourself seem important and in on some “big secret” it is a way of appearing to be in control of a world that is scary and uncontrollable. Normal people do this by accepting a lack of control and not needing to make oursevles out to be something we are not.
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July 19th, 2010 at 1:37 am
The signals probably did come from the moon. Look up above and you’ll notice I never dispute that spacecraft went there, but there’s no evidence they contained people. They just were robot or remote control missions which can be done and they played back all that transmission stuff.
Maybe the russians knew. The Russians didn’t say anything about the van allen radiation or the fact that it would have been impossible to get a man there and back given the heat and cold and that a space suit probably would melt on the moon. I think the russians knew.
They kept up the act as the Americans did probably because they got something in return. Maybe it was that America knew some dirty secret of theirs. They could have made a deal not to tell if Russia does not tell the world America’s dirty secret. Otherwise, maybe nasa just payed them. Maybe the Russians were the enemy, but I bet even the enemy would shut up for enough billions of dollars.
I think there’s more to the cold war than you think. Did the Russians and US really have it at eachother? Maybe or maybe it was all a ruse to support their own military industrial complexes. It’s possible they are a lot friendlier under the surface than you think.
“Hey, Russia, do me a favor and make a threat against me so that I can make the excuse to spend more to support the rich military companies”
“Okay, sure US, but you have to do the same for me, because I want to have an excuse to make the military industry richer too”
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July 19th, 2010 at 1:43 am
Well now we’re just getting silly.
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July 19th, 2010 at 1:48 am
Uh, well Russia didn’t have military production companies, but they had design bureaus and government-run production houses. Actually, if the goal was simply to get the party leaders and bosses of industry rich, which they were, they didn’t need to actually bother with buying military products or anything. The system worked differently so they didn’t need to make purchases or contracts for anything. They also didn’t need excuses for anything. They just did it.
I think you’ll find the ideological differences between the USSR/Soviet Block and the US (and UK, Canada, France, Australia and so on) was pretty damn real and the two sides had plenty to not get along over.
Also, on occasion one side did find out a ‘dirty little secret’ of the other. When that happened, they usually were pretty fast to publish it. The world on the two sides of the iron curtain did not trust each other at all. That is very clear in all their interactions.
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July 19th, 2010 at 1:49 am
Roger said:
This is the point that Occam’s Razor cuts in. You can’t keep multiplying odd reasons in more and more fantastical strings. This was understood in the Dark Ages already by Christian apologists, who were already attempting to explain the illogical. In the end the simplest explanation is most probably true, and in this case, men going to the Moon is the least complex.
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July 19th, 2010 at 2:36 am
Dude, the shadows in that photo are all wrong.
I mean if you look at the shadows on the monitor base and on his cheeks you’ll clearly see that…
For my part, having done my final university project on sloshing of fluid in tanks not so very long ago I’m happily convinced that NASA sent people to the moon and back. Frankly the blindingly enormity of the research produced is pretty impressive evidence. Who would bother to do (and pay for!) all of that work otherwise?
Seriously, the sloshing bible is still a NASA report (SP-106) from 1967. It’s been given a facelift and polished a little since, but the text is pretty much unchanged.
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July 19th, 2010 at 5:51 am
drbuzz0 said:
Do you have some proof of that?
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July 19th, 2010 at 6:08 am
Roger said:
In the early days of nuclear power they were not sure that the reaction could be controlled, but after more study they found ways to control the reaction rate. Or are nuclear power plants all fakes?
In the early days of nuclear weapons there were concerns that a single detonation could cause worldwide damage, but after more study they found this wasn’t the case. Or were the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with all the testing in the 50’s and 60’s fakes?
There have been repeated stories in the main stream media of asteroids that are going to ‘hit’ or come dangerously close to the Earth, but all these reports are based on early limited data. In all the case so far (sooner or later there will be one that does come dangerously close or actually hit the Earth again) further study has refined the orbit estimates and shown no danger. Does this mean the data was faked and the Earth really was hit recently by an asteroid?
All the case I mentioned were examples of the media, with help in some case from researchers who may want to stroke their egos, publishing early data that was later refined and corrected. More study to correct/refine data is the way science works but the later correction with no doomsday predictions doesn’t sell newspapers, so most people never read about it.
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July 19th, 2010 at 8:24 am
Roger said:
Right. Sure. And nobody every talked about it.
FYI Russia (USSR) had no “military industral complex” they just had the State.
I would also add that you could not fake the radio signals relably with 1960s tech. Your “taped” conversatsions would be on a reel to reel player. How long would a 2 week tape be? Did they work smoothly in changing gravity? How would mission control keep it on “script” for 2 weeks? The whole thing is silly beyond reason.
You basic statement is we cannot “prove” people were on the ships – the radio evidance does that, but you reject it out of hand. No evidance would be accepted because you are a “beleiver” – you cannot argue with beleif. Thanksfully the world is not made out of belief.
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July 19th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Compared to the dramatic, rugged landscape people had been led to expect by science fiction artwork, the actual lunar landscape appears smooth, soft with the erosion of billions of years of micrometeoroid impacts, and kind of dull. If the Apollo program had been faked, the landscape would have been portrayed as more rugged and dramatic, in line with people’s expectations.
The same can be said concerning images returned by interplanetary probes. If they had been faked, they’d be more in line with pre-space age expectations.
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July 19th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Wow. A lot of people seem to be really committed to defend this and gang up on one guy asking the questions.
If you actually take the time to dig deeper you might find there is a lot more to this story than I’ve even begun to go into.
Interesting observation:
Going to the moon was the goal declared by president Kennedy. He said this before they had good information about the radiation and the dangers.
It is believed that by 1963 NASA already knew the whole thing was not going to work and had started to plan how to fake it. Chances are Kennedy would have found out about it. How do you think he would have taken it? I bet he would have been very angry to hear this. Kennedy would have said that if we couldn’t go to the moon, then we should just be truthful and tell the people that it turns out that they can’t do it. It would have meant he would have to apologize for making a promise he could not keep, but the American people would still probably understand that it was a science issue that they had to face. Faking it would be the kind of thing Kennedy would never stand for.
Then what happened? Kennedy went to the place where NASA is headquartered in Houston Texas. He went onto nasa’s own turf and probably ripped their people a new one and told them he would not ever stand for fakery and was going to let the whole thing out and stop the big scam.
Is it a coincidence that the next day after Houston he went to Dallas and was shot dead under very suspicious circumstances and there’s tons of evidence the government was involved.
Then Johnson takes over and is all gunhoe for the moon and never a peep is heard that it may not be possible to go there.
Coincidence?
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July 19th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Oh not this again.
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July 19th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Roger said:
Yes.
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July 19th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
So what was his schedule on the 21st of November?
“On November 21, the President and First Lady departed on Air Force One for the two-day, five-city tour of Texas.
The first stop was San Antonio. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Governor John B. Connally and Senator Ralph W. Yarborough led the welcoming party and accompanied the President to Brooks Air Force Base for the dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health Center. Continuing on to Houston, he addressed a Latin American citizens’ organization and spoke at a testimonial dinner for Congressman Albert Thomas before ending the day in Fort Worth.”
No mention of a meeting at NASA in Houston, but of course it was all covered up. So he went there to tell them that the US would not fake a Moon landing and we would just have to tell the country that the science would not allow a Moon mission.
Then why in San Antonio, on his way to rip NASA for suggesting we just fake the moon landing, did he say; “I think the United States should be a leader. A country as rich and powerful as this which bears so many burdens and responsibilities, which has so many opportunities, should be second to none. And in December, while I do not regard our mastery of space as anywhere near complete, while I recognize that there are still areas where we are behind–at least in one area, the size of the booster–this year I hope the United States will be ahead. And I am for it. We have a long way to go. Many weeks and months and years of long, tedious work lie ahead. There will be setbacks and frustrations and disappointments. There will be, as there always are, pressures in this country to do less in this area as in so many others, and temptations to do something else that is perhaps easier. But this research here must go on. This space effort must go on. The conquest of space must and will go ahead. That much we know. That much we can say with confidence and conviction.”
He was getting ready to say it wasn’t possible, so he gives a speech saying he has confidence that the US will conquer space. He knowingly lies in this speech while planning to tell the world that it is impossible. Kind of strange actions for a man who “would not ever stand for fakery and was going to let the whole thing out and stop the big scam.”
So again I guess the speech was faked and all the news reports of the speech were faked and anyone at the speech who might spill the beans was killed.
Then in less than 24 hours NASA arranges not just the assassination but the cover up. And to this day no really proof has been found.
