Amazed that some folks don't believe!

[Curious George]

Hi all,
1st time poster here. Its my pleasure to happen upon this BBS . Anyhow, I purchased the 3 volume Time/Life books titled 'A Man on the Moon'. I read them in a week flat and went out on the internet to further my knowledge of the Apollo missions. I was freakin' appalled at all the sites dedicated to debunking NASA's accomplishments regarding the manned Moon missions. I was actually getting pissed off when (I) was being described as a 'nutter' for believing the science was legit.
I am no expert in space or gov't. conspiricies but I must admit feeling a bit 'taken for a fool' when visiting these websites.
One of the webites I visited that claimed the Apollo missions were faked had photos overlaying text and basically looked like a 5 year old put the webpage together. I responded via e-mail to the site saying something to the effect, 'if you are trying to dislodge the technical achievements of NASA during the manned Apollo missions puts you in a place of technical authority. So, why can't you get something as 'low-tech' as a website formatted properly?
I admit I got a bit of a chuckle when I hit the 'send' button on that one.
I guess my question is, why are there people out there that do not believe men went to the moon? What more do they need to believe it? What is the crux of their disbelief?
I can understand the occasional fringe-element fruit-cake opinion of a 'staged moon landing' -but there seems to be alot of non-believers out there. As for myself, I believe it all really happened.
Thank you in advance for your comments.

Matt

[Johnno]

" I guess my question is, why are there people out there that do not believe men went to the moon? "

Because they're lazy uneducated people who want to believe in conspiracies, want to feel that they know a secret, want to feel that they're smart, and so on. Who knows what each single HBers' life story is, but most of the time theyll quiet down once you start proving their 'evidence' wrong.



"What more do they need to believe it? "

Well, once you start offering moon trips to see the LM descent stages and equipment left behind, Ill become a HBer too.

Til then they want hi res hubble images (impossible) or other satellite images, until some poor government has used their money for that, and showed the pictures, they'll say it's faked, US paid them off, etc, and find up 'evidence' to prove this (for example US donated large amounts of grain to the russians to keep quiet during the space race).


" I can understand the occasional fringe-element fruit-cake opinion of a 'staged moon landing' -but there seems to be alot of non-believers out there."

Those are the sheep who dont want to think for themselves, just take the 'evidence' that's served to em, and eat it happily thinking they're so smart that they could see errors the top people of NASA couldnt.

Johnno

[AstroMike]

On 2002-04-24 18:22, Curious George wrote:
One of the webites I visited that claimed the Apollo missions were faked had photos overlaying text and basically looked like a 5 year old put the webpage together

I may have seen that site before. Is it this one?

[Curious George]

Thanks for your replies.
The 'hoax' website with the photos overlaying the text is:

http://www.geocities.com/nasascam/APOLLOSCAM/

too funny.

Matt

[jrkeller]

Here's my take on the hoax stuff.

I think that for the originators of the moon hoax myth, they had some good questions like: Why aren't the shadows parallel, Why isn't there a blast crater, and How could they survive on the surface when the temperature is several hundred degrees. Instead of doing what most of us would do and find someone who knows, they instantly assume that things must be faked. It doesn't fit what they know or have experienced. Before anyone knows, they write some books, make some movies and rake in a lot of bucks.

At this point, people who know science, engineering, photography, etc, come along and say, what you're saying here is wrong. Now these people who have taken in millions of dollars are stuck. Do they admit they were wrong or do they never admit it and make more cash. Most never admit they were wrong, at this point they just start making up stuff and it just keeps snowballing. Once the money train starts, it's hard to stop it.

Look at the moon rocks. No geologist has ever said that the rocks were fake. The one thing that sticks out in all the scientific documents about the moon rocks is the lack of minerals (none) that form in the presence of water. So now the moon rocks didn't come from Earth, so they must be meteorites. Then it's pointed out that the outer surfaces of the rocks are not melted from high speed passage through the Earth's atmosphere, so now the rocks are made in ovens at NASA. It will soon be pointed out that radioactive dating and solar weathering of the rocks shows that they're billions of years old. Then we will probably hear that NASA has some gamma ray gun that can do this.

When it comes to selling this stuff, most of the people who buy it are probably taken in by the official sounding titles of the people involved. "Former Rockwell employee, they built the Apollo capasule you know" Stuff like that. I don't know of anyone who owns a bit of the moon hoax stuff, but I deal professional people all day long. I think they get people who have little or no education or at least critical thinking skills.

Another thing too, if you listen, read or watch the moon hoax stuff, it all sounds very official, like these people are authorities. My ex-wife use to say, "If you sound like you know what you're doing, people will believe you, even if you don't know what you're doing."

Also, a sucker is born every minute.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jrkeller on 2002-04-24 20:03 ]</font>

[JayUtah]

Hi C. G.

The "nasascam" web site is notorious. You'll be lucky if you get a reply. It's author is one of the most arrogant and least intelligent people in this debate. And he doesn't usually debate. His thesis is, basically, that you have to be brain damaged in order to believe NASA actually landed a man on the moon, and he'll have no problem telling you to your face that you're hopelessly delusional and that you therefore have no business talking to him.

There are other hoax believers who are at least civil in debate.

I agree with the notion that belief in the hoax is a sort of surrogate for legitimate education and experience. It gives these folks some kind of rush to believe that they have outsmarted NASA. And the whole conspiracy phenomenon seems to cherish the feeling of being "on the inside".

They tend to see society as highly stratified -- a very "us versus them" setup. They believe they are the oppressed masses under the thumb of a corrupt elite which routinely experiments on them without their knowledge. They also believe the governing elite (which may or may not correspond to the visual government) hides a vast amount of "true" knowledge from the public.

That said, I agree in part with Mr. Keller. That is, I agree in the phenomenon he sets forth, where perceived anamalies are not legitimately investigated, but instead amplified for use as supposed empirical support for a purely conjectural conspiracy hypothesis. My disagreement is minor: I don't think conspiracy belief starts with the examination of evidence. I believe it derives from the worldview I outlined above. The empirical evidence is presented to try to make it all sound plausible to the non-conspiracist.

And there is indeed a segment of otherwise reasonable people who do not necessarily subscribe to all the conspiracy theories, or even any of them. But because they too lack the specialized knowledge to see through the conspiracy theorists' poor arguments, they are somewhat convinced by them. These are the people who are most worth talking to, because they will respond to sound arguments and true science.

But people like the Nasascam webmaster are far too deeply entrenched in their beliefs to make good discussion.

[Karamoon]

Johnno: Because they're lazy uneducated people who want to believe in conspiracies, want to feel that they know a secret, want to feel that they're smart, and so on.

Yeah, dude, you is well right. I don't believe it either, and I am so much smarter than all of you fools. I am in on de' big secret yet you folks haven't a clue.

The world is full of aliens too. I'm tellin' yeah, man. You better watch out!

[Karamoon]

Jay: There are other hoax believers who are at least civil in debate.

Did you hear that, Johnno?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: karamoon on 2002-04-24 22:17 ]</font>

[Ian R]

JayUtah with a Big Hooter?

[Karamoon]

Ian: JayUtah with a Big Hooter?

May I remind you that name calling will not be tolerated on this disscusion board.

[Ian R]

May I point out that Mr Karamoon’s earlier post has clearly been edited in a cynical attempt to remove the slanderous and, quite frankly, unfounded accusations aimed at Mr Utah and his ample nasal appendage. Evidently my post was an attempt to use humour in order to diffuse a potentially volatile situation.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Ian R on 2002-04-24 22:44 ]</font>

[Karamoon]

Ian R: Look, Karamoon, nobody likes you and nobody wants you here. Don't you think you have caused enough damage already? Your pea-brain was always likely to cause you problems and now you are severely embarrassing yourself. Your an utter utter fool and if I were you I'd quit while you're in last place. Idiot.

Gosh. Does everyone else feel the same way?

[Karamoon]

Evidently, Ian R was previously a member of the Allied forces double-cross committee, or so it would seem. He has led me down the garden path and then, at some point, and unbeknownst to myself, edited his previous message to deflect attention away from his unwarranted and continual outbursts.

However, Ian is correct with his observation that I myself edited an earlier posting, but I would like to point out that was simply because I spelt Johnno's name incorrectly, with only one 'o'. Not wanting to cause offence, upon realising my error, I set about putting this right.

Now, BA, if you would, please escort Ian from this board.

Thank you.

[Johnno]

Karamoon, the reason I said "uneducated" regarding hoax believers is because anyone with a high school physics degree can do the calculations necessary when watching film taken on the moon, and conclude that it is in fact 1/6th gravity and vacuum.

On the other hand, if you are to say it isn't, you have to come up with a reasonable explanation on how that was faked.

I havent heard if from you before, so go ahead and explain it.

Whenever I ask a hoax believer how it was faked (after explaining to him the physics involved) they start going on about how the astronauts were attach to wires etc etc. Someone tried to go with the 'slowed down film' explanation, but pretty much stepped on his own tongue when he was going to explain the physics calculations that supported his 'theory'.

I have yet to meet a hoax believer who wasent wrong half the time, did his research in half of the cases, and actually was civil about it when shown beyond doubt that he was wrong.

