Editor,
This is in response to the article posted at the URL
http://concrete.stu.uea.ac.uk/servle...e/16-02-2000/c
oncrete/features/00_moonlandings/
on your web site, written by Mr. Dave Dickson.
I am an engineer of several years' experience, and I have special expertise in the Apollo missions and the historical, technical, and evidentiary aspects surrounding them. I have studied for a number of years the so-called conspiracy theory that says the moon landings were hoaxed.
Mr. Dickson admits at the beginning of his article that he cannot prove his case. I wonder why the rest of the article then is of any concern to anyone. It merely attempts to shift the burden of proof onto those who believe the missions were authentic and requires them to prove not just by a preponderance of evidence, not just beyond reasonable doubt, but in fact beyond any conjectural possibility that the Apollo missions succeeded. This abrogation of Mr. Dickson's responsibility -- for it is he who strongly claims that, "in fact, the moon landings never took place at all" -- is hardly satisfied by the few straw-man arguments he offers.
To begin with, I agree with Mr. Dickson that the photographs, film, videotape, and similar records provide the best evidence of the missions' authenticity. I am promised a detailed analysis of some of the photographs showing something "very wrong" about them, but no such photographs or analysis appears. If Mr. Dickson proposes to prove his case by the specious method of unraveling some other case, then I expect to see a conclusive treatment of what he considers to be the best evidence against him.
The author dismisses with a speculative wave of his hand more than 350 kilograms of lunar samples that have been studied by professional geologists all over the world, including samples documented in situ, core extractions, and pieces ranging in size from grains of dust to football-sized chunks. He proposes that they are meteorites, but neglects to explain the countless obvious differences between recovered planetary samples and meteoritic samples. He proposes that they could have been recovered by automated probes, but neglects to specify who built and operated these probes (under the noses of the Russians, no less, who carefully monitored all of NASA's space endeavors), how they worked, and how they managed to obtain so much material in so many different forms. The Soviets obtained lunar samples by unmanned probe, but could return only a few grams of largely undifferentiated material. Mr. Dickson is simply speculating in ignorance: the moon rocks are not meteorites, and the sample-return technology of the late 1960s cannot account for the prevalence of the certified lunar material on hand.
At this point -- after having discussed (but not provided) the photographs, and after handwaving through a cursory dismissal of lunar surface samples -- Mr. Dickson now says the evidentiary case for Apollo lies in rubble. Not so, for two snowflakes do not make a blizzard. If the author wishes to undermine the evidentiary value of the mountain of information from Apollo he will have to do better than vague dismissals. Where is the evidence of the actual hoax? Where are the sets, the scripts, the people who worked behind the scenes?
The author goes on to build a case for plausibility for the hoax. NASA, in order to retain its funding, must be perceived as successful. And this, apparently, "naturally" leads to faking evidence of success rather than simply working harder to ensure genuine success? The political cost of failure is high, but the political cost of being caught in a lie are much
higher: people go to jail when that happens. NASA was indeed under tremendous pressure to succeed, but that burden would be satisfied even better by an actual success than by a hoax that waits to be discovered by later generations. Mr. Dickson's attempt to cobble together a motive is flaccid and unconvincing.
The behavior of radiation in cislunar space, and of radiation in general, is almost always misunderstood by the layman. As engineer who has worked on space technology, it is my business to understand it and design machines to operate under those conditions. Mr. Dickson's comments illustrate the typical naiveté that passes for erudition amongst conspiracy theorists.
He does well to invoke the name of James Van Allen, for Dr. Van Allen has specifically repudiated the notion that the radiation environment around earth would prevent the Apollo missions from succeeding. Quoting from a letter which I received from him:
"The recent Fox TV show, which I saw, is an ingenious and entertaining assemblage of nonsense. The claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is only one example of such nonsense."
