So the so-called moon photos could've been taken on Earth then?

No, that is not the argument. I said some of the features can be reproduced on earth, such as diverging or converging shadows cast by sunlit objects. These are features conspiracy theorists claim point conclusively to a studio environment. They misrepresent light's behavior on earth, and therefore they mischaracterize the expected behavior on the moon.

Other features cannot be reproduced on earth, such as stark-hardedged shadows over a wide field of view cast by parallel light rays. And there is a whole host of non-optical features that must be considered.

Having taken the "moon photos" on earth requires reproducing all the visible characteristics, not just the ones possible to reproduce on earth.

well enough, passed all exams so far, only two more to go before summer vacation (and one more summer class to finish before year 2 starts), we're still doing basics, wont have any real space related subjects til year 2.

Otherwise Im doing fine [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

He wouldn't necessarily need to have seen the program to have been disatisfied.

Not according to the argument as first formulated. In the original story, Welch thought he did pretty good, but was then criticized after the show aired and so went back to study some more. When it was pointed out that bringing criticism to the deceased Welch's attention after the program aired would be ... problematic, then the story changed. This story has many variations.

The problem is, the people telling the story either had the facts when they first told it, or they did not. It's pretty clear they did not.

Consider also that a perfectly adequate rebuttal to the moon hoax theories can be formulated using materials easily and cheaply available to the public from NASA, and even from scientific textbooks not affiliated in any way with NASA. Therefore the premise that Welch needed access to alleged top-secret files in order to prepare a more robust response is stupid.

Further, even stipulating all the points in the story, why would NASA's top officials allow Welch access to their secret files and then kill him suspiciously afterwards? That's a stupid course of action. Since Welch would not know beforehand what those files would contain, NASA conspirators could simply hand him fabricated "top secret files" in order to satisfy his curiosity, while keeping the real files hidden. Then Welch could go on the air and say, "I've seen the most top secret files NASA has, and they say nothing of a hoax."

Showing him the actual files (accepting for the sake of argument that they exist), letting the story leak out that they have shown him the actual files, and then killing him is just about the stupidest thing I can imagine.

So to summarize:

1. The originators of this story don't seem to have their facts straight.

2. The premise on which the story is based is implausible.

3. The story is simply an elaborately begged question: the postulated and unproven "secret files" can exist only if you assume the moon landing was hoaxed, which is what is trying to be proved.

4. The story requires me to believe that NASA officials will act recklessly and stupidly.

Have I left anything out?

I'm simply saying that if the anomalies can be reproduced on Earth then it's possible that the photos were produced on Earth in the first place.

Even if it were true, what would that mean? You seem to want to reject evidence simply on the basis that it's not impossible for it to be fabricated. That's true for almost any kind of evidence, so you have to take that extra step of showing that it actually was falsified.

Further, you seem to want to have your cake and eat it too. You start by misrepresenting our argument regarding the behavior of light. Then you demand examples of our arguments. When it is pointed out that many examples of some of them exist, then you say, "Ha! See, they could have faked it."

What, exactly, is your point here?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JayUtah on 2002-05-18 14:09 ]</font>

There is a problem with your theory. Exactly where does the data on the bogus craft come from? Do they tape the entire mission and send the astronaut's side of the conversations up to be played back? That would be terribly difficult. The only other option would be to bounce the signal off the ship, but that would cause problems with the delay, essentially doubling it. Not to mention the fact that the uplink could be detected by anybody. There is no way to make this work.



Actually I think that the telemetry and radio signals are the strongest evidence against a hoax, as it is impossible to fake.

The operative passage in that quote is "only to discover later". And your art example isn't doing you any good either, as science is regularly used to ferret out fake paintings.

And you missed another point about satellites. The fact of the matter is that satellites that are in geostationary orbit reside WITHIN the Van Allen belts. Now, I just fried a video card in my computer because I touched it without discharging the static electricity on my body, how could satellites filled with sensitive electronics survive?

Also, since these satellites spend all their time inside the Belts, don't you think there is a tremendous amount of data concerning radiation in the Belts? And this data doesn't come from any government entity, but from private corporations all over the world.
That is completely untrue. I've seen stories of lectures or speeches he's done from a few years ago where he discusses the Belts.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Tomblvd on 2002-05-18 16:55 ]</font>

Ok, they may have tracked SOMETHING, but where's the proof that it was anything that was manned?

