I´ll bet that you have never heard about this 1996 speech by Bill Wood, a close friend of Bill Kaysing:

http://www.hawken.edu/ptra/archive/msg01616.html

The speech was posted in a forum on February 15, 2002, by fellow debunker Carol Balfe.

She does not mention exactly from where she has the transcript of Bill Wood´s speech, but these are her own comments:

"Hi Steve and others,

I found the doc that I was given citing some of the "Moon Hoax"
ideas. Since it seems to be floating out there so prevalently, you may as
well see some of the arguments -- all of the "conspiracy theory" variety --
Pseudo science is alive and well!! I think it can be an opportunity to
help students examine ideas like these critically!!

Anyway -- here's the text -- that contains a reference to a book about all
this stuff. The author claims to have been an engineer and therefore "in
the know."

And then follows a HUUUUGE transcript of HB Bill Wood´s speech.

These are but a few quotes from this speech:

"William (Bill) Wood presented this speech to an audience of 90 people in
San Jose, California in 1996.

**The title of my talk today is “Did we ever go to the Moon?”

*About half of what I’m presenting today is extracted from Bill Kaysing’s
book, We Never Went to The Moon, which I highly recommend. Anyone who is
interested can obtain one from him for $20, including shipping. See me
afterwards for the address. The rest of what I’m presenting today comes
from my own 30-year investigation."

And ..

"**In the Apollo photographs there are no stars in the lunar sky. No crater
was produced by the rocket exhaust under the LEM. Recent tests with the
DC-X rocket, landing tail first on Earth, produced a large, 2’ deep crater
and significant damage to the vehicle. The crater was so large that there
was concern that the DC-X might fall over, into it. On the Moon the crater
would have been much larger, due to the Moon having only 1/6 as much
gravity as the Earth and no atmosphere. In the Apollo landings, there was
no Moon dust on the landing pads in spite of the fact that Armstrong talked
about all the dust he was kicking up. In photos, Moon dirt is clearly
defined out to a certain distance, then there is an abrupt transition to a
fuzzy enlarged photo of lava flows in Hawaii and Utah used for
background. Prior to Apollo, top geologists were asked what they expected
lunar soil to be like. Afterward, they were provided with just what they
expected: nothing not found on Earth."

Lava flows in Hawaii and UTAH, eh ? Oh, Jaaayy, any comments on these lava flows in Utah ? [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

"**As in the 1974 movie Capricorn I, Apollo missions took off with no
astronauts aboard and went into orbit. Then the 3rd stage took an unmanned
spacecraft to the Moon, where it performed a lunar landing, lowered a
seismometer, ejected a laser reflector, transmitted back prerecorded manned
audio and video, then dug up Moon rocks and returned them to Earth. Later,
the crew in a burned capsule were dropped from a C-5a aircraft into the
Pacific for recovery. Some of the real Moon rocks were then traded with
the Russians for real Moon rocks they has just obtained with their own
unmanned lunar lander and return craft. Larger amounts of phony Moon rocks
were manufactured on Earth and sent to laboratories for analysis and put on
public display."

Jay, I would absolutely love if you would dissect the cadaver at:

http://www.hawken.edu/ptra/archive/msg01616.html




<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Maskelyne on 2002-07-07 17:31 ]</font>

Bill Kaysing worked at Rocketdyne for over 7 years (1956-1963) with a secret security clearance ...

Most of what Rocketdyne was doing would have been classified as potential military technology during the Cold War. Kaysing would have needed security clearance just to handle the printed material he was charged with cataloguing. This does not mean he understood those documents, only that he had to be trusted not to hand them over to the Soviets.

The notion that Kaysing's security clearance made him an insider "whistle-blower", as many have characterized him, is ludicrous. Where is his inside knowledge? The guy's almost dead and he hasn't given us any. How are we conclude except that he doesn't really know any inside secrets.

He witnessed the poor management,
inadequate equipment and lackadaisical attitude that characterized the
entire Apollo program.

All from his little office in California. That must have been some trick.

Let me give you a brief summary of my background.

Strangely enough, no one in the industry seems to remember him.

In 1958, top U.S. space scientists ... said, optimistically, that it might be possible to land a man on the Moon by 1980, but that a lot of major problems would have to be solved first.

Well, that was in 1958. After 1961 things changed. And what about those problems? What were they? Were they actually solved? How were they solved? Mr. Wood should be able to describe this in detail since he claims it as his life's work. But instead we just get silence.

According to Bill Kaysing, in 1961 the U.S. Government established the secret $7 billion “Apollo Simulation Project” to hoax the Moon landings.

Utter speculation. Bill Kaysing's ability to spin tales does not impress me.

In Oct. 1963, after consulting with his top rocket scientists (who said it couldn’t be done), Khrushchev stated that Russia had no intention of attempting a manned Moon landing in this century.

Yet we have the records, the eyewitness testimony, and even the prototypes from the Soviets' moon landing program.

General Samuel Phillips, submitted a lengthy report to NASA and to J.L. Atwood, President of North American Aviation in 1966 ... stated that ... they had no confidence in the future performance of the Apollo program.

Factually false. The "programs" referred to in Phillips' report was not the Apollo program as a whole, but rather the CSM and S-II programs that NAA were supplying under contract. It does not, for example, concern the remainder of the Saturn V or the lunar module.

His investigation was conducted as a result of the continual failure to achieve
the progress required to support the Apollo lunar landing.

