This is story about one moon astronaut Eugene Cernan.
This is to show that you may have all the moon hoax theories you like, but meeting the person and knowing their story will give you all the answers if he was or was not on the moon.

Cernan had his ancestors from Czechoslovakia, at that time a communist (or socialist dictatorship) country. He was always absolutely curious about visiting the country, he even flew a CZ flag to the moon with his belongings. His dream was to actually deliver the flag to Czechoslovakia, but the official communist establishment always refused him an entry. So in 1974 when he was returning from Moscow he changed his identity as a journalist and come to the Bratislava Incheba exhibition. His troubles to deliver the flag just started - every official whom he try to meet has been afraid to even talk to him, not to mention to take a flag that flew to the moon. Here you have, an lonely astronaut who wants to share his story with the country of his ancestors in secret and nobody wants to listen. No press, no official invitations. He tried president, he tried academics. But he didn't give up and after all contacted director of astronomy lab L. Perek. whom he give the flag and his stories. They put it in the observatory in Ondrejov (same place where another great guy J. Grygar worked) but then they had to hide it after the Perek departure as it was too contoversial for the new director... mind you this was a Czechoslovakian flag, but flying it to the moon on american ship seemed something very dangerous for the communists.

Anyway he again went there after the fall of communists few times, browsed places of his people, churches, houses of his grand parents talk to folks and shared his moon landing stories. Always with just small local press or no press at all.

I think this story is the best indirect proof that he indeed went to the moon and was eager to share his stories on his own, even without any press coverage or any script from NASA or even secretly under false identity with just a normal people.

This is how astronauts are made.

I am not even surprised that Buzz punched Bart Sibrel when he called him coward an liar - this is how astronauts deal with the problem.

Welcome to BAUT. An interesting story, but I don't see how it is evidence one way or another for a genuine moon landing or a fake. If it had been a fake, this is what he would have been set up to do anyway.

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γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Oh puh-leeze.

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There in the valley of Scorpio, beneath the Cross of jade
Smoking on the seashell pipe the gypsies had made
We sat and we dreamed a while...in that crystal thought time in Mexico. ~Donovan

Always the ray of sunshine, aren't we Buttercup. Even I'm not that cynical.

Welcome to BAUT AbelovPes. Thanks for introducing us to this story.

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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

My grandfather always told me that he was from Czechoslovakia, even though he was born before there was a Czechoslovakia, and died after there was a Czechoslovakia.

And now we are sadly just a Czech republic, after stupid disagreement between two problematic to say at least, politics. Nevermind.

The Egene Cernan roots are well known to me, yet there is a much more plausible explaination for it - we are, as people living in the middle of Europe, experienced first hand nazis and them commies, very suspicious to any "government backed up truth".

Everything that come up with that label is dismissed as propaganda, because our historic experience taught us so.

The point I trying to make there is, that the number of people that believe NASA really send man to Moon is pretty low. I did not say "nonexistant", but the skepticism is huge. Don't blame us, blame our own governments that hide and distort the truth of way so many events, broken treaty and have nothing to say to us except false promises and then stood up with Hitler and "sacrificed us for peace".

Now we have their own astronaut Vladimir Remek, few own satalites and stuff, so we have some concept of what is out there. We have also shared very much data with the Russians and they are very avare of the radioactive dangers up there.
Since there is no weight to spare for shielding against so powerfull cosmic rays and solar flare particles (not to mention the normal flow of particles from Sun), we are established that no-one can pass thru the magnetosphere and Van Allen belts, before we invent how to shield the astronaut from radiation.

There are some experiments done (most in Russia, but here too), however it turns out that wrong shielding even increase the radiation problems (thx to particle fragmentation it can be one particle outside and 100 secondary - and still VERY dangerous - particles inside!) and that solid shields are, in fact, contraproductive for cosmic rays. It does shield well Alpha radiation particles, but it does worse problems with beta and much worse the problems with gamma... not to mention the cosmic rays.

So, what Eugene Cernan encountered there, was a disbelief in Apollo missions validity for abovementioned reasons mainly.

Commies, on the other hand, are ready to spin him as ex-Commie hero that go on the Moon. However as I mention above, there are grave concerns that it was just a staged show. Personally, I did not know one guy that would believe it and we are each year more sure, that it has to be a hoax. Because if we after 40 years still can't get there - how we can get there 40 years ago?

