Posted on 01/05/2003 5:06:37 PM PST by 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.
Good essay. These critics are no better than the vandals who knocked over gravestones in Roman cemeteries 1500 years ago.
Sounds like a lot. It isn't, though, even if the claim proves up. There is also the Helium 3, which is going to be just as hard to recover. We can go back to the moon, and we can stay permanently. It's just going to take a little preparation.
On the contrary, it is a lot, enough for one Shuttle launch per hour for over 100,000 years! It's roughly equivalent to the volume of the Great Salt Lake.
And there's no dispute that the hydrogen is there -- what's disputed is its physical form, as molecular hydrogen from the solar wind or as water ice from cometary impacts.
Helium-3 is irrelevant -- it's present in much lower abundance levels (~ 1 part-per-BILLION) and anyway, we have no use for it at the moment, there being no fusion reactors that can use it for fuel.
That's ridiculous. Everyone knows it was really the FBI.
Anyway, I agree -- at the moment, there's no way to do it at a profit. However, I contend that it would be a valuable research effort to learn how to harvest it. That might be a mission that NASA could undertake that makes sense -- it would create infrastructure that would enable lunar and planetary flight.
Someone asserted that there is in fact hydrogen there. It is a claim. There is no hydrogen there, and even if there were, it would not be economic to mine it. A couple billion tons of anything on a planetary scale is commonly called a trace. There might be a cubic mile of gold in the oceans of the world, but who is proposing desalinization for LA with intent to get at the gold as well as the water? Not economic. Can't mine it.
You are still conflating several different concepts.
1. There IS hydrogen on the Moon. It's in the samples (regolith) and present in quantity at the poles (seen from orbit; neutron spectrometer data and radar). This is beyond dispute -- no one doubts it. The debate is about the physical state of the hydrogen.
2. The definition of an "ore" is economic, not geological. While concentrations are small, quantities are large. If our task were to fill the Atlantic Ocean basin, yes, we would be in trouble. That's not the issue nor the goal.
3. If you insist on being both wrong and wrong-headed, please be my guest.
Mamzelle has a special mission to try to belittle the achievements of astronauts, all of 'em, no matter what era, no matter who they are.
If you are interested you can read about similar case of excessive bile with many b!tchy posts from Mamzelle in this thread (sorry about my lack of HTML skills, you'll have to cut and paste):
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/748775/posts
There is no reasoning with this woman. She apparently witnessed a broken marriage or two within the astronauts corps (we all know that doesn't happen anywhere else...), and as a result anything that smacks of admiration for members of the corps sets off her very short fuse. I'd rather argue with a teenager...
Stay well.
My advice to NASA is to ignore this nonsenseThey can. These guys skewer the conspiracy nuts quite thoroughly.
-Eric
Thanks for your insight. We've locked horns once before over this issue.
I was very young when Sheppard made his first flight. He and all the early astronauts made a huge impression on me, and in my opinion, any person with guts enough to strap his or her butt on top of a exploding rocket deserves all the adulation they get.
We went to see Liberty Bell 7 a few weeks ago. I'm still speechless about the encounter. I remember when Grissom went up in her...and now, so many years later, I stood just 6-inches away from it. Incredible. The thing is just a CAN...no windows, only a periscope. No computers, no real technology, and no room to move much less breathe. And Gus went up in her. Amazing!
So if these guys are pompous, arrogant SOBs, more power to them. They did what few humans would ever have the guts to do...and they are still my heros.
" Once again, the weird alien environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine taking a bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids: ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a deep breath, and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof! Flour goes everywhere. Why? Because the momentum of your breath goes into the flour, which makes it move. But note that the flour goes up, and sideways, and aloft into the air. If you blow hard enough, you might see little curlicues of air lifting the flour farther than your breath alone could have, and doing so to dust well outside of where your breath actually blew.
That's the heart of this problem. We are used to air helping us blow things around. The air itself is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust, or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was. Ironically, the dust around the landing site was probably a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown out would have piled up there.
I think the root of the problem is you can't use Earth atmosphere observations and apply them to the moon. The moon provides a setting where you almost have to think in pure Newtonian physics examples.
During the period 79-82 I worked at KSC as a computer operator while going to school in Orlando. It was a great experience during the ramp-up and first four Shuttle flights.
By the way, I too had a little sparring contest with Mamzelle in that thread I pointed out to you. I guess I can understand that she might have some feelings of personal bitterness toward astronauts she knew. However, I totally disagree with her belittling of the entire astronaut corp as "seat meat" with no control over the flight. That just wasn't true, then or now. I too have a lot of admiration for the profession.
add me as well.
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