Mr. Wood seems to want the Phillips report to apply to the entire program, when in fact it was basically just a lengthy complaint about NAA, one of several major contractors. That in itself has to be taken with a grain of salt. NASA was under fire for schedule slippages, and it's natural to shift blame for those onto someone else. In fact NAA had, in addition to its own problems, endured endless design changes and late modifications by NASA, making it almost impossible to satisfy NASA's imposed schedules. Gen. Phillips conveniently brushes those factors under the carpet. In a report designed assign blame to someone else, it's not very smart to acknowledge that some of that blame might be your own fault.

NASA's subsequent performance review concluded on May 18, 1968 states that NASA was impressed with North American's performance. Clearly NAA had cleaned up its act.

The Saturn 5 was supposed to contain over 2 million parts, an impossible
reliability nightmare.

No. Part count is only one measure of reliability. Factors such as linearity and coupling also affect the reliability of a system. In fact, the Saturn V is a much more loosely coupled system than, say, a Boeing 747 which has about six million parts and was also being developed at this time.

Mr. Wood's engineering assessment is pure fantasy.

After that, he was very outspoken in his criticism of the Apollo program. ... The morning of the fire he picked a lemon from the tree in his yard and told his wife, Betty, he was going to put it in the capsule, because it was a lemon too.

No. Grissom tagged the simulator, not the capsule, and this happened quite some time before the flight. Grissom was upset that NAA techs were behind in keeping the simulator up to date with the actual spacecraft. This inaccurate tale is quite common among conspiracy theorists.

The fire was started under Grissom’s seat, in 10 pounds of oily rags that had been placed there, and burned furiously in the pure oxygen in the capsule.

Completely, totally false. No oily rags were in the command module, and the fire started at Grissom's feet in the lower equipment bay where cracked insulation allowed a spark and was fueled by leaking ECS coolant.

After the fire, government agents entered Grissom’s home and confiscated all of his papers.

Grissom had worked almost hand-in-hand with North American engineers designing and building the Block I spacecraft, just as he had been instrumental in designing and building the Gemini spacecraft. Mr. Wood isn't specific about which "government agents" were involved, but everything having to do with spacecraft 012 was impounded precisely so that it couldn't be destroyed or tampered with. If an investigation were to follow, who would you expect would be charged with impounding documents if not "government agents"?

four other Apollo astronauts also died Willliams in a mid-air explosion, two others in a routine airplane landing and Given in a one-car crash.

C.C. Williams indeed died in a T-38 crash on Oct. 5, 1967. Ed Givens indeed died in an auto accident on July 6, 1967. But the other two that Mr. Wood alleges remain a mystery. He seems to refer to the crash which claimed Charlie Bassett and Elliot See, but that occurred on Feb. 28, 1966 -- nearly a year before the Apollo 1 fire.

Surely Mr. Wood's alleged 30 years of research should have picked up this fact.

Was this an attempt to silence uncooperative astronauts?

... or were these simple accidents? Mr. Wood fails to make any sort of case.

Thomas Baron testified before a congressional investigation committee that the Moon mission was crippled by defective
equipment and poor management.

Baron's evidence was shown to be unreliable and inadmissible. His appearance before the committee was a piece of political posturing by anti-NASA senator Walter Mondale.

He died in a mysterious car vs. train
accident four days later.

"Four days later" is extremely misleading. Baron died a week or so after the House committee's report was issued, weeks after he testified, and months after he wrote his report.

No autopsy was performed, although required by Florida state law.

First time I've heard this one; I'll have to check into it. However, what I know about Florida law makes it impossible for the body to have been cremated without a death certificate, which can only be signed by the medical examiner who performed the autopsy in the case of a non-natural death. Sounds a little hard to swallow.

NASA heavily subsidized Stanley Kubrick when he produced the movie, “2001”.

Uh, proof?

... was to show the public what a real lunar landing was supposed to look like.

Then how come it doesn't look anything like a real lunar landing?

Apollo 8 was the first capsule recovered from the lunar vicinity, manned
or not. Its re-entry specific kinetic energy was twice as high as from
Earth orbit.

This is why the unmanned tests of the command module ended by using the SPS to take the spacecraft to a high orbital altitude, and then basically turning around and flooring it to simulate the entry velocity from a translunar return. The notion that only a translunar mission could provide a suitable re-entry test is fairly ignorant.

Supposedly 5,000 changes were made
to the Apollo capsule after the fire in just 21 months.

Nope. About 700.

Early F-1 Saturn 5 first stage rocket motors suffered catastrophic explosions on the test stand. Suddenly the problem, attributed to combustion instability, was solved and no more explosions occurred.

Yes, that's how propulsion problems are often diagnosed and fixed. Catastrophic failures are often due to very simple causes which produce divergent feedbacks. Check again, Mr. Wood, are you sure you're a propulsion engineer?

Launch footage shows an 800’ long, highly
fuel-rich exhaust plume being produced by the 5 “F-1” motors

But Mr. Wood is not an expert in the F-1 design, or in RP-1 fueled motors. Others who are experts don't have a problem with the F-1 plume.

Mysteriously, the F-1 exhaust plumes are dark for the first 8’ after the end of the nozzle, then ignition of a very fuel-rich exhaust plume occurs in the atmosphere.

Mr. Wood's careful, expert examination of the F-1 plume is based solely on the launch stand diagnostic DAC photography operating at about 200 fps, therefore at a very brief exposure. His opinion that it is "fuel rich" is generalized from his supposed experience with hydrogen rockets. He doesn't appear to have much experience with kerosene-burning engines.

Burning kerosene for "show" as Mr. Wood suggests would produce a simple ball of flame, not a linear plume as is observed. In fact, the exhaust gas velocity can be pretty accurately computed from the launch films and is consistent with the specification of the F-1 engine.

