NASA Unsure of How to Counter the 'Moon Hoax'

The Associated Press ^ | January 5th 2003 | MARCIA DUNN

[ContentiousObjector]

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Is that the moon or a studio in the Nevada desert? How can the flag flutter when there's no wind on the moon? Why can't we see stars in the moon-landing pictures?

For three decades, NASA has taken the high road, ignoring those who claimed the Apollo moon landings were faked and part of a colossal government conspiracy.

The claims and suspicious questions such as the ones cited here mostly showed up in books and on the Internet. But last year's prime-time Fox TV special on the so-called "moon hoax" prompted schoolteachers and others to plead with NASA for factual ammunition to fight back.

So a few months ago, the space agency budgeted $15,000 to hire a former rocket scientist and author to produce a small book refuting the disbelievers' claims. It would be written primarily with teachers and students in mind.

The idea backfired, however, embarrassing the space agency for responding to ignorance, and the book deal was chucked.

"The issue of trying to do a targeted response to this is just lending credibility to something that is, on its face, asinine," NASA chief Sean O'Keefe said in late November after the dust settled.

So it's back to square one -- ignoring the hoaxers. That's troubling to some scientific experts who contend that someone needs to lead the fight against scientific illiteracy and the growing belief in pseudoscience such as aliens and astrology.

Someone like NASA.
"If they don't speak out, who will?" asks Melissa Pollak, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation.

Author James Oberg will. The former space shuttle flight controller plans to write the book NASA commissioned from him even though the agency pulled the plug. He is seeking money elsewhere. His working title: "A Pall Over Apollo."

Tom Hanks will speak out, too.
The Academy Award-winning actor, who starred in the 1995 movie "Apollo 13" and later directed the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," is working on another lunar-themed project. The IMAX documentary will feature Apollo archival footage. Its title: "Magnificent Desolation," astronaut Buzz Aldrin's real-time description of the moon on July 20, 1969.

While attending the Cape Canaveral premiere of the IMAX version of "Apollo 13" in November, Hanks said the film industry has a responsibility to promote historical literacy. He took a jab at the 1978 movie "Capricorn One," which had NASA's first manned mission to Mars being faked on a sound stage.

"We live in a society where there is no law in making money in the promulgation of ignorance or, in some cases, stupidity," Hanks said. "There are a lot of things you can say never happened. You can go as relatively quasi-harmless as saying no one went to the moon. But you also can say that the Holocaust never happened."

A spokesman for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington says there will always be those who will not be convinced. But the museum does not engage them in debate.

The spokesman acknowledges, however, that if a major news channel was doing a program that questioned the authenticity of the Holocaust, "I'd certainly want to inject myself into the debate with them in a very forceful way."

Television's Fox Network was the moon-hoax purveyor. In February 2001 and again a month later, Fox broadcast an hourlong program titled "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?"

Roger Launius, who agreed to Oberg's book just before leaving NASA's history office, says the story about the moon hoax has been around a long time. But the Fox show "raised it to a new level, it gave it legs and credibility that it didn't have before."

Indeed, the National Science Foundation's Pollak says two of her colleagues, after watching the Fox special, thought it was possible that NASA faked the moon landings. "These are people who work at NSF," she stresses.

The story went -- and still goes -- something like this: America was desperate to beat the Soviet Union in the high-stakes race to the moon, but lacked the technology to pull it off. So NASA faked the six manned moon landings in a studio somewhere out West.

Ralph Rene, a retired carpenter in Passaic, N.J., takes it one step farther. The space fakery started during the Gemini program, according to Rene, author of the 1992 book, NASA Mooned America!

"I don't know what real achievements they've done because when do you trust a liar?" Rene says. "I know we have a shuttle running right around above our heads, but that's only 175 miles up. It's under the shield. You cannot go through the shield and live."

He is talking, of course, about the radiation shield.

Alex Roland, a NASA historian during the 1970s and early 1980s, says his office used to have "a kook drawer" for such correspondence and never took it seriously. But there were no prime-time TV shows disputing the moon landings then -- and no Internet.

Still, Roland would be inclined to "just let it go because you'll probably just make it worse by giving it any official attention."