PS. come to think, Jiri Grygar started to believe in Apollo. Dunno what convinced him. As I child, I used to watch his TV show "Okna vermiru dokoran" (something like "Windows to space are open") as a child (oh my, it is about 26 years ago, lol), but he recently turn to God and started to believe in fairytales, so he became sort of loonie out there. IIRC last time he went like "disbelievers of Apollo should be slapped around" Like I say, sadly in the past years, he become something like a laughable "show-figure", instead of being a respected astronom. That in addition hurt any possible belief the Czechs might had in Apollo. I mean, come on. When only such nuts believe in Apollo - geee, I did not want to be in one room with them

As a Czech guy, I might check on the flag story and on the flag itself, if there is some interest about it. But mind you, the problem is, that we are very skeptical about it...

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"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." - Voltaire
...just keep folding, just keep folding... :)

The Russians know that living things can pass through the Van Allen Belts and survive. The biological specimens they sent around the Moon on Zond 5 were returned to Earth alive.

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

Welcome to BAUT, AbelovPes.

Two articles and an old BAUT thread touching on the Russian tortoises that flew on Zond 5:

ENERGIA's driving force
In praise of space monkeys (and tortoises)
Zond 5 "Are you a turtle?" UPDATED (mcclir received a reply from S.V. Kartashev, Energia's site administrator.)

Thank you very much for the links. To finally have a photo of the Zond 5 tortoises is something of a (small) dream come true. I have a sad life.

The term I think you are searching for is Bremsstrahlung. And the "wrong shielding" for spacecraft is lead and other metals with a high atomic number, making Bremsstrahlung worse.

What materials work better than lead to provide adequate protection for astronauts during relatively short missions that pass through the Van Allen radiation belt, like Apollo, trodas?

What ever became of those Russian tortoises that flew on Zond 5? If they were young tortoises back in 1968, teenagers perhaps, they could still be alive if they have been well cared for.

I'm glad to be of service.

Point 1 - the Zond 5 turtles is a myth story, cooked up months after to support the validity of Apollo hoax. Because always Russians did something major, they brag about it. There was NO word about turtles on Zond 5 for months and the first source that come up with it was a very tiny article in US newspapers.
Debunked.

Point 2 - turtles can withstand 2 000 rems, even in relatively short period of days. 4x smaller dose recieved in the matter of days is leathal to humans. So even if the urban myth about turtles is true, it did not prove a thing. It is not true, and it does not prove anything, even if it was true.
Debunked.

Point 3 - later Sputniks as well, as the Explorer 1, 2, 3... all had onboard geiger counters to measure how bad the radioactivity is out there. If you bother to read what happend, you surely know that the Explorer 1 geiger counter was overhelmed by the radioactivity. Not only it cross the "red line" or maximum allowable radioactivity, as the Explorer climb higher in his highly ellipse curve with minimum at 358 km and maximum at 2 550 km, the radioactivity levels climb too. And since about 500km it start climbing very rapidly and each orbit above 965 km it stop counting. It took there other Explorer to figure that out - above 965 km the geiger counter go over the range!
So, not only there is a strong radioactivity - not only the geiger counter pass the "red line", but in the end it jam itself, overhelmed with the radioactivity. Americans shielded it then with lead to extend it range to map the Van Allen radiation belts.
Point - if geiger counter not only pass the red line, but it was unable to measure the amount of radiation recieved, it prove without shadow of doubt that nothing can get there and live - at least not w/o meters of water and electric/magnetic shielding.
And even then it is not possible to shield the highest energy particles above 10GeV (and there is even above 100GeV ones - rare, but one can get unlucky)...