And even if you basic premise is true, why would they take such a big risk. Why wouldn’t they just sabotage the President’s plane? I mean they didn’t have any conscience, so killing a bunch of other people wouldn’t matter and with a mid-air explosion and crash all the evidence would be destroyed, much less chance of discovery and much fewer people involved.
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July 19th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Roger said:
No, there is no coincidence, because nearly all of the so-called events you mention are completely based on your own presumptions and are not actually documented as having happened.
All you can say is he was in Houston the day before being killed. The idea that he “ripped their people a new one” or even met with NASA personnel is completely your own invention (or maybe the invention of someone whose website or book you read) The idea he was going to announce to the country that the moon was unreachable is your own invention as well.
There is no coincidence because none of this happened
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July 19th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Roger said:
Of course we shouldn’t mischaracterize people asking hard questions. Let’s go through your questions, step by step. By your response, we can determine whether you are asking hard questions or just throwing stuff out. I won’t prejudge you.
I’m sure some of them out there are not the brightest, just like any group, but it’s not fair to find a few things wrong with their statements and then dismiss the whole notion.
Quite true. Likewise, don’t assume that people are just picking on the idiots just because a single post hasn’t addressed every single possible complaint ever made.
Countries are prone to lying to benefit themselves and the only way to keep this from getting out of hand is to ask the hard questions, which you will notice NASA does not like to answer.
Because countries do lie doesn’t mean they always do. In fact, most countries are telling the truth most of the time, because lies have a way of making themselves known, and will generally only lie if the stakes are very high. I am unconvinced that the moon landing really constituted such high stakes, but as it’s a “what if” question, there’s really not much point evaluating the whole premise based on that.
First, lets consider the fact that laser beams do bounce back.
I have no doubt that there are reflectors on the moon and no doubt that there is other man-made items on the moon.
The US did send spacecraft to the moon. There can be no real debate there.
The big question, the one which is more likely to cause the problems for the NASA-fans is the question to whether these spacecraft had people on them.
Actually, this isn’t a hard question; this is in the same ilk as the “countries are prone to lying” comment. It’s pure speculation. Do you have any evidence NASA did not send people in the Apollo spacecraft? Fact is, if NASA faked it, they wasted a hell of a lot of money in the process, because the people were, quite frankly, the cheapest part of the package.
Nobody will debate that you can send remote controlled vehicles to the moon or send robotic missions and transmitters.
That’s not the point.
If it’s not, why ask it? I thought you were asking hard questions, not speculating.
robots can survive radiation that humans can’t.
Certainly true; look at what Galileo endured before it accumulated so much damage it had to be deorbited. But humans can endure more than you apparently think. The Van Allen belts are not someplace you want to live. But it is certainly possible to transit them and live. I’ll address this in more detail later.
So what do we have for proof?
Reflectors on the moon?
Signals received from the moon?
This proves a spacecraft went there, but were there people on it?
There are more signals than just the retroreflectors. Have you heard of an ALSEP? These experiment packages were RTG powered and allowed NASA to continue gathering data long after the astronauts left. (Until funding ran out in 1977, actually.) They remain the most capable experiment packages ever sent to the Moon. They recorded vibrations from automatic mortar rounds, from S-IVB impacts (including that from Apollo 13), and from LM ascent stage impacts, as well as from natural sources. NASA has contemplated attempting to reactivate them; they may still work.
There were also audio, video, and film recordings made of the astronauts on the Moon. I know you believe them to be faked, but I’d like to know if you have any compelling reason for believing that, rather than merely that it is consistent with your belief that the mission was faked.
Then there are the artifacts, the sheer quantity of which indicate that a spacecraft capable of delivering humans went to the Moon and back. Have you seen the camera from Surveyor 3? (I have. It’s at the National Air & Space Museum.) Have you seen moon rocks, or read the research performed around the world, by thousands of independent scientists, on the Apollo samples? Did you know that the Apollo samples are consistent with the Luna samples obtained robotically by the Soviets?
