16-11-2010, 05:41 AM
Tom Kellum has introduced me to a site, the Metapedia entry on "Moon Hoax", http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Moon_Hoax which convinces me that others know vastly more than do I about this monstrosity and have proven it many times over. As illustrations, I am citing here some of its most striking passages, but that is no substitute for reading it in its entirety. Among my favorites are "1967 deaths", "Lunar samples", "Splashdown", "18-day quarantine", "Visibility of stars", and "Why is the Saturn V no longer used?" The quotes from famous people are classic, once you know the score.
History
Doubts about the authenticity of Apollo Moon landings appeared first in December 1968 when Apollo 8 was launched.[1] The almost perfectly executed odyssey of Apollo 11 seemed unreal to some who believed it to be a hoax, contrived for mere publicity.[1]
The first book on the subject ("Did man land on the Moon?") was issued in 1970 by the Texas mathematician James J. Cranny.[1][1](2:52–3:03) The suggestive scenes[1] in the films "Diamonds are forever" by Guy Hamilton (1971)[1] and especially "Capricorn One" by Peter Hyams (1978, about a hoaxed flight to Mars in a spacecraft that looks the same as the Apollo craft)[1] gave a powerful boost to the popularity of the hoax theory, coinciding with the increased distrust in official US reports after the Watergate scandal.[1][1][1][1] And today, a sequel to "Capricorn One" is in the "deep development stage", said Navid McIlhargey, Senior Vice President of New Regency Productions in Los Angeles.[1]
In 2006, the Apollo era slow-scan TV and telemetry data tape reels were declared missing.[1] The question of what happened to the tapes "stuck in the craw" of the Moon doubters.[1] And in 2009, NASA revealed that the tapes were erased.[1][1]
Moon sceptics or "conspiracy theorists"?
Moon sceptics are often labelled "conspiracy theorists" (e.g. by Roger Launius, senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum at the US Smithsonian Institution) but they disagree. For example, Bart Sibrel (see below) said:[1]
“I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe in aliens from outer space, and I grew up as a big fan of the Moon missions from age 8 to 14.”
Psychologist Floyd Rudmin writes that "conspiracy theory" is a powerful pejorative label, meaning paranoid, nutty, marginal, and certainly untrue. Its power is that it discounts a theory by attacking the motivations and mental competence of its advocates. By labelling an explanation of events "conspiracy theory", evidence and argument are dismissed because they come from a mentally or morally deficient personality, not because they have been shown to be incorrect. Calling an explanation of events "conspiracy theory" means, in effect, "We don't like you, and no one should listen to your explanation."
Keeping it secret
Too many people were involved with the project to keep a secret like this. More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, and a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences. It would have been significantly easier to actually land on the Moon than to generate such a massive conspiracy to fake such a landing.[1]
CON:
NASA engineering-technical personnel was about 13,000.[1] Much fewer people were in the know, and there are examples in history for secrets known by a lot of people but kept for many years (N-1 rocket, cruiser Belfast crashes, Enigma machine message decryption, cargo vessel Rona sinking, operations of British submarines in Swedish waters accusing the Soviets, etc).[1] The Manhattan Project[1] employed hundreds of thousands of people and hardly a word was leaked out.[1](p. 19)
If someone who attended the Apollo programme admits a hoax, he will lose his prestige and risks being declared insane or killed.[1](p. 423)
1967 deaths
On the death of Virgil Grissom,[1] Edward White,[1] and Roger Chaffee[1] (in the Apollo 1 fire), Edward Givens[1] (on a car crash), Clifton Williams[1] (on a T-38 jet trainer), Michael Adams[1] (on an X-15 high-altitude experimental aircraft), Robert Lawrence[1] (on an F-104B combat trainer), Russel Rogers[1] (on an F-105 fighter), and Thomas Baron[1] with all his family (at a railroad crossing) in 1967,[1] the NASA defenders asked: Why remove the disagreeable along with the unique experimental aircraft or the first spacecraft prototype?[1]
CON:
3 of the X-15 were built, and its last flight was a year later (in 1968), out of 9 service years in total.[1] Apollo 1 was not the first prototype but had a serial number of 012.[1]. For many years before and after 1967 both the US and Soviet space industry had from 0 to 3 death cases per year. Only in 1967, a year before the first manned Apollo flight, there were 11 death cases.[1]