No, that's not how it works. If you assert that they were unmanned, you must prove they were unmanned. If you say, "Well, they might have been unmanned," I say, "So what? They might have been filled with cottage cheese, but that doesn't mean they were."

Now a bunch of people tracked these objects entering orbit from the surface, then leaving orbit on a trajectory for the moon. They heard radio transmissions coming from them that contained human voice conversations. They saw the rockets burning for TLI in the night sky.

Now keep in mind that none of this evidence stands in a vacuum. NASA had previously announced it was send a manned spacecraft to the moon. That's the context in which the evidence exists. It's not a bunch of people making observations and saying, "Hm, I wonder what this could mean." It's a bunch of people making observations entirely consistent with a previously announced plan.

So there's the assertion that manned spacecraft were sent to the moon, and then all the empirical evidence collected so far points exactly to that same assertion. You come along and say, "But it's not impossible to fake that." It sounds as if you're saying, "I'm not going to believe that evidence unless you can show there's no possible way for it to have been falsified."

You can't just dismiss a body of evidence because you have devised some hypothetical way in which it might have been falsified. You must show that it actually was falsified according to that hypothesis, or perhaps some other one. There is a very, very large gulf between showing that something is possible, and showing that it was actually done.

And the 11 who were killed in the space of a year - don't forget that!

We won't forget that, but you didn't really address the issue. If anyone would have been in a position to know about the forgery, it would have been the astronauts. They would know whether or not they walked on the moon.

Eleven dead in a year. Well, two years is more accurate. 20% casualties in a high-risk occupation? Among some groups of test pilots the mortality rate due to accident was closer to 25%. The astronauts were expected to maintain flight proficiency and required to fly high-performance aircraft aerobatically in order to acclimate to flight stresses. In other words, these guys continued being test pilots.

And you might want to list the names, dates, and circumstances of their deaths. Three dead in Apollo 1. Two dead in a single plane crash. Two others in another single incident. Five of your eleven died in only three separate incidents, over the space of a year. Eleven deaths seems like a lot. But the issue is incidents, not individual deaths. And three fatal incidents in a high-risk profession over a year is not remarkable.

...who were fed what they were TOLD was a live feed.

True, most of the MOCR people would not necessarily be able to tell whether they were receiving live telemetry or simulated telemetry. But if there were simulated telemetry being passed off as real, someone had to create that telemetry. Those would be people involved in the hoax.

Besides, the MSFN operators would definitely know if they were getting a live feed or a simulated feed. They're the ones doing the actual tracking.

The scientists themselves were fooled. How many "experts" get duped into buying what they consider to be the geniune article on (for instance) works of art only to discover later that it was a fake?

Apples and oranges. Your example relates to the "soft" world of art evaluation and other enterprises which basically boil down to some person's opinion. We're talking about the "hard" sciences which rely on rigid methodology and careful quantification of observations. Art historians are experts, but they are not scientists.

We still use the data collected by and for Apollo in designing new spacecraft, for example the Boeing 601HP of which about seventy are currently on order. This spacecraft is meant to operate commercially within the Van Allen belts. It must be "hardened" against the radiation it finds there, which it can also measure.

Now if we've been using bogus Van Allen belt data and hardening our spacecraft accordingly, then we should expect to see many, many otherwise unexplained premature failures of those products. We don't. Keep in mind people pay $300 million for one of these things, and insure them to the hilt. If they fail unexpectedly, there are a lot of angry people in suits pounding desks asking for checks.

This point was already brought up, and you completely sidestepped. There are hundreds of satellites currently in geosynchronous orbit, inside the Van Allen belts. These were built, launched, and are operated by private companies from all over the world who have nothing to do with NASA.

It's a common misconception that NASA can just say whatever it wants about the Van Allen belts and nobody would know the difference. That's just pure fantasy. It's not the way the industry works at all.

Van Allen himself in later years downplayed his initially very persuasive findings about the belt named after him. He didn't disavow them, he just went quiet.

His initial findings were found to have been contaminated by orbital nuclear testing -- not his fault, but science has to march onward. And Van Allen has marched onward with it. We don't talk much about his initial findings because they aren't quantitatively useful. That's why additional samples were taken during Apollo development. Further, Van Allen opposes manned exploration of space, but he had the good sense to realize that Apollo was what the country wanted at the time and not to openly speak out against it. Now that Apollo is over and done, he is once more vocal about it.

