http://www.metroactive.com/papers/me...-rpt-9704.html

I like what the writer of this article says at the bottom: "One hopes Kaysing consults someone other than his attorney, who happens to be himself."

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~AstroMike

Kaysing's finances have undoubtedly improved quite a bit since this was written, thanks to Fox TV. I liked the part about Lovell having a better case for libel than Kaysing does. I am not an attorney, but I have been party to a couple of libel actions, once each as defendant and plaintiff. I won them both. I have always maintained that individuals who were involved in Project Apollo, especially the astronauts themselves, have a good case for libel. This didn't matter as long as the top HBs were impoverished cranks, they weren't worth suing. Things have changed now, though. Fox has a lot of money, so do some of the top HBs.

Even Ralph Rene is critical of the way Bill Kaysing went about this. Rene wanted to get a few proponents together and combine their efforts. Kaysing initially agreed but later he decided to go it alone and submitted, according to Rene, a load of drivel.

I doubt Fox payed Kaysing much for his interview. Such things go for cheap, like hundreds of bucks. However, it has no doubt boosted his book sales. I notices someone bought a copy of Kaysing's book on Amazon through my own bookstore! Irony.

To be fair, I have not once seen Kaysing go out of his way to plug his book. On the contrary, I have seen you plug your own book twice on Tech TV and numerous times on the web.

I was reading about the Coriolis effect the other day. Very interesting, that.

Your point about the stars (pg 173) is misleading, by the way. The claim is not that they forgot about them, it is that they deliberately stonewalled them and the subject matter.

Your point being...? I have no problems with people plugging their books, mine being no exception. I merely stated that Kaysing was probably not payed all that well for the Fox show. Some people think that appearance made him some cash; it did, but not a lot is my guess.

My point is that I don't think Kaysing is pushing the hoax theory just to support sales of his book, I think he is promoting the hoax theory because he truly believes in it.

Folks here like to suggest that this is all just an elaborate way to make lots of money. If these go uncorrected then you yourself could find yourself open to the same charge.

People can accuse me of whatever they want; money or no, the Apollo landings did in fact occur. I could make a lot more money claiming that NASA really did hoax the landings! I would't be surprised if I could make several hundred thousand dollars by backing the HB claims. Yet I don't. What does that tell you? And no, I'm not an idiot.

So NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars setting up a fake apollo mission, accurately reproducing everything down to the finest detail, yet when they get to making visible stars, which would be comparatively easy to fake, they just say "screw it, we'll just stonewall them"?

I don't understand this. What does stonewalling have to do with anything?

In the passage you cite, the BA is discussing the HBs claim that stars should be visible in the lunar surface photos. If this were true (it isn't), then NASA must have faked the pictures and forgotten to include the stars. I think the BA's statement is entirely valid.

Stonewalling means refusing to answer legitimate questions. Which questions, and who's refusing to answer them?

TBA: People can accuse me of whatever they want; money or no, the Apollo landings did in fact occur.

And I am sure Bart Sibrel and Bill Kaysing will echo the exact opposite of your conclusion. These people, like yourself, are expressing an honest belief, and the book is as a consequent of that belief. Whether that belief is valid or not -- for the moment -- is secondary to the point I am trying to make. And the point is this: let us not turn this into a "they're just trying to sell copies of their book" saga, otherwise mud will sling in both directions.

TBA: I would't be surprised if I could make several hundred thousand dollars by backing the HB claims. Yet I don't. What does that tell you? And no, I'm not an idiot.

It tells me that you believe in what you are preaching. I'm not disputing that. Quite the opposite in fact. I am saying that, in both camps, this is not a money thing.

Tomblvd: So NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars setting up a fake apollo mission, accurately reproducing everything down to the finest detail, yet when they get to making visible stars, which would be comparatively easy to fake, they just say "screw it, we'll just stonewall them"?

But would they be comparatively easy to fake? Their argument is that they would be most difficult to falsify because all of the astronomy buffs would come out of the woodwork and start analysing them in great detail. I concur with them.

Donnie B: In the passage you cite, the BA is discussing the HBs claim that stars should be visible in the lunar surface photos. If this were true (it isn't), then NASA must have faked the pictures and forgotten to include the stars. I think the BA's statement is entirely valid.

