I hope you can answer this question and if not I hope it gives you food for thought as it has me.

Regarding the moon landing hoax. I didn’t see the fox special on it but I have heard of it. I don’t disbelieve that the landings happened.

My question regards the Apollo 13 story. According to the story the spacecraft got cold when it had to power down all non essential equipment after it lost power after the accident. It got so cold that the astronauts cought colds, their breath fogged when they exhaled and condensation formed on the inside if the ship.

My question is, since the closed ship was in direct raw sunlight with no aptnospheric
insulation and with a solar exposure equivelent to the equatorial desert, at high noon, 24 hours a day for 5 days. Like a car parked in direct sunlight with the windows rolled up. How did they throw off all that heat as well as the heat produced by their bodies?

Part of the "answer" is that some of the light was reflected by the skin of the ship and the heat coming in from the sun side of the ship was radiated away from the shaded side. Some of the light comming through the windows would have been trapped inside the ship by the greenhouse effect. The astronauts mentioned they were irritated by the bright light coming in the window. They did not mention that they were warmed by that light.
Also the condensation pattern inside the ship was as if the ship was in contact with cold water. The tempreture was cold enough to condense the water but not freeze it as it would if the ship was in contact with somthing else of a different tempreture. Which is a very narrow range.

As you may know, because anything in direct sunlight in space gets hot as well as heat
produced by the bodies of the astronauts, heat builds up. Heat removal apparatus is a major design feature of spacecraft and spacesuits. Turning off those apparatus to conserve energy would have created an overheating problem not an over cooling problem.

Naturaly, having thought up this complex of peculiarities I have also bult up some
suspicions as to what may have really happened. I have three main possibilities, from the picayune to the tragic.
One is that it was a publicity stunt to reaquire waning public intrest and funding. another is that there was a covert mission under way and the disaster was a cover. Finaly, that the mission was actually lost and the story was fabricated to cover the fact.
In all cases the hoax, if it was a hoax, could have been carried out in the mission
simulators using one of the preplaned disaster scenareos that all crews train under. As is part of the story the people on the ground were trying to help the men up there. So there was a lot of activity at the mission simulators at that time. Since the mission was notoriously under reported by
the media before the accident. NASA had more than usual freedom to set up the hoax. If it was a hoax I suspect mostly the covert mision because there are earmarks of planning evident in the events as told by the story. The under reporting could have been planned as a cover for a planned covert mission. In the planning stage of the cover story someone thinking to make the hoax as realistic as possible may have said ‘It’s cold in space, so if we say they lose power then they should get cold.” Not knowing that space in fact is niether hot nor cold. An object in the sun gets very hot and an object in the shade gets very cold. That fallacy was and still is a common myth. A person including it in the story may have pointed out that people know that “It’s cold in space.” so convinced all involved that the simulator had to get cold or the cover would be blown. That error in the planning stage, when being set up may have had the crew asking themselves “How are we going to get this simulator cold”. Rather than build a huge refrigerator to cool the simulator they may have just set it up in a tank of cold water. Setting up in an artificial environment would also explain why the bright lights of the powerful floodlights set to simulate the sun irritated the
astronauts but did not warm them.
Since as this story is one of NASA’s finest hours and everyone involved seemes more than
willing to talk. If you ask some questions sensitive to this scenario of your contacts in NASA and they suddenly freeze up, could you let me know that? If you answer this I would ask the question of why anything else in direct sunlight in space gets hot but this
didn’t.

Yours
David Samuel
dpsamu@yahoo.com
1337 Esplanade Ave.
New Orleans LA
70116