Johnno

[GrapesOfWrath]

[quote]
On 2002-04-24 18:56, Curious George wrote:
The 'hoax' website with the photos overlaying the text is:

http://www.geocities.com/nasascam/APOLLOSCAM/</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR></TD></TR></TABLE>

Looks OK to me, but then, I'm using Netscape.

[Moonman]

I think we went to the Moon, I'm almost certain, 99.999999%. I just have one little nagging doubt. It concerns the LM.

Here was a piece of machinery that worked perfectly (almost, except for a few glithces with radar) every time. It landed OK, that I am OK with, but it took off and met up with the CM perfectly 6 times. This had never been tested before in situation. It was one almighty risk that they took. How did they know it was going to be OK? It is a very complicated operation, man has not usually been good at getting things right first time. So what was the testing procedure?

I love Apollo, to me it was more than science, it was a work of art.

[Donnie B.]

Hi, Moonman, and welcome to the forum.

The LM was carefully and conservatively designed, and that design was put through a very rigorous process of review and improvement before it was finalized. Grumman, NASA, the astronauts, and even other Apollo contractors all had input into its design. In fact, each LM descent engine was actually manufactured by two different contractors; it was begun by Bell (the original contractor), and the partially-assembled engine was sent to Rocketdyne for completion (Rocketdyne solved some combustion instability problems that Bell couldn't resolve). This illustrates that the Apollo program was able to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure their hardware would be reliable.

Besides the solid design, the LM was tested in Earth orbit before it went to the Moon, first unmanned (launched on a Saturn I booster), then manned (the Apollo 9 mission), during which they exercised all systems and procedures they'd be using during the landings. Then, Apollo 10 took the LM to the moon and performed further testing in lunar orbit; they did everything but actually land.

Humans don't always get everything right the first time, but when they are careful and do whatever testing they can in advance, they can succeed. Remember: the very first orbital Space Shuttle mission was launched with a crew... they were that confident that it would succeed.

[Moonman]

I've read 'Moon Lander' by Thomas J. Kelly. It's an interesting book (a little dry maybe) but I still have the same nagging doubt.

The ascent engine lift-off from a platform on the ground in 1/6th G into Moon orbit was never tested. They should have carried out un-manned tests first but they didn't. Everything is almost 'too perfect'.

Another question! I have seen the video clips of the ascent launch taken from the Lunar Rover. The camera follows the ascent stage as it flys up into orbit. How did it track it. Was the camera motion pre-programmed to coincide with liftoff. It couldn't have been remotely controlled from Earth because of the time delay.

[Donnie B.]

It was indeed remotely controlled from Earth. Others on this forum can give you the name of the tech who did it!

The time delay was indeed a problem, but it was anticipated; the controller practised the procedure. He still didn't get it perfect on the first attempt; the Apollo 15 liftoff was only tracked for a few moments before it was lost. 16 was better and 17 was tracked for a long time.

As to the other issue, it would have been very difficult, expensive, and unnecessary to perform an unmanned lunar landing to test the hardware, when they had already tested it in every possible mode short of an actual landing. Ascent from a hovering descent stage a few miles above the surface is not very different from ascent from the surface... unless you have to deal with clinging Lunarites trying to drag you back down.

Which makes me wonder why no hoax believer has claimed that the landings were faked because the Moon was inhabited... not by alien bases but native Moon folk!

Should I start my own web site?

[Moonman]

Thanks for that.

So the technician started moving the camera 4 seconds (?) earlier. I thought it might have been programmed.

I guess am an ultra-cautious type of person. I would have insisted on un-manned trials. Firing the acsent stage above the surface and on the surface are two slightly different things. Above the surface, the descent stage will move away from the ascent. On the ground it can't do that of course. Maybe it's not important.

[SpacedOut]

Actually, in Tom Kelly’s book, he discusses the concerns about firing the ascent engine while the two stages were joined together creating the “Fire in the hole” effect. Based on my memory of that part of the book, it was one of the most important tests of the first unmanned flight, and the engine firing/stage separation was again tested on the two subsequent manned test flights as well.

You posted your previous comment as I was writing this. My guess is that the differences between the two scenarios are minor and only affect the operation of the ascent module for fractions of a second, and if anything – as compared to the Apollo 10 test in 1/6G it might have been better because you didn’t need to worry about any tumble in the descent stage.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SpacedOut on 2002-04-25 09:43 ]</font>

[JayUtah]

So the technician started moving the camera 4 seconds (?) earlier.