No, it is not. Firstly, the BA has a habit of typecasting us. For example, Bart Sibrel accepts that the stars would be near impossible to capture from the lunar surface, but he objects to the crew members claims that they themselves didn't see any at any other time. Phil ignores this point. It is Bill Kaysing who believes the stars should be visible, yet in addition he too has noted that they very rarely talked about them. He says "it would be like going to Niagara Falls and talking about the hamburger you just ate". But regardless, Bill Kaysings initial claim isn't that they forgot about the stars, it is that he believes this element was too hard to incorporate, so in turn they stonewalled them and the subject matter.

The BA is making out that the main thrust of this claim is that it was an oversight. Call me Mr. Cynical, but I can't help and feel that he did it on purpose just to make the argument appear senseless.

Karamoon

Just a little thought experiment here, so if you can find any problems, please let me know.

If I walk outside at night when there are no clouds and no Moon, I can see a great number of stars. The Milky Way makes a spectacular and magnificent band across the sky.

If I walk outside at night when there are no clouds, but the Moon is in the sky, I can't see as many stars.

If I walk outside at night when there are no clouds, and there's a full Moon, I can see very few stars.

In each case, the number of stars I can see is diminished as the brightness of a particular light source increases (the Moon).

Now let's replace the Moon with the Sun. The Sun is much brighter than the Moon, so it's going to wash out the light from the stars even more.

At least, that's how it seems to me...

And as for the comment about going to Niagara, well, the astronauts were going to the Moon to study the Moon, conduct experiments, pick up rocks, and so on. They weren't sent there to rubberneck at the stars in the sky, visible or not. Kaysing's comment to me seems back to front: if NASA sent astronauts to the Moon to study the Moon, and all they did was rave on about the stars they could see in the sky, then that's what _I_ would consider going to Niagara and only talking about the hamburgers.

Could the astronaus see stars while they were on the moon?

SeekingKnowledge, if I understand correctly, they *may* have been able to see a few of the brightest stars, but for the majority of it, there was nothing to see. It's no different than a day on Earth. The atmosphere has next to no bearing on star visibility.

Peter B: In each case, the number of stars I can see is diminished as the brightness of a particular light source increases (the Moon).

Now let's replace the Moon with the Sun. The Sun is much brighter than the Moon, so it's going to wash out the light from the stars even more.

At least, that's how it seems to me...

And I largely agree with that myself. Some of it has to do with your position, or how you position yourself. Replying to a question in the post flight press conference, Michael Collins said he couldn't recall seeing any stars. But this is very odd, as Collins had the opportunity to blank out any light contamination entering the spacecraft -- as shown when they apparently filmed their distance from the Earth. This means he would have had a spectacular view of all the stars -- the very same stars Yuri Gagarin said were amazingly bright.

What is even weirder is that later, in his book, Collins changed his mind! Bart Sibrel makes the case that you can't posibly forget something like that. It's like the World Trade Towers, it's something that burns into your memory.

Actually, you don't know that. They could be lying to make money. I am not saying they are; I am saying it's a possibility. On the other hand, what I am saying is not making me as much money as I could earn by lying.

Oh, I agree. But I never said they were lying to make money. I have brought it up as a valid possibility, but they are innocent until proven guilty.

Again, you don't know that, except in my case. If it were a money thing for me, I would be saying NASA is lying.

But you areentirely missing the point. I have shown simply and easily why there should be no stars in the images. It's really that simple. There is no case for having to fake them. If there had been stars, we'd know they were faked!

Again, not true. I have said before that you don't have to be an idiot to believe NASA faked the Moon landings. These people-- Sibrel and Kaysing-- talk a slick talk, and can sway people. But upon further reflection, they are shown to be wrong every time. I have talked with reasonable, intelligent people who believed what the Fox show was telling them. After I talked to them, in many cases, they realized they had been swindled, for lack of a better word.

I ignore this? Where? In my book, where I had only 5000-6000 words to debunk the entire hoax? Or on my web page, where I only talk about Fox? I am not ignoring it, I am simply not going to debunk every single silly point raised by Sibrel and Kasying, Percy and Rene. It would take 100,000 words, and who would read that much? Better simply to show why the major points are wrong.

He can be as pithy as he wants, but he's still grossly and utterly wrong. If stars were hard to see from the surface (and they are), then the astronauts wouldn't be talking about them.

