I don´t know if you have heard about this guy, but for a long, long time the newsgroup humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare (HLAS) has had a true Moon Hoax believer among them.

His name is John Baker and back on October 24, 2001, he published a very long manifest in the newsgroup. A manifest, where he tries to "answer the concerns of NASA supporters, like Art and David Webb, and skeptics as well, in the essay that follows."

You can read the entire manifest, or "essay" as he labels it, at:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...&output=gplain

Here are two quotes:

"So skeptics conjecture our intrepid astronauts, risking their lives
performing heroic feats, circumnavigated the moon. They took a lot of
pictures. At the appointed time they sent the LM, unmanned and under
their control or its autopilot , off to land on the moon.

Three out of the six LMs crashed (or four out of seven if the attempt
was first made with Apollo 10). In any case three made it. These
three are responsible for those laser reflectors, which many offer as
poof positive and we walked on the surface of the moon."

.. and a little later:

"Now lets move to the "coverup."

The primary principles who know or knew about this could be limited to
the astronauts involved, the NASA guys who planned it and the
photographers. Even the backup crews would not need to know.

You didn't need to know until you were in the final hours of approach.
I can imagine them being told only then. This way if they were killed
during take off they would never have known. And being told out there
left them with no real choice.

On Apollo 10 the play would have been: shuttle around in the LM, then
attempt an _un- televised_ secret landing of the LM.

The orders would have been: if it fails we say nothing publically.
It will finish the program. So they test it and it fails. Now what to
do? We've already involved the crew in a public lie.

So NASA officials keep telling the crews they are going to the moon to
land...perhaps in hopes they will get killed on the pad. But a tape
is made to be played on approach to the moon for the Apollo Eleven
crew. On it the top man says, there is no chance we can land you
safely, we have devised a plan to make it appear that you will land
and return safely.

You are to land the LM on autopilot. If it blows up you are to say
nothing. If it lands successfully it will carry a laser beacon and
remote telemetry which will be of great value to mankind.

You will return to the earth and take the bows for having landed. And
you will say nothing.

You have now involved the three men in an international coverup and
they are not likely to squeak. NASA had overrides and could abort,
certainly shut down the communications."

PS: It seems that John Baker´s big idol is James Collier - and he is absolutely NOT a fan of debunker Bob Braeunig.

URL:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...&output=gplain







<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Sea of Tranquility on 2002-06-22 10:32 ]</font>

This is even more idiotic than the usual HB drivel. Sorry, BA, but really...

So, they build a spaceship which goes to the Moon, train the astronauts to walk on the Moon, give them spacesuits to go out on the Moon, build and heavily test a lander to land and return from the Moon... and keep the astronauts on board the CM because they think the LM would blow up?

Disregarding the utter lack of evidence, disregarding the patently false claims about the LM, disregarding the lack of understanding about how many people would need to be involved, disregarding the ridiculous characterizations about the engineering and reliability issues involved... it's still idiotic.

When I hear stuff like this, I think the gene pool needs a little more chlorine.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: sts60 on 2002-06-22 11:47 ]</font>

... and fewer life guards!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

The entire thread can be read here:

Moon Hoax thread.

I guess NASA also invented a radio transmitter that could beam straight through the Moon, since the astronauts who landed remained in radio contact continuously and didn't have a blackout period each revolution.

Good point. Although that's probably wasted on HBs.

More likely that they went into a polar orbit around the moon and the CM "blackouts" were faked. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

REAL question - just how difficult is it to put an object into a lunar polar orbit?

I think it would be easy enough, if the plane of the orbit was pointed more or less toward the Earth (that is, the orbit would still take them behind the Moon every revolution).

It would take a lot of energy, I think, to get a craft into lunar orbit such that it was plane-on to the Earth - and therefore constantly visible. To do that, somehow you'd have to "turn the corner", and I doubt there's a fuel-efficient way to do that... unless you take a loop around Mars on the way!

The polar orbit would always point the same way. So within a month you'd have two times where the plane of that orbit would intersect the center of the Earth, and twice when it would be 90 degrees off.

For the short term of the lunar landings you could pull it off, I think. But the people tracking the craft would be able to see this sort of nonsense. If they could tell when the craft vented waste, they could that it was in polar orbit like we're describing.

__________________
Jeff Schwarz
__________________________________________________
Argh!! They booby-trapped their sun!!****--Invader ZIM

The doppler tracking used to map the Mascons during the decsent orbit would give the game away to the tracking guys. The TLI burn would have to be different as well, giving the game away to the trajectory guys. Because Apollo was a team effort, you'd have to decieve everyone at the same time. That's why a 'fix' to one problem with producing the hoax produces another problem somewhere else. Plus, I doubt the Apollo spacecraft had the delta V to be able to carry out such a maneover anyway.

Ah, that's true -- but that implies that you'd send the orbiter up a week ahead (or so)... wouldn't that be noticed? And timing would be critical; your "landing" would have to "succeed" just as the orbiter's track got to the "plane-on" orientation.

And then, of course, on those longer missions, it would start occulting after a day or less.

Dang, you know, sometimes I think we'd all have made pretty good moon hoaxers! I wonder -- do you think NASA has any jobs open in that line? [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

I think that, once in a polar orbit, you could do a series of correcting burns to adjust it so that it would become, and then stay, oriented face on to the Earth. But it would require a large amount of fuel to do so, especially if you plan to correct the orbit all at once. If you planned to do it gradually, and let Moon's orbit help you out a little it could be done over some days or weeks.

Still useless for a fake mission though.

__________________
...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

But since your not really landing, maybe you could use the LM's engines for course corrections, etc.

But your right the tracking guys would know its fake.

Thanks for the polar orbit info - I hadn't thought about initially going into the polar orbit parallel to the line between the earth and the moon then "tweaking" the orbit so that earth would always be visible. That’s got to be a lot easer to do than entering into such an orbit directly (reason for my question).

Of course it would be detectable from earth but it would solve the issue of no communication blackouts with the “landing” crew.

Once agian we’ve shown why it was just simpler to go and land on the moon than it was to hoax it. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]