Could those be recovered by robot? No. Seriously. The best robots of the day could return small samples of lunar soil — a single, blindly collected core sample. The Apollo samples are far more than that. The samples were collected in a very deliberate manner, not blindly or randomly at all, and in the case of later missions, were transported a considerable distance to the spacecraft for return to Earth. Robots can’t even do that *today*. Cutting edge robotics researchers have managed to build rovers that can identify meteorites in Antarctica as they encounter them, but they can’t pick them up — and it’s a heck of a lot easier to do that sort of identification against snow than against lunar regolith. (Meteorites stick out like a sore thumb on the Antarctic icepack.) And that’s cutting edge in 2010. It wasn’t possible in 1969.
The other thing is the sheer quantity of samples. They returned hundreds of pounds of rocks on every mission. No unmanned mission has ever done that. If you have the ability to return hundreds of pounds of rocks, you frankly have the capability to send humans. Ahter all, the hard parts are the same whether you’re returning people or rocks. The Apollo system had the capacity to send people. Why *wouldn’t* they?
Of course, this is still in the speculation boat. They *could* have launched Apollo empty. Yes, that is true, and in fact the early shakedown missions were unmanned. But why bother building Apollo if you’re *not* going to send people? You clearly agree that NASA did all the hardest parts. Why would then then fake the easy parts?
Evidence is that there were not.
Would you be willing to share that evidence? LIke I said, I’d be interested in some hard questions. So far, all I’m getting from you is hand-waving and speculation.
Most of the pictures and movies are faked. All the ones with humans are of course faked.
Special effects of various sorts like wires or slowmotion and careful editing.
It’s obvious.
Obvious? To you, perhaps. It doesn’t look like slow motion, careful editing, wires, or any combination of the above. Not to me, anyway. Perhaps you could explain why this is so obvious to you, rather than simply a claim made to prop up a chain of supposition in lieu of evidence.
But look at the issue of safety.
You go through the Van Allen belts and you get cooked by radiation. It is possible that this could be avoided if they had the spacecraft coated in hundreds of tons of lead, but that’d never get off the ground.
In all likelihood, you’d be dead before making it to the moon, but making it there and back going through the belts twice is suicide!
This is not true at all, and it’s not really concealed knowledge or anything. The Van Allen belts are not someplace where you’d want to park a space station and live for a few years. But zipping through the thinnest parts in just a few hours is acceptable. It’s true that it will increase your radiation exposure, but if you had the chance to walk on the Moon, would *you* say no? Seriously, these men were largely fighter pilots. They’d probably gotten as much cumulative radiation exposure from that as they did from their trips through the Van Allen belts. They wore dosimeters (just as astronauts today are required to do) in order to track exposure; it would found to be acceptable after the missions.
The Apollo mission trajectories are rather interesting, and I recommend you search for that sort of information. (If you’re really interested in asking hard questions, that is, rather than just idly hand-waving. Depends on what sort of person you are.) The Van Allen belts are not a uniform sphere around the Earth. If you are clever, you can arrange it so your spacecraft passes through as little of them as possible. The fact that the Moon’s orbit is inclined so much to the Earth’s ecliptic helps a great deal — the Apollo missions were carried out in a very favorable time as far as radiation exposure goes. (Better even than NASA realized in the day; the Sun was in a deep solar minimum. Solar radiation wasn’t as well understood or appreciated at the time; while the Van Allen belts were well accounted for by the mission design, a coronal mass ejection was not. As far as that goes, the crew were protected mainly by luck.)
Incidentally, hundreds of tons of lead are not needed even for longer exposure. The best shielding material is actually water. And guess what! They had water, and various liquid hydrocarbons, in big tanks in the Service Module. They also had their potable water supplies, of course, but the main shielding came by orienting the Apollo “stack” such that the massive Service Module was facing into the direction of travel. (The radiation in the Van Allen Belts comes in the form of charged particles, thus, they’ll mainly come from whatever direction you’re travelling, as you plow through them.)
Maybe you think you could survive. What about the question of the long term?
Radiation causes cancer and anyone exposed to very high amounts, even if they survived it, they might be okay for a bit after, but they’d probably get cancer within a few years.
Why do you think that? People get more radiation from x-rays or even radon seeping into their basements and live long and fruitful lives. Not everybody who gets exposed to increased radiation will have cancer in a few years. In fact, most will not, which is why you need huge numbers of people before you even get statistical significance in any cancer research. Even *smoking* doesn’t have that strong a correlation with cancer.