Well, the rockets were possibly capable of going to the moon, just not on a ship with men inside them

"Rocket science" includes the parts of the spacecraft that contain astronauts. The engineers at North American and Grumman and McDonnell would certainly know if they were or weren't building spacecraft capable of the missions assigned to them.

It is another common misconception that only NASA would know how to build a spacecraft and that they just handed a set of completed plans to these companies who dumbly built them. NASA engineers worked hand in hand with the top engineers in these firms, all of whom had the required expertise to build spacecraft.

Now I am trained as an engineer. I have seen the detailed plans of these spacecraft, and I have in many cases seen the actual specimens of spacecraft that were used, and have been permitted to inspect them. I have expended considerable effort to understand the designs and verify them, according to my professional expertise.

Now after having acquired that expertise and having made the appropriate examinations, it is my opinion that the Apollo spacecraft were capable of accomplishing the moon landings substantially as advertised. Have you made the same examinations? Are you a trained engineer? What do you know about space travel? How did you learn it? In short, what can you do to convince me that my investigation is in error?

who were picking up something else that had been sent up earlier supposedly as some sort of test tracker.

I assume you refer to the TETR-A satellite. First, that satellite crashed before the first moon mission. Lots of people tracked it as it deorbited.

Second, there is no way a satellite in a 90-minute orbit can fool ground stations into thinking it's a spacecraft on a translunar trajectory. The MSFN operators who used TETR-A as a training target definitely knew the difference between a small satellite streaking overhead and an outbound Apollo spacecraft.

And so would HAM operators. A low-flying satellite is visible at any given time only to a small portion of the earth's surface. And from any point on the earth's surface it's only in the sky for a minute or two. That means the HAM operators would have been tipped off by not being able to raise the ship, or getting transmissions only for a minute. HAM operators and amateur satellite trackers, who have been doing this as a hobby since the late 1950s, are not complete idiots.

Can you explain, in detail, how the TETR-A satellite could have been used to accurately fake a translunar mission?

Those new scientists are being trained with misinformation so the secret will remain buried

This is preposterous. First, science is a worldwide body of knowledge. The rules of physics don't change from country to country. Do you really mean to propose that the U.S. government controls all the science education everywhere in the world?

Second, you can't just fake natural laws. The scientific models will either correspond to observation, or they will not. Science is a harsh mistress.

Third, science has many more uses than those applied to the Apollo project. Geology, for example, does much more than just evaluate moonrocks. If the principles of geology must be rewritten to allow fake moonrocks to be accepted as genuine, then when those principles are applied to other aspects of geology -- say, the location of petrochemical deposits -- then the error will be found. There are people who rely on science to be correct, not just appear correct, in order to carry on their business.

Optics? Did we reinvent optics in order to retrospectively validate Apollo photographs? Not likely, since the principles of affine-to-projective transformation have been around for a couple of hundred years. And that's one of many optical and mathematical properties which validate Apollo photographs.

And what of the other applications of optics? The same principles used to talk about Apollo are used in, say, medical imaging. And you can't fake that. If you fake it, people die. And then their relatives sue you. Therefore you are well motivated to keep your science correct.

The notion that government fiat can sidestep natural law is simply the most nonsensical and irrational thing I've ever heard.

much like what is happening already.

There are many forward-thinking people in the world who operate largely outside of the world of mainstream science. However, there are many more crackpots who merely fancy themselves forward-thinkers and harp about pseudoscientific principles about which they know next to nothing. Strangely, all of these people have an idea in which they want you to invest your hard-earned money.

The point is, just because someone is rejected by mainstream science doesn't automatically mean they're onto something.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JayUtah on 2002-05-18 17:09 ]</font>

<blockquote>Ok, they may have tracked SOMETHING, but where's the proof that it was anything that was manned?</blockquote>

Millions of people saw the Apollo/Saturn V launches, many thousands (including me) saw them in person. The vehicle was tracked continuously from the moment of liftoff by one non-NASA entity or another. Independent astronomers and foreign governments had the ability to track it visually in Earth orbit. Your "something" had to be the Apollo CSM/lander combination. The rocket had the power, the craft went to the moon. Why bother to send it if there was nobody in it, and what happened to the astronauts who were seen (by millions) to board it earlier?

<blockquote>2) The astronauts (approximately 55 were selected by NASA during that period, 24 of whom went to the moon);

And the 11 who were killed in the space of a year - don't forget that!</blockquote>

How about names, dates and sources?