What do you think ECC rams are there for?
http://www.google.cz/search?hl=cs&q=...m&lr=&aq=f&oq=

That's right. Cosmic rays!
New Scientist Technology Blog: Should every computer chip have a ...
If your desktop with 1GB of RAM throws a cosmic-ray-induced error ... ECC memory already exists, and is designed for exactly this problem. ...
http://www.newscientist.com/.../do-w...lerts-for.html - Archiv - Podobné

ECC ram for my personal server? | Ask Metafilter
I understand the purpose of ECC RAM, but not the point. I mean, I've never noticed any issue resulting from cosmic ray bit flipping. ...
ask.metafilter.com/110544/ECC-ram-for-my-personal-server - Archiv - Podobné

ECC SDRAM Primer
... of soft errors in SDRAM is electrical disturbance caused by cosmic rays, ... The 1GB ECC memory-equipped server received 9 outages per 100 servers over ...
www.infohq.com/Computer/ecc-dram.htm - Archiv - Podobné

Slashdot | Intel Patents On-Chip Cosmic Ray Detectors
8 Mar 2008 ... Firehose:Intel wants cosmic ray detectors on every chip by holy_calamity (872269) ... that would be why servers etc all use ECC type RAM, ...
yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/08/1349220 - Archiv - Podobné

Intel patents cosmic ray detectors on-a-chip. What a relief.
Apparently Intel is concerned that cosmic rays -- those perky particles from space that blast .... ECC ram? vote up vote down Report Neutral ...
http://www.engadget.com/.../intel-pa...what-a-relief/ - Archiv - Podobné

Advantage of ECC RAM? - Photo.net Digital Darkroom Forum
Celkem příspěvků: 13 - Počet autorů: 10 - Poslední příspěvek: 16. prosinec 2004
The purpose of ECC is to prevent data corruption from cosmic rays. These would cause an error about once a month per 256MB of RAM (see this ...
photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/007OGq - Archiv - Podobné

FreeBSD and ECC memory?
25 Jul 2008 ... Non-ECC RAM can > correct single bit errors while ECC is capable of ... (Due to cosmic rays, radioactive decay in surrounding material, ...

__________________
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." - Voltaire
...just keep folding, just keep folding... :)

Please cite your sources.

These are not Russian tortoises.

Zond 5 flew round the Moon in September 1968. Less than two minutes research with Google showed the earliest reference to this was a report within two months in a Soviet newspaper. Within 12 months there were two scientific papers.

Zond 5 flew in September 1969.

Gaidamakin NA, Parfenov GP, Petrukhin VG, Antipov VV, Saksonov PP. 1969. Pathomorphological And Histochemical Changes In The Organs Of Turtles On Board The Automatic Station "Zond-5" 18th IAF Conf., Buenos Aires

Antipov VV. Gazenko OG, Parfenov GP, Saksonov PP. 1969. Results of a biological experiment conducted aboard the automatic station "Zond-5" Aerospace Medicine Vol. 40: 1244-7.

Gazenko 0, Saksonov P, Antipov V, and Parfenov G. 1968 Biological Investigations in Outer Space (Zond-5) Pravda 320, November 1968.

Within two years the work was being cited in US review publications.

Allenby RJ. 1970 Space Science Reviews 11: 5-53

Another two minutes work turned up the following

Gakenko OG, Antipov VV, Parfenov GP. 1971. Results of biological investigations performed on the Zond-5, Zond-6 and Zond-7 Kosmich. issled. (Moscow), 9: 601-609. Results of studies of turtles on some spacecraft (Turtles organs and tissues responses during Zond 5 and 7 lunar probes circumlunar flight)

Antipov VV, Gaidamakin NA, Parfenov GP, Petrukhin VG. 1971. Results of studies of turtles on some spacecraft (Turtles organs and tissues responses during Zond 5 and 7 lunar probes circumlunar flight). Akademiia Nauk Sssr, Izvestiia, Seriia Biologicheskaia , pp. 451-453.

It is your statement thatb this is a "myth" is comprehensively debunked.

The turtles are not an urban myth.

If turtles really have high radiation resistance, how is this relevant to Apollo? What about the other organisms on Zond 5 (flies, seeds, bacteria)?

You will find we are quite familiar with these missions and the radiation belts. How does this show that people can't traverse them?

Again, how is this relevant?

Jon

Wow, someone should have warned the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic before they awarded Dr. Jiří Grygar with their Honorary Medal For Merits last year.

Dr. Grygar wrote an article in 1970, "Last Apollo Flights," that was published in Rise Hvezd. (See abstract #167 on this SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) author query page.) I have not read the article, but something tells me that there is nothing in it about how Stanley Kubrick pulled it off.

Sisyfos, the Czech Skeptics Club, hands out a prize similar to the Ig Nobel Prize called the Erratic Boulder. Dr. Grygar established the organization in 1995. Now then, behold the Erratic Boulder 2007.

