History

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Clayton — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 06:47:34 GMT

@eliot: Yeah, I agree that the visibility of the stars is definitely not one of the pressing issues.

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

eliotn — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 06:18:01 GMT

"So, you're basically claiming that the cameras could not resolve any stars? Consider this photo taken of Earth on the way to the Moon during Apollo 17:

There is no moon surface here, no Sun in the frame. What bright object is responsible for the blacking out of all the stars? Since the path of the moon rocket would have had to be nearly in the ecliptic plane (the Moon is tilted just 5 degrees from the ecliptic, there should be any number of planets visible in these shots. Venus is the brightest astronomical object beside the Sun and Moon (and, in this case, Earth itself) with an apparent magnitude of around -4.9 from the Earth's surface on a clear night - sans Earth's atmosphere, its apparent magnitude would be even greater.

I'll do some more digging on this because it seems too obvious a point to have been overlooked. The conspiracy-theoretic explanations for simply blacking out the stars that I've seen given is that the astronomers could not have been fooled. But then it seems like this is an even more incredible story. "Our cameras were too insensitive to pick up any stars." Seriously?"

I might have explained it wrong. The problem with the pictures has to do with shutter speed. To make the pictures look good, as opposed to taking pictures of the stars, they used a really low shutter speed that could make the lit objects look good. However, because the shutter speed was so fast, the stars did not appear, because not enough light from the stars got onto the camera. Reducing the shutter speed would overexpose the image, unfortunately, due to the relative brightness of everything but the stars. This is a realistic limitation of photography.

For an explanation of why some people don't accept this as proof of a hoax, read item 4 under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories#Photograph_and_film_oddities

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Anenome — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:26:34 GMT

Malachi:
I like your textbook idea.

as for ice in space, are you suggesting that whenever (or most times) scientists mention it, they are referring to hydrates?

No, not always. Comets, for instance, certainly have actual ice on them. But they must have come from recent explosions of planets or something, 'cause it seems like the ice would have sublimated off eons ago.

Or maybe the rate of sublimation drops very much as ice gets colder. That seems more likely to me. Since space is very, very cold, unless sun hits it of course, but more importantly it's always very low pressure.

We'd be talking about the extreme lower left of this diagram, and moving right, but not up, when sunlight hits it:

So, ice is quite reflective, it's a question then of how hot ice gets when sunlight hits it when it's already near absolute zero. It's certainly imaginable that the rate of sublimation could be extremely low still, dunno for sure. Would be a good question to ask a NASA scientist.

As for the moon, these guys talk about calthrate hydrates: http://permafrost.gi.alaska.edu/content/possibility-clathrate-hydrates-moon

Malachi:
That seems like another pesky detail that the reader would like to know.

It's all theory till someone lands a mining bot in there. Water on the moon could make a settlement viable, be it in hydrates or ice or some combination. We do know that water is everywhere in space. I only wondered specifically if there's actual ice on the moon in large quantities.

Malachi:
Because astronomical literature contains many references to ice in what is typically considered a vaccuum. On the moon, from what I have been reading, the story is that there is solid water in the bottom of craters that are deep enough to escape direct solar radiation. Theres also supposed to be millions of tons of it.

Well, your question prompted me to look up the phase change diagram and consider if maybe the coldness and vacuum might mean incredibly low sublimation rates that would make such a thing possible. Having done skimmed that info, I think now that it may be possible for ice to live a long time in space after all.

Comet's tails are probably sublimated ice, and they last quite long after all.

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Malachi — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 23:37:18 GMT

1) Motive issues. Praxeologically, the Moon missions serve the same function the Pyramids did for the Egyptian Pharaohs. They are big, impressive monuments to the massive swinging balls and unsurpassed excellence and "can-do" of the USG. Superlatives like "heroic" "superhuman" "titanic" are regularly invoked both in respect to the operational achievements of the lunar astronauts and in respect to the technological achievements of NASA.

first of all, you cant say that apollo served the same function as the pyramids since the function of the pyramids is still an open question. That question is beyond the scope of this thread, so lets just leave it there. Secondly, I argue that the apollo program was a reconnaissance campaign. Dont confuse the propaganda that surrounds the program and uses it for other purposes with the actual program. Humans have recorded transient lunar phenomena for over a thousand years, when ballistic missile tech got to a point where people believed it was feasible to explore luna, they did.