Mr. Wood is not saying much that is consistent with someone who claims to be an expert in rocket propulsion.

Were the F-1 engines now on display
produced mainly for public display?

Well, were they? Mr. Wood is adept at raising unsubstantiated questions, but does not take a stab at answering them.

The $6.9 billion LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) Program proposal was only
110 pages.

That's because it was such a new thing that nobody was really sure what it needed to do at first. It was understood that the details would have to be worked out. They hadn't even selected a mission mode, for heaven's sake!

I have found that ten other proposals for programs of this size average over 38,000 pages (with a range of 5,000 to 86,000 pages).

Apples and oranges.

The LEM was poorly designed, with 2
doors instead of one, adding critical weight and reducing interior space
and safety.

False. The LM was brilliantly designed with the forward hatch being optimized for lunar surface egress and ingress, and the upper hatch optimized for docking. In fact the LM is often praised as the most innovative and "pure" vehicle design of the 20th century.

NASA was unable to test the LEM propulsion, landing and staging sequences.

Absolutely false. Numerous unmanned tests validated the propulsion. Apollo 9 was the manned test. Apollo 10 tested both the staging and the backup guidance system.

Armstrong was nearly killed on Earth in the LEM simulator.

Many test pilots are often almost killed testing new designs. That's why test piloting is dangerous and why NASA hired test pilots as astronauts.

The footage showing liftoff from the Moon shows impossible thrust-to-mass ratios

Computations, Mr. Wood? I've done them, and it works out just fine.

... and no luminous exhaust plume.

Since when has Aerozine/N204 propulsion produced a visible flame in a vacuum? Check again, Mr. Wood, are you sure you're a propulsion expert?

In the Apollo photographs there are no stars in the lunar sky.

This from a man who claims to have a baccalaureate and a master degree in engineering, and three other unspecificed degrees in highly technical fields, including physics and chemistry?

No crater was produced by the rocket exhaust under the LEM.

Nor should there have been. Computations, Mr. Wood?

Recent tests with the DC-X rocket, landing tail first on Earth, produced a large, 2’ deep crater and significant damage to the vehicle.

Hm, DC-X at 16,000 kg in earth gravity versus a 7,000 kg lunar module in lunar gravity. Could there possibly be just a tad more thrust involved with the DC-X?

the Moon the crater would have been much larger, due to the Moon having only 1/6 as much gravity as the Earth and no atmosphere.

This is a total non-sequitur. The factors that affect cratering are compaction factor and dynamic fluid pressure. Compaction might be an issue under lunar gravity, but it has been shown that moonquakes have "settled" the regolith. Dynamic fluid pressure is tightly tied to lunar gravity -- less gravity means there's less dynamic fluid pressure from the engine.

a fuzzy enlarged photo of lava flows in Hawaii and Utah used for background.

I can't vouch for Hawaii, but here in Utah our lava flows are very old and have trees growing in them. Most of Utah's geology was formed by wind and water.

Afterward, they were provided with just what they expected: nothing not found on Earth.

Um, geologists can speak at length about what is different about lunar soil.

The U.S. could not afford to conduct a real Apollo program.

Huh? We couldn't afford $30 billion over ten years to land a man on the moon, but we can dole out $70 billion a year for entitlement programs?

If astronauts had been sent to the Moon then, they would have all died from exposure to solar radiation.

Computations, Mr. Wood?

Noam Chomsky, who was characterized by Time Magazine as “arguably the most important intellectual alive” has stated that propaganda is essential in a democracy.

Hm, let's see. The argument is, "Propaganda exists, therefore Apollo was propaganda." A man who holds five degrees and can't reason?

In July 1969, European newspapers questioned the authenticity of the Moon
landing.

Source? May we examine these newspapers? Since they are European, we presume the U.S. government hasn't made them "disappear". This is the kind of argument which must be established by direct proof because counterproof is impossible. We cannot prove that European newspapers did not publish these things, therefore the conclusion cannot be held unless disproven.

Worldwide, more than 70% of the population do not believe the landings happened.

Source?

6/14/70 the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain polled 1,721 U.S. residents in 6 cities and found that more than 30% of Americans did not believe that the Moon landings were authentic.

But we were just told that no U.S. newspapers covered the alleged American skepticism. So if Knight-Ridder conducted this poll, it must have never published the results. So how did Mr. Wood find out about it?

David Wise in “The Politics of Lying” said in 1973: “A substantial number of Americans do not believe that their
government landed men on the Moon.”

But what's the context of this statement? Did Mr. Wise conduct any sort of scientific inquiry to quantify his statement?

Today, top NASA official admit that
“many millions” of people still don’t believe it happened.

That is a statement of fact, not an admission of guilt. NASA may be speaking about the worldwide conspiracy movement, but even if we limit it to the United States, "many millions" can still be a very small percentage.

recent polls show that less than 50% of the U.S. population now believe that it happened.

Which polls?

First, this entire section smacks of argumentum at populum. Apollo is either authentic or not, regardless of the majority of belief. Further, the vast amount of unsubstantiated claims here is highly suspicious. Mr. Wood has made claims which can be documented and ought to be documented, but which have no documentation.

Was it [Von Braun's] his job to come up with a design for a Moon rocket that would withstand careful technical scrutiny?

Forever? Why is it that people who say the Saturn V doesn't work won't give us any specifics?

Did he resign from the Apollo Program in 1970 out of disappointment that we weren’t really going?

Where did this come from? Yet another question with no answer from Mr. Wood.

As in the 1974 movie Capricorn I ...

A whole lotta speculation.

