Hi, Hi Henry!
Once more, thanks for your thoughtful posts. I removed the image you posted as readers can backtrack and see it. The universe IS amazing! The LEM landing mass was about 5 tonnes, the maximum thrust about the same. The engine sand blasted Surveyor 3 from over 150m away and left marks visible to the LRO. It's little brother in the ascent stage knocked a flag around and shredded gold foil. However this mighty unit leaves the gold foil undamaged and not a speck of dust in the pad!
In this image here, AS14-66-9254 NASA claims that 'LM left pad surface contact occurred at 108:15:09.3 followed by engine shutdown 1.83 seconds later.' Here's a snip from that image below, look at the crater.
The crater walls have been damaged by the landing pad and the 'nauts' feet but the engine bell is barely a meter away appears to have left it untouched. Even the craterlets on the parent crater's rim have survived a thrust of anything up to 5 tonnes. Surely the engine, even at quarter throttle would have obliterated it! At least destroyed the walls! Even Shepard remarked "The soil is so soft that it comes all the way to the top of the footpad;" A hair dryer would've done it serious damage! The gold foil appears undamaged too, the leg to the left has no foil but looking at the LEM orbital inspection photos all the lower legs appear naked, including the one closest to the crater which strangely has become well cladded! They must have done this during EVA1 but why do so when the descent stage had all but served it's purpose, why thermally protect it? Other missions blasted off from wonky platforms with no problem and there is no record of any damage and repair in the official record. Just found that one because of my fixation with the crater and engine thrust! Before and after thumbnails below. Cheers Brewer
Jesus, that's a millenial's word against experts twice her age in the What Happened On the Moon? Part 1 # 2 videos. She is as convincing to me as a yellow potato.
The observations shared by the presenter remain valid, and if you have a problem with them, it would be wise to address them and not her age. Millennial madness is certainly an affliction, but I think it's important to judge individuals based on their words and actions rather than the group identity a person might fall into.
The old fellow in the video you linked to who she disagrees with, one Bill Kaysing, is described as "Head of technical publications at Rocketdyne 1956". That means he was an editor. Not a rocket scientist. In his comments, he makes it clear that his knowledge is derived from things he picked up while editing the findings of scientists working in his company, and this would have certainly put him into a position where he could acquire a unique perspective. It is also clear, however, that he made mistakes as his claims don't match the reality of observable launches using the very chemistry he's criticizing.In fact, other rockets using that same chemistry have observably clear flames with no smoke. This is the Titan II carrying one of the Gemini capsules, also using the same fuel as the LEM. Where are the clouds of dirty flame and smoke Mr. Kaysing told us we should see? :
I am not a chemist either, but even I know that if the chemical mixes are off, you can get unclean, smokey burns, which would explain some of the bench top experiments done with this particular chemistry which have been dirtier than other examples. Further, having no oxygen or other elements of an atmosphere on the Moon would play into the way a flame appears or doesn't. I think in this case, our millennial podcaster is both more reasonable and measurably correct on the subject, probably as a result of having the benefit of 30+ extra years and the internet with which to arrive at more realistic conclusions.
The fact that the documentary attempted to base further argumentation on this primary false idea of a big, messy burn constitutes several minutes of wasted film time and aggravation to the viewer (me). And I confess, after having suffered through an hour and 10 minutes of this torture, I had to stop watching because I was getting ready to rip my hair out. (The only person in that whole video who seemed to know what she was talking about was the lady who was expert in Soviet era space program history.)
Right there is the staged photo with the studio lighting, made in a Hollywood studio with a professional, probably a Senior Lighting Technical Director
versus
Here is a real-world photo, properly unprocessed = zero post process, without any regard to studio lighting: just someone snapping a photo with a mere camera.. exactly as how it would look like if the Moon astronauts just snapped a photo with a mere camera
This is an odd comparison for you to make. The NASA photo you offer, as you indicate, WAS a studio-lit shot. It is not representative of the moon landing pictures in any way other than the equipment. The lighting in it looks completely different when compared to any of the actual pictures brought back from the Moon. Why did you offer it and not one of the pictures from the Moon?