<blockquote>3) Mission control members;

...who were fed what they were TOLD was a live feed.</blockquote>

Evidence? The controllers carried on a 2-way conversation with the astronauts. They could have faked it, but they would have to have known. What about the technicians who rigged the fake message system and fed the bogus messages? What about the tracking stations that monitored the signals directly?
How do you fake the direction of arrival and the time delay without doubling it? All recorded and played back on cue? Impossible, unless the the media commentators who spoke directly to the astronauts were in on the hoax as well along with the controllers and everyone who was evesdropping.

<blockquote>4) Scientists (how do they stop scientists from revealing the truth about the Van Allen Belt or the faked moon rocks?);

The scientists themselves were fooled.</blockquote>

And HBs deny that they are arrogant authoritarians! So, NASA can fool every geologist who has ever examined the moon rocks (including Soviets, Chinese, and even Iranians btw), every physicist who has ever examined satellite radiation data, and the mission controllers, and the professional media all over the world, but they can't fool you and Bart Sibrel.

<blockquote>5) Rocket engineers (if the rockets weren't capable of going to the moon the engineers would know it);

Well, the rockets were possibly capable of going to the moon, just not on a ship with men inside them</blockquote>

Why not? Oh, the "deadly" radiation in the Van Allen belts. Are you aware that about 25 countries have rockets capable of reaching the Van Allen belts, and of measuring the radiation levels there? This has been going on for 44 years, almost literally every day. Are they all conspiring to hide the truth, as pronounced by the self-educated physicist and Newton denialist, Ralph Renee?

<blockquote>6) HAM radio operators;

who were picking up something else that had been sent up earlier supposedly as some sort of test tracker.</blockquote>

Whatever it was, it left from Cape Canaveral at the same time as Apollo and it went to the moon. There is no way to fake the trajectory of an object heading toward the moon, Newton's laws won't allow it, and amateurs were able to determine the signals' direction of arrival and doppler shift.

<blockquote>7) Any communications or television company who has a satellite in geosyncronous orbit (which is inside the Van Allen Belt so they must know a thing or two about the radiation);

again picking up the aforementioned bogus tracker or unmanned craft</blockquote>

There are many comsats in orbit, these companies built them and own them and use them to broadcast signals to us. They operate the equipment that receives those signals, and they built it.
The great irony of course is that we could not have seen the Fox broadcast if its claims about radiation levels had been true.

<blockquote>Those are just SOME of the people who would have to be in on the secret. Some of those people will die eventually, taking the secret with them to their graves... but universities will continue to pump out new scientists. How will the government keep scientists from revealing the secret for the rest of time?

Those new scientists are being trained with misinformation so the secret will remain buried</blockquote>

And you have some proof of this? Yes, you and Sibrel are smarter than all the scientists and science students in the world put together. They are tricked en masse but you, someone who believes that a single 30+ year old transmitter could fool comsat operators into wasting billions, know better. And you complain about "name-calling" and insults!

<blockquote>except for the occasional brave upstart who will dare to rally against the establishment by thinking for himself and work out the truth but will be labelled as crazy</blockquote>
Megalomaniacal arrogance is pretty fair evidence of mental illness.

<blockquote>...by aforementioned establishment and thus not be taken seriously much like what is happening already.</blockquote>

Challenging the authority of Fox TV and Bart Sibrel would never cross your mind, would it?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Ad Hominid on 2002-05-18 18:13 ]</font>

Like Jay said, it's not up to me or NASA to prove the craft was manned. If you want to make wild claims you have to back them up with proof.

NASA has plenty of proof backing up their claims (ie. photographs of astronauts in zero-g with pictures of the moon outside their window)... where is your proof that the craft was unmanned?

If you want to accuse NASA of murder I would like to see the evidence.

None of those deaths were unusual considering the line of work the astronauts were involved in. What did NASA do in the case of Theodore Freeman... train a bird to fly into his canopy?

That is ridiculous. How can the mission control be a part of the hoax unknowingly? How can they go along with it if they can't follow "the script"?

If the feed wasn't live when the mission control folks talked to the Apollo crew they wouldn't get real responses, just pre-recorded answers that wouldn't always make sense.

For example, this is how I imagine the communications would sound if the MC people was talking to a tape recorded crew:

MC: "Apollo 11, this is Houston. What does your CO2 monitor say?"

A11: "Houston, Apollo 11. We had hot dogs for lunch and we're about to go into the LM to prepare for separation."

MC: "Apollo 11, I repeat, please check your CO2 monitor."

