Quick Poll: Apollo Hoax Believers.

Originally posted by mlprior
Research is not required to voice an opinion...

It is, however, a requirement for not looking like a thorough dingleberry while voicing that opinion.

Richard

Originally posted by mikelom
So what about the famous pictures of shadows in the wrong places, and a blowing flag?

Ah, those are fakes. But only the versions provided to you by "thoroughly honest" hoax believers. Not the originals, those are real.

Every film you see on youtube of an Apollo flag flapping about is a fake, consisting of the original footage of Armstrong (or maybe Aldrin, I don't know which of them did it) erecting a flag-onna-spring, carefully cut and spliced so that it looks like a flag which flapped once because of the spring is blowing about in the wind. The original shows much more clearly what really happened.
Every photograph you see which has shadows in actually wrong places has been photoshopped. Most photographs only have shadows that look wrong to someone growing up on Earth, with, you know, an atmosphere, and not a lot of sharp rocky debris or impact craters lying about in our usual living environments. For shadows on a body as alien to us as the moon, they are in the correct places in all the original photographs.

You know, people who want to believe in such sloppy arguments could do worse than to watch Mythbusters, which has debunked all these daft arguments in a way which even someone with a 50% overlap in their grandpaternal ancestry can understand.

Richard

What's funny is there's an hour long youtube video that's a lampoon of hoax theories, it even says in the description that it's a joke and not meant to be taken seriously, yet most of the tongue-in-cheek claims from the video end up being quoted by various hoaxers as fact.

They really are a clueless lot.

Shadows from a single point light source should run in the same direction ... on a flat surface, on a lumpy surface they don't, the moon is lumpy, thus the shadows follow the topography.
Try reading some stuff at bad astronomy for more details.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/iangoddard/moon01.htm

Originally posted by mlprior
Ha Ha!

Research is not required to voice an opinion...I'm sure you know that already though.

To have an opinion on a subject/incident, one should know something about that subject/incident.
One can ask questions in complete ignorance as questions are designed to gain information, opinions are supposed to be based ON information.
While I agree it is perfectly possible to voice an opinion without any background knowledge, It is not advisable.

The original suggestion was that you shouldn't voice an opinion without knowing your facts, and not that you couldn't voice an opinion in ignorance.

I would suggest that the advice given was good and possibly shouldn't have been greeted with 'Ha Ha' and an irrelevant factual assertion.

Originally posted by Shallow Blue
It is, however, a requirement for not looking like a thorough dingleberry while voicing that opinion.

Richard

The fact that my opinion is different than your means that I am a dingleberry? You are a presumptuous fellow.

You presume that I should be doing some research before stating my opinion, where is your research that you are basing your opinion on? I would be happy to read your actual research.

I base my opinion on my knowledge of engineering, pysics and chemistry. I feel that this background allows me to form a very good opinion on my own and my opinion is that I doubt the technology was in place to carry out a moon landing in 1969 based on my knowledge.

Originally posted by mlprior
I base my opinion on my knowledge of engineering, pysics and chemistry. I feel that this background allows me to form a very good opinion on my own and my opinion is that I doubt the technology was in place to carry out a moon landing in 1969 based on my knowledge.

What technology do you think would have been required that we did not have at the time?

You do realize that there were already satellites at the time, so basic rocketry etc must have been available.

I personally think we probably had the engineering, physics, chemistry etc knowledge required long before that. What we didn't have was the money to get it done and the experience.

Originally posted by mlprior
I base my opinion on my knowledge of engineering, pysics and chemistry. I feel that this background allows me to form a very good opinion on my own and my opinion is that I doubt the technology was in place to carry out a moon landing in 1969 based on my knowledge.

So your knowledge of the technology of the time is such that you believe the United States faked 6 moon landings over a 3 year period and the scientific community of every nation ON EARTH was fooled, and remains fooled to this day, while you know better?

This is the problem with moon hoax advocates, regardless of the facts, they think they know better than everyone else.

Originally posted by mlprior
I base my opinion on my knowledge of engineering, pysics and chemistry. I feel that this background allows me to form a very good opinion on my own and my opinion is that I doubt the technology was in place to carry out a moon landing in 1969 based on my knowledge.

At the time of the Apollo missions we had satellites (can't be faked you can literally SEE them go overhead) and radio telescopes capable
of tracking the origin of an incoming radio signal.

