Bart Sibrel's Top Fifteen

[Glom]

Updated.

The space race point now has its own page.

[JayUtah]

Wow, it's only been up for a couple of hours. And I thought I needed a life. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

It looks like Bart's been reading Der Voron and Ralph Rene.

I especially like the allegations that the LM had a high center of gravity. "Gee, it's absurd to think it wouldn't just tip right over." I'm glad Sibrel isn't in charge of designing anything intended for human use.

[SeanF]

Typo for you to fix, Jay:

About two-thirds of the way down, in the fourth paragraph of the section dealing with the temperature of the LM sitting in the sun, you say:

Since Mr. Sibrel does tell us how he arrived at his figure, we can't tell whether his claim is defensible or not.

I'm pretty sure that fourth word should be "doesn't."

[jrkeller]

Jay,

A bunch of those questions popped up on the Yahoo Apollo hoax group.

There are already some nice responses.

[Kizarvexis]

May I make a few suggestions for helping new or casual readers?

On the space race question, I would add the first paragraph from the space race page to the space race question on the top 15 list. IMO, it will make more sense to the first time/casual reader to see this short explanation and then be able to click on the link if they want.

On the question about the LM overheating on the moon, you might want to add a link to your page on heat transfer for the readers that haven't learned how heat is tranferred in space yet.

On the question about glare and shadow directions, you might want to provide a link to your Photograhpy chapter for readers who aren't conversant with photography.

Great job and you are a bastion of light in the sinster darkness of the twinkies.

Kizarvexis

[g99]

I know this sounds stupid, but what the heck:

How about on the anaversary of the moon landing we all send Bart a twinkey in the mail? A inside joke that he probobly will not get. But just imagine bart getting 500 twinkeys in the mail on the same day.

[g99]

Amazing site Jay. I don't know if you have thought about this, but some of your pages can be rather long in length. Have you ever thought about breaking them up into seperate pages for people who use dialup modems?

<a name="JD2452683.Sh"> page JD2452683.Sh aka Shadows
On 2003-02-12 01:43, g99 wrote: to? 4:19 A.M. PST
not yet math hour..anyway I got off the #17
and walked west from fifth street up past 6th to Broadway
on my way WEST i noticed sunlight reflected off some window pains
So as i walked thru those reflections I could se my shadow
ponting SW {whereasthe person walking beside me} in sun light
Her shadow pointed NW {ms/} so there were the two of us
both travling West up Harrison my shadow pointing SW hers NW /
kind of spooky. then when i was alone in the Sun & the reflected SUN {TB.tbc} http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/vi...15#20030212.MH {5:25 A.M.}

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: HUb' on 2003-02-12 08:16 ]</font>

[ToSeek]

So the space shuttle must orbit at altitudes nearing 150 miles (94 km) where the air is thin enough to be negligible for a few weeks.

I think you converted kilometers to miles when doing your calculation, rather than vice versa. It should be more like 240 km.

[DaveC]

It seems to me that a better way to flag any errors we spot on Clavius is to email the webmaster directly. I'm not sure it benefits anyone, except maybe HBs, to have Jay pilloried in public for typos.

[ToSeek]

On 2003-02-12 11:58, DaveC wrote:
It seems to me that a better way to flag any errors we spot on Clavius is to email the webmaster directly. I'm not sure it benefits anyone, except maybe HBs, to have Jay pilloried in public for typos.

You're no fun!

[JayUtah]

jrkeller: A bunch of those questions popped up on the Yahoo Apollo hoax group.

I've weighed in.

"DesertFox" is the same guy who posted here as SaturnV, and who posts at ApolloHoax under Apollo_172003

His first post to that list diagnosing me with "cognitive dissonance" bears a striking resemblance to this post from Apollo_172003 at ApolloHoax.com:

I'll quote Bart Sibrel here Jay you have a human condition called "Cognitive Dissonance" This means that you have a long held belief rooted so deeply in psyche that you can not see anything else. Even if visible facts prove contrary to your belief.

http://www.apollohoax.com/forums/vie...=1076&forum=12

Kizarvexis: I would add the first paragraph from the space race page to the space race question on the top 15 list.