Incidentally, Sibrel is wrong too. He wonders why the astronauts didn't do astronomy from the surface of the Moon in his video. In reality, they did do some. The did some ultraviolet photography, which is impossible from the surface of the Earth. The reason not much astronomy was done was because the majority of science done from the Moon was geological, unsurprisingly. Astronomy can be done from orbit much more cheaply, and weight/money was a huge concern. Clearly, Sibrel hasn't done a whole lot of research, depsite his claims.

Fer criminy's sake, it doesn't matter. It only matters that the HB claims are wrong. I do make the case that HBs say NASA forgot to put it stars, but that's because I have seen them make that case. But it doesn't matter if they claim that NASA forgot, or knew it wouldn't work, or that little green men told them not to include stars. The important point is that cold stone fact, pictures taken of astronauts in full sunlight will show no stars in the sky.

Honestly, your arguments are almost entirely missing the basic point here.

Perhaps a better example would be downtown New York at night. The light pollution is so great that many New Yorkers haven't seen the stars for years. Much the same happens here in Houston, even in the 'burbs. But in each case, the sky is definitely black.

The highly reflective lunar surface is a tremendous source of light pollution.

Not odd at all. Collins had quite a few tasks to perform, and star gazing wasn't one of them. After thinking about it some, he realized, by gosh, he had noticed the stars, but his attention was focused elsewhere. (Probably looking at the moon. Which goes to the WTC comment. If you go to NY to shop the Garment District, you might remember after you get back home that you did catch a glimpse of them, but didn't pay much attention as that wasn't the purpose of your trip.)

Terrestrial light pollution is a bit of a flawed analogy here. LP here lights up the sky, which then becomes bright, drowning out stars. On the Moon, with no air, it's different. Basically, glare from the Moon itself would close down your pupils. You could probably see stars if you faced away from the bright Earth and Sun (which would be nearly opposite each other in the sky at new Moon) and then you would have to block the lunar landscape as well. Not easy to do in a spacesuit! Even then, there would be a lot of internal reflection from the helmet.

I make this case in my book, too, after talking to Shuttle astronaut Ron Parise. He says internal reflections makes it nearly impossible to see stars out the Shuttle window.

I am curious about the Gagarin quote. Was his capsule lit from the inside?

Folks here like to suggest that this is all just an elaborate way to make lots of money.

Not exactly, in my opinion. I think notoreity is the chief motivation, with money being secondary. Some hoax believers appear mercenary probably because they have laid out considerable sums of cash to produce their books and videos, and if they don't sell them they'll have to eat the cost. It's not that they want to get rich. They want to get out of debt.

These people, like yourself, are expressing an honest belief, and the book is as a consequent of that belief.

I disagree. There is ample evidence that the major hoax theorists' cases are anything but honest. They have made contradictory claims and have sidestepped and suppressed contrary evidence. They have passed themselves off as experts while demonstrating almost total ignorance of the topics they discuss.

What about any of that seems honest?

I concur with them.

Not if I understand your argument correctly. You claim Apollos 11-13 were definitely falsified, Apollo 14 may have been falsified, and Apollo 15-17 were probably genuine.

For example, Bart Sibrel accepts that the stars would be near impossible to capture from the lunar surface, but he objects to the crew members claims that they themselves didn't see any at any other time.

The correction of the navigation platform is based on the ability to see stars through the AOT. Whether they remember seeing stars through the window is irrelevant. They weren't expected to try. It is unlikely the conditions inside the spacecraft, even with the cabin lights turned off, would have allowed it.

It is Bill Kaysing who believes the stars should be visible, yet in addition he too has noted that they very rarely talked about them.

That's because all the Apollo 11 astronauts had been in space before, and were engaged in a very difficult mission with a 50/50 chance of success.

He says "it would be like going to Niagara Falls and talking about the hamburger you just ate".

Well, if you lived near Niagara Falls and saw it every day, and you had trained for years to eat that hamburger, I'll bet you'd recall a lot more about the hamburger than about whether the falls were producing lots of spray.

Kaysing's conclusion is based on projecting his anticipation on the astronauts, and of course the incorrect assumption that the stars would be brilliant and hard to ignore.

it is that he believes this element was too hard to incorporate

Refuted. Planetariums of the day did it all the time. They still do. Navigation of the LM in preparation to ascend is based on knowing where specific stars would be in the lunar sky.