Yes, and Ed Fendell practiced this. Since the tilt rate was fixed at 3&deg; per second and the zoom rate was also fixed, a precise combination of the two was required in order to keep the LM in frame. The ascent stage will, of course, accelerate as it climbs. But ten seconds after liftoff it pitches over and begins moving forward away from the LRV. After pitchover only minimal camera control would have been required.

But it was all done according to the low-tech method of Fendell manually accounting for the communication delays. He was, after all, one of the world's foremost experts in radio communications.

I guess am an ultra-cautious type of person. I would have insisted on un-manned trials.

Being ultra conservative isn't a sin. You just have to realize that achieving reliability doesn't always require the straithforward test.

There were essentially three concerns: (1) the engine wouldn't light, (2) the stages wouldn't separate cleanly, and (3) the guidance system would fail.

The LM ascent engine is the second simplest rocket design on the planet, the first being the RCS jets. The fuel is helium-pressurized (no pump to fail). The propellant valves are doubled in parallel (only one of two needs to open). The system is hypergolic (no igniter). Rocketdyne fixed Bell's problem with the injector.

Redundancy also provides reliable staging. Pyrotechnic fasteners were in series, allowing for failure. The guillotine that severed the interstage link was also redundant.

The guidance system was also doubled. PGNS was used normally, but AGS was also available and was tested on Apollo 10.

Now if you know the APS will fire, and you know the vehicle will stage, and you know the guidance system is sufficient, what is there left to test? Under those conditions the vehicle will rise to a stable enough orbit.

Above the surface, the descent stage will move away from the ascent. On the ground it can't do that of course. Maybe it's not important.

In terms of ascent stage flight, it's not important. The only danger is that the descent stage will tumble on separation and put a landing strut through the cabin.

The guidance system simply integrates thrust over time and combines that interval result with its understanding of the state vector. So the guidance system doesn't care if you're moving or still.

It's actually easier to launch on the lunar surface because the moon's gravity provides propellant ullage. In orbit that would have to be done using a pre-fire burst from the RCS.

Apollo 10 was really the acid test of the LM staging. They staged the vehicle in a tumble and it worked just fine. Honestly they were more worried about the SPS for TEI than they were getting back up off the lunar surface.

[Moonman]

Thanks, this is all good stuff!

I have another thought that niggles me!

You mentioned the RCS. How precise was the RCS? To keep the ascent on an even keel the RCS would have to keep firing in the opposite direction to the undesired motion, but to achieve a precise balance in space would be impossible wouldn't it? With no atmosphere to act as a damper.

(I assume each RCS fired at a constant rate and the variable factor was time.)

[JayUtah]

The question is not how accurate the RCS is, but how accurate the guidance system is. The guidance system is precise to 0.001° and accurate to something like 0.05° when properly calibrated. It can sense very minute rotation rates. It also cycles at about 20 Hz (not processor speed, but loop speed) so it's sampling the spacecraft's attitude twenty times a second.

The spacecraft's attitude state is a combination of error angles (how far off the correct attitude it is) and error rates (how fast it's spinning). Now imagine a graph where error angle is the horizontal axis and error rate is the vertical axis. One of these exists for roll, pitch, and yaw, but let's just consider one of them. Every spacecraft attitude state is a point on that graph. You want the attitude to be at the origin -- zero error, zero rate.

Now there are some "envelopes" on this graph. There is the hysteresis envelope. That's a circle around the origin. The spacecraft's attitude state has to pass outside this envelope in order for the guidance system to care about it. It detects smaller movements, but decides not to do anything about it.

It's difficult to describe the shape of the other envelopes. I know there's a picture somewhere. Anyway, the guidanced system software has a predetermined procedure for getting from any error point on the graph to the boundary of the envelopes and following them down to the origin. The code took a year to develop and test, and requires only a few dozen instructions.

The precise pattern of RCS firing depends on which recovery method is chosen.

The RCS jets are 100 lbf Marquardt hypergolic thrusters. You can still buy them from Marquardt and they haven't changed much since Apollo. They do not have to be fired at steady-state. They can be fired in "pulse mode" with durations as short as 0.014 second. This is shorter than the ramp-up time, so you don't get the full 100 lbf thrust. Valve response time is on the order of 0.001 second.

The ascent stage has a somewhat ideal mass distribution. The centers of mass for the ascent fuel tanks are actually below the center of thrust of the APS. If the center of (dry) mass of the vehicle is near the geometrical center of volume, this means that the LM ascent stage is inherently stable during the first portion of the ascent. Oscillations would actually self-correct.