More than a link would be nice, but consider also

g99: I don't know if you have thought about this, but some of your pages can be rather long in length.

The Sibrel response is a very long page indeed. That's why a lot of it is getting off-loaded into separate pages.

Kizarvexis: ... you might want to add a link to your page on heat transfer

Sure, but I want to flesh out the radiant transfer page a bit. It turns out many of those concepts keep coming up.

ToSeek: I think you converted kilometers to miles when doing your calculation

Yep. I do that all the time.

DaveC: It seems to me that a better way to flag any errors we spot on Clavius is to email the webmaster directly.

I get them either way. But there's no point clogging up the board here with proofreading. If it's a typo, just mail it. But I prefer talking about logical, factual, or interpretational issues here. This board is a highly effective peer review.

[Jim]

On 2003-02-11 17:36, JayUtah wrote:
I especially like the allegations that the LM had a high center of gravity. "Gee, it's absurd to think it wouldn't just tip right over." I'm glad Sibrel isn't in charge of designing anything intended for human use.

We-e-el-l-ll... The typical SUV has a high center of gravity, and a track record of flipping over.

Of course, when used as intended, it seems to function jus' fine.

I liked this:

Nixon was inaugurated as the 37th U.S. president on January 20, 1969. Apollo 8, the first mission to venture through the Van Allen belts Sibrel says are so deadly, was launched on December 21, 1968, a month before Nixon took power. But the designs for the spacecraft and the plans for the mission were finalized long before this time, during Johnson's presidency.

One point I don't recall seeing about this...

If Johnson had ordered or even authorized a lunar hoax, Nixon would have had to be brought onboard quickly. Had Nixon been informed of a hoax - started under Johnson - he would have blown the whistle himself.

As you said, he was not fond of the space program (used it only for the PR value) and was even less fond of Johnson. This would have been a golden opportunity to destroy them both at once, and look the hero to the deluded American public (even better PR).

[Glom]

They typically refuse to give interviews to conspiracy theorists.

Naturally. I know we get pretty steamed up by Sibrel's antics from time to time, but I can't imagine how insulting it must be to be confronted face to face with a tub of lard saying you are a liar. My only complaint about Aldrin's punch was that it didn't do any permanent damage.

Sibrel's "rare, uncirculated photos" have been available since the 1970s. His "exclusive" film footage is available (unedited) from various sources.

Sibrel is a liar. There's nothing more to be said about him.

So here's more.

To look at its design and think such could have actually occurred is absolutely ludicrous.

Geoffrey Archer! I hate it when these people promote themselves to the status of self-appointed engineer. I'm not an aerospace engineer (yet) but I'd imagine that such a statement from an over-inflated (in more ways than one) hot-air balloon would be extremely insulting to one who is. You don't see them coming round his house and telling him how to operate his camera.

Upon just looking at this design, to think it would not immediately pinwheel and and crash, as the lunar module trainer did three weeks prior on earth, is absurd.

See above.

It crashed not because it was unstable, but because it broke.

Brilliant.

While Sputnik clearly preceded Explorer I, the technology gap was not so wide as the political gap.

I like this point. Conspiracists have a tendancy to simplify things for their own conveniance. In this case, they are simplifying the situation by assuming that both America and Russia were trying to do exactly the same race. The reasons why the Russians were the first into space was because they were the first to try.

The Soviets rushed Gagarin into orbit in an unsafe, uncompleted spacecraft.

I didn't know that before. The list is now complete. All the important manned spaceflight firsts were set by the Soviets because of their use of cheap, dangerous stunts. I knew about the Voskhod 1 cheat and the Voskhod 2 fiasco, but not about Vostok 1. Thanks.

This would be a good example if the Soviets hadn't simply stuffed a third man into their two-man capsule just to set the record.

I may be mistaken, but I thought that the Voskhod capsule was merely a one man Vostok capsule that was dangerously modified to include an extra two.

Wow, it's only been up for a couple of hours. And I thought I needed a life.

Well, it was late evening when I was browsing things. You're not the first one to say that. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Glom on 2003-02-12 14:16 ]</font>

[JayUtah]

We-e-el-l-ll... The typical SUV has a high center of gravity, and a track record of flipping over.

Agreed. My sister rolled her Ford Explorer on New Year's Eve. She's fine, but you're right about the SUV.

But what does that compare to a lunar module? There's really no comparison. They're two completely different designs with entirely different mass properties.

You can see the ascent stage cutaway on my web site. The descent stage is about the same. You have low-slung fuel tanks on moment-arms transverse to the thrust vector. You have a motor mounted as high in the structure as the structure permits. You have two systems able to provide corrective moments and two independent adaptive, closed-loop systems actively controlling them. Good heavens, the only rocket design I've seen which is more inherently stable than the lunar module is Robert Goddard's, which at the time was entirely passively stabilized.

[jrkeller]

Jay,

You might want to add a few more first for the Soviets.

For example,

First person and crew to die in space.

First animinal, on Sputnik to die in space.

First manned abort from the pad.

First manned flight to fail to reach orbit.

First nuclear reactor to crash in a country.

The Russian had a lot of firsts in the diaster area too.

[Glom]

JRKeller, it's unfair of you to expect conspiracists to accept those firsts. They have a code of honour that states they must employ strict selective vision, only taking into account facts that can be twisted in to supporting their conspiracy theory and disregarding facts that contradict it.

Jay, with regard to Sibrel's pathetic reference to one-sixth the tank size, it is often the case that when we refer to scale factors, we mean linear. This would make a tank six times smaller, six cubed times smaller in volume. When you say there is no linear relationship between payload and fuel volume, you should also say that there is no simple cubic relationship.

[JayUtah]

You might want to add a few more first for the Soviets.

I don't want to be misunderstood. Us v. Them can often come off sounding like sour grapes, which is not my intent. Soviet failures should be interpreted as a sign of a program that was too big for its technological britches. There's a certain amount of daredevilry in any space program, but it has to be clear that these failures were caused by rushing to set records, not just by trying to extend the envelope.

[JayUtah]

When you say there is no linear relationship between payload and fuel volume, you should also say that there is no simple cubic relationship.

I mean linear in the mathematical sense, not in the geometrical sense. This is confusing, I admit. It's probably better to say there's no "simple" relationship instead of forcing the reader to interpret "linear".

[jrkeller]

My thought is to get to those clear thinking folks who are coming to Jay's site for more information.

[Glom]

Regarding the missile advantage or whatever. I checked out Encyclopedia Astronautica and looked up the mission durations.

In turns out that by the time of Apollo 11, the Americans had already earned 1864 hours. This compares to just 697 hours that the Soviets had with the completion Soyuz 5, the last mission before Apollo 11.

So the Americans had a three-to-one advantage in manned space hours over the Soviets and not the five-to-one disadvantage.

Sibrel is liar! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_mad.gif[/img]

[jrkeller]

I believe that NASA surpassed Russian in the total number of man hours in space after the completion of the Gemini 7 mission.

[Glom]

Regarding Krushev's deposing and the motivations behind it, Jay, do you know of a specific historian/book/whatever that actually does make the that he was removed in part because of his treatment of the space program?

We obviously trust you, but you always taught us that it's better to actually have sources. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[JayUtah]

It was either Burroughs or Zimmerman, but I can't recall which. It may even have been Chaikin. I can check all three sources tonight.

[Glom]

Just had a thought about American man hours. The statistics I gave were the sum of flight times, but many of the missions had multiple crew members, so that means that the man hours for the flight is however many crew members times the flight time. Given that a higher proportion of American flights than Russian flights included multiple crew members and that their big hitter flights (Gemini 7, Apollo 7) had multiple crew members, I'd expect the American advantage was even greater.

I would calculate, but Encylopedia Astronautica isn't working at the moment.