The Apollo 1 crew was still alive for at least 15 minutes after the craft caught fire, because their autopsy found that they have managed to develop pulmatory oedema, which cannot happen if they had died earlier.[1](p. 95) Senior NASA astronaut and Apollo 1 commander Virgil Grissom was a sharp critic of the programme. "Quite a number of things are not in order with this spacecraft, he once said. "It's not as good as the ones we flew before." He publicly called the Apollo capsule "a bucket of bolts" and the spacecraft "a heap of old scrap". On 22 January 1967 (5 days before his death), he picked the largest lemon from his lemon garden in Texas, and intended to hang it on the Apollo spacecraft—as a symbol of failure. (In December 1966, a report made by Joe Shea noted that "At least 20,000 failures of all kinds had been logged, more than 200 of them in the environmental control system.")[1](p. 115)[1] Grissom had received death threats earlier, which his family saw as coming from the space programme. "If there ever is a serious accident in the space programme, it's likely to be me", he said to his wife.[1](p. 39)[1](pp. 87–90) NASA quality engineer Thomas Baron died with his family a week after his 500-page report analysing the Apollo 1 incident was deposed before the Congressational committee, and the report vanished.[1](p. 94)
Jump height
Lunar explorers should be able to jump vertical distances up to 12 or 14 ft (4 ± 0.3 m) on the Moon, unencumbered with a spacesuit or other equipment, but will experience difficulty in maintaining their balance. However, falls from these heights under similar conditions are not likely to result in personal injury.[1] The EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or the Apollo spacesuit) tested on Apollo 9 and used on Apollo 11–14 weighs about 85 kg fully charged.[1]
CON
Assuming astronaut's body weight of 85 kg, his total weight including the space suit would be 170 kg, so he could achieve jump heights of 2 m. But the maximum jump height shown by an Apollo astronaut was 0.42 m,[1] which is five times less.[1]
Lunar samples
Between 1969 and 1972, six Apollo missions brought back 382 kg of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust from the lunar surface. Lunar samples are prepared for shipment to scientists and educators at NASA's Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility. Nearly 400 samples are distributed each year for research and teaching projects. All samples (split or intact) must be returned to the NASA Johnson Space Centre after being studied.[1]
There are plenty of museums, including the Smithsonian and others, where members of the public can touch and examine rocks from the Moon.[1]
CON
Unlike the Apollo lunar samples, their Soviet counterparts exhibit triboluminescence[1] and non-oxidation,[1] contain 6 to 9 times more Mercury (which should be uniformly distributed on the lunar surface),[1] orders of magnitude more molybdenum, wolfram, cadmium and silver, and have 50 times lower thermoluminescence sensitivity. Also, A. Dollfus and E. Bouell of the Paris Observatory found that unlike the NASA samples, the polarisation of reflected light from the Soviet samples corresponds to that from the Moon surface.[1](pp. 141–152, 208–210, 216–224, 231–232)[1][1]
Geochemist Minoru Ozima of the Tokyo University discovered that the nitrogen-14/nitrogen-15 isotope ratio in the Apollo lunar samples is very different from that in the solar wind whose blasts drilled these atoms into the lunar soil.[1][1] The explanation is simple—the Apollo's soil was made on Earth.[1](pp. 467–470)
In the 1990s, publications about lunar soil simulation started to appear.[1] They could not have appeared earlier as this would raise questions about the Apollo programme.[1]
Splashdown
At 13:35 P.M., as the [Apollo 11] command module with its human passengers and its cargo of Moon rocks sped on a north-easterly course 80 [nautical] miles above the Gilbert Islands, it slammed into the atmosphere and streaked like a flaming meteor towards a soft landing in the water below. Fifteen minutes later the command ship's three parachutes lowered it gently, at 21 [nautical] miles an hour, into the Pacific 950 [nautical] miles south-west of Hawaii, 2.7 [nautical] miles (5 km) from its aiming point and 13.8 [nautical] miles (25.6 km) from the [aircraft] carrier Hornet, the recovery ship. Man's first expedition to another world was over. President Nixon watched the recovery from one of the Hornet's two bridges. He caught a glimpse of the spaceship's fiery re-entry into the atmosphere, but shared in the disappointment of the crew and millions of television viewers when the craft splashed down out of sight of the ship.[1] [Apollo 11] capsule was first righted by flotation bags.[1](left photo)