Larger amounts of phony Moon rocks
were manufactured on Earth and sent to laboratories for analysis

... which would have immediately revealed them to be forged. Manufatured how?

The rest of the article is mostly an apples-and-oranges comparison of other technology that ignores political and fiscal concerns.

Interesting. Someone with five (count 'em, five) degrees in highly technical fields, and a resume that includes everything that flies, makes numerous scientific blunders and then bases the majority of his case around political issues and comparisons to unequivalent programs. Wouldn't someone with Mr. Wood's qualifications want to spend more time doing a technical analysis of Apollo hardware, procedures, and claims?

As usual Jay smashes the competition. One thing to add.

The RL-10A-5 engines that the DC-X used have a thrust range of 4,500 to 15,000 pounds. So it is basically 18,000 lbf vs 3000 lbf for the LM. It's probably closer to 22,000 to 25,000lbf, when accounting for the fuel.


In the G. Harry Stine Book, Halfway to Anywhere, which is a book devoted to Single Stage to Orbit vehicles, with about half covering the DC-X, there is a nice photograph of the "blast crater" in the sand. The author calls them four small potholes. The ground is not burnt or melted or anything like that, even with the higher burning temperature fuel of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The four craters each are about 2 feet across and maybe a foot deep.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...102443-9702213


If I find the photo on the Internet I'll post it.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jrkeller on 2002-07-07 23:58 ]</font>

"**As in the 1974 movie Capricorn I, Apollo missions took off with no
astronauts aboard and went into orbit. Then the 3rd stage took an unmanned
spacecraft to the Moon, where it performed a lunar landing, lowered a
seismometer, ejected a laser reflector, transmitted back prerecorded manned
audio and video, then dug up Moon rocks and returned them to Earth. Later,
the crew in a burned capsule were dropped from a C-5a aircraft into the
Pacific for recovery. Some of the real Moon rocks were then traded with
the Russians for real Moon rocks they has just obtained with their own
unmanned lunar lander and return craft. Larger amounts of phony Moon rocks
were manufactured on Earth and sent to laboratories for analysis and put on
public display."
.html
font>
[/quote]

Ha ha ha hahahaha!!
Oh my aching ribs! thank you for cheering me up on a rather drab Monday morning.

That 3rd stage vehicle was some piece of work, eh? I bet we can't construct anything like that right now. Gosh how technology has slipped in the past 30 years.

__________________
Garlic Bread?!?!

Bill Kaysing worked at Rocketdyne for over 7 years (1956-1963) with a secret security clearance ...

Just to add... I applied for a job with the IRS while in college. As part of the application process, I was investigated and givn a Secret security clearance. This is the minimum security clearance there is. As Jay implied, it doesn't mean you will be privy to "gubmint secrets" but that you can be trusted not to speak out of school.

And Kaysing himself puts the lie to that.

The Saturn 5 was supposed to contain over 2 million parts, an impossible
reliability nightmare.

No. Part count is only one measure of reliability. Factors such as linearity and coupling also affect the reliability of a system. In fact, the Saturn V is a much more loosely coupled system than, say, a Boeing 747 which has about six million parts and was also being developed at this time.

So, you're saying the 747 can't really fly? That the airlines have been tricking us all these years? Will the conspiracy never end?!

The LEM was poorly designed, with 2
doors instead of one, adding critical weight and reducing interior space
and safety.

False. The LM was brilliantly designed ... the LM is often praised as the most innovative and "pure" vehicle design of the 20th century.

Just wanted to emphasize this.

In the Apollo photographs there are no stars in the lunar sky.

This from a man who claims to have a baccalaureate and a master degree in engineering, and three other unspecificed degrees in highly technical fields, including physics and chemistry?

Degrees which don't make him an expert on astronomy or photography, but which do make it sound like we should pay attention when he speaks.

Recent tests with the DC-X rocket, landing tail first on Earth, produced a large, 2’ deep crater and significant damage to the vehicle.

Hm, DC-X at 16,000 kg in earth gravity versus a 7,000 kg lunar module in lunar gravity. Could there possibly be just a tad more thrust involved with the DC-X?

Now, here's where all those degrees should come in to play. So, why didn't he use one or two of them?

He seems to be taking only the facts he wants to use... 1/6G so the same force should have 6X the effect as on earth... but ignoring the others... 1/6G so you don't need the same force.

The factors that affect cratering are...

And, of course, ignored these, too.

Did he resign from the Apollo Program in 1970 out of disappointment that we weren’t really going?

In 1970, NASA asked von Braun to move from Marshall Space Flight Center where he was Director to Washington, D.C., to head up the strategic planning effort for the agency. Less than two years he decided to retire from NASA and go to work for Fairchild Industries. He died in 1977.

Looks like Wood was guilty of some of that "lackadaisical attitude" Kaysing noted.

_________________
<font color=000099>Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.</font>
Isaac Asimov

(fixed Code)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Jim on 2002-07-08 09:06 ]</font>

I think I start to work on a bot in my spare time that parses a text from a HB and adds appropriate annotations to the "arguments"... [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

If permission is granted, I even may call it the "JayUtahBot" [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_razz.gif[/img]

Or, maybe you're already a bot, programmed by the BA? Do you have irrefutable proof - know that phrase? - that you really exist? [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

Added after seeing the next post:
Uh, I forgot, we've already one bot here. But I promise to make the output of my bot less enigmatic than the one from HUb'. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: kucharek on 2002-07-08 10:20 ]</font>

How anyone could devote 30 Y
to what happend in the back seat

of a `57 Chevvy
in 1958
beyound my
Grasp!
Gasp
not to mentionwhat happend UP FRONT
5:45 A.M. 5:45 A.M. 5:45 A.M. 5:45 A.M. 5:45 A.M.