It is often argued that the LM is an inherently unstable craft, but this is pure fantasy. It does have a lower moment of inertia than a cylindrical rocket, but the careful placement of fuel and engine and RCS jets make it very stable indeed. The astronauts' movements do not significantly affect the attitude state of the vehicle. They are considerably less massive than the fuel, and very much more inboard. The primary force shifting the center of mass is the depletion of ascent propellants.

The RCS quads are mounted far outboard on outriggers. They can exert a tremendous amount of torque that way, something on the order of 2,000 ft-lbs. (That's an estimate, I've never computed it precisely.) And since this torque is variable when integrated over large fractions of a second, via the pulse mode RCS operation, a wide range of rotation rates can be induced or corrected.

The descent stage has a gimballed engine. The guidance computer maintains balanced thrust through a combination of trim commands to the engine gimbal and RCS commands. The DPS gimbal is a screwjack mechanism, so it isn't very responsive, but the idea is to perform coarse trim once and then manage attitude errors so that they don't drift outside the gimbal capacity.

The LM is very much fly-by-wire. The pilot's hand controller gives commands to the computer. For example, pushing the control forward tells the computer, "I want to fly forward," much like the cyclical stick in a helicopter. The computer decides how far forward to gimbal the engine, taking care not to go too far and "fall off" the thrust or induce a dangerous rotation rate. The farther the pilot deflects the controller, the more the computer allows forward tilt and speed to develop, up to a programmed maximum.

The pilot manually controls the RCS only by putting his controller "hard over", in which case signals are sent directly to the RCS controller, bypassing the guidance computer. This would only be necessary in extreme situations.

As for air acting as a damper, that's not really an issue. Air resistance to rotation, in the rates typically encountered in flight, is negligible. In aircraft flight, air acts to damp rotation because the airframe and control surfaces are designed to use the slipstream to accomplish this.

Is it clearer now, or have I just confused you more?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JayUtah on 2002-04-25 13:40 ]</font>

[SpacedOut]

On 2002-04-25 13:33, JayUtah wrote:

The RCS jets are 100 lbf Marquardt hypergolic thrusters. You can still buy them from Marquardt and they haven't changed much since Apollo. They do not have to be fired at steady-state. They can be fired in "pulse mode" with durations as short as 0.014 second. This is shorter than the ramp-up time, so you don't get the full 100 lbf thrust. Valve response time is on the order of 0.001 second.

Jay – A question about the RCS Thrusters in pulse mode – Did they actually calculate the actual thrust amounts for the various pulse times or was it strictly a simple feedback loop that kept hunting for the correct solution? Except for why they were placed where they were on the LM, the RCS Thrusters were barely mentioned in Tom Kelly’s book and this aspect of the RSC thruster operation wasn’t mentioned at all.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SpacedOut on 2002-04-25 15:27 ]</font>

[Moonman]

That is a fantastic response, thank you for all that effort!

[Kaptain K]

Jay,
Minor nitpick.

They can exert a tremendous amount of torque that way, something on the order of 2,000 ft-lbs

The units for torque are lb-ft not ft-lbs.

[JayUtah]

Personally I prefer Newton-meters. You're right, of course, but I've been hanging around mechanics all month, and they pronounce it "foot pounds" even though the units canonically put the force unit prior to the length unit.

[JimB]

On 2002-04-25 20:01, Ian R wrote:



Well, I found the following clip at a NASA site and it certainly doesn't look like Apollo 14 to me. Or did that mission have two DAC cameras filming the ascent?


<center></center>


<a href="http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/video/apollo/apollo11/mpg/apollo11_onbclip08.mpg">Apollo 11 ascent footage.
</a>

Here's a neat clip that Ian R found and posted on another topic. It shows the control the LM had during lift off of the moon. Do you think the oscillation is an artifact of the program "seeking" -- finding the envelope, determining the best thruster pattern to get to zero, finding it's in another envelope and using another pattern, finding it's in another envelope and on and on... ?

[JayUtah]

I'm reasonably sure the clip we're seeing starts well after pitchover.

The oscillation is indeed due to the closed loop guidance system. The ascent is relatively smooth because, as I mentioned, the LM ascent stage is highly stable by design. But the oscillation is caused by the slightly off-axis thrust having induced a very small error rate. When the attitude exceeds the hysteresis, the guidance system will pulse the RCS to reverse the rate. The vehicle then rotates back to the correct heading, at which point the RCS pulses again to null the rate. But the thrust is still off-axis, so having corrected the heading and nulled the rate does not produce a long-term stable state. As soon as the off-axis thrust again exceeds the hysteresis, the whole process starts over.

The oscillation could be damped with a tighter hysteresis, at the expense of greater fuel consumption. "Close enough" is close enough in this case.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JayUtah on 2002-04-25 22:44 ]</font>