Going back to 1995, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific published a story by Vladimir Štefl, "World Beat: Czech Republic."

Utter rubbish. Articles about it appeared long before then, and Zond 5 was a direct influence on the decision to send Apollo 8 to the Moon, since the Zond capsule was capable of carrying a man and NASA believed Russia might send men on the next flight.

Good thing turtles weren't the only organisms on the flight then.

So? What was the maximum range of the onboard counter? You can't just arbitrarily say that because it saturated the counter it was lethal.

Absolute rubbish. What was the maximum intensity measured? I have access to a number of thermometers at work, some of which would explode if I tried using them in certain applications because their maximum range is limited.

The irony of this statement is you then go on to prove that not even the kilometres of air we have above our heads can shield those cosmic rays, but we don't seem to be dying despite our daily exposure to them....

__________________
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

trodas,
When Explorer 1 was sent up, Van Allen had no idea what to expect. He mounted some sort of Geiger counter aboard, along with other experiments. When the detector went "down", it took them a while to realize it was saturated.
Can you tell us the sensitivity of that experimental detector? It would be easy to have a detector that is saturated at very low levels of radiation, much line a variable Vu meter on an audio panel.

Follow-on flights began to characterize the threats in the belts (particle) and the dimensions of the belts. The belts were defined, the threat better understood.

Apollo had this data, with a mission thet required them to get through them. They knew the materials that were good at attenuating the radiation. They also knew that an escape vector using the KSC inclination (plus a little extra) would pass through the thinner, less intense regions of the belts...simple orbital mechanics.

The danger is there, and it can be mitigated to a great degree. Short exposure in the weaker edges of the belt. There's nothing to debunk here...

In particular, I'd expect the detector to be designed to give a useful count rate at ground level, allowing it to measure a reduction in radioactivity as well as an increase. The same situation as with the stars...real instrumentation has a finite dynamic range. A detector with an overly high range would have had less precision and sensitivity, and would have lost details at lower intensities, just as the moon photos lack stars. A camera set up to capture stars would be drastically overexposed and thus blinded on a sunny day at the beach...that doesn't mean humans would be blinded as well.

Going on and on about how the detector was saturated, without any reference to real radiation levels, is just ridiculous and meaningless.

There was NO word about turtles on Zond 5 for months...

False and irrelevant. The point at which some story appears in the Western press is not the point at which the information becomes useful to those who sought it.

turtles can withstand 2 000 rems, even in relatively short period of days.

Irrelevant. The biological specimens in question do not need to be exactly as susceptible to radiation as humans in order to be relevant to humans. The point is to gather information about the effect of radiation in a certain area of space upon biological organisms, not necessarily to precisely duplicate what some human in some spacecraft would experience.

The original conspiracist claim was that no living creature had been sent into and beyond the Van Allen belts. Now we find the conspiracists falling all over themselves to explain away Zond 5 as a means of distracting from the fact that they didn't know about it at all until qualified space engineers told them about it. They didn't do their homework.

...you surely know that the Explorer 1 geiger counter was overhelmed by the radioactivity.

Only because it had not been calibrated to the proper expected exposure.

Geiger counters come in only one band of sensitivity: the natural number of collisions recorded in the sensing medium. To calibrate the counter to some expected dose, one places material of known absorptive capability between the radiation source and the counter, attenuating the level to that which is sensible by the attached telemeter.

How many spacecraft have you personally designed and operated?

Not only it cross the "red line" or maximum allowable radioactivity...

"Maximum allowable radioactivity" is highly misleading. The counter saturated, but that does not equate to some magically dangerous level of radiation. Take a voltmeter calibrated for 0 to 1 volt and hook it up to your car battery. It will peg the meter and probably damage its electronics. You must calibrate the meter properly. That doesn't mean that 12 volts is a lot.

So, not only there is a strong radioactivity - not only the geiger counter pass the "red line", but in the end it jam itself...

No, it just shows that like most conspiracy theorists, you have no training or experience in the equipment used to measure radiation and the theory by which it operates.

...at least not w/o meters of water and electric/magnetic shielding.

I'm an engineer. I'm not prepared to accept your estimate of "meters of water" or "electric/magnetic shielding" without its supporting numerical computation. Please show your work.