Anyway.., I watched that video, "What happened on the Moon". It was a long process because I kept stopping to fact check along the way, but I did (most of) my due diligence. (-Which I strongly recommend you do as well with that Everyday Astronaut video about the evolution of rocket engines which I linked to previously. It will give you some great insight which can inform your further investigations, and I promise, you won't want to pull your hair out.)
They spent time trying to demonstrate that the Soviet space program was indulging in faking some of their successes. Cool history, but..., so what? The Soviets were working under a socialist system headed by a psychopath. How was that relevant to the American Moon missions? If anything, where a Leftist is a liar almost by default, the Right tends to adhere more strictly to facts.
The documentary indicates that the LEM design was based on a short, 110 page proposal, and suggested that this was due not to time constraints or inside baseball, but rather that it was never intended to actually land on the moon at all! And then they blithely went on to describe how a test module nearly killed Neil Armstrong, showing footage of him ejecting from the module as it tumbled from the sky. Again.., what..? How does building a flying machine and putting their lead astronaut in it and nearly killing him during a test flight indicate that they never intended for it to work? That's nuts. You only risk your life if you're genuinely trying to build something that performs properly. Similarly peculiar logic was amply evident throughout the whole film.
They made great hay over the fact that NASA's program bore a striking resemblance to the space program depicted by Fritz Lang's Nazi propaganda film about traveling to the Moon. While interesting, the Duhn Duhn DUHHHHN musical accoutraments in the doc just seemed jarring and childish. Nobody disputes that NASA was populated by German rocket scientists. What was their point exactly? Lang consulted with the reigning rocket scientsts of his day as to what he should depict in his film, and they told him how they would solve the various technical problems. Then they got jobs with NASA and brought their thinking with them. How does that add up to "Hoax!"? It doesn't. Why did they even include that in the film? I don't get it.
More: The primary complaints presented early on seemed to surround speculation about invisible forces. "It would have been too radioactive!" "It would have been too Hot!" "It would have been too Cold!"
Well, on the Hot/Cold front, the NASA engineers completely agreed with this sentiment. But rather than throw their hands up and say, "It can't be done" they instead put in the work, the enormous time and resources to solve those problems the way good engineers do. For instance, white material is very good at reflecting heat radiation. So they made the space suits white. All of the problems were real, and they had real solutions. Anybody can look them up and if they dig enough, see how they were solved.
The radiation question is more interesting, and was more of a gamble with greater levels of uncertainty involved, but NASA made the best educated decisions available and they paid off. Here's a video explaining the intricacies:
The thing to keep in mind with all of this is that NASA was a fresh and new organization at the time, specially developed to solve a difficult problem. When an organization is young, it can be genuine in its intent. Bureaucracies will grow fetid and corrupt with time and subsequent generations; I wouldn't trust NASA today, but the project that Kennedy kicked into gear was another thing entirely.
The dust (very fine particles) are not only found on the surface of this mélange layer but through out it. The lunar surface is a dynamic surface as it is also on other planets. Things accumulate, appear, and disappear as a result of dynamic forces, earthquakes, volcanoes, impact events etc.
We are told that this is the typical cross section of the lunar surface,
So we have about 10 meters of this stuff. Engine cut off is at around 1-2 feet from when the surface is contacted. At that height (> 2 feet) the rocket engine would be blowing not just dust but grains of various diameters so I find it hard to believe that no rock particle of whatever size (that was under such an engine) would not bounce inside that landing foot. Whatever it blew away more was available as the following paper suggests.
Reading this paper I get the impression that they were standing on a surface of dust (see table 7.3 and 7.17),
So the hypothesis that dust was cleared as they approached is a weak explanation as supported by the above (supposedly lunar) hard data provided in the paper.