But that’s not the point. The Apollo astronauts *did* knowingly accept an increased risk of cancer. They also accepted the much more imminent threats of horrible instant death. I mean seriously, the Apollo astronauts faced many other much bigger threats than a possible increase in their lifetime risk of cancer. I’ll let an astronaut put it much better than I:
“We put seven people on top of 6 million pounds of high explosives and launch them into orbit at speeds six times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?” — John Young
Now, Young was talking about the Space Shuttle, but the comments apply equally well to all manned spaceflight. (Young actually walked on the Moon during Apollo 16, incidentally. He went on to command the very first Shuttle mission, which was remarkable in that it was the first time a manned spacecraft had made its maiden flight with humans on board. Even the Soviet shuttle didn’t take that risk.)
Since everyone who went to the moon would get so much radiation, most or all will die of cancer.
You clearly understand cancer about as well as you understand the Van Allen belts, which is to say not at all. That’s probably a good thing; it means you probably haven’t had much personal experience with it, and if that’s the case, then I am happy for you.
Being exposed to a carcinogen does not guarantee you will develop cancer. A lot of people will develop cancer regardless; the causes are not all known, and some are likely just part of the inherent complexity of the human system. Even an elevated level of exposure is no guarantee. Radiation’s correlation to cancer is actually not as well understood as you may expect; no one has ever identified a minimum “safe” dose, which is probably in large part because it’s so random — one person may get cancer from a small exposure, while another may be fine after a heavy exposure. There are nuclear industry workers who have had much higher exposure than any astronaut and never developed cancer.
Incidentally, I suspect that the highest space exposure to radiation is not in any of the Apollo astronauts but in men like Sergei Krikalov, who presently holds the world’s record for total hours spent in space (803 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes). Exposure time is very significant.
Now lets look at the real life astronauts.
There are twelve astronauts who are said to have walked on the moon.
This all happened about 40 years ago.
The twelve all got a huge amount of radiation forty years ago.
Three have since died.
That’s only 25%.
So after 40 years, most of those who got zapped in the Van Alen belts are still alive and well?
Then there are 14 men who orbited the moon, or so NASA tells us.
Three of them are dead an the rest are alive.
Would you expect that this group of 26 who were all passed through the Van Alen belts 40 years ago would all be in such remarkably good health?
These are almost all military men; they kept in good shape. So yeah, they’re mostly still alive and in pretty good health despite pushing 80. Seriously, eating right and exercising will, for most people, make a great deal of difference. I notice, however, that you did not bother to look up actual cause of death (or, for that matter, the actual radiation exposure, though we already addressed that you clearly do not know what it was).
So let’s do your work for you. Hard questions? No, not really, unless you think calling up Wikipedia is hard.
The first Apollo astronaut to die was Jack Swigert. (Apollo 13 CMP) He died at the tender age of 51, of bone cancer.
Ron Evans (Apollo 17 CMP) died at the age of 56 of a heart attack.
Stuart Roosa (Apollo 14 CMP) died at the age of 61 due to complications from pancreatitis. (I was unable to learn more than that; pancreatitis can be associated with pancreatic cancer, which isn’t always diagnosed before it kills, but it can be associated with other things as well. Doctors likely would not know unless the family had wanted an autopsy. Most families don’t, unless there is suspicion of foul play.)
James Irwin (Apollo 15 LMP) died at age 61 of a heart attack. It was his second heart attack.
Alan Shephard (Apollo 14 CDR, also the first American in space) died at age 74 of leukemia.
Pete Conrad (Apollo 12 CDR) was the most recent death; he died of internal bleeding following a motorcycle accident at the age of 69.
So there it is, if are interested. Of course, none of us knows the rest of these men’s health histories. Medical privacy is important. For all any of us knows, all of them have had cancer that simply wasn’t terminal. (Not all cancer is.)
I think not.
The truth is obvious.
No human ever went to the moon.
Really? So far, all your arguments revolve around a single point: that you believe it is impossible to survive passage through the Van Allen belts. This is in defiance of what is known about the Van Allen Belts. You wouldn’t want to build a summer home there, but you can get through them without much fuss, especially if you plan your trip for the fastest transit and orient your spacecraft to put its large tanks between you and the direction of travel.
Can I ask you some hard questions?
* If they faked it, how did they pull off the hammer & feather experiment?
* Why do the “rooster tails” behind the LRVs look like that?
* How come the flag flaps exactly as it would if there is no air to damp out its movement?
* How did they recover hundreds of pounds of lunar samples, when robotic technology of the day could only manage pre-choreographed movements?
* How were all the experiment packages laid out so neatly, despite robotic technology even today not being up to that? What was the technology used, and why did we apparently lose it?
* The solar wind capture experiment, which was not really repeated until Genesis; how did they pull that off with the tecnology of the day?
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July 19th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Or, to summarize….
Roger, your main argument is that it was too dangerous to send people. I quoted John Young above, and in case you don’t want to go through the whole point-by-point, here’s the quote again:
“We put seven people on top of 6 million pounds of high explosives and launch them into orbit at speeds six times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?”
If you’re willing to sit on top of a Saturn V on a very uncomfortable trip where even the slightest screw up could kill you instantly, are you seriously gonna be worried about maybe getting cancer in fifteen years?
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July 19th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Calli Arcale – wow. Let me just add “what he said”
I would also add that John Young was a Navy test pilot. Flew the first manned Gemmi Mission (brining in the Corned beef sandwhich).
Flew on Apollo 10 (around the Moon) and was the first person to fly solo in the CM.
Was backup commonder of Apollo 13 and assisted in saving the crew by testing all the modifications.
Commanded Apollo 16 and walked on the moon
Commanded Shuttle Test Flight 1
Commanded the first launch of Spacelab.
He worked for Nasa for 42 years and retired at 74.
I suddenly feel lazy.
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July 19th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Roger said:
Aww, man! That’s beautiful. It was Alan Shepard on the grassy knoll.
But where does he fit in with the homosexual Cuba sympathizers from the Castro District? Did Shepard have a relationship with Marilyn Monroe? Was Oswald there to try to kill Shepard before Shepard could kill Kennedy because Oswald was a bitter enemy of Neil Armstrong, and a living Kennedy would not have credited Armstrong with the moon landing, but a dead Kennedy would put Oswald out of the space program? How have they managed to cover up Oswald’s involvement in the space program? Is there a robotic sniper’s nest in the sea of tranquility? So many pieces to the puzzle, but how do they all fit together?
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July 19th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Chris Brown said:
Actually it’s what she said. While this page does have a slight bias toward male readership (about 65/35% by one analytics tool I used), Calli is one of the fine lady commenter here, and a damn good commenter with some damn good comments too.
BTW: I’m not entirely sure why the readership is tilted toward males. This is not intended as a male-oriented site, eventhough I am male. However, by the same token, 65/35 is not considered so bad. Many blogs have a worse bias one way or the other.
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July 19th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
The funny thing is that any universe in which these wild explanations favoured by conspiracy theorists could possibly be true would be one that by necessity Occam’s Razor would not hold (or be very weak). It can be shown that such a universe would be so probabilistically unstable that it would just as likely disappear down the rabbit-hole at any given time, as not.
In the end this is the final, physical, answer to the general refrain: “…but how do you know for sure (prove) things couldn’t have happened this way.” Well because if they could, as consistently as conspiracy theorists imagine, this universe would have long winked out of existence.
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July 20th, 2010 at 12:04 am
Moon Landing Conspiracy –> Kennedy Assassination ???
Are you freakin kidding me?
What’s next? Roswell and 9/11 somehow fitting into the puzzle?
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July 20th, 2010 at 12:06 am
DV82XL said:
I thinkt he easiest way to get them to admit the moom landing was real is to have NASA say it was fake. They would would then say the Government must be lying.
I know one “moon denier” in real life. I honestly think he only does it to piss people off and make himself the center of attention at parties. It drives his wife nutz since she is a Ph.D. and it just makes her look crazy for marrying the loon.
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July 20th, 2010 at 2:31 am
drbuzz0 said:
I know this is going WAY off-topic, but how does your analytics tool work? Are we each secretly betraying our genders each time we post or are you just using the mindrays to spy on us?
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July 20th, 2010 at 9:40 am
I’mnotreallyhere said:
Actually I have absolutely no idea how it works, but I think it probably is a rough aproximation based on some kind of survey data, like knowing a small portion of the genders of visitors to some sites – kind of like Neilson ratings work, where they only know a tiny portion of viewers demographics and use that as representative data.
Or maybe it’s all bull. I don’t really know.
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July 20th, 2010 at 10:31 am
drbuzz0 said:
I think they reverse the polarity of your monitor so they can see the user and make a judgment regarding sex. It’s technology that was reverse engineered from wreckage at the Area 51 crash, but all records of its origins were lost when the Feds demolished Bldg 7 of the WTC.
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July 20th, 2010 at 10:44 am
Magic Donuts said:
You mean you didn’t know? They staged through Area 51, using teleporters from the Roswell ship to get in and out in under a second (just long enough to fire), and the speed + the cloaking tech was why there are exactly zero witnesses who saw a second shooter. The problem is that a guy in the Pentagon was going to spill the beans on September 12, 2001, so they crashed a jetliner into the place to silence him (in an ironic twist, trhey did it on the same day that a terrorist group run by a crazy Saudi crashed two planes into the WTC in an entirely unrelated incident).
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July 20th, 2010 at 10:54 am
Moon hoaxing is one of my pet peeves.
And I kind of typify this XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/386/
In my experience, most skeptical blogs and science-related forums are predominantly male. The ratio is shifting, which I find very encouraging. More girls are learning that it’s okay to be interested in science and stuff like that. Sometimes I wonder if the reason so much nonsense has prevailed for so long was because fully half of the population was raised explicitly to think they didn’t need science. And since that half of the population was also most of the teachers and caretakers for the next generation, a lot of boys also grew up with the impression that science isn’t important. I think girls getting interested in science is a great sign; it’s a bellwether for society as a whole.
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July 21st, 2010 at 1:54 am
Calli Arcale said:
I keep trying (and failing) to find an Australian comedy site from years gone by with a spoof on the moon-hoax which pointed out all the shadow discrepancies and scientific errors in episodes of Button Moon.
Calli Arcale said:
My mother taught herself physics back in the early sixties because her girls-only school didn’t offer it as a subject because it wasn’t suitable for young ladies. Our generation at least gets equal access, even if the vast majority of science students are still male (especially in the physical / engineering sciences).
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July 21st, 2010 at 5:50 am
Roger said:
You are not asking questions, you are forcing your religions onto infidels.
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July 22nd, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Check it, dudes — Darryl Cunningham has done the Moon Hoax now!
http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/2010/07/moon-hoax.html
I expect this is awesome (as his Andrew Wakefield cartoon and his homeopathy cartoon were), but I haven’t yet read it. I wanted to pass it along first because I’m so tickled that he’s hitting this pet topic.
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July 25th, 2010 at 9:14 pm
drbuzz0 said:
The whole site is, isn’t it?
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July 27th, 2010 at 1:28 am
It got me thinking with recent Afganistan documents leak, there were so many leaks and exposures in USA history, how can sane person belive that if Moon landing was hoax, how could goverment keep it secret? There has been no documents and testimonies, just a bunch of fringe fools pulling ”evidence” out of their collective ass, in order to get their 15 minutes of fame.
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July 29th, 2010 at 4:47 am
http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/2010/jul/22/just-another-day-office-skeptics-convention/ – A good write-up of TAM8 along with more info on Jarrah White.
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August 18th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
It was refreshing to see the non-Little Dude from the Moon version. Thank you for reporting the actual version of events. I am afraid the Little Dude seems to cherry pick what he showed on YouTube. I am beginning to think he is very disingenuous. I have no issues with alternative views, but his continued bad science and treatment of others that oppose him is becoming tiresome now. If only Adam Savage knew how he had arrived at his 67% playback speed, he might have given him an even put down that he received.
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August 18th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Roger said:
Jarrah? Is that you, son? You really need to go back to YouTube and leave these nice people alone.
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August 18th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
ddpalmer said:
Touché! This Roger idiot is an expert moon hoax propagandist. He’s probably the best they have to offer. He just throws it out there, deep and wide, like a Gatling gun. It’s ridiculous how complex the moon hoax has to grow in order to satisfy all the conditions of his claims. So many people had to be involved in the hoax to pull it off the way he suggests, that you have to wonder, who were they trying to fool? All but five percent of the population had to be involved in the cover-up — no doubt, the five percent of the population who believe it was a hoax? So why bother?
He doesn’t consider all the loose ends he leaves hanging. He never attempts to think out the logistics of his silly little schemes. It’s creationist mentality at its worst. He believes that if he throws a few stupid accusations out there, that’s enough to discredit the entire history of manned space flight. It’s best to ignore him. After blowing some steam, he’ll eventually slither away and disappear back under his rock.
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