Mr. Dickson presumes to educate the reader on the nature of those hazards. He states in general terms that the Apollo missions took place during a solar maximum. In fact, the solar maximum peaked in late 1968. Most of the Apollo missions prior to this were conducted in the relative safety of earth orbit. The lunar missions occurred during the tapering down of the solar maximum. There are plenty of international records depicting exactly what the solar activity was during each mission. Mr. Dickson fails to note that the major solar particle events during the period from 1969 to 1972 numbered fewer than the missions.
The author claims the Apollo 11 and 12 crews would have been subjected to up to two sieverts (200 REM) of radiation exposure. Equivalent dosages for any particular application (e.g., space flight in an Apollo capsule) are fiendishly difficult to analytically compute and typically require empirically based computer models running on very powerful computers. This is why radiation is measured on site rather than computed ahead of time. Mr. Dickson owes us a source for this claim.
The exact timing of any individual major solar particle event is indeed impossible to predict. But it is a straightforward matter of statistical probability to compute the likelihood of a major solar event occurring in any given two-week period. Given the statistical nature of the solar cycle, which was well understood in the 1960s, it is possible to state with statistical confidence that any given Apollo mission stood only a very slim chance of being caught outside the Van Allen belts during a major solar event.
The article's undocumented assertion that 489 solar events occurred during the Apollo 11 mission is misleading; most detectable solar events are inconsequentially weak. The article's assertion that the Apollo spacecraft lacked "any protection against particulate radiation" is false. Particle radiation is easy to shield against, requiring in some cases only a few thicknesses of typing paper. The astronauts were provided with several thicknesses of steel, aluminum, and fibrous insulation.
The pseudo-scientific analysis of the radiation hazard ends with an unnamed "expert" who makes vague statements of uncertainty. If Mr. Dickson wishes to erode faith in the authenticity of Apollo based on his understanding of the science of radiation, he must answer the objections made against him by
*named* experts.
Again Mr. Dickson tries to stir up suspicion about motive by wafting smoke around. The Soviet space program, contrary to lay belief, lost its momentum in the mid-1960s. By 1967 the U.S. had clear pre-eminence in terms of the capability of its hardware and the skill of its crews. To be sure, they were interested in beating the U.S. to the moon, but less interested in being the second to land there. Reforms in their space program intended to increase safety and reliability and the loss of key engineers prevented them from completing their lunar landing program in time.
Mr. Dickson attributes the drama of Apollo 13 to public apathy and sagging TV ratings following the excitement of the first landing. Unfortunately he has not checked his facts. The nadir of public interest in Apollo was actually during Apollo 15. According to the article's logic, we should see dramatic failures on Apollos 16 and 17 to compensate for this, which were fairly straightforward missions. The ultimate aftermath of Apollo 13 was to reduce funds and truncate the project, hardly the "boost" Mr. Dickson argues it was intended to provide.
And the author makes the standard claim that the true nature of the hoax would have been hidden from all but those who needed to know, and that the remainder of the workers at NASA and its contractors would have genuinely believed they were sending man to the moon. Since the author has provided no working hoax scenario against which to test this claim, it remains pure bluster; he is simply telling us what needs to be true in order for his conclusion to hold. It is also quite a ludicrous claim in light of how engineers and scientists work. It would be quite impossible for the hundreds of thousands of experts working solving the problem of space flight to believe they were solving the problems when in fact they were not.
And this enormous scale spells doom for the author's next assertion: that fear of losing one's job would keep the workers happy with living a lie. This presumes that during a ten-year project involving tens of billions of dollars, thousands of companies, and hundreds of thousands of workers not one person was fired and decided to exact retribution by spilling the beans. And now that all these people have gone on to other pursuits and their mortgages and futures no longer depend on keeping the Apollo "secret", what keeps them in line? Why no deathbed confessions? Anyone with verifiable proof of a hoax could get hoards of money from the various conspiracy theorist out to prove their point.
No, as with the other attempts to slap together a motive-based argument, this proposal is completely implausible. For an article that boldly proclaims, "that's not the way it happened," there is a whole lot of smoke and mirrors in Mr. Dickson's writings.
Jay Windley
Webmaster
www.clavius.org
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24-September-2003, 04:33 PM
Another hoax article
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