Also, in terms of basic risk analysis, the lunar plunge just doesn't make any sense. Going to orbit the Moon is insanely impressive and the risk of just going and orbiting the Moon is many, many orders of magnitude less risky than descending to the lunar surface. While descending to the lunar surface is more impressive than merely orbiting, it is not nearly as much more impressive as it is more risky. Cost-benefit wise, it's just not worth it. The final moments of a beloved American hero being broadcast across live TV as he burns up and suffocates to death, stranded on the Lunar surface is just beyond unthinkable and USG would be 100% to blame for it.

This is built upon the paragraph before it, and so I contend that only a manned reconnaissance mission (or series of missions, i.e. a campaign) could have returned the data that they wanted. As for the risk, the planners and powers that be were not astronauts, they operated through intermediaries and used regular folk to do the dangerous work. I also contend that if the lethal accident on apollo 1 where three americans died in a training/test sequence, and the public reaction to that incident, reveals that the risk of dead, dying, or marooned astronauts was not so bad as you suppose. The public accepted the risk because of many reasons, the astronauts were largely active-duty military pilots, they were volunteers, and people identified with them.

2) Technical issues. The biggest hang-up for me is the blatantly insufficient testing of the lunar landing. They should have gone back after Apollo 10 at least three or four more times before even dreaming of taking the final plunge. If the program really was so reckless as to move straight from Apollo 10 to Apollo 11, then the flawless* record of success from there on out is simply unbelievable. The risks in getting down to and back up off the lunar surface are almost incalculable.

I tend to agree that the risks are incalculable, but that causes me to reject this argument. I dont understand what further testing you would have done between the flyover and the landing. And I dont believe that repeating apollo 10 three or four times wold have been worth the cost, when those missions could have gathered data from the lunar surface. Theres also precedent for nasa deleting what they considered to be superfluous tests from the schedule.

There are other, less glaring - but still fatal - technical issues. How the modules were kept cool, how the astronauts survived the radiation, and so on.

http://www.wartnaby.org/ideas/space_radiator.html

I dont think that lethal amounts of radiation are a given.

EDITED TO ADD: I'm sorry, Clayton, I saw that bare url and got to thinking how much time and effort you put into your posts and thought it might seem kind of disrespectful to just bleh with the bare url. So I will explain, I did a search and found out they used space radiators, the thing is that space is actually very cold in that it doesnt have much thermal energy, indeed there isnt much of anything. So they convert the heat into infrared radiation and beam it out into space. This works inside an atmosphere, but the inbound thermal radiation is almost as bad, so its not worth the trouble.

3) Evidentiary issues. Look at the footage in the videos I linked above. It's simply not believable. They must have faked those portions of the footage. This leads me to want to dig further in terms of evidence. I'm generally uninterested in evidence unless I suspect somebody's lying. Then I want to find the proof they are lying. And you only need one piece of evidence. You do not need to build a "preponderance" of evidence. This isn't a court case.

I agree with you that nasa lies, and has lied countless times about the moon and the space program. The existence of a lie does not mean that any story that contradicts it is true. In fact, you cold prove that every image that nasa had released was fake, and that still would not resolve the issue at hand. Fake pictures dont prove that someone didnt do something.

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Malachi — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 22:55:45 GMT

I like your textbook idea.

as for ice in space, are you suggesting that whenever (or most times) scientists mention it, they are referring to hydrates? That seems like another pesky detail that the reader would like to know. Because astronomical literature contains many references to ice in what is typically considered a vaccuum. On the moon, from what I have been reading, the story is that there is solid water in the bottom of craters that are deep enough to escape direct solar radiation. Theres also supposed to be millions of tons of it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2162505/More-water-moon-NASA-finds-mile-deep-crater-ice-scattered-quarter-surface.html

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Clayton — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 02:46:42 GMT

God, are -you- a conspiracist too?

Yes. I'll admit Lew Rockwell got me started on this but the more I've looked into it, the more I realize that it really, really just does not add up.

1) Motive issues. Praxeologically, the Moon missions serve the same function the Pyramids did for the Egyptian Pharaohs. They are big, impressive monuments to the massive swinging balls and unsurpassed excellence and "can-do" of the USG. Superlatives like "heroic" "superhuman" "titanic" are regularly invoked both in respect to the operational achievements of the lunar astronauts and in respect to the technological achievements of NASA.