CON
If Nixon could see the spacecraft's entry into the atmosphere down its sloping trajectory, the sky must have been exceptionally clear, assuring direct visibleness of hundreds of kilometres. Then the craft descending on three huge parachutes at only 25 km should have been noticeable too: aircraft carrier's bridges are 40–50 m above sea level, corresponding to a horizon of 20–25 km, so the high flying parachutes would be visible. But only a helicopter and the capsule were filmed, without even its parachutes.[1](left photo) And if the splashdown accuracy was only 5 km, why was not the ship at the aiming point but stayed 25 km away? Finally, even today Soyuz spacecraft's landing accuracy (50–60 km)[1] is an order of magnitude worse than the average of 4 km Apollo could achieve back then,[1] which makes such high accuracy unreal.[1] All issues vanish if we assume that the crew did not fly but the capsule with it was dropped in advance far enough (25 km) from the ship. Craft entry into the atmosphere can be imitated by a ballistic missile with a suitable head surface material to produce enough fire.[1](pp. 254–257)
18-day quarantine
As [Apollo 11] astronauts in special isolation suits watched, frogman scrubbed the capsule down with disinfectant.[1](right photo) Apollo crew waved as they entered quarantine trainer aboard Hornet.[1] The astronauts then settled down for an 18-day quarantine to make certain their contact with the Moon had not contaminated or infected them in any way.[1]
CON
What bacteria can there be on the Moon, tilled already for several billions of years every 27 days now by space cold of −150°C, now by Sun heat of +150°C, and irradiated by streams of radiation from the Sun flares? Do Earth medics have such sterilisers? And why scrub the craft down with disinfectant if it had flown through the atmosphere in a cloud with a temperature of several thousands of degrees on its return? And, if lunar bacteria do exist and are so hardy, then what quatantine, and what disinfectant can help against them? But if there was a hoax, the quarantine was important for its success. The black [gas] masks on the astronauts' faces[1] helped them avoid unwanted sights by the welcoming people (and questions from the press during the whole quarantine)[1] while getting used to their most important role (Moon flight stories), having ensured three weeks later that the world public opinion had already believed Apollo Moon landings. It did, so next Apollo crews had no quarantine.[1]
Visibility of stars from the lunar surface
[Neil] Armstrong (Apollo 11): "We were never able to see stars from the lunar surface or on the daylight side of the Moon by eye without looking through the optics."
[Michael] Collins (Command Module pilot): "I don't remember seeing any."[1](1:06:00–1:06:19) (Collins' remark is misattributed to [Edwin] Aldrin in the transcript.[1] In his book "Liftoff", Collins writes "My God, the stars are everywhere, even below me. They are somewhat brighter than on Earth")[1](p. 33)[1]
Alan Bean (Apollo 12): "Oh so carefully, I removed my silver pin, took one last look at it, and gave it my strongest underarm toss out towards Surveyor. I can still remember how it flashed in the bright sunlight then disappeared in the distance. It was the only star I ever saw up in the black sky, the sunlight was just too bright on the Moon's surface to see any of the others."[1]
Stars are not readily seen in the daylight lunar sky by either the human eye or a camera because of the brightness of the sunlight surface.[1]
CON
103:22:54 Duke: "...Gene Cernan says that, while standing in the shadow of the Apollo 17 [Lunar Module] (LM), he could see some stars while he was outside."[1] (Correction on the star visibility issue from the Moon is introduced later.) Astronauts' reminiscences contradict the descriptions of the star sky observed by Soviet cosmonauts (Leonov, Lebedev, Savinykh) on the dayside of the orbit; light from the Earth (Earth albedo 0.367, Moon albedo 0.12) did not hamper them see the stars.[1] For example, Leonov says that "the brightest of the stars can be recognised when they are farther than 30° away from the daylight luminary [the Sun]".[1]
On the Moon, the sky is black—even during the day—and the stars are always visible.[1][1]
In fact, the Moon is about the poorest reflector in the solar system... The Moon reflects only 7% of the sunlight that falls upon it.[1]
Why is the Saturn V no longer used?
Notwithstanding the great carrying capacity, the Saturn [V] expendable launch systems did not get use—they got nothing to carry. The mass of even the most sophisticated artificial Earth satellites does not exceed 20 t. Yet another obstacle is the complexity and cost of service of the huge rocket.[1]
CON
If we could build it from scratch in a few years in the 60's, and we already have all the plans, why not rebuild it now? Did they really have the load capacity NASA claims they had?[1]
The reason that the Saturn V was quietly forgotten was that it never preformed as stated... If NASA had attempted to correct the problems with the Saturn V it would have become apparent that the rocket could not have sent people to the Moon and that the Moon landings were faked.[1]
If the Saturn V carried the International Space Station (ISS) modules, which are now not heavier than 20 t, their mass could quadruple while their number be reduced four times, along with the number of the docking assemblies for space rendezvous, whose mass is now about one-seventh of the mass of the entire ISS. The number of the dangerous space rendezvous procedures would also be reduced. The cost of the two Proton rockets and one Space Shuttle used to carry three ISS modules is roughly equal to the cost of one Saturn V. And the ISS cost is thousands of times greater than the Saturn V service cost. Also, the launching cost for 1 kg of cargo using the Space Shuttle turns out to be much higher than using the Saturn V.[1](drawing 4) But for some reason, the Americans have money for the "prodigal" Shuttles and not for the "frugal" Saturns. And why is the F-1 engine no longer used but the US Atlas V rocket uses the Russian RD-180 engines instead that are nothing else but one half of the RD-170/171 engines of the Soviet Energia and Zenith rockets?[1][1][1]
The F-1 engine failure modes (especially combustion instability) need substantial research and the Russian RD-180 is recommended as a model for its modification, if it is to be used in future manned flights to the Moon and Mars.[1]
Quotes by famous people
“I can't be 100% sure that man actually walked on the Moon. It's possible that NASA could have covered it up, just in order to cut corners, and to be the first to allegedly go to the Moon.”—Dr Brian Todd O'Leary, NASA astronaut & Apollo programme adviser[1][1][1](5:22–5:45)[1]
“Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the Moon, beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the Moon before the decade was out. The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that "them television fellers" could make things look real that weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.”—Dr[1] William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States of America (1993–2001)[1]
“The date of the so-called return to the Moon slipped from 2020 to heaven-knows when... I ask my friends and readers to get behind Obama's new policy. Join with me and help usher in a new age of space. A space programme that truly goes somewhere!”—Dr Buzz Aldrin (born Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr), astronaut, the Apollo 11 lunar module pilot[1]
History
Doubts about the authenticity of Apollo Moon landings appeared first in December 1968 when Apollo 8 was launched.[1] The almost perfectly executed odyssey of Apollo 11 seemed unreal to some who believed it to be a hoax, contrived for mere publicity.[1]
The first book on the subject ("Did man land on the Moon?") was issued in 1970 by the Texas mathematician James J. Cranny.[1][1](2:52–3:03) The suggestive scenes[1] in the films "Diamonds are forever" by Guy Hamilton (1971)[1] and especially "Capricorn One" by Peter Hyams (1978, about a hoaxed flight to Mars in a spacecraft that looks the same as the Apollo craft)[1] gave a powerful boost to the popularity of the hoax theory, coinciding with the increased distrust in official US reports after the Watergate scandal.[1][1][1][1] And today, a sequel to "Capricorn One" is in the "deep development stage", said Navid McIlhargey, Senior Vice President of New Regency Productions in Los Angeles.[1]
In 2006, the Apollo era slow-scan TV and telemetry data tape reels were declared missing.[1] The question of what happened to the tapes "stuck in the craw" of the Moon doubters.[1] And in 2009, NASA revealed that the tapes were erased.[1][1]
Moon sceptics or "conspiracy theorists"?
Moon sceptics are often labelled "conspiracy theorists" (e.g. by Roger Launius, senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum at the US Smithsonian Institution) but they disagree. For example, Bart Sibrel (see below) said:[1]
“I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe in aliens from outer space, and I grew up as a big fan of the Moon missions from age 8 to 14.”
Psychologist Floyd Rudmin writes that "conspiracy theory" is a powerful pejorative label, meaning paranoid, nutty, marginal, and certainly untrue. Its power is that it discounts a theory by attacking the motivations and mental competence of its advocates. By labelling an explanation of events "conspiracy theory", evidence and argument are dismissed because they come from a mentally or morally deficient personality, not because they have been shown to be incorrect. Calling an explanation of events "conspiracy theory" means, in effect, "We don't like you, and no one should listen to your explanation."