The signal picked up by many nations around the world (not just the official receiving stations, Jodrell bank for example tuned in to the
TV signal directly) MUST have come from the moon.

It can't have come from a satellite around the earth as the motion/parallax was all wrong.

Thus to broadcast this signal they MUST have sent something to the moon.

If they must have sent something to the moon then sending people just means the something needs to be big enough to house
people + life-support.

Technically difficult but they had tens of thousands of people, hundreds of billions of dollars and a decade to work out the details.

I want to know what it is that you think we lacked in the 60's that would have been needed to go to the moon.

However regardless, as I have said before, if they didn't go to the moon they had to have faked going to the moon.
In a way that fooled the entire rest of the planet.
For 43 years.
Left detectable artefacts on the moon.
Retrieved rocks chemically and radiologically different from ANYTHING found on earth.
In a conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people, requiring technology WE STILL DON'T HAVE.

Your augment that the technology to go to the moon didn't exist therefore the landings must have been faked falls down,
not only because they demonstrably did have the technology,
but that faking the landings is even more technologically challenging.

It not only requires ALL the tech needed to actually do it,
but requires other technologies in addition to convincingly fake the things that would just happen naturally if you actually did it
(like micro/reduced gravity, and moon rocks).

EDIT: Oh and on the scaling up so its big enough for humans bit... we SAW the launch vehicle, it WAS big enough.
So we know they launched something that went to the moon, because it broadcast signals all the way.
We know it was big enough to house people.
So your argument boils down to, they had the tech to send something big enough to house people to the moon,
But not actually send people in it...
presumably because you believe we couldn't keep 3 people alive in a space the sizeof a few telephone booths for a week...

To which I say submarines.

Originally posted by Sam The Sham
So your knowledge of the technology of the time is such that you believe the United States faked 6 moon landings over a 3 year period and the scientific community of every nation ON EARTH was fooled, and remains fooled to this day, while you know better?

This is the problem with moon hoax advocates, regardless of the facts, they think they know better than everyone else.

You're the one who asked for people's opinion in the first place, then you jump all over their a*s when you don't like the answer you get? Nice.

You are a waste of time.

BTW I didn't say I believed it was faked, I said it is possible.

Originally posted by mlprior
BTW I didn't say I believed it was faked, I said it is possible.

Ok, that changes the discussion to
'how can you believe it was possible that the moon landings were faked?'
rather than
'how can you believe that the moon landings were faked?'
but doesn't otherwise change much about the debate.

We are arguing that there is not only overwhelming evidence that the moon
landings really happened but also that faking them wasn't/isn't yet possible.

The debate might be a little more abstract as a 'could they have been faked?'
instead of 'were they faked?' but the answer/arguments for both are the same.

ie no they couldn't/weren't faked.

Originally posted by mlprior
.

BTW I didn't say I believed it was faked, I said it is possible.

You said:
"I doubt the technology was in place to carry out a moon landing in 1969 based on my knowledge".

Originally posted by mlprior
The fact that my opinion is different than your means that I am a dingleberry? You are a presumptuous fellow.

No.

The fact that your opinion is different from every single real scientist out there who has done relevant research into this, makes you a dingleberry.
The fact that your arguments boil down to "I don't think this could be done", when real scientists have demonstrated time and again not only that it could be done, but how, and you choose to ignore all that evidence, makes you a dingleberry.
The fact that there is not a scrap of evidence for the theory that the moon landings were faked, beyond some easily disprovable misunderstandings of photographic theory, and yet you choose to find these misunderstandings plausible, and don't take the paltry effort of looking up the many sources that disprove them, makes you a dingleberry. If you have looked at the disproof but do not understand it, you're worse than a dingleberry.

If that makes me presumptuous, so is all of real science.

Richard

Originally posted by mlprior
You're the one who asked for people's opinion in the first place, then you jump all over their a*s when you don't like the answer you get? Nice.

You are a waste of time.

BTW I didn't say I believed it was faked, I said it is possible.

Tell me what your background in engineering and physics is, also were you even around in 1970? If so, what, 4 years old? I know for a fact there were single board computers back then, I saw them at Goddard Space Flight Center, of course way underpowered compared to a cell phone but they did the job asked of them at the time.

