Hiya !

Found this anti-HB essay dated December 4, 2003 written by the son of an Apollo engineer. When I first saw it, it only had 8 reads and it kind of deserves a lot more ! =D> =D> =D> :

http://www.dailyread.com/tiki-read_a...p?articleId=27

"We´ve all heard the loonies talking about how the whole entire Apollo Program (1966-1975) was a hoax, and I generally just ignore these whackos.

I mean, hell, my dad was an Apollo engineer. I lived in Cocoa Beach as a kid and personally saw the Saturn Vs take off. They were not faked.

So what has changed the Mahatma's policy of not negotiating with the ridiculous? Read on to find out!"

(....................................)

"Periodically a couple times a year I receive a forwarded Email with a title on the order of Top Ten Reasons Why We Didnt Go To The Moon or some slight variation thereof. Its a fair representation of what the anti-moon nuts are blathering about. As I´m sick of replying to this crap, I´m going to reproduce the Email below, along with my answers once and for all. Anyone asks me about this stuff from here on out, I´m going to refer them to this essay, and give no other answer. "

(.......................................)

And then he rebuts claim after claim. Very long essay, check it out at:

http://www.dailyread.com/tiki-read_a...p?articleId=27

I liked this part about Buzz' punch:
[/quote]

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"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"

Interesting read. Thanks for pointing it out!

JayUtah, can you comment on the part near the bottom where he talks about why no one has gone back since 1972? I'd like to know what you think, as I get this question all the time.

I get the question a lot too. I don't think there's a single right answer. The reasons for going to the moon were not universally held, and so the reasons for not having gone back are not universally understood.

The conspiracists make it a purely technical question. If we had the technology then, we must certainly have it now and it should be a matter of simply dusting off the hardware and going back. Ergo, since we freely admit not having the equipment at the ready, it must never have existed. People don't generally understand the expense and effort required to stay current in high-stakes engineering. When you engineer at that level, a lot of what you do is very specialized and not often applicable directly to other projects. So while some of the skills developed by, say, Grumman in building the lunar module might have been transferred abstractly to the STS orbiter wing, the F-14, and other major projects, it is not the same as saying Grumman could just whip out another lunar module today. The parts aren't available either. Grumman relied on hundreds of subcontractors to supply parts that you just can't get anymore. Modernizing the design requires tracking down equivalents for hundreds of thousands of parts.

So thither the technical argument.

But the conspiracists are wrong to limit this entirely to a technical argument. Apollo was a technology project undertaken in a certain social, political, and fiscal environment. The American public was quite willing to spend oodles of money outdoing the Soviets. Today public sentiment is different. We have other things we'd rather spend our money on. So the answer I usually give most people is that we haven't been back to the moon because Americans simply aren't intersted enough in it. Look at what happened when the Chinese announced their intent to land on the moon. All of a sudden the American public started talking about whether it was time to go back. Now, as it was then, it's more about the prestige of being the prevalent spacefaring nation than about actually doing anything important on the moon.

The author's theory that the Soviets were more interested in Mars than in the moon is interesting. I've never heard that. While it's obviously difficult to discover what went on in the Soviet space program back then, I don't recall any of the salient authors talking about the moon being a waypoint for an ambition toward Mars. This sounds like a Jim Oberg question. I think he'd know more about the Soviet space program than I.

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

One statement that jarred badly for me was:

"All the Apollo landings took place during the local day, and were timed for the local Lunar noon when the sun was directly overhead. This was for landing safety reasons." :-s

And again later, he seems to re-emphasis this point by confirming that the lunar surface temperature at 'high noon' was 280 degrees F.

This is not correct. All of the lunar landings occurred early in the local lunar morning. The sun was highest during the landing of Apollo 17 in the Taurus-Littrow valley, but even then the sun angle was only a measly 13 degrees. For Apollo 12, the sun had barely risen, with a sun angle of only 5.1 degrees!

This of course provided an important aid for thermal control for the astronauts - the surface temperature at that time in the 'morning' had not reached anything like 280F.

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

I loved the comment when discussing the guidance computer that "Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star without a targeting computer!"

I can just imagine giving that response to your standard run-of-the-mill HB and having them turn away mumbling, "Oh, yeah........"!

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

Some other points to note:

...the landers guidance computer was shut down during the final approach.