The argument that the astronauts would have noticed the stars and been unable to forget them -- regardless of who's making it -- is predicated on a number of false assumptions, among which the notion that the astronauts placed great emphasis on stargazing, and that they would have been bright.

Could the astronaus see stars while they were on the moon?

Yes, under the right circumstances. One of the first tasks the astronauts had to perform after landing was to very precisely orient the LM's guidance platform to account for the angle of the terrain. This orientation was used to tune the ascent program.

To orient the platform, a special telescope was used to take star sights. The eyepiece was the typical rubber gasket affair used on some camera viewfinders to block out extra light. The astronauts reported it took about sixty seconds for their eyes to adjust so that they could see the stars they were after.

So in order to guarantee a good liftoff they had to see a few stars, at least through the telescope.

Whether they could see them gallivanting around on the surface is another question. The answer would be, generally no. It may have been possible to see them with the naked eye, giving an intentional and concerted effort to do so. Nothing in the Apollo record indicates any of the astronauts undertook the effort to do so. They were simply too busy.

As you would expect, the way to see stars would be to force your eyes to adjust to the darkness by blocking out anything bright. How could you do that in a space suit?

All around you would be the brilliantly lit lunar surface. Even if you were standing in the LM's shadow, or some other large shadow, you could still see sunlit surface. And since the eye tends to adjust to the brightest object in the field of view, it wouldn't work.

So could you just crane your neck upward so that you couldn't see the surface? You could try, except that the overhelmet would block your view. You can't look straight up in an Apollo space suit, or in any space suit. Besides, there's a headrest inside the internal bubble helmet (and integral to it) that prevents you from tilting your head too far back.

So you could stand in a shadow and try to block the glare from the surface with your hands. And looking up, what would you find in your field of view? Either the earth or the sun, both too bright to allow your irises to open.

So if you managed to block the direct illumination from the earth and sun, and the glare from the surface, and get enough of the sky visible in your faceplate, and do this for a minute or so while your eyes adjust -- then you might be able to see some bright stars.

But you can see how that might be out of place. While you're standing there in a shadow with your hands in a weird position for a minute or so, someone's going to remind you that you have other activities to accomplish, for which you have trained for many months.

The ultraviolet photographs taken with the Schmitt camera (no relation to the astronaut) very clearly show brilliant stars. They were expected to because the exposure was set to do so.

Yes, VERY easy to fake. As others have pointed out, there are planetariums that do it regularly.



What exactly is your point about the stars? Did NASA forget them or did they purposely leave them out becasue they felt it was impossible to fake? And waht about the last couple missions that were "real"? Why does the real lunar sky look so much like the fake one?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Tomblvd on 2002-03-28 13:04 ]</font>

One additional point about the astronauts not mentioning the stars (or lack of) – esp. the Apollo 11 crew – they had each flown into space during Gemini and had already been accustomed to the view of the stars from space long before July 1969. Even those astronauts whose first mission was Apollo – they would have been able to do their initial stargazing prior to reaching the moon.

Remember - they went to the Moon to do a job – they weren’t idle tourists.

As for the WTC reference about being an indelible memory – I went to college in NYC and my memories of the WTC are from a much later time in my life when I’d occasionally drive past southern Manhattan on the NJTpk. I can’t picture them from street level in the city – even though I know I had to have seen them many times. My point is, they were just part of the background of my focus at the time – just as the stars would be if your mission was to explore the moon.

"it would be like going to Niagara Falls and talking about the hamburger you just ate".

Couldn't agree more. Talking about the stars you saw after having been to the moon would be like talking about the hamburger you ate at Niagra Falls.

Didn't the astronauts have their visors down most of the time too?

I think Karamoon is referring to the 9/11 incident when he mentions the WTC. That you're not likely to forget it.

Jay - it turns out that at least one of the astronauts did see stars during their EVAs. The following excerpt is taken from the Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal:



[Comm Break]


[Buzz is about to do a platform alignment using the Alignment Optical Telescope ( AOT) to do star sightings. Gene Cernan says that, while standing in the shadow of the Apollo 17 LM, he could see some stars while he was outside. I asked the 11 crew if they had made any such experiment.]



[Armstrong - "I don't recall doing it on the surface. We tried a good bit inside."]



[Aldrin - "I guess I wouldn't have given it any hope at all."]



[Armstrong - "There was a thought that, if you could look through a tube, you would probably be able to see stars. I don't remember that we tried anything like that."]



[Aldrin - "You could see them in the AOT, which was sort of like that."]



[Armstrong - "Which was just one power (meaning a telescope with no magnification)."]


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Ian R on 2002-03-28 16:19 ]</font>

Yes, I made this point earlier. Aldrin is describing the use of the AOT, which is the optical instrument inside the LM used to check the guidance platform alignment. Had Aldrin not been able to see stars through the AOT, they would have had to employ some contingency plan for the ascent.

Aldrin's comment about looking through a tube is one possible solution to the problem I mentioned of having too much unavoidable glare from the surface and bright celestial objects.

Jay, I was actually referring to Gene Cernan's sighting of stars from the shadow of the LM, but I take your point.



Cernan also claimed that if the LM's navigational systems had failed during the ascent from the surface, he would have been able to fly the craft using the Lunar horizon and stars as a reference. Following quote is again taken from the ALSJ:

["By the same token, I had a lot of personal pride that, if we had lost three quarters of our automatic systems, I still could have landed the vehicle safely. Same thing for leaving the lunar surface. True, you have to believe that you can do it; you would have no other choice. But I knew that if we lost all of our guidance computers, I could have flown that LM into lunar orbit for a rendezvous with Ron Evans. Manually. And by 'manually', I mean (visually guiding) with the stars (and) with the horizon of the Moon. I'd done it enough in the simulators that I knew what my remaining systems were going to tell me; and I had confidence that Jack was going to give me whatever information I need from him... ]



I'm not sure what Cernan is saying here - does he mean he could observe stars through the LM window with the naked eye? Or was he referring to Jack Schmitt's using the telescopic device instead?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Ian R on 2002-03-28 18:51 ]</font>

More comments by the Apollo 17 astronauts regarding spotting stars from the lunar surface:



<font color="#0000FF">[Jack is probably adjusting the window shade to let in a little light for his own activities while keeping the cabin dark enough for Gene to do the star sightings.</font> Jack seems to be saying that he can't get to the light switch, probably because it is covered by his helmet and/or gloves. The shade on Gene's window and on the overhead rendezvous window are denoted in AS17-145-22225 as labelled by Lennie Waugh.]


<font color="#0000FF">[Schmitt - "We couldn't see the stars out the window or when we were out on the surface. It took the collimation of the telescope to eliminate all of the reflected light reaching your eye from your surroundings. Even in the LM shadow, there were too many bright things in your field-of-view for the stars to be visible."]</font>



[A telescope - or any long, straight tube - admits only light rays coming from a small range of directions. The light rays that reach the end of the tube are virtually parallel to each other and to the long axis of the tube and, therefore, have been "collimated".]



<font color="#0000FF">[Cernan - "When you were in the lunar module, looking out the window, you certainly couldn't see stars. Using the telescope was sort of like being in a deep well; it cut out all the reflected light and let you see the stars. </font>(Ian R: As a side note, isn't this actually a fallacy about seeing stars from deep wells?)<font color="#0000FF"> It was also generally true that, when you were on the surface in the LM's shadow, there were too many bright things in your field-of-view for the stars to be visible. But I remember that I wanted to see whether I could see stars, and there were times out on the surface when I found that, if you allowed yourself to just focus and maybe even just shielded your eyes to some degree, even outside the LM shadow you could see stars in the sky. And, quite frankly, under the right conditions here on Earth on a bright sunlit day, you can do the same thing. I could see stars through my helmet visor; not easily, but it can be done."]</font>



(Note to the BA: I would post a link to this material, but it's right in the middle of a very long page over on the ALSJ.)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Ian R on 2002-03-28 18:50 ]</font>

Only if you're talking about seeing the stars in the daytime. Works fine at night, except it does limit your field of view somewhat...

Hypothetically, could they have just laid down in a shadow, so they naturally would be looking straight up, and what if they walked over to the dark side of the moon, and if they could get a 100% crystal clear look, would they be seeing ALOT more stars, than we can see on earth, at the clearest, highest pt, or is it basically the same?