I played a chess playing computer there also and was surprised that primitive box trapped my queen! That was in 1971 so the technology was a bit more advanced than you figured.

For instance, I almost got a job at Goddard as an engineering tech on the very first x-ray analysis electron microscope, they pulled out a large chunk of his budget and I lost out.

He put an x ray detector on an angular mount and used it to give a z (brightness) signal to the monitor so the particular element being detected would shine brighter, showing where, say, aluminum was on the lunar samples.

That was developed by hand right on the spot so don't tell me how poor the technology was at that time. Also for instance, my job in Apollo Tracking and timing utilized atomic clocks, a pretty high technology in anyones book, we had a Hewlett Packard cesium beam atomic clock in every downrange site, along with a rubidium atomic clock as backup and a highly temperature compensated quartz clock as a tertiary backup.

That stuff was available way before 1970 and a key part of the technology allowing the moon landings. Switching data inputs from the Apollo, hand off from one radio telescope to another had to be done within one tenth of a microsecond and that is exactly what the atomic clock in the timing system accomplished on a daily basis.

The technology of the other half of my job, Apollo tracking, was very complex, involving acoustic signals travelling on a spiral shaped wire with four of those units combining signals at specific times to match the time markers on a transponder aboard the Apollo, a signal was sent to the apollo from earth, the transponder turned that signal around and retransmitted it on a different frequency and the time analysis of the difference in signals gave the distance to the apollo at any time during the flight.

That technology was developed starting in 1963 or thereabouts and worked very well and in its final form allowed computing the distance to that Apollo within 50 feet and they knew further analysis would have gotten the distance measurement down to about 6 inches but they decided it was not worth the trouble since 50 foot accuracy was way good enough for the project.

One of my jobs was to build patch panels for analog computers at the time. 1728 pins with specific wiring patterns hand soldered in place for a specific analog computer program designed to analyse the precession of satellites spinning in orbit but it proved to be clumsy so the engineer I was working with, Horst Schlingloff, designed a communications net to combine the power of those early main frame computers and a newer analog computer with motor driven potentiometers, changed the game of spinning satellite analysis by allowing a digital computer to control the analog computer, which allowed programmers to do their early punched card routine and change the individual parameters much faster than I could do building a new patch panel to try different arrangements of weights around the inside perimeter of a satellite to see if it was stable spinning in a straight line while in orbit.

Of course any PC could do the job a thousand times faster but so what, they were doing such things in 1970, even given the clumsy state of computing back then.

You totally underestimate the level of technology then because you see 50 years of improvements. Just because there have been tremendous strides made since then does not mean they could not do certain science related jobs with the available technology.

They had advanced the state of the art of the atomic clock a thousand times back then, over the cesium beam clocks already being used by us at Goddard, I saw the hydrogen beam clock in 1971, it was the newest thing on the block and was to be included in the next step of lunar landings, of course now we know never happened. That clock, the hydrogen maser clock, was accurate to within one second in 5 million years, compared to the accuracy of our HP units of one second in 2000 years.

Think about that. Even the off the shelf atomic clocks were accurate to within one second in 2000 years way back in those backwards times of 1970.

Then tell me again, how we could not have had the technology to have gone to the moon in 1970.

One other piece of technology I had personal experience on, Ratheon in 1968 had a communications transceiver based on a ground mounted dish not much bigger than the small dishes used for satellite tv now. You had two such dishes and packages, say 100 miles apart. The technology, very carefully engineered, very clever engineering I must say, had 17 microwave channels available. They found out that on a time scale of milliseconds, one of those channels would produce a clear signal but only for a tenth of a second or so. The job those units did was to analyze all 17 channels in real time, sending out test pulses sequentially on all 17 channels continuously and one channel would win out, that was where the audio was switched to for that one tenth of a second or so, then another channel came up in clarity and the audio switched to that and so forth, all in millisecond time frames, and the people talking to one another on each end did so seamlessly with no breaks in signal. That is the basis, called frequency hopping, that allows the present day cell phone systems to work as well as they do. Another example of the poor state of technology way back in 1968.

Originally posted by sonhouse
.... way back in those backwards times of 1970.

And of course the landing was broadcast on live TV over large parts of the world. Live tv broadcasts, together with the technology inside a tv, are technological achievements often underestimated.