That 3rd stage vehicle was some piece of work, eh? I bet we can't construct anything like that right now.

Maybe, but it'd cost ya.

Unmanned soft-landing on the moon was possible. Remember the Surveyors. But of course the Surveyors didn't always work. Unmanned pinpoint landing is even harder. Now try it with a vehicle the size and complexity of the proposal. Sample-return, deploys various precision-aligned equipment, and plays a two-hour (or 24-hour, for the J-mission) prerecorded EVA video. Heaven help us if the VCR jams up there.

And who built this thing? The original argument was that NASA and its contractors were technically inept and managerially lackadaisical. Yet they come up with this miraculous piece of equipment to do all this stuff by automation and/or remote control. Why not just put a couple of pilots on the dang thing in order to simplify its design, and call it a lunar module?

... adds appropriate annotations to the "arguments"... [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Sure, all you need is a Perl script that inserts the phrase, "Very interesting, sir or madame; do you have any evidence to support that?" after each paragraph.

Do you have irrefutable proof - know that phrase? - that you really exist?

The IRS seems to think I do. Do you want to argue with them?

Reading this thread has reminded me that you can have a lot of degrees and still be, well, an idiot. Mr. Wood seems to be in this category. Sorry, but there it is.

JayUtah: Mr. Wood should be able to describe this in detail since he claims it as his life's work. But instead we just get silence.

The man actually suffered a stroke, and was left unable to talk.

Seriously.

Of course, the IRS really doesn't care if you're real or not. They only care that JayUtah's (or JayUtahBot's, as the case may be) taxable income is real. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

As Jay implied, it doesn't mean you will be privy to "gubmint secrets" but that you can be trusted not to speak out of school.

I'm sure Kaysing had a security clearance of some sort. He couldn't have done his job without it. But he's not the first conspiracy theorist to try to bolster his credibility by touting a real or imagined security clearance. The problem is that it's always a two-edged sword. I'm sure you were told about the very draconian penalties for violating the terms of a security clearance, and the little white card you sign which waives your right to trial in such matters.

Given that the U.S. government appears very serious about its security clearances, how are we to interpret the actions of alleged holders of these clearances? You can go to jail just for telling your mother about secret information, and these guys are writing books and going on television? Can anyone explain to me why the FBI can't seem to catch them?

The obvious answer is that the tales these folks are spinning have nothing to do with anything they might have learned as a result of their security clearances. The whole idea of a security clearance is to prevent just such an occurrence.

But the real answer, as I said, lies in the structure of Bill Kaysing's case. He stands up and claims to be an insider. But his evidence consists of things that anybody could have found out: photo anomalies, etc. Kaysing may have had a security clearance, but compared to his argument that's just a big smelly red herring.

So, you're saying the 747 can't really fly?

LOL! No, I'm putting the Saturn V in perspective. Most large-scale engineering projects have parameters that would impress or frighten the layman. Two million parts sounds like a lot to people who have trouble with a 100-part kitchen toaster. But of course professional engineers have ways to manage that complexity.

The Boeing 747 has about six million parts, or three times as much as the Saturn V launch vehicle. It was rolled out in 1968, if memory serves, about the same time the Saturn V became a viable machine.

Bill Wood wants to make the Saturn V sound like some impossible engineering nightmare that couldn't possibly have been accomplished because it had two million (gasp!) parts. That's very misleading, and someone with as extensive an engineering background as Mr. Wood purports to have shouldn't be making that sort of argument. In engineering terms, the Saturn V has only two million parts.

Another thing to consider is that the Saturn V is a three-stage rocket, and each stage was given to a different company to design and build: The S-IC first stage went to Boeing (while it was building the vastly more complicated 747, I might add), The S-II second stage went to North American Aviation, and the S-IVB third stage went to McDonnell-Douglas. Divide and conquer.

The issue about linearity and coupling is very important. The Saturn V is a modular design. The S-IVB, for example, can work either as the Saturn V third stage or as the S-IB second stage. What does that mean? It means that the design and operation of the S-IVB is largely independent of what you stack above or below it. That greatly reduces the coupling in the system. There's very little the S-IC or the payload can do to affect the operation of the S-IVB. That means it can be designed, built, tested, and certified independently. It's not a matter of throwing all two million parts together and hoping they work.

Compare that to a 747. While it's not true that each part affects the other six million parts in the design, it is true that the 747 is not modular. You can't detach the wings and hook other wings on. You can't partition the design up into large segments and say that the operation of each segment is unaffected by other segments. Sure, you can put different engines on, but those are made by someone else anyway. That's a "design interface" problem.

The point is that Mr. Wood isn't giving us the engineer's point of view. He's simply reinforcing the incorrect layman's view of large scale engineering and how it affects reliability. The 747 is a highly reliable design, and according to Mr. Wood it would have been three times the nightmare of the Saturn V, which he says is an unreliable design.

Degrees which don't make him an expert on astronomy or photography ...

You can't get a physics degree without taking astronomy classes. You can't get a chemistry degree without knowing about photochemical reactions. While you can say he might not personally have acquired the necessary special expertise to cover this question, consider that he claims to have researched these questions for 30 years, and the statements in question were given in 1996. Surely by that time someone would have said, "Uh, Mr. Wood, that's not a supportable argument."

Let me be frank. I don't think Mr. Wood actually holds all the degrees he claims. Let's break it down.

and then after that,

He doesn't say he was actually in the Air Force, but his title "munitious specialist" sounds like a plausible military job title. Of course, that's the bit that explodes, and that has nothing to do with propulsion.