Keeping it secret
Too many people were involved with the project to keep a secret like this. More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, and a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences. It would have been significantly easier to actually land on the Moon than to generate such a massive conspiracy to fake such a landing.[1]
CON:
NASA engineering-technical personnel was about 13,000.[1] Much fewer people were in the know, and there are examples in history for secrets known by a lot of people but kept for many years (N-1 rocket, cruiser Belfast crashes, Enigma machine message decryption, cargo vessel Rona sinking, operations of British submarines in Swedish waters accusing the Soviets, etc).[1] The Manhattan Project[1] employed hundreds of thousands of people and hardly a word was leaked out.[1](p. 19)
If someone who attended the Apollo programme admits a hoax, he will lose his prestige and risks being declared insane or killed.[1](p. 423)
1967 deaths
On the death of Virgil Grissom,[1] Edward White,[1] and Roger Chaffee[1] (in the Apollo 1 fire), Edward Givens[1] (on a car crash), Clifton Williams[1] (on a T-38 jet trainer), Michael Adams[1] (on an X-15 high-altitude experimental aircraft), Robert Lawrence[1] (on an F-104B combat trainer), Russel Rogers[1] (on an F-105 fighter), and Thomas Baron[1] with all his family (at a railroad crossing) in 1967,[1] the NASA defenders asked: Why remove the disagreeable along with the unique experimental aircraft or the first spacecraft prototype?[1]
CON:
3 of the X-15 were built, and its last flight was a year later (in 1968), out of 9 service years in total.[1] Apollo 1 was not the first prototype but had a serial number of 012.[1]. For many years before and after 1967 both the US and Soviet space industry had from 0 to 3 death cases per year. Only in 1967, a year before the first manned Apollo flight, there were 11 death cases.[1]
The Apollo 1 crew was still alive for at least 15 minutes after the craft caught fire, because their autopsy found that they have managed to develop pulmatory oedema, which cannot happen if they had died earlier.[1](p. 95) Senior NASA astronaut and Apollo 1 commander Virgil Grissom was a sharp critic of the programme. "Quite a number of things are not in order with this spacecraft, he once said. "It's not as good as the ones we flew before." He publicly called the Apollo capsule "a bucket of bolts" and the spacecraft "a heap of old scrap". On 22 January 1967 (5 days before his death), he picked the largest lemon from his lemon garden in Texas, and intended to hang it on the Apollo spacecraft—as a symbol of failure. (In December 1966, a report made by Joe Shea noted that "At least 20,000 failures of all kinds had been logged, more than 200 of them in the environmental control system.")[1](p. 115)[1] Grissom had received death threats earlier, which his family saw as coming from the space programme. "If there ever is a serious accident in the space programme, it's likely to be me", he said to his wife.[1](p. 39)[1](pp. 87–90) NASA quality engineer Thomas Baron died with his family a week after his 500-page report analysing the Apollo 1 incident was deposed before the Congressational committee, and the report vanished.[1](p. 94)
Jump height
Lunar explorers should be able to jump vertical distances up to 12 or 14 ft (4 ± 0.3 m) on the Moon, unencumbered with a spacesuit or other equipment, but will experience difficulty in maintaining their balance. However, falls from these heights under similar conditions are not likely to result in personal injury.[1] The EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or the Apollo spacesuit) tested on Apollo 9 and used on Apollo 11–14 weighs about 85 kg fully charged.[1]
CON
Assuming astronaut's body weight of 85 kg, his total weight including the space suit would be 170 kg, so he could achieve jump heights of 2 m. But the maximum jump height shown by an Apollo astronaut was 0.42 m,[1] which is five times less.[1]
Lunar samples
Between 1969 and 1972, six Apollo missions brought back 382 kg of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust from the lunar surface. Lunar samples are prepared for shipment to scientists and educators at NASA's Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility. Nearly 400 samples are distributed each year for research and teaching projects. All samples (split or intact) must be returned to the NASA Johnson Space Centre after being studied.[1]
There are plenty of museums, including the Smithsonian and others, where members of the public can touch and examine rocks from the Moon.[1]
CON
Unlike the Apollo lunar samples, their Soviet counterparts exhibit triboluminescence[1] and non-oxidation,[1] contain 6 to 9 times more Mercury (which should be uniformly distributed on the lunar surface),[1] orders of magnitude more molybdenum, wolfram, cadmium and silver, and have 50 times lower thermoluminescence sensitivity. Also, A. Dollfus and E. Bouell of the Paris Observatory found that unlike the NASA samples, the polarisation of reflected light from the Soviet samples corresponds to that from the Moon surface.[1](pp. 141–152, 208–210, 216–224, 231–232)[1][1]
Geochemist Minoru Ozima of the Tokyo University discovered that the nitrogen-14/nitrogen-15 isotope ratio in the Apollo lunar samples is very different from that in the solar wind whose blasts drilled these atoms into the lunar soil.[1][1] The explanation is simple—the Apollo's soil was made on Earth.[1](pp. 467–470)
In the 1990s, publications about lunar soil simulation started to appear.[1] They could not have appeared earlier as this would raise questions about the Apollo programme.[1]
Splashdown
At 13:35 P.M., as the [Apollo 11] command module with its human passengers and its cargo of Moon rocks sped on a north-easterly course 80 [nautical] miles above the Gilbert Islands, it slammed into the atmosphere and streaked like a flaming meteor towards a soft landing in the water below. Fifteen minutes later the command ship's three parachutes lowered it gently, at 21 [nautical] miles an hour, into the Pacific 950 [nautical] miles south-west of Hawaii, 2.7 [nautical] miles (5 km) from its aiming point and 13.8 [nautical] miles (25.6 km) from the [aircraft] carrier Hornet, the recovery ship. Man's first expedition to another world was over. President Nixon watched the recovery from one of the Hornet's two bridges. He caught a glimpse of the spaceship's fiery re-entry into the atmosphere, but shared in the disappointment of the crew and millions of television viewers when the craft splashed down out of sight of the ship.[1] [Apollo 11] capsule was first righted by flotation bags.[1](left photo)
CON
If Nixon could see the spacecraft's entry into the atmosphere down its sloping trajectory, the sky must have been exceptionally clear, assuring direct visibleness of hundreds of kilometres. Then the craft descending on three huge parachutes at only 25 km should have been noticeable too: aircraft carrier's bridges are 40–50 m above sea level, corresponding to a horizon of 20–25 km, so the high flying parachutes would be visible. But only a helicopter and the capsule were filmed, without even its parachutes.[1](left photo) And if the splashdown accuracy was only 5 km, why was not the ship at the aiming point but stayed 25 km away? Finally, even today Soyuz spacecraft's landing accuracy (50–60 km)[1] is an order of magnitude worse than the average of 4 km Apollo could achieve back then,[1] which makes such high accuracy unreal.[1] All issues vanish if we assume that the crew did not fly but the capsule with it was dropped in advance far enough (25 km) from the ship. Craft entry into the atmosphere can be imitated by a ballistic missile with a suitable head surface material to produce enough fire.[1](pp. 254–257)
18-day quarantine
As [Apollo 11] astronauts in special isolation suits watched, frogman scrubbed the capsule down with disinfectant.[1](right photo) Apollo crew waved as they entered quarantine trainer aboard Hornet.[1] The astronauts then settled down for an 18-day quarantine to make certain their contact with the Moon had not contaminated or infected them in any way.[1]
CON
What bacteria can there be on the Moon, tilled already for several billions of years every 27 days now by space cold of −150°C, now by Sun heat of +150°C, and irradiated by streams of radiation from the Sun flares? Do Earth medics have such sterilisers? And why scrub the craft down with disinfectant if it had flown through the atmosphere in a cloud with a temperature of several thousands of degrees on its return? And, if lunar bacteria do exist and are so hardy, then what quatantine, and what disinfectant can help against them? But if there was a hoax, the quarantine was important for its success. The black [gas] masks on the astronauts' faces[1] helped them avoid unwanted sights by the welcoming people (and questions from the press during the whole quarantine)[1] while getting used to their most important role (Moon flight stories), having ensured three weeks later that the world public opinion had already believed Apollo Moon landings. It did, so next Apollo crews had no quarantine.[1]
Visibility of stars from the lunar surface
[Neil] Armstrong (Apollo 11): "We were never able to see stars from the lunar surface or on the daylight side of the Moon by eye without looking through the optics."
[Michael] Collins (Command Module pilot): "I don't remember seeing any."[1](1:06:00–1:06:19) (Collins' remark is misattributed to [Edwin] Aldrin in the transcript.[1] In his book "Liftoff", Collins writes "My God, the stars are everywhere, even below me. They are somewhat brighter than on Earth")[1](p. 33)[1]
Alan Bean (Apollo 12): "Oh so carefully, I removed my silver pin, took one last look at it, and gave it my strongest underarm toss out towards Surveyor. I can still remember how it flashed in the bright sunlight then disappeared in the distance. It was the only star I ever saw up in the black sky, the sunlight was just too bright on the Moon's surface to see any of the others."[1]
Stars are not readily seen in the daylight lunar sky by either the human eye or a camera because of the brightness of the sunlight surface.[1]
CON
103:22:54 Duke: "...Gene Cernan says that, while standing in the shadow of the Apollo 17 [Lunar Module] (LM), he could see some stars while he was outside."[1] (Correction on the star visibility issue from the Moon is introduced later.) Astronauts' reminiscences contradict the descriptions of the star sky observed by Soviet cosmonauts (Leonov, Lebedev, Savinykh) on the dayside of the orbit; light from the Earth (Earth albedo 0.367, Moon albedo 0.12) did not hamper them see the stars.[1] For example, Leonov says that "the brightest of the stars can be recognised when they are farther than 30° away from the daylight luminary [the Sun]".[1]
On the Moon, the sky is black—even during the day—and the stars are always visible.[1][1]
In fact, the Moon is about the poorest reflector in the solar system... The Moon reflects only 7% of the sunlight that falls upon it.[1]
Why is the Saturn V no longer used?
Notwithstanding the great carrying capacity, the Saturn [V] expendable launch systems did not get use—they got nothing to carry. The mass of even the most sophisticated artificial Earth satellites does not exceed 20 t. Yet another obstacle is the complexity and cost of service of the huge rocket.[1]
CON
If we could build it from scratch in a few years in the 60's, and we already have all the plans, why not rebuild it now? Did they really have the load capacity NASA claims they had?[1]
The reason that the Saturn V was quietly forgotten was that it never preformed as stated... If NASA had attempted to correct the problems with the Saturn V it would have become apparent that the rocket could not have sent people to the Moon and that the Moon landings were faked.[1]
If the Saturn V carried the International Space Station (ISS) modules, which are now not heavier than 20 t, their mass could quadruple while their number be reduced four times, along with the number of the docking assemblies for space rendezvous, whose mass is now about one-seventh of the mass of the entire ISS. The number of the dangerous space rendezvous procedures would also be reduced. The cost of the two Proton rockets and one Space Shuttle used to carry three ISS modules is roughly equal to the cost of one Saturn V. And the ISS cost is thousands of times greater than the Saturn V service cost. Also, the launching cost for 1 kg of cargo using the Space Shuttle turns out to be much higher than using the Saturn V.[1](drawing 4) But for some reason, the Americans have money for the "prodigal" Shuttles and not for the "frugal" Saturns. And why is the F-1 engine no longer used but the US Atlas V rocket uses the Russian RD-180 engines instead that are nothing else but one half of the RD-170/171 engines of the Soviet Energia and Zenith rockets?[1][1][1]
The F-1 engine failure modes (especially combustion instability) need substantial research and the Russian RD-180 is recommended as a model for its modification, if it is to be used in future manned flights to the Moon and Mars.[1]
Quotes by famous people
“I can't be 100% sure that man actually walked on the Moon. It's possible that NASA could have covered it up, just in order to cut corners, and to be the first to allegedly go to the Moon.”—Dr Brian Todd O'Leary, NASA astronaut & Apollo programme adviser[1][1][1](5:22–5:45)[1]
“Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the Moon, beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the Moon before the decade was out. The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that "them television fellers" could make things look real that weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.”—Dr[1] William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States of America (1993–2001)[1]
“The date of the so-called return to the Moon slipped from 2020 to heaven-knows when... I ask my friends and readers to get behind Obama's new policy. Join with me and help usher in a new age of space. A space programme that truly goes somewhere!”—Dr Buzz Aldrin (born Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr), astronaut, the Apollo 11 lunar module pilot[1]