Within NASA, opinions were split about a rebuttal book. Oberg, a Houston-based author of 12 books, mostly about the Russian space program, said ignoring the problem "just makes this harder. To a conspiracy mind, refusing to respond is a sign of cover-up."

Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell does not know what else, if anything, can be done to confront this moon madness.

"All I know is that somebody sued me because I said I went to the moon," says the 74-year-old astronaut. "Of course, the courts threw it out."

The authorities also threw out the case involving Apollo 11 moonwalker Aldrin in September.

A much bigger and younger man was hounding the 72-year-old astronaut in Beverly Hills, Calif., calling him "a coward, a liar and a thief" and trying to get him to swear on a Bible, on camera, that he walked on the moon. Aldrin, a Korean War combat pilot, responded with a fist in the chops.

[Da_Shrimp]

Half of the capsule would be in direct sunlight and very hot, the other side in shadow and close to absolute zero. Excess heat is radiated away into the vacuum from the side in shadow.

[sit-rep]

show me this...it is what I've been waiting for. show me this picture.

No, I am not looking for something to hold up my end. I have argued thus far that there should be signs of thrust on the moons surface. You said there does not need to be all along except your last comment.

Show me the pic with the smoothed out patch of lunar soil...

SR

[catfish1957]

I asked this question at Space center Hou. The spokesman gave some laame excuse that the shuttle didn't have the fuel to escaape Earth's gravity. Funny that that they can raise and lower elevation by dozens fo miles by one rocket thrust though.

[Semper911]

Semper911, were yoou talking about the Van Allen radiation belts?

Of course.

[BaBaStooey]

you beat me to it. I tried looking for a pic of the moon with CHA on it but can't find one. Strange, I figured there would be Tick sites all over the internet.

now there is a show that I wish would come back, any way it could (maybe Cartoon Network can bring it back? PLEASE?!)

[Fudd]

These are pictures of the Apollo 17 Landing Site taken by the Soviet Lunar rover Lunokhod 2... No, I don't think so.

But there is the reflector the Apollo 11 crew left on the moon. Scientists on earth (and not necessarily affiliated with NASA) have used it to make precise earth-moon distance measurements .

[sam_paine]

If you are really interested, then read these pages describing the radiators on the Apollo Service Module. Page 3-8 and Figure 3-6 describe the two 30 sq ft radiators used during the trip to and from the moon.

As for:

I understand the process poorly, but if the shuttle, which is in low orbit and protected by some atmosphere, and hiding behind the earth for hours a day, needs to convey heat away....

Are you pulling my leg? The operational orbit of the shuttle is around 125 miles!!! There is negligible atmosphere there, and the shuttle does not need any kind of "air" to orbit in. Did you know that the shuttle typically orbits upside-down and backwards??? Would they do that if LEO orbital aerodynamics was important???...instead that keeps the de-orbit engines pointed the right way and you get a better view looking back down on Earth than up.

Anyway, you seem to be missing the point about radiant heat (which happens everywhere) versus convection and conduction (which needs matter nearby to transfer heat). For example, you may notice identical cars in a new car lot on an early dewey morning. Two identical Camaros, for example, may be sitting next to each other and the black one with black interior will have frost/dew on the window, while the white one with light interior does not. Why? Because overnight, black objects radiate heat (and absorb it) faster than the lighter objects, so the interior of the black car will get cooler faster. It will also get warmer (absorb) faster when the sun comes up (this I'm sure you've noticed.) It doesn't matter if the cars were in a vacuum or in Houston, the radiant heat from the sun "warms" black objects faster than lighter objects. This is obviously not because of convection or conduction (no atmosphere connecting Sun and Earth for either.)

[boris]

"If a 1960's moonship can land, you would think the Shuttle could orbit the moon as well as the earth. IMO, they can't because the landing was a hoax."

This is because you do not understand basic orbital mechanics.

The Shuttle was designed to carry lots of mass and men into LOW EARTH ORBIT (LEO). The Apollo vehicle (Saturn V) was designed to send 3 men and a lander to the Moon, and return a much smaller vehicle. The technology that enabled the mission using 1960s technology was the 'dynamic entry', i.e., using the atmosphere to provide the bulk of the braking power. The shuttle, BTW, still uses this idea.