The point is, he isn't designing the things, he's just following the steps in the maintenance manual intended for use by your average airman. Of course he'd have a security clearance. You don't even get to see the service manual without a clearance.

The point is that all this happened before he got his degrees from the institution he named.

What degrees? Bachelor, Master, Doctorate? What institutions granted these degrees, and why would they accept him to their programs if he already held several degrees?

When did he get them? His resume has him working on various projects from his graduation from CalPoly in 1976 right up to 1993, three years before making his claims. Sure, I worked professionally while working toward advanced degrees, but I certainly couldn't have kept up that pace through three highly technical degrees.

Continuing on,

That might be true. Unfortunately Mr. Wood chooses to question the validity of the Saturn first stage, which uses a completely different kind of fuel and was built by a completely different company.

In any case, if Mr. Wood was familiar with the Delta launch vehicle, we wonder why he has such a problem understanding the LM ascent engine. The Delta second stage uses an Aerojet engine which is an almost exact double of the TRW LM ascent engine. It's about the same size, produces the same thrust, and burns the same fuel.

Is Mr. Wood playing dumb, or is he padding his resume?

Which programs? With which companies? The old, "I worked on classified programs" line is a staple of aerospace resumes.

To this point he hasn't been specific about what he worked on with these projects. His arguments below discuss supposed irregularities with propulsion, yet he doesn't say what he did for the Delta program, or for his "various classified projects".

The problem is that "Bill Wood" is a pretty common name, and so it's easy to verify that a certain "Bill Wood" did this, and a certain other "Bill Wood" did that, but we can't verify that they're this particular Bill Wood. There's a Bill Wood who works on propulsion at the University of Michigan, and one who works on propulsion at Stanford, and a Bill Wood who wrote a proposal to NASA.

There's also a Bill Wood who is well-known in California in the field of model rocket propulsion. Now model rocketry requires expertise, but one can be a model rocketeer without having the required expertise to say definitively that the F-1 engines wouldn't have worked.

Such as? We don't care about the classified ones, if they exist. Strangely enough, I can find lots of papers written by people I know are experts in the propulsion field, but I fail to find any written by a "Bill Wood" who could fit.

Strangely enough the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) does not have a Propulsion Technical Committee. They're checking whether they ever had one and whether Mr. Wood might have chaired it.

Such as? If they're non-government then they won't be classified. Are they, perhaps, models?

The problem is when he goes to criticize the F-1. The plume, he argues, is "fuel-rich", meaning that the plume contains unburnt fuel. This is an indication of combustion inefficiency -- fuel which should have burnt in the combustion chamber to produce thrust is being ejected unburnt where it burns non-propulsively in the atmosphere.

Since all the hoax books, sites, and videos mention no more about Mr. Wood's claims than what has been given on the site under critique, we wonder what Mr. Wood believes is suspicious.

Plume incandescence, perhaps? The Saturn V sure does have a bright exhaust plume. Might Mr. Wood have mistaken incandescence for combustion? Unfortunately the LOX/RP-1 bipropellant is known for its highly incandescent flame, and the best examples of it are the very Delta rockets that Mr. Wood claims to have worked on!

What does he say?

Mysteriously, the F-1 exhaust plumes are dark for the first 8’ after the end of the nozzle, then ignition of a very fuel-rich exhaust plume occurs in the atmosphere.

You probably know the clip in question. It starts with a dark, grainy image looking up the skirts of a Saturn V. You see cryogenic oxidizer cascading from the nozzle in slow motion followed by the ignition. Then the view shifts to pad level and you watch the rocket rize slowly. As you see the nozzles rise above the MLP, you can see a portion of laminar flow, and underneath it a brighter turbulent flow.

Mr. Wood theorizes that there's a smaller engine hidden inside the F-1, and they just squirted additional kerosine into the space between the "little" engine's nozzle and the "big" F-1 nozzle and lit it up for a light show.

Well, any propulsion engineer can tell you that's a good way to blow your nozzle into a million pieces. Why do you think they make all those sparks under the space shuttle's engines? Cardinal rule: Thou shalt not burn thy fuel in thy nozzle, lest it go to pieces and smite thee.

Further, if the combustion took place outside of the nozzle, it would produce a dramatic spheroid fireball, not an 800-foot sufficiently laminar plume. The F-1 nozzle ration was optimized for sea level, to provide the most thrust at launch. (The N-1's engines were optimized for about halfway through the first-stage burn.) The Saturn V's plume just after launch is only about twice the diameter of the rocket itself, and almost perfectly cylindrical. That's a textbook plume.

Apparently Mr. Wood doesn't realize his "dark plume" argument is based on footage taken from a high-speed armored DAC and thus is trememdously underexposed. Though taken in daylight, most of the rest of the frame is dark. It's only when the F-1 plume becomes visible that the frame is sufficiently lit. Not only does this plume completely saturate film at normal exposure, we even get optical scattering in some lenses, centered right at the nozzle where the plume would be brightest.

The plume is not "dark" coming out of the nozzle, it's merely very slightly darker than the more turbulent flow beneath it. In terms of human visual perception both would be too bright to look at with the naked eye.

Mr. Wood's statements about "combustion instability" are fairly misleading. "Combustion instability" is a catch-all phrase in rocket engineering which is equivalent to the automotive, "My car's making a funny noise." What was really going on was that the injector scaled up from the H-1 design wasn't working. And the problem wasn't "suddenly" solved; it took Rocketdyne 12 months to design a new injector that damped out the instability.