This could be misleading. The computer performed several roles, both high-level and low-level. The high-level guidance program intended to bring the lunar module to a stop a few hundred feet above a preselected landing site with little or no pilot intervention. Armstrong, as we all know, noticed the preselected landing site was strewn with boulders. So at this point he deactivated the landing program and flew the spacecraft to a safer place.

But the computer also had the job of stabilizing the spacecraft and translating Armstrong's control inputs into specific commands for the RCS jets. One control mode, for example, applied a lateral drift rate as the hand controller was deflected. The greater the deflection, the greater the drift rate. There was some discussion about whether releasing the controller and allowing to go back to detent should simply maintain the drift rate, or negate it. After Apollo 11 the behavior was changed. In either case, a program in the computer interpreted the hand controller position and produced RCS jet fire commands to "do the right thing". The change was a software modification.

When I tilt the controller to the left, the LM will drift left. The farther I tilt the controller, the faster I will drift. Obviously a constant drift rate doesn't need a constant firing of the jet. Once the drift rate is established, the jet turns off. If I let go of the controller and let it bounce back to the center, the computer fires the opposite jets just enough to "null" that drift. Only when I push the stick all the way over does this "hardover" command connect directly to the jet controls and bypass the computer.

I don't know much about broadcasting...

Thankfully I know a fair amount. The original question speaks solely of digital video compression techniques and implies that those are the only ones with which the individual is familiar. It's difficult to know where to begin explaining all that is wrong with the questioner's presumptions. The S band (ca. 2 gigahertz) is simply the highest frequency that could be successfully and reliably demodulated over that distance, and one reasonably free of external noise. Today the S band is used for cordless telephones. In space we use primarily the C- and Ku-bands -- the later reaching past 12 gigahertz.

Analog television signals are wholly unconnected to today's digital standards. The signal formats, modulation constraints, etc., are entirely different. We still use phase-locked loops for the basic low-level modulation, but that's where the similarity ends.

The questioner is likely very young and doesn't necessarily realize that there was a whole sophisticated world of analog encodings and modulations before video was pushed out over digital media.

All the Apollo landings ... were timed for the local Lunar Noon.

Nope. Early the lunar morning, so that long shadows would be cast and the surfaces would not have attained high equilibrium temperatures.

Groan. I promise you, you can't [see reflections of the studio in the insulation].

This is something I've seen first hand with Apollo equipment. You can't put anything anywhere on a set where you're going to use an Apollo space helmet and pretend it won't be seen. For theatrical purposes you have to cloak everything in black cloth and clear the set for dozens of feet around your actor. And even then you see reflections of black bulks where your equipment is hidden.

Occasionally you see arguments that thus-and-such a detail can't be positively identified as Apollo equipment (by the conspiracist), therefore it must be some unidentified piece of studio equipment. I don't see why the inability to identify it as studio equipment is any more valid than the inability to identify it as Apollo equipment. And I tend to have much better luck than the conspiracists at identifying Apollo equipment.

You have people like Jack White claiming that graduations on the LM windows are the shadows of lighting rigs. And you have other people pointing to any white spot in a helmet and saying it must be a row of studio lights. I honestly wonder if any of these people have ever been on a stage or in a studio. You can't have a row of lights without having a row of shadows. It's a pretty tight correlation. I'm getting ready to post some pictures taken on my stages under the rows of lights these people say they see in the photos. So where do these "rows of lights" come from? From the helmets themselves. It's not too difficult to apply a bright light to a double-pane window (cf., the Apollo visor and helmets provided three concentric layers of material) and get rows of interreflections.

...the flag on the moon does not wave.

I would love to have someone take a nylon flag out into the desert at night and shoot an hour of video in which that flag moves only when touched. Nylon flags move when a gnat farts, and deserts are notoriously windy places -- especially at night. Out in the Mojave our flag mockup blew across our "set" after having been firmly planted by our "astronaut" (assisted by two grips with a very heavy hammer). In the scenes where I'm pointing to the flag and discussing it, there is a grip just out of frame holding the flagpole in a death grip to keep it from departing the shot.

...impossible to fake stuff using the Vomit Comet.

The notion that the airplane must be at 40,000 or 50,000 feet in order to simulate weightlessness is fairly daft.

The Vomit Comet is based on the popular Boeing 707 airframe. That version of the airframe (the -80, or "dash eighty") has a service ceiling (i.e., maximum altitude) of 43,000 feet. The Dash 80 is the one that did the barrel roll on its initial public flyby. It's a pretty tough bird.

But the notion that weightlessness is associated with some altitude seems to misunderstand how the aircraft produces the illusion of weightlessness. The aircraft simply flies a parabolic arc -- up, over, and down -- so that the airplane and its contents follow the same ballistic arc for a time. You are not weightless, just falling along the same trajectory as the airplane. You can do that at any altitude that falls within your airplane's operation envelope, although for safety it's best done as high as possible to provide recovery time in case you lose control.

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

One teensy criticism of the tone of the article...

He complains about the standard of grammar in the HBer's message, but his own grammar is nothing to write home about either. This does rather open him up to attack.

Otherwise good stuff.

An interesting comparison here is the major effort it took to recreate the Wright brother's Flyer for the centennial. Of couse, one could argue that we could simply take the original down out of the Smithsonian and fly it again, but even that would require us to recover obsolete technologies to refurbish the plane. So, to apply HB logic, flight is impossible since we can't just pull the Flyer out and take it for a spin. :roll:

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

IIRC the Soviets were more interested in Venus than in Mars, I remember readint that the majority of their deep space probes (specifically the Venera Series) were sent to Venus.

[Editted for Clarity and Spelling]

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Take a closer but more complex example: The Avro Arrow.

Developed by Avro Canada in the late 50s, after they had two succesful prototypes the proyect was canceled, the prototypes destroyed and Avro Canada went out of business. Once could argue that Mach 2 Interceptors where impossible for the Canadians to build in the 50s and that's what happened to the proyect. Nowadays some people in Canada want to rebuild an Arrow, a task which is gargantuan task considering that all the engineering know-how on making the Arrow was lost DESPITE the fact that the technology to make Mach 2 interceptors is VERY widely available.

[Editted for clarity]

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

...and Avro Canada went out of business.

And many of its engineers and managers went to the U.S. to work on the Apollo project. Apollo, according to the Canadians, is the phoenix that arose from the ashes of the Arrow.

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

The simple answer I give as to "Why haven't we gone back?" is that, if the American public had been interested, we'd have gone back. They weren't, so we didn't. Those of us who remember the 70s (no, I wasn't "stoned") remember cries to "spend the money closer to home." Also, Apollo overlapped the Vietnam War, and it derived from the same "beat the Russians" mentality. At the end of the war, the American people wanted to chuck all of it. I'm sure the space buffs and astronomers in this forum didn't feel that way, but most average citizens did.

As to the article by the weary son of the Apollo engineer, it appears to me that his apostrophes -- missing throughout the article -- were probably stripped out in a file conversion somewhere along the way. I can't believe he missed all of them. Like the rest of you, I was bothered by his technical lapses. His heart is in the right place, but maybe someone can contact him off-line to get it cleaned up.

Yes I remember reading about that. Canadians are very proud of it (and if I were Canadian I would be too)

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

The Avro Arrow was an extremely impressive aircraft. At the time it was developed, my father worked for Hughes Aircraft in L.A. Hughes was to develop the missile systems for the Arrow, which was going to use the Hughes-developed Falcon air-to-air missile. They had an Arrow at Hughes Airport. I only saw it from the road, but it was very impressive. Alas, I never saw it fly.

Jay...can you briefly explain to this layman the criteria for designating the different bands? S-band is around 2GHz, C-band and Ku-band are of different bandwidths. Where do the letter designations originate and is there a rhyme and reason to it? Just kinda curious.

Thanks!

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Why does "monosyllabic" have 5 syllables?

If there's a rhyme or reason to naming the bands, it eludes me too.

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

Hello everyone, Mahatma Randy here. I'm the "Apollo Engineer's Son" in question.

I suppose it's to be expected. I've been writing essays and reviews and opinion pieces online for more than a decade now, none of which have ever attracted any attention outside of my own website. So what actually gets attention? A spastic rant written in a moment of pique as a reply to a friend of mine who forwarded me that damn Lunar Conspiracy email. I banged the thing out in like an hour during a slow day at work, and sent it on to him without even bothering to check the spelling.

Now, suddenly, I'm getting Emails from as far away as Europe and Australia telling me alternately that I'm the greatest thing since sliced cats *or* that I'm an idiot because I don't know the landings were timed for local dawn. It's both heartening and depressing. Heartening because it shows the number of educated, intelligent people out there probably *do* exceed the number of lunatics and conspiracy theorists.

It's depressing, however, because I've finally achieved a kind of momentary notariety for something I wrote in one sitting, while I was angry, and by my own standards of these things, I don't think it's very good. Funny, yes, but not all that good.

I most humbly apologize for the 'noon' vs. 'dawn' thing. That's my mistake, and I'll retract and revise it just as soon as I get a chance, and thank you for all your other comments and criticisms.

Anyway, thank y'all for your attention to my prattling, and if any of you have interest in such things, the original of the article is on my site at http://www.mahatmarandy.com/art/I_Promise_You.htm which is in my 'prodigious nonproductivity' section. The main page to my site is http://www.mahatmarandy.com I've got a couple of channels of Streaming Audio. Please feel free to stop in and look around.

Thank you again,
Mahatma Randy

It's depressing, however, because I've finally achieved a kind of momentary notariety for something I wrote in one sitting, while I was angry

Yeah, never write angry. :-) I still get haunted by things I wrote in a fit of passion -- factually correct or otherwise. Don't worry about it too much. We still like you. :-)

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

Thank you, Mr. Utah.

Incidentally, as the subject was raised several times about my grammer in the article: When it was reposted on dailyRead, for some reason the software on that site stripped all the apostrophes, commas, and such.

Ordinarily I wouldn't have commented on the grammer of the author in my rebuttal, as I'm American, and therefore and incapable of speaking english to anyone's satisfaction. That kind of thing is snobbish and just not my style. But the initial Email was soooooo bad that it was almost incomprehensible in places. I really do doubt that it's author was a native speaker.

Thanks again for the kind words, and Happy New Year!
Mahatma Randy

I think a similar technical argument could be made for just about any piece of hardware that hasn't been produced in a long time.

For example:

Have Ford build a brand new 1964 1/2 Mustang. How long would it take them to do it? How much would it cost as compared to the original? (Would they be allowed to use Freon in the AC?). Would their inability / unwillingness to do it be "proof" that the 1964 1/2 Mustang never existed?

Have a shipyard build a WW2 Iowa-class battleship. What would it cost? What infrastructure would have to be put in place. If the shipyard was unwilling / unable to do it, would it be "proof" that the USS Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey, and Wisconsin never existed???

I think a similar technical argument could be made for just about any piece of hardware that hasn't been produced in a long time.

For example:

Have Ford build a brand new 1964 1/2 Mustang. How long would it take them to do it? How much would it cost as compared to the original? (Would they be allowed to use Freon in the AC?). Would their inability / unwillingness to do it be "proof" that the 1964 1/2 Mustang never existed?

Have a shipyard build a WW2 Iowa-class battleship. What would it cost? What infrastructure would have to be put in place. If the shipyard was unwilling / unable to do it, would it be "proof" that the USS Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey, and Wisconsin never existed???

Great examples. =D>

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

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

My typical example is a wagon wheel. How many automotive engineers can make a good old-fashioned wagon wheel?

I know lots of electrical engineers who complain that they've lost all their analog circuit skills. Everything's digital now. The notion that people actually used to do signal processing and control circuits using analog techniques is quaint.

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

In PCs is even worse, ask any PC support personnel if they know how to do a Low Level Format on a Hard disk.

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

So to all those people who say, why can't we just pull out all the old blueprints and just build another Saturn V, we should say we have the plans but they are on 5-1/4" disks in AutoCAD version 1.0!

I'm just joking guys, don't jump on me because they were really on 8" disks.

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

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

More like 14" disks

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Give me a break. The space shuttle plans aren't even CAD. Significant chunks of it are, but the canonical design documents are on paper and haven't been maintained.

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

You don't need to go that far. As a child, I was pretty skillful in building things with a construction kit. Getting it again in my hands after some 20 years, I was pretty unable to build anything good for my son to show him the stuff. We have to learn it both again.

Harald

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

My question is, why would "we" want to build another Saturn V? It's 30 year old technology! I would think that today we could come up with something a tad better.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov