Hello, all.

I recently received the following e-mail from James Van Allen in response to a request for his comments on the radiation effects of the Van Allen belts. I post it here as a possible aid to other debunkers. I have edited out sections of my original e-mail for length; Professor Van Allen's response is reprinted in its entirety.

My request:
Professor Van Allen's response:
As a side note, here is an excellent newspaper article about James Van Allen: http://www.press-citizen.com/progres...h/vanallen.htm

--Doug

[edited for extraneous carriage return]
[ditto]
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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SpitfireIX on 2003-03-05 08:00 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SpitfireIX on 2003-03-05 08:20 ]</font>

Well at least now we have a concise answer to the radiation question. And it's put in simple enough terms that even most of the HB's will understand it.

The HBs will just say he's a NASA stooge (as I mentioned in my e-mail to him). The value of Professor Van Allen's comments is that they are perfect for countering the HBs' disinformation, vis:

HB: "The Van Allen radiation belts would have killed the crew."

Person on street: "Wow, that sounds reasonable."

Debunker: "Well, here's what James Van Allen himself had to say on the subject."

That's why I wanted to pass Professor Van Allen's comments along to everyone here. Happy debunking [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

--Doug

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

"The resulting radiation exposure for the round trip was less than 1% of a fatal dosage."

I suppose that when there is a "bus" between earth and moon -a reusable vehicle making regular runs from earth orbit- that it would need to have a constantly rotating crew to keep each crewmembers over all exposure time to a minimum.

Most will probably stop after the third paragraph and claim that JVA agrees with them, the belts are deadly.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
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If it all it does is go between earth and luna orbits then you could probably afford to clad it to lower the effects of radiation on the crew, but even then i think crew rotation would be necessary

Well done, Spitfire.

Conspiracists now face a serious problem (as if they didn't before). The have to disregard Van Allen's statement as being 'NASA spy bunk' as the Dark Lord might phrase it. But the problem with that is that this is the man who discovered the Van Allen Belts in the first place. It's completely unparsimonious to take onto the record some things the guy says (things that favour what they've chosen to believe) and disregard others (things that contradict them) without any backing. Of course, conspiracists are remarkably light on backing ("How do you use a femtometre?")

"Audiatur et altera pars" as Jay once said.

Of course, at the end of the day, that's never stopped the conspiracists before.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Awesome, simply awesome. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img] I shall make a copy of these comments of the good Professor for future encounters with nomoonie bunk.

Most will probably stop after the third paragraph and claim that JVA agrees with them, the belts are deadly.

Which is why I quote only the last paragraph of his letter on Clavius -- the paragraph where he unambiguously repudiates the hoax theory.

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

"How do you use a femtometre?"

Do you want the short version?

I agree, this is the perfect quote to be 'mined' and taken out of context like the Creationists do all the time.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

Well, the comment that the Van Allen belts are, indeed, deadly is similar to the statement that chlorine is deadly. It is, but we use it all the time. We even put in our drinking water! It's all a question of exposure/dose.

Drinking water - or should I say dihydrogen monoxide? - is deadly, too, but that doesn't seem to bother people much.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Exactly. I recently had a patient who spent some time in the hospital last year because she essentially overdosed on water. There was some unusual circumstance involved, but if you drink enough water to cause the flow across the cell membranes to reverse, you're in deep doo-doo. There are all sorts of things that are perfectly safe in certain doses that become toxic in high levels.

In fact, I read an article not all that long ago about a scientist investigating if certain herbicides in very low doses actually cause plants to grow faster rather than kill them. Interesting stuff...

I just don't have the desire to look it up right now, but last year I read an interesting article about bear repellant. I think the article was in an outdoor magazine of some sort. It said that there is some evidence that bears actually really like the repellant at low levels. There have been sightings of bears rolling around vigorously on the ground in places where the spray had been discharged. There is also growing anecdotal evidence of increased bear activity near campsites where people have spray-tested their repellant cans.

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Aporetic

Yep; if you screw up the level of electrolytes in your blood, you're in serious trouble because many of the processes used to transfer nutrients into your cells are passive; they work purely on the basis of ion concentrations on either side of the cell membrane. If you really really really work at it, you can get enough water into you that it messes this up. But you're more likely to get the opposite problem, as a result of dehydration or over exertion (since you lose salt through your sweat).

Of course, *anything* can be deadly. A wise-acre in my confirmation class years ago talked about the answer he put down on a biology test when he couldn't remember the correct answer. The question was "How does tobacco damage the body?" He replied, "Tobacco can be very damaging if dropped on your head in large quantities." [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_razz.gif[/img]

What puzzles me, according to my moon souvenir newspaper, is that when the astronauts first got back to the Earth and were quarrantined, was that they checked for possible moon diseases but they never bothered to check for any sign of radiation poisoning (or at least there is no mention of it). On later trips, they even did away with the quarantine time, having decided that the moon didn't contain any diseases.

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Behind every conspiracy is another conspiracy.

For me, this is a rather confusing paragraph...

Van AllenThe first time I read this, I thought the inner radiation belt extended to infinity because you have to be lower than 250 miles for safety. Confusing. Do a re~mix on this e~mail if you wanna use it for argument. Also, the order of the paragraphs favours the hoaxsters using the first parts as propaganda and editing out the rest for reasons of...length. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

Also, Van Allen is no fan of manned spaceflight so its hard to call him a NASA stooge.
---

RueDepends on the mass ratio of crew compartment to payload. If 2 crew perseons/personettes drive 50 passengers, the crew compartment alone can be sheilded and each trip the crew can stay in it for the 15 minutes mentioned by Dr. Allen. This would not add much mass compared to the already massive ship.

RustyLanderBecause they never left low Earth orbit. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

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Stanly is a moron, kai is a walking dead beet, Xev just want sex.

Radiation exposure and effects were already pretty well understood. The astronauts wore dosimeters - devices that measured the actual level of radiation that they encountered. These dosimeters were read. So there was no need to check for radiation poisoning - the measuring devices did that for them.

However, after the quarantine period, they were also checked out medically.

"How do you use a femtometre?"

Very,very carefully! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

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T. Anderson