And even then it is not possible to shield the highest energy particles above 10GeV...

And at what flux do those occur? What is the probability of encountering one on a 10-day mission?

What do you think ECC rams are there for?

Because the tolerance for cosmic ray effects on large scale supercomputers is very low, as opposed to the tolerance for cosmic ray effects in biological organisms. Apples and oranges.

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

Cosmos 110 was another Soviet biosatellite, this one contained two dogs, named Veterok and Ugolyok. This capsule orbited in and out of the inner Van Allen belt, for 22 days. The total dosage? 12 rads.. Here's some details on it's orbit.(scroll down to February 22)

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Thanks for the account, but please remember that there really isn't any doubt that the moon missions happened.

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

Or, indeed, minimum! My bathroom thermometer has a very narrow range of sensitivity, because it's only intended to show a possible range of human body temperatures. If it is in an enivronment below about 95F or above about 105F, it doesn't know what temperature it is. My meat thermometer goes much higher, and indeed lower, but below a certain point (I'm not sure what it is), the digital readout goes to "low." It's not that these tools aren't reliable. It's that they're only reliable for certain jobs.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

So how much was known about the belts?

From Count Zero: Moon Hoax

1958 February 1 - Explorer 1: Perigee: 347 km Apogee: 1,859 km. Discovered radiation belt around Earth.
1958 March 26 - Explorer 3: Perigee: 186 km Apogee: 2,799 km. Radiation & micrometeoroid data.
1958 July 26 - Explorer 4: Perigee: 257 km Apogee: 1,352 km. Mapped project Argus radiation.
1958 October 11 - Pioneer 1: Apogee 113854 km
1958 December 6 - Pioneer 3: Apogee 102,332 km. Discovered 2nd radiation belt
1959 February 17 - Vanguard 2: Perigee: 557 km Apogee: 3,049 km. Studied magnetosphere.
1959 March 3 - Pioneer 4: Lunar fly-by, Solar orbit. Measured radiation near the Moon.
1959 August 7 - Explorer 6: Perigee: 245 km Apogee: 42,400 km. First Earth photo; radiation data.
1959 September 18 - Vanguard 3: Perigee: 512 km Apogee: 3,413 km. Radiation & micrometeoroid data.
1959 October 13 - Explorer 7: Perigee: 523 km Apogee: 857 km. Magnetic field and solar flare data.
1960 November 3 - Explorer 8: Perigee: 394 km Apogee: 1,331 km. Ionospheric research.
1960 March 11 - Pioneer 5: Solar orbit. Mapped magnetic fields in interplanetary space.
1961 March 25 - Explorer 10: Perigee: 221 km Apogee: 181,100 km. Magnetic field data.
1961 April 27 - Explorer 11: Perigee: 480 km Apogee: 1,458 km. Gamma ray data.
1961 June 29 - Injun 1: Perigee: 869 km Apogee: 992 km. Radiation data.
1961 August 16 - Explorer 12: Perigee: 790 km Apogee: 76,620 km. Radiation and solar wind data.
1962 August 27 - Mariner 2: Solar orbit, Venus fly-by. Returned radiation and solar wind data.
1962 October 2 - Explorer 14: Perigee: 2,558 km Apogee: 96,229 km. Magnetosphere studies.
1962 October 27 - Explorer 15: Perigee: 306 km Apogee: 17,610 km. Radiation decay data.
1962 December 13 - Injun 3: Perigee: 240 km Apogee: 2,406 km. Radiation decay data.
1963 November 27 - Explorer 18: Perigee: 192 km Apogee: 197,616 km. Interplanetary radiation data.
1964 August 25 - Explorer 20: Perigee: 857 km Apogee: 999 km. Ionospheric research.
1964 October 4 - Explorer 21: Perigee: 191 km Apogee: 95,590 km. Magnetic field, radiation data.
1964 October 10 - Explorer 22: Perigee: 872 km Apogee: 1,053 km. Ionospheric and geodetic data.
1964 November 21 - Explorer 25: Perigee: 526 km Apogee: 2,319 km. Radiation data.
1964 November 28 - Mariner 4: Solar orbit, Mars fly-by. Returned radiation and solar wind data.
1964 December 21 - Explorer 26: Perigee: 284 km Apogee: 10,043 km. Radiation and solar wind data.
1965 April 29 - Explorer 27: Perigee: 932 km Apogee: 1,309 km. Ionospheric and geodetic data.
1965 May 29 - Explorer 28: Perigee: 229 km Apogee: 261,206 km. Magnetic field, radiation data.
1965 November 19 - Explorer 30: Perigee: 671 km Apogee: 856 km. Solar radiation data.
1965 November 29 - Explorer 31: Perigee: 505 km Apogee: 2,833 km. Ionospheric research.
1965 December 16 - Pioneer 6: Solar orbit. Studied Solar wind and Sun’s magnetic field.
1966 July 1 - Explorer 33: Perigee: 265,679 km Apogee: 480,762 km. Magnetic field, radiation data.
1966 August 17 - Pioneer 7: Solar orbit. Monitored Solar wind and cosmic rays.
1967 May 24 - Explorer 34: Perigee: 242 km Apogee: 214,379 km. Radiation, magnetic field data.
1967 June 14 - Mariner 5: Solar orbit, Venus fly-by. Returned radiation and solar wind data.
1967 July 19 - Explorer 35: Lunar orbit, Perigee: 484 km Apogee: 675 km. Earth magnetic tail measurements.
1967 November 9 - Apollo 4: Apogee 18,256 km. Unmanned test of Apollo Spacecraft.
1967 December 13 - Pioneer 8: Solar orbit. Returned Solar radiation data.
1968 March 5 - Explorer 37: Perigee: 353 km Apogee: 433 km. Solar radiation data.
1968 April 4 - Apollo 6: Apogee 22,259 km. Unmanned test of Apollo Spacecraft.
1968 August 8 - Explorer 40: Perigee: 679 km Apogee: 2,489 km. Radiation data.
1968 November 8 - Pioneer 9: Solar orbit. Returned Solar radiation data.
1969 June 21 - Explorer 41: Perigee: 80,374 km Apogee: 98,159 km. Cislunar radiation data.
1971 March 13 - Explorer 43: Perigee: 1,845 km Apogee: 203,130 km. Earth magnetosphere research.
1971 July 8 - Explorer 44: Perigee: 433 km (269 mi). Apogee: 632 km. Solar radiation data.
1971 November 15 - Explorer 45: Perigee: 272 km Apogee: 18,149 km. Studied magnetosphere, energetic particles.
1972 September 23 - Explorer 47: Perigee: 201,100 km Apogee: 235,600 km. Investigated cislunar radiation, Earth's magnetosphere, interplanetary magnetic field.

That's at least 43 missions in nearly 11 years before NASA sent the first men to the Moon in Apollo 8. The list also omits a few Gemini missions that went into the belts.

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Gemini 10 and 11. But if a conspiracy theorist thinks the US faked six Moon landings, believing they faked a few Gemini flights is probably not a stretch.

__________________
"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

The typical dismissal of the Gemini flights is that they only skirted the Van Allen belts and didn't get the full effect. The conspiracists don't realize that the Apollo missions didn't go through the densest parts of the belts.

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

The Štefánikova Observatory in Prague has opened a special exhibit commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The Czech Republic's only sample of Moon rocks and the Czechoslovakian flag that was taken to the Moon and back will be among the historical items on display. The exhibit will run from July 21 to August 23, 2009. (The observatory is closed Mondays, hence the July 21 opening date for the exhibit.)

Theo Publishing's bi-monthly magazine, Welcome to the Heart of Europe, published an English version of Karel Pacner's story, "Czech Footprints in Space," (PDF file) in their 5/2008 edition. AbelovPes's post follows Pacner's story of Cernan's Czech flag saga.

That is, of course, after the bluster and backtracking to conceal the blatantly obvious fact that they didn't know about the Gemini missions in the first place....

The conspiracists don't realise a lot of things, which is sad when you consider how easy it is to obtain the information.

__________________
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

And a lot of the Soviet data was published in the west too. It showns how well understood the vABs were by the time people went to the Moon. They were after all of immense scientific and practical interest.

Jon

I had of course heard of the mission, but I had not previously realised the significance of the orbit. Apogee was 900 km, some too km inside the inner belt, most energetic belt. With 22 days of exposure the dogs would have got many times the dose of anyone going to the Moon.

Cosmos 110 was a modified Voskhod, BTW.

Jon