...A retired Russian space program officer stated that the hazardous space radiation was the biggest reason they did not send a man to the moon.

The retired Russian must be Bill Kaysingpov??? ...hehe

http://www.sju.edu/~tk098681/spc110/hoax.htm

Or one of his comrades. :-$ :-#

Not trying to be a spoilsport but I found a very interesting note at the end of that Web Page:

And it also links to an article written by Jim Scotti debunking the Fox Video!

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

If this were the true reason they didn't go, then I'd say they gave up too easily.

When someone comes up with a new and pluasable reason why no one did it, I might take them seriously, but while they trot out the old and tired and repeatily disproved "moon dust", "flag", "radiation", "shadows" arguements...... *yawn*

:roll:

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

And it seems like each new HBer thinks he's the first to try those arguments.

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Help! Marxist literary critics are following me!

The sense that one's arguments are novel is an oft-encountered problem in polemical discussion. Newcomers predisposed toward one side of the debate first encounter some argument and generally don't look for an existing rebuttal. Conspiracists rely on this to hawk their goodies to successive new crops of rubes even 25 years after the first arguments were rebutted.

In this case the claim to authority is a bit more nebulous. At NASA, key figures in Apollo were well known. We can find out, for example, that Maurice Chatelain never held the positions he claimed, nor that Bill Kaysing was ever "Head of Advanced Research" at Rocketdyne. But the Soviet space program was highly compartmentalized and very secret. So unless this witness is known to people who can vouce for his authority, it would be very difficult to verify his status, either to support or refute him. Even I could claim to have been in the Soviet space program, and there would be very little anyone could do to prove that I wasn't.

On its face this testimony seems false. This official seems unaware of the Zond missions that proved their version of the command module was sufficient to protect living organisms from space radiation. You have to wonder about a former Soviet space officer who disputes the findings of his own program.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Yeah, these points seemed particularly silly. He seems to say NASA should have drop tested the LM. (Did they by any chance? That'd be ironic.) Why he'd expect a big hunk of aluminum foil to take the same kind of stresses the
CM did is beyond me. He also says the fact that we launched more missions after Apollo 11 is proof that Apollo 11 failed. #-o

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Anyone who believes in the warning of the bible (prophecies concerning the end time which is now) shall be benefited from my invention. Because they won't be stupid enough to pass this! -Alex Chiu

They did: Apollos 10 and 11.

Or did he mean though Earth's atmosphere?

It would have been a terrible and meaningless waste to drop-test an entire completed lunar module, at least for the purposes of testing the undercarriage. This is a clear case where testing can be "decoupled" and where unit testing is both cheaper and more effective than integrated testing.

To test whether the undercarriage is within specifications, all that is required is to mount a sample of the struts on any suitable mass and drop it. The struts are instrumented and the tests filmed at high frame rates to verify the expected dynamics. The lunar module structure and contents are simply mass in the strut-centric view. Even better, individual struts are mounted on test stands which collide them with an immovable surface at appropriate kinetic energies.

The structures are tested in a similar fashion. The computer, for example, is dead weight when it comes to testing its structural surroundings. One need not waste a priceless computer testing the structure in which it sits. Concrete and sandbags are wonderful low-cost alternatives to expensive equipment. One need merely apply masses to the appropriate places of the structure and then apply suitable kinetic energies, again with instrumentation and detailed observation.

The computer, on the other hand, can be subjected in prototype to shocks consistent with the dynamics of the landing without using the spacecraft's frame in order to do it.

This sort of decoupled testing is the norm. It has been proven to be reasonably predictive of the integrated system's behavior, and is conducted at considerably reduced cost. One does not generally need to undertake the expense and time of final assembly merely to test the integrated system - especially to destruction. Very little is learned in through integrated dynamics tests that cannot be learned otherwise.

I would venture to say that for someone purporting to have worked in the Soviet space program, this individual knows very little about engineering test methods.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Don't know that NASA ever "drop tested" the complete LM, but the Apollo flights that checked out its hardware and software were 9 (Earth orbit) and 10 (lunar orbit).

I always wondered what Stafford and Cernan must have felt, being only 50,000 feet from the lunar surface, but due to mass and other restrictions, not able to land. :-?

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At least one of the CSMs, CSM-102 perhaps, was tested to destruction. Destructive testing is helpful because it helps validate design margins and confirm failure modes. But destructive tests on fully integrated systems are generally conducted only when the cost of each article is low (e.g., it can be pulled off a manufacturer's high capacity assembly line) or when articles become unusable for other reasons and would otherwise be scrapped.

Boeing conducts destructive tests of its airliner wings, for example. But that is not while the wing is bolted to a fuselage -- there is no point in ruining a fuselage simply to determine the wing's failure mode. And you wouldn't necessarily put the wing's wiring harnesses in place either. Wiring harnesses don't generally contribute to the structure in a quantitatively significant way. But the wing may be fitted with its hydraulics and brought up to simulated flight pressure. Hydraulic lines under pressure do have structural significance, although the design will not necessarily depend on their rigidity. Nevertheless the destructive test is undertaken to know exactly how the wing will behave in as close a simulation to an overload as can be obtained, as opposed to a computed expectation of failure based on design analysis. If design analysis were fully predictive, no destructive testing would ever be required. However, engineers are uncannily accurate in their ability to predict how and usually when a structure will fail under load. Knowing the precise margin is frequently comforting. Boeing wings typically have a 40% margin on structural failure.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

I wonder... Did Eugene Cernan know, during Apollo 10, that he'd "be back" to the Moon in 3 years?

I hope his class tore his argument apart afterwards. I would have.

edit: gack! A CS major, too!

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Neither love nor money makes the world go round.
Unfortunately, we're down to about 17 ounces of the highly unstable stuff that does.

I wonder if he was assigned the position to defend? After all, one of his links goes to an HB debunking site. Speech students don't always get to choose their topics, or even the position they are meant to be defending. It's good practise, and helps you not feel hurt if you are defeated, because it wasn't a position in which you had a huge emotional stake anyway.

We don't know his assignment. Perhaps it was to pick something controversial or against common knowledge and persuade the audience to accept the new premise. Perhaps he selected it himself, out of curiosity on the topic. The link to Jim Scotti's page suggests an attempt to at least provide an alternate view. Unless he was using the Scotti page to provide notes of what the show's arguments were.