The injector is basically just a big showerhead at the top of the combustion chamber that sprays fuel and oxidizer in a pattern for optimal combustion. That's hard to determine. It's easy for flow characteristics to alter the pattern, which in turn alters the flow characteristics and you get a divergent feedback that blows your engine apart.

Here's an example of divergent feedback. It's one of those "don't try this for real; just think about it" experiments. Accelerate down the street in your car. Now reach down and pull the release by which you adjust your seat. Since you're accelerating, you'll slide backwards. This pulls your foot off the accelerator, and your car begins to slow, This pushes you forward on the rail, which puts your foot back on the pedal and you accelerate, and back you go again. Now imagine those oscillations getting worse and worse each time. That's divergent feedback.

Once the Rocketdyne engineers found a suitable dynamically stable injector design, they simply had to refine it to damp out induced instabilities. That is, you find an injector that won't spontaneously develope an instability that diverges and blows up your engine. But what if something causes the fuel flow to fluctuate? What if something bangs on the size of the nozzle? You have to find a design that naturally damps out these effects.

Truth be told, they never actually got this fixed. The Saturn V was known for its "pogo" effect -- longitudinal vibrations caused by combustion instabilities. They just figured out how to work around it and limit its effects.

In 1970, NASA asked von Braun to move from Marshall Space Flight Center where he was Director to Washington, D.C., to head up the strategic planning effort for the agency.

Yes, to be sure, Mr. Wood gets his dates wrong. More than once. But the underlying concept is what's at issue. Mr. Wood insinuates that von Braun left NASA because NASA wasn't really going to the moon. That's consummate question-begging.

I imagine a hypothetical situation along these lines:

"Yes, Mr. von Braun, we know you've been very helpful designing our spacecraft and getting us to the moon, but that's going find now without your supervision. We'd like you to take a job in Washington D.C. where you'll be sitting in meetings all day with politicians and bureaucrats who will disagree with you just for the sake of disagreement. How does that sound?"

And then along comes Fairchild and says,

"Gee, Mr. von Braun, you're the most brilliant aerospace engineer that this century has ever known. Why does NASA have you sitting in meetings all day? Tell you what: we'll hire you as our V.P. of engineering, and you'll get to supervise all our design engineers and come up with great designs."

It's clear von Braun wasn't happy at NASA anymore, but the question is why he wasn't happy. The hoax believers just assume it's because of the reason they've postulated and go from there. It's all very circular.

The man actually suffered a stroke, and was left unable to talk.

That's no excuse for having given half an argument (if even that) for decades. Yes, in 1958 there were many problems with going to the moon. They were solved in the subsequent decade. Mr. Wood claims to be an expert in the industry that solved those problems. Other experts in the industry speak freely about having solved those problems. (Just try to shut them up.)

Mr. Wood is clearly splitting rails and I want to know why.

Myself: The man actually suffered a stroke, and was left unable to talk.

Jay: That's no excuse for having given half an argument (if even that) for decades.

You are joking, surely?

Perhaps he has elaborated on this and we just don't know about it yet? After all, I have never seen this transcript before today but, evidently, he gave this particular speech some time ago. We know he talked a little bit on the WHotM? video, but it would seem that shortly after this he suffered a stroke.

You are joking, surely?

I am most serious. Rail-splits are inexcusable. It is Wood's responsibility as an expert lecturer to establish for his audience the proper context for his statements. To say something is suspicious because certain problems once existed with it -- without discussing how those problems were subsequently solved -- is dishonest.

You want me to believe that Wood just innocently neglected to mention the part of the story that completely undermines the point he was trying to make, and that if we just dig farther we'll find it. I'm not that naive.

I have never seen this transcript before today

Strange. It is almost verbatim what Wood contributes to Dark Moon on pages 127-128, which you claim to have read.

This thing about the LM proposal only being 100ish pages long, when other proposals for other projects contained thousands...

I've just read Tom Kelly's Moon Lander and it specifically states that the proposal, without apendices etc, was limited to 100 pages by NASA. It even states that during the final printing, it was found to be half a page too long and Kelly and a colleage went through the whole thing taking out singlw phrases and sentences to bring the document in under the hundred page limit. All the proposals for Landers by all the companies asked to sumbit were under 100 pages. That's what NASA wanted.

DC-X craters...

Let me get this straight. The DC-X has five engines, each of which produces much more thrust than the LM DPS at landing. The DC-X keeps it's five engines firing until it has actually landed, unlike the LM which fell unpowered the last eight feet. The DC-X is very tall and slim, liable to topple, with retractable legs whereas the LM was short and fat, with legs that were extended once and verified locked in place before a landing was attempted, to enable it to be 'dropped' onto the surface quite safely. Even though the DC-X is set up to be more likely to produce craters and is operating to make craters more likely, it only produces craters two feet wide and one foot deep. This argument should make it less likely for a crater to be observed under the LM, not more likely.

Consider also the DPS plume dispersal in a vacuum.

Jay: Strange. It is almost verbatim what Wood contributes to Dark Moon on pages 127-128, which you claim to have read.

I started to read the book but then I watched the video box-set, and so after that I just couldn't bring myself to go over the same ground, other than to flick through the occasional page.

I started to read the book but then I watched the video box-set, and so after that I just couldn't bring myself to go over the same ground, other than to flick through the occasional page.

So that's the in depth investigation you claim to have done. Watched the vid, couldn't be bothered to read the book.

How many of us have spent hours trawling through the ALSJ or the NASA photo archives to find a particular picture or a quote that answers a particular and obscure claim?

Karamoon, go read some books, then come back with a coherent argument.

I've read both sides of the argument. I actually read the HB stuff first, and I did indeed get angry. I wanted to verify what they'd claimed. Then I got really angry at the HBs for trying to take me for a fool.

John, I have no idea what you are now going on about!

Angry?

Most HBs claim they 'stumbled' across the Moon Hoax by accident, and they got angry because they had been lied to, ie NASA had duped them into believing man had walked on the Moon. I also got angry at this thought. I then did a bit of backup research, just to see if they'd got their facts straight. They had not. I got angry at the fact that the HBs had tried to con me. Their subsequent behaviour (not answering questions, ignoring relevent facts, selective presentation of evidence and deleting whole web forums) has forced me to the conclusion that the Hoax is a con, to make money from the unwary. That's what makes me angry.

Yes, okay, I understand that. Just for your information, the book I decided to stop reading was Dark Moon. It wasn't a NASA publication, or anything. I thought that you might have misunderstood me there.

John,

Your experience is almost identical to mine and I even work for a NASA contractor. When I watched the fox show I thought that most of their claims at least had some merit. When the show got to the blast crater part, then I knew that they hadn't researched anything on this topic. At the time of the shows airing, I had spent about five years researching and analyzing blast craters. It's really more like lack of blast craters. The entire process is a very complex, fluid mechanics and heat transfer problem and what I heard made me gag. After that I have researched the Moon hoax topic to death. I have yet to find anything that even remotely sways me to believe in the moon hoax. I'm more convinced than ever that it happened. When it comes to to heat transfer, thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, my expertise, they have violated the first and second laws of thermodynamics just to make their points.


I also believe that most of these people are just con artists and that they really know that Apollo did land on the moon.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jrkeller on 2002-07-08 23:46 ]</font>

The hoax arguments were first presented to me in a way which immediately led me to think there was nothing behind them. They were so obviously ill-conceived. I've studied them extensively in the intervening years and in some cases spoken with their chief proponents. While I can't speak to their motives, I can definitely say that they go to great lengths to avoid and suppress the contrary evidence. That's suspicious.

Do you get as angry when charlatans try to con the unwary oughta money with products as get-rich-quick, super fast weight loss and other products along those lines? Or is your indignation just reserved for the HB charlatans?

CzC

Generally weight-loss schemes don't involve unfounded accusations of large-scale fraud and calling people liars who risked their lives in the exploration of space. Neither do they impugn the honor of an entire industry, in which I once worked and in which I still have many friends. Instead what you mention falls generally under caveat emptor.

Sell someone a sugar pill or a "balanced resistance coil" (i.e., a helical spring) at an exorbitant price and tell him he'll lose weight, and what do you get? Someone who's just as fat and somewhat poorer. Eventually, if he's smart, he'll quit buying the stuff.

Plop a kid down in front of the Fox program and what do you get? Someone with a distorted and factually incorrect understanding of logic, science, and history, some of which will stay in his noggin for the rest of his life.

Yes, it makes me a bit angry to see ineffectual products being greedily sold to a trusting public. But I talk about the moon hoax theory because I believe there's more at stake there, and primarily because that's where my expertise lies. I assume that there are qualified dieticians out there to debunk the latest weight-loss fad, if they feel the need.

Jay, here for (I think) the first time, I am going to challenge you.

There does indeed seem to be a section of the exhaust plume from the F-1 engine that is objectively dark. It's visible in at least two Saturn V launch photos I have in my possession, as well as the famous footage you described above. It extends from the bottom of the engine bell for about 2/3 the size of the engine bell below it -- maybe 4-5 feet. It is very dark indeed -- much darker than the sunlit sides of the S-V, and far, far darker than the incandescent (and greatly overexposed) exhaust plume below that. It's a sort of golden brown color.

The effect is so clear and surprising that for a long time I assumed that the F-1 engine had a long "skirt" of some relatively thin metal, through which the brilliant exhaust plume was visible. However, I have now seen pictures of the F-1 that show very clearly that the engine bell ends above this dark region. One unambiguous marker is the plumbing for the LOX coolant that wraps around the bell about halfway down. The dark plume is clearly not part of the engine bell.

I have a couple ideas about what might be causing this effect, but they would be pure speculation at this point. However, one thing I would argue strongly: the dark portion of the exhaust plume is really dark, and would be no harder to look at directly than any other sunlit scene, if the incandescent plume were not present.

If anyone has definitive information about the causes of this phenomenon, I'd be very happy to learn more.

But wasn't pogo a problem mainly with the second stage? My recollection is that the S-IC was a very smooth-burning launcher, but the S-II had the pogo problem -- so bad that the second unmanned launch would probably have been aborted if there had been a crew aboard.

Incidentally, Rocketdyne tried a lot of things to fix the F-1 problem, including changing the position and angles of the LOX and fuel sprays, moving the impingement positions somewhat lower in the combustion chamber (at a cost of some engine efficiency), and adding baffles to the injector plate (which had to be cooled by circulating LOX). None of these was a "magic bullet", but in combination, eventually the F-1 became so stable that they could detonate a small bomb in the combustion chamber, and the resulting oscillations would damp out within 100mS.

There does indeed seem to be a section of the exhaust plume from the F-1 engine that is objectively dark. It's visible in at least two Saturn V launch photos I have in my possession, as well as the famous footage you described above.

That would be interesting. Any way you could scan those photos? I've only seen this effect in the underexposed photos. I'm reluctant to comment further until I can see what you're looking at.

But wasn't pogo a problem mainly with the second stage?

Come to think of it, you might be right. I'll have to go scour through the S-5 performance reports and make sure.

Any way you could scan those photos?

Nevermind, I think I can get hi-res copies of my own.