There is an equation, first derived by Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and called "The Rocket Equation". It tells you (almost) all you need to design rockets. It is simple:

DV = exp(g*Is*ln(R))

where:
DV is velocity change in feet per second
g is the acceleration of gravity in feet per second^2
Is is the "specific impulse" of the rocket, in (lbf-sec)/lbm
R is the "mass ratio" (ratio of gross weight to burnout or 'empty' weight)

To climb out of Earth's "gravity" well requires a "DV" of about 30,000 ft/sec. To catch the minimum-fuel-orbit (a "Hohmann" orbit) to get to the Moon one-way is another 14,000. But to simply return from the moon and hit the atmosphere costs (I forget the exact value) only ~8000 ft/sec of DV.

Using multi-stage rockets and dropping the dead weight after each stage is the brilliant idea (first proposed by Tsiolkovsky as a 'cosmic train', no kidding) which makes this possible.

The Shuttle is hard-pressed even to attain LEO. Its main tanks are drained; the solid boosters jettisoned, and all it needs to return is a gentle retro burn of (probably) a few hundred ft/sec.

--Boris

[Prodigal Son]

A question for the "Moon landings were a hoax"ers.

If it was all a hoax, why have no other countries reproduced the hoax? Surely, there must be more than 2 dozen countries today who could match the "hoax technology" of the late 60's NASA.

China and India both want to go to the moon. Why haven't they merely "launched a mission in the studio" by now? The Chinese in particular are keenly into propaganda for their citizenry as were the Soviets. It seems to me, there would be many, many reasons for some countries to "fake it" (to show their superiority or whatever) and the technology for doing so is much better than it was.

The fact that no other country has done so makes me wonder if the hoax was real or not...

This is obviously a bit of using the looney argument on the loon... ;-)

[boris]

'They could counter arguments, the time tested way. Teach people to think above the moron level. For instance, I cannot understand how they kept the capsule cool. I know the pat answer, but since space is a perfect vacuum, and the capsule is under constant radiation, the interior would seem to be logically, an oven. Standard cooling systems, like refrigerator, only work by transferring energy, being there really is no such thing as heat and cold. So where did it convey the heat to, since a vacuum is non-concuctive? I don't believe we didn't go to the moon, but that is a question, that could be answered with a better teaching of physics. If anyone can explain the seeming paradox to me, please do."

Certainly. The early capsules (e.g. Gemini) rolled the spacecraft so that only one side saw the sun; the other side was looking at the vacuum of outer space, which has a radiation temperature of 3 deg K. Very cold. Things radiate heat really efficiently. It goes as T**4. If the part viewing the outer darkness was at, say, 273 K, it would have radiated energy at rougly 273**4 or 5 million times the rate it absorbed it on the other side.

On today's vehicles, like the Shuttle, you will notice that the payload doors are usually open. The contain refrigeration coils that are positioned to radiate internal heat away to the blackness of space. They are pointed away from the Sun.

Finally, on the international space station, there is a very complex temperature control system consisting of an ammonia-based refrigeration plant and big radiators.

Some early satellites used 'louvers' or slats that could open to admit heat or close (white on the outside) to reject it.

Incidentally, the 'average' temperature of a body in LEO and using no special heaters/coolers is just about what we call 'room temperature'.

--Boris

[Mr. K]

I think the problem with trying to view with the hubble is that the lens would fry if it was exposed to the bright light from the moon. It is pretty sensitive, I know they cant point it at the sun or we would have a 6 billion dollar space lump...

[boris]

"Grav speed here is 32 ft/sec/sec. It is a third less on the Moon so your notion is wrong."

No. The moon's gravity is roughly 1/6 of a g.

I.e., 32/6 =5.3 ft/sec^2

BTW there is no such thing as "grav speed", gravity is an acceleration and is given in feet per second per second.

On Mars the gravity is roughly 1/3 of Earth's (2/3 less). The actual value on Mars is 0.37 standarg "G".

--Boris

[boris]

Well, from what I understand, NASA is currently developing Ion engines (and have at least 1 prototype working I THINK...) plus they're conjuring up plans to create an elevator to the moon. Using some type of light weight material that has 5x the durability of steel. (Very useful if its say, a thread and you can use en masse.) NASA and Drayden are working on alot of cool stuff right now. I wouldnt be surprised if we get to Mars quicker than anticipated.

Where to begin? Firstly ion engines are very efficient but have very low thrust levels (a few pounds max). The power plants must be HUGE and heavy.

It is impossible to create an elevator to the moon. Space elevators have been proposed to move cargo and passengers to GEOSYNCHRONOUS ORBIT, at an altitude of 22,000 miles. The moon is about 250 thousand miles away.

Space elevators look like good bets, once the material properties are dealt with and all of the engineering 'gotcha's are dealt with.

Finally, nobody is going to mars. The U.S. has lost its guts. I'd guess the Japanese or Chinese will go to Mars, but you and I will be dead before it happens.

--Boris

[boris]

"I think the problem with trying to view with the hubble is that the lens would fry if it was exposed to the bright light from the moon. It is pretty sensitive, I know they cant point it at the sun or we would have a 6 billion dollar space lump.."

Looking at the moon would not harm the Hubble. The Hubble uses a mirror, BTW, not a "lens"--except for the complex bunch of small lenses installed to correct for flaws in the mirror.

The real problem is that the Hubble does not have sufficient resolution to see man-made objects on the moon.

--Boris

[sit-rep]

Okay, let's forget the Apollo landing, and talk moon atmosphere physics...

First, I'm no boiling water IQ over here. As stated, I just hold on to a little common sense. Something that may not work on the moon! Here is my question, with some thumbnail sketches to help me along... Pic1 is a rock in the soil of the moon. Half of it is exposed.

Pic2 below, shows what I would think the erosion of soil around the rock would look like regardless of the atmospheric conditions of the moon. I understand the fact that "Drifting may not occur, but, what elements/forces would cause the back of the rock to clear along with the front?

Pic3 below shows a completed thrust blast(Module landed). This IMO should be the case with every large pebble/rock under the module...Pic 4 illustrates a plan view of the rock.

Now, I am not arguing the landing on the moon...to be honest, I could give a rats ass. I just seen this early on, and if the elements on the surface of the moon are as you say, there should be minute signs of my presentation above. If there is not means for my proposal, Why? ...in laymens(sp?) please...

SR

[Da_Shrimp]

The spokesman gave some laame excuse that the shuttle didn't have the fuel to escaape Earth's gravity

Nothing lame about it at all. It doesn't have enough fuel and it's not designed to do anything except get to low earth orbit.

[Mamzelle]

re: atta boy, BS!)))

Maybe you'd like to buy some goodies from the gasbag from his official web site? Toys, signed photos and his personal action figure. Whatta big fat fake....

this is really what it's all about...astronaut's incredible egos

[jeremiah]

I can't understand most of what you referred to, but at least it sounds logical. Most people just say that space is cold, and that is that.

[BaBaStooey]

all your moon men are belong to us!

[Mamzelle]

The Real Story--Believe it or not, from the inside track. .

You might say, there is no hoax. Or, rather, The hoax is a hoax to get some attention from the public. It's sad to watch so many here try to take up the astronauts' cause and fight a hoax due to the "victim status" of NASA. You're being HAD.

It all comes down to Life After the Mission for these little banty pilots with the big elbows. Trouble is, they don't have much, (life, that is) so they specialize in being the Professional Former Astronaut. They give speeches, mostly, promoting themselves and charging admission. Woe to the jockey who stutters. They start Space Explorer-type non-profits that basically give awards dinners to former astronauts. Then *those* former astronauts form non-profits and return the favor.

Some of these speeches are rather boring, and a recent trend is the "heckler" who gets enough of the Big Ego talking and becomes rude and asks silly questions. The astronaut, so used to the adulation of the sixties and seventies when aviation contractors bought them Corvettes, then gets all upset and feeds the ego of the heckler. The heckling becomes far more entertaining than the speech, and other hecklers are attracted to the fun. Then the astronaut runs around crying that there's a conspiracy out there to disrespect the Saints of Apollo. Cut to present.

The legacy will survive without these herculean efforts to prove what is patently true. No reasonable person believes the hoax.