Whether the moon surface was made of packed dust, or solid rock isn't relevant to the point and I never meant to indicate that it was. The part of my comment you highlighted in red doesn't have to do with the constituency of the Moon's material. I'll try again to express my thinking regarding the lander: When touching down, why would there have been any material at all to fall on the the lander's feet? The astronauts said it felt like a helicopter settling into the ground when he cut the engines. Your issue seems contingent on the feet of the lander having to be in the direct path of particulate matter being pushed by the rocket exhaust. If that exhaust was cut just as it landed, then it is reasonably conceivable that there would have been no dust flowing around the feet at all, but rather, beneath them.
[Armstrong: "I was surprised by a number of things, and I'm not sure (I can) recall them all now. I was surprised by the apparent closeness of the horizon. I was surprised by the trajectory of dust that you kicked up with your boot, and I was surprised that even though logic would have told me that there shouldn't be any, there was no dust when you kicked. You never had a cloud of dust there. That's a product of having an atmosphere, and when you don't have an atmosphere, you don't have any clouds of dust."]
["I was absolutely dumbfounded when I shut the rocket engine off and the particles that were going out radially from the bottom of the engine fell all the way out over the horizon, and when I shut the engine off, they just raced out over the horizon and instantaneously disappeared, you know, just like it had been shut off for a week. That was remarkable. I'd never seen that. I'd never seen anything like that. And logic says, yes, that's the way it ought to be there, but I hadn't thought about it and I was surprised."]
Beat, rock, tech, thought - Moon Traveller Herald has it all. Jack Vaughan, Boston writer, is the WebMaster.
moontravellerherald.blogspot.com
I don't think there's enough to go on here to say that it should be obvious that moon dust should be on top of the lander's feet.
Clearly you do, but I think it's a subjective opinion at best.
Indeed, it appears that you and others here are deeply committed at a belief level to this idea of Moon Hoax, so I think it is probably best for me to stop spending energy when it might be a matter of free will violation at this point.
However, before I leave this, I will hazard to point out: It is dangerous to indulge in lies; on this forum it is understood that a large part of what we must do is to try to clean our machines and wake up, to discern truth from lies, and it seems this moon hoax issue presents a big sticking point.
I just watched the first one. The TL;DR is that a modern speech analyst went through a seven minute interview with Neil Armstrong which was conducted in 1970.
Neil's language use was very impersonal and distanced, using lots of impartial descriptors, favoring almost 100% universal pronouns over saying "I did" or "I saw".
The analyst was asked why Neil Armstrong spoke in this manner and offered 4 possibilities:
The presenter and analyst missed one that I figured everybody knew about, or at least should know about. It's a stated part of the American space program: Psychological Conditioning.
That is, a deliberate period of training designed to affect point #2, the Baseline.
These are not normal people. These are test pilots and scientists, selected for their ability to NOT become personally involved in their work, so that they can approach science as free from bias as possible, and so that multi-billion dollar missions are not compromised by any element of emotional and psychological instability. Some test pilots barely record heart rate increases of more than a few beats per second even at launch time. These are unique human specimens, and measuring them against common speech analysis standards borders on inept. How did the analyst manage to fail to take this element into account? It seems like a big oversight.
I might add that the man who made this video and pursued the idea that Neil was a self-interested (STS) liar, and openly mocked the idea that Neil might be different from himself, is probably projecting.
STO-leaning behavior when engaged in taking a Giant Leap for Mankind ought to have been a requirement for the job, and while I have not explored the psychological selection and conditioning process to any depth used by NASA at the time, I am willing to bet it was a major consideration.
The "Moon Walker" issue is not a live-or-die matter for me. There are aspect of it that puzzle me and that is basicly it. Governments throughout history lied and continue to lie. About what ? Well there we have a problem. Each individual needs to arrive at an answer by themselves. I for one do my own thinking as much as it is possible. I'm not perfect but hey , "Who is ?".
Not sure how to react to such a suggestive statement. English being my native language presents me with no problem to understand it and the subtle tone of its usage. Use of language speaks loudly of the one using it and yours in this fragