On his website, author Tim Furniss claims that NASA covered up the true cause of the Challenger accident. Scroll down to Chapter 10.

In some ways, this is just like the moon hoax peddlers. You can only get the book through his website. At 13.95 pounds.

I stopped looking at that page after I read "Why no photos of Armstrong" in the contents.

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In some ways, this is just like the moon hoax peddlers. You can only get the book through his website. At 13.95 pounds.

Classic sales scheme. You can't prove me wrong unless you give me money first. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

No wonder I plod through this world broke and frustrated. I work hard to come up with a way to make a decent living when all I really have to do is devote 20 minutes to concocting some half-baked theory and get rich quick.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

Ah, Ali Abutaha. The guy who claimed that the Challenger crew were reporting the pressures inside the SRBs as the crisis developed. Completely ignored what instruments were available to the crew and what they normally reported. His "pressure reading" was actually an equivalent airspeed in knots.

When you catch someone making that sort of sloppy error, you tend to disbelieve the rest of their claims.

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"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head" Terry Pratchett

How gullible does NASA think we are, as if a leak in the wall of a high pressure, agressively burning combustion chamber could *possibly* affect the fuel tank right next to the leak.

Yeah, aerodynamic forces during ascent are the most difficult to understand or estimate element of a whole shuttle system and mission, agreed. Furthermore, they will result in no visible effects other than a leaking stream out of an SRB seam.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Do people doing this really get rich? I seem to remember something about one of them complaining about the rise in rent on his trailer in the desert in California.

I think the main thing to do is, avoid buying the book

I seem to remember something about one of them complaining about the rise in rent on his trailer in the desert in California.
Good point. I guess it's back to the grindstone

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

This is from his about the author page
Big Bang hysterics???? I must be reading the wrong papers.

And while trying to find out more about his position on this (I couldn't find anything, guess I'll have to buy the book), but I did find this, talking about the Valles Marineris on Mars (my bold):
I got a guess where he is coming from.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Tim used to do a space news page on the Swedish Space Corp's website. On the whole it was very good, but whenever any science news item concerned the Big Bang or the origin of life there was always Tim's added personal comment putting a creationist view.

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"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head" Terry Pratchett

DISASTER LOOMS! PHYSICISTS REPORT UNIVERSE ABOUT TO EXPLODE 13 BILLION YEARS AGO!

Wasn't Challenger Revealed (http://bautforum.com/showthread.php?t=56235) horrible enough as it was?

I must add to this sarcastic comments I made earlier that strangely enough, the aerodynamic forces caused the leaking stream out of the SRB seam to form already before the shuttle had left the launch pad. With picture evidence.

Pardon the board rules, but selling the "aedoynamic loads" theory is pure idiocy.

Now if he had proposed reflective forces on the pad as cause (the same forces that damaged STS-1 before the water noise reduction system was in place), that would have been another thing. Quite possibly these forces added to the problem, as they are a major part of the loads during ignition (apart from the pressure and temperature inside the SRB's, obviously). But if these reflective/acoustic loads were nominal, then they are no cause for the incident, only faulty working SRB's are. (anything that's nominal and does not destroy an otherwise OK craft at nominal value, is no cause for an accident.)

It's like saying the water pressure at nominal depth is the cause of a submarine accident when it wasn't properly seamed. Faulty seams are the cause, as there was nothing out of the ordinary on unforeseen in the water pressure, and with a proper submarine it should cause no problems at all.

But I'm giving the guy too much credit in this reasoning, as he isn't even as far as giving a plausible element in the accident (aerodynamic loads pre liftoff tend to be quite close to zero...).

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I shot it down. They didn't have overfly permission through my garden.

This statement is ridiculous!
I can't believe this person believes what he's saying and that other people really believe this....

To be fair to Tim Furniss, he has provided years of excellent space coverage through various BIS publications. he has a few odd ideas, obviously a young earth sympathiser, and has bought the more wacky ideas on Challenger. But he has done a lot of good stuff for many decades. There is not the slightest evidence I know of that he believes that Apollo was a hoax. Of course as the years roll by he could do a Hoagland and make the transition from mainstream to nutty. That would be a shame.

Jon

Has someone here been unfair to him? Has anyone here misrepresented Tim's "wacky ideas"??

I don't think that's what JonClarke was implying; I believe he simply felt that people might jump to the conclusion that Furniss is a complete woo-woo on the basis of this one idea of his, and wanted to provide some evidence that Furniss is not.

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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

Once you go down the woo-woo path, forever will it dominate your destiny,

Stay away from the woo²path I must.
Use strange word order I shall.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Pretty much.

Jon

You can be a part-timer. A lot of people are.