A11: "Houston, the LM is fully activated, we're ready to begin..."

On the other hand, if the feed was live but the astronauts were on Earth it would be obvious. The delay in the radio transmissions would be doubled.

How can NASA fool every scientist on Earth... forever? Sooner or later someone is going to study the Van Allen Belts for themselves. Either the radiation will be just like NASA says, or the scientist will discover NASA was lying.

In fact, people have already made their own independent studies of the VAB. That was the point I was making when I mentioned the satellites in geostationary orbit that are owned and operated by independent communications companies.

So are you saying NASA built fully functional (in every possible way) spacecrafts in order to fool the engineers? The only things NASA didn't send to the moon were the astronauts?

That means NASA had to spend money on a fully operational spacecraft, not just a mock-up. And on top of that they had to bribe half a million people. So how did NASA manage to do that without spending far more than they actually did?

You missed my point. What I said was that modern day communications companies have studied the Van Allen Belt. They probably know more about it than NASA did before they went to the moon. If NASA was lying about the VAB the communications companies would know about it.

Scientists aren't exactly like figure skating judges you know... science isn't a subjective sport or a form of art, it's, well, a science.

You can't tell people 2+2=5 and expect them to be fooled. If you give scientists wrong information they will realize it. That is what scientists do.

__________________
" We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." - John F. Kennedy
TheSpaceRace.com

That is ridiculous. How can the mission control be a part of the hoax unknowingly? How can they go along with it if they can't follow "the script"?

Let me explain "live feed" in this context. Most of the flight controllers operated consoles that displayed information gleaned from the digital stream of telemetry beamed down from the spaceship.

The Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN) consisted of a large number of ground receiving stations -- radio telescopes, ships, airplanes, etc. -- that fed their signals via land phone lines, satellite links, and occasionally radio links to a sort of collation point. The consoles in the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) -- the prosaic "Houston" -- connected to this collation equipment to receive their data.

That was the genius of the design: in order to conduct a simulation for MOCR controllers, you could simply disconnect the MSFN links and connect in its place a computer which fed the consoles a prearranged set of inputs that was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from real flight data.

So the operators sitting at the consoles could be shown a simulation and many of them might not be able to tell it wasn't real. But of course the collator operators and the MSFN station operators would know without any doubt whether they were in a simulation or a flight. You're talking about fooling maybe 25 people in the MOCR, but you can't fool the hundreds of other Mission Control people.

This argument comes from the rather inexpert hypothesis by Bart Sibrel that the TETR-A training satellite did not fall to earth as observed, but instead was used to relay data down through the MSFN in order to fool flight controllers.

In fact, people have already made their own independent studies of the VAB.

People were making independent studies of the Van Allen belts before the moon landings. NASA used data from Canadian research on the Van Allen belts.

That was the point I was making when I mentioned the satellites in geostationary orbit that are owned and operated by independent communications companies.

Geosynchronous satellites for communication have been launched by various countries -- some hostile to the U.S. -- since 1965.

You can't tell people 2+2=5 and expect them to be fooled. If you give scientists wrong information they will realize it.

It's like Ralph Rene's "proof" that pi is exactly 3.1516. I don't need to refute the proof. I don't even need to see it. I know it's wrong, because if pi were different than its current definition, we engineers would be in huge trouble.

The space shuttle SRBs, for example, are about twelve feet in diameter. The infamous joints are constructed to 0.001-inch precision. If pi were wrong, then when we got around to spacing the pin holes we'd be three-quarters of an inch off by the time we got back to the starting point.

Engineers can be held legally liable for the quality of their work. If I hire a geologist to tell me all about the strength of a certain mineral material, or how it's going to react to static and dynamic loads, vibration, thermal stress, etc., I want him to tell me true facts, not some fantasy based on a government-mandated cover story that misstates the true nature of geological materials.

Science can occasionally be wrong, and it can occasionally be incomplete. (In fact, science is based on the presumption that its theories are incomplete.) But it can't be knowingly falsified. Not for very long, anyway.

Reading this thread will give you a good reason why most hoax-believers won't touch this place with a ten foot pole.

The equipment needed to do this was a minimum of a twelve-foot parabolic dish with about a one degree field of view. Given the locations of the people on this list, where would the signals have to come from?

<h2>Amateur Apollo Tracking</h2>
<table border="1" cols="6" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td>Person(s)</td><td>Location</td><td>Latitude</td><td>Longitude</td><td>Missions Tracked</td><td>Documentation</td></tr><tr>
<td>W4HHK +W4UDQ</td><td>Collierville, TN</td><td>35° 3' N</td><td>89° 40' W</td><td>Apollo 10,12,14,15,16</td><td>June 72, QST</td></tr><tr><td>K2RIW</td><td>Dix Hills, NY</td><td>40° 48' N</td><td>73° 20' W</td><td>Apollo 15,16</td><td>June, July 72, QST</td></tr><tr><td>K2ALX</td><td>Jamaica, NY</td><td>40° 42' N</td><td>73° 47' W</td><td>Apollo 16</td><td>
</td></tr><tr><td>WA6QYR</td><td>Ridgecrest, CA</td><td>35° 37' N</td><td>117° 41' W</td><td>Apollo 15</td><td>History of SBMS²</td></tr>
<tr><td>K6HIJ +W6DSL +WA6QYR</td><td>Barstow, CA</td><td>34° 53' N</td><td>117° 2' W</td><td>Apollo 14</td><td>History of SBMS</td></tr><tr><td>W6YFK</td><td>Santa Barbara, CA</td><td>34° 26' N</td><td> 119° 48' W</td><td>Apollo 17</td><td>CSVHF Society¹ Conference in Rochester MN</td></tr><tr><td>AH6NM &
Sven Grahn</td><td>Gainesville, FL</td><td>29° 41' N</td><td>82° 24' W</td><td>Apollo 17</td><td> <a href="http://www.users.wineasy.se/svengrahn/trackind/Apollo17/APOLLO17.htm">
WebLink</a></td></tr><tr><td>Heinz Kaminski</td><td>Bochum, Germany</td><td>51.44° N</td><td>7.26° E</td><td>Apollo 8-16</td><td>1976 Report³</td></tr><tr><td>G1HTB</td><td>Penistone, England</td><td>55.54N</td><td>1.4W</td><td>Apollo 10,13</td><td>
</td></tr><tr><td>G0JEQ</td><td>York, England</td><td>55.4N</td><td>1.3W</td><td>Apollo 10, 11, 13, 14</td><td>
</td></tr></tbody></table>


Note 1: Central States VHF Society


Note 2: San Bernadino Microwave Society
Note 3: "Data Reception in the S-Band using the 20-metre-parabolic universal antenna of Bochum" Lists the following: </p>
<ul>[*]Lunar Orbiter 5, (2295MHz)[*]Pioneer 8, (2292MHz)[*]Surveyor 7, (2295MHz)[*]Apollo 8-16, (2272.5, 2282.5, 2287.5MHz)
[/list]
Edit to improve HTML.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Karl on 2002-05-20 01:56 ]</font>

Karl - it's nice to see that old chestnut again. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Jay's description of the Mission Control is essentially right, but there are several aspects of their operations that he failed to mention. First of all, there are three shifts of people, so instead of fooling 25 people, there are 75 people to be fooled. Secondly, there was and still are a large engineering support staff, called the Mission Evaluation Room (MER) which works simultaneously with Mission Control. They don't get much press, but there are bigger and typically more knowledgeable about specific aspects of the mission or specific hardware. They also work in three shifts, typically have two to four people supporting a designated aspect of the flight and received detailed telemetry on specific hardware systems. For example, the environmental control system or the thermal control system. Also, on the later flights, there was a geological support room, which helped direct the lunar surface operations.

Well back to the MER. The most important aspect about the MER is that the people who are there are the experts on a given piece of hardware and in many cases the designers and the developers of the given hardware. Therefore, if something fails, the best and brightest NASA has is right there. The interesting thing about the MER folks is that unlike Mission Control, these people are a combination of contractor and NASA people. I seriously doubt that anyone trying to fake a moon landing could fool these experts. As any engineer knows, if the data is always perfect, something's probably wrong.

As someone who has worked in the MER, I can tell you that there is always a different feel to a "SIM" vs. a real mission. I can't put my finger on it, but it probably has to do with the fact that no ones life is in danger.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jrkeller on 2002-05-21 14:15 ]</font>

HB's have never really explained why NASA would have faked the Apollo 13 explosion.

Some HB's say that people were losing interest in Apollo so NASA needed a dramatic "story" to regain the audience. But that doesn't make sense. If they were really faking Apollo they would be glad that people were losing interest because it would mean they didn't need to fool as many people.

People can't see evidence of a hoax if they aren't watching the missions on TV.

__________________
" We choose to go