Also, in terms of basic risk analysis, the lunar plunge just doesn't make any sense. Going to orbit the Moon is insanely impressive and the risk of just going and orbiting the Moon is many, many orders of magnitude less risky than descending to the lunar surface. While descending to the lunar surface is more impressive than merely orbiting, it is not nearly as much more impressive as it is more risky. Cost-benefit wise, it's just not worth it. The final moments of a beloved American hero being broadcast across live TV as he burns up and suffocates to death, stranded on the Lunar surface is just beyond unthinkable and USG would be 100% to blame for it.

2) Technical issues. The biggest hang-up for me is the blatantly insufficient testing of the lunar landing. They should have gone back after Apollo 10 at least three or four more times before even dreaming of taking the final plunge. If the program really was so reckless as to move straight from Apollo 10 to Apollo 11, then the flawless* record of success from there on out is simply unbelievable. The risks in getting down to and back up off the lunar surface are almost incalculable.

There are other, less glaring - but still fatal - technical issues. How the modules were kept cool, how the astronauts survived the radiation, and so on.

3) Evidentiary issues. Look at the footage in the videos I linked above. It's simply not believable. They must have faked those portions of the footage. This leads me to want to dig further in terms of evidence. I'm generally uninterested in evidence unless I suspect somebody's lying. Then I want to find the proof they are lying. And you only need one piece of evidence. You do not need to build a "preponderance" of evidence. This isn't a court case.

Clayton -

*Sans 13, but you know what I mean... zero deaths above LEO.

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

gotlucky — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 02:36:47 GMT

Anenome:

God, are -you- a conspiracist too? ...I suppose I should've realized with your musings on the Catholic church and Blavatsky.

lol wut?

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Anenome — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 02:04:48 GMT

Clayton:

So, you're basically claiming that the cameras could not resolve any stars? Consider this photo taken of Earth on the way to the Moon during Apollo 17:

God, are -you- a conspiracist too? ...I suppose I should've realized with your musings on the Catholic church and Blavatsky.

I believe you've quoted here a picture of the famous photo known as The Blue Marble.

Brightness is certainly a factor even here. The sun in reflection is just as bright as the sun in reflection on the moon. In both cases there is no atmosphere to scatter.

But, in reality, this picture does have stars showing in it, despite the adjustment for exposure, as can be seen in a hi-res copy of the original, enjoy:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg

Clayton:
I'll do some more digging on this because it seems too obvious a point to have been overlooked. The conspiracy-theoretic explanations for simply blacking out the stars that I've seen given is that the astronomers could not have been fooled. But then it seems like this is an even more incredible story. "Our cameras were too insensitive to pick up any stars." Seriously?

Again, view the larger image. The human eye is so good at adjusting for luminosity disparities that I think you're being tricked by your own human experience.

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Aristophanes — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 02:03:20 GMT

Clayton have you ever taken a photo of a star?

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Clayton — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 01:40:25 GMT

So, you're basically claiming that the cameras could not resolve any stars? Consider this photo taken of Earth on the way to the Moon during Apollo 17:

Clayton -

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Anenome — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 01:20:39 GMT

Buzz Killington:

NASA MOON LANDING FILMED IN NEVADA DESERT

I'd like to think libertarians are a breed apart, able to take the correct approach to things like this :\ Anyway, some rebuttal:

"- No stars appear in any of the pictures that were allegedly taken from the moon nor were any mentioned by the astronauts. Because the moon has no atmosphere to diffuse their light, the stars should have looked spectacular."

The moon is bright. Because the sun is bright. To take a picture on the moon is not quite like taking a picture on earth. The ISO value would be quite low to compensate for brightness. Depending on the luminosity of the stars then, which wouldn't be significantly different from that of seen from earth, if you block really bright light (the sun) to get a photo, then it's perfectly obvious that you do so at the expense of dim lights. Thus why the moon photos had no visible stars. This actually ends up being exactly what you'd expect, and evidence for the moon landing rather than against it. Could you see stars, we'd know it had been faked. And since photoshop didn't exist back then it would've long since been detected.

- NASA has never released any photos in which the moon can be seen in relationship to planets other than Earth, because those relationships would be almost impossible to fake, said Kaysing.

This assumes its conclusion, and thus is ridiculous. It also casts aspersions on motives, a weak rhetorical move if any.

- Pictures of Earth that were allegedly taken from the lunar surface are patent fakes, he added, because the Earth appears much too small in relationship to the lunar horizon.

To know that you'd need to be able to accurately measure the distance, in the pictures, to the perceived horizon. However, they landed in a crater, didn't they? Therefore we're not seeing the actualy horizon, just the like of the crater, I believe.

- Lunar landers should have kicked up tons of dust and debris as they landed on the moon but photos show that the areas directly under the modules’ rocket engines are undisturbed. If powerful rockets didn’t affect the lunar surface as the module landed, asked Kaysing, why are the astronaut’s bootprints clearly visible in the dust?

Really relies on an argument from analogy, the analogy being to how thrust works on earth. On earth, wind and thrust create large vortices because it's pushing against an existing atmosphere. But thrust on the moon works primarily by mass-expelling. The mass being expelled isn't going to hit very much stuff, much less rile them up. The logic simply fails a basic science-literacy test.

- Pictures taken with the sun behind the astronauts show bright detail on helmet visors and the front of their suits. This could only be done with artificial lighting of the type that is used on movie sets.

I assume this is referring to the old canard that only an atmosphere can scatter light, shouldn't all the shadows be perfectly black? A moment's thought will show you that, even without an atmosphere, light can reflect just fine in a vacuum and hit things with their back to the sun, no atmosphere needed at all.

- It would have been a simple matter for astronauts to signal Earth and all mankind with silver foil or a laser device after they reached the moon but they didn’t. It’s hard to imagine how NASA could have overlooked such a public relations stunt.

It's also a (fairly) simple thing to send a cheap satellite to the moon with a hi-rez camera and film the landing sight. And you're going to find all the bootprints still there, in perfect correlation with the photos we have now. That would be essentially unfakeable. Then you'll know for sure. If the Russians had doubted us, they could've verified the landing. I don't doubt they did in fact, because if the US had faked it, the revelation would've been a tremendous propaganda victory.

- If Apollo astronauts had really flown to the moon they would have passed through radiation belts that would have burned them to crisps. Astronauts who merely orbit Earth don’t encounter these belts and return unharmed.

Ridiculous on so many levels. I'm done here. Not worth the effort.

Naysayers gonna nay.

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Buzz Killington — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 01:02:55 GMT

NASA MOON LANDING FILMED IN NEVADA DESERT

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Buzz Killington — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 01:01:39 GMT

Malachi:
We read you the first time, thats not very informative. You could at least post a picture of the moon where the terrain looks like the nevada picture. Surely there must be one of those somewhere, right? Or do we have more pictures of the moon than we have of nevada and so I could flip it around, and question whether anyone had ever been to nevada, as the landscape looks awfully lunar....

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Anenome — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:45:44 GMT

Malachi:
...thanks for the chemistry review.

Sure thing, and point taken on disinformation.

I've had a thought for a long time now that we should create a digital textbook that allows you to drill-down into detail and out of abstractions.

At it's top level, it would be science at a first grade level. The text might only be 20 pages long, with incredibly basic explanations of basic science.

But, with a click you could have it expand into say a 5th grade level, or a 12th or graduate level, almost like zooming in for more detail in Google Maps.

What might be a page on the 1st grade level could turn into an entire book by the graduate level. The mere introduction of a concept on the st grade level could turn into a reference library at the graduate level primarily concerned with that one aspect of the field! All with a single click.

This would allow students to drill down and pursue self-study as desired. How I've wanted to do such a thing in the past.

---

Anyway, back to our discussion. I think that the science writers, in saying the moon has no atmosphere, mean that there is no ring of gases which are held in place by gravity. Pretty much the only air that earth loses are the incredibly light gases like helium and hydrogen. The rest are held in place despite exposure to the vacuum.

In that sense, it's not misleading.

As for water on the moon, I've always been deeply suspicious of the claim, for the simple reason that any water thus on the moon would be exposed to extreme of cold and heat and vacuum, and the phase-change diagram of ice show that cold + vacuum = sublimation, meaning ice turns directly to a gas, skipping the liquid phase, which means any existing ice would simply turn to gas and be lost to space in no time. Not to mention being boiled if the sun hit it.

I finally understood that they meant that water is trapped in the form of chemical hydrates on the moon, chemical compounds with water which cannot simply boil away as a gas.

Re: Why the moon landings were not faked

Malachi — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 22:58:29 GMT

We read you the first time, thats not very informative. You could at least post a picture of the moon where the terrain looks like the nevada picture. Surely there must be one of those somewhere, right? Or do we have more pictures of the moon than we have of nevada and so I could flip it around, and question whether anyone had ever been to nevada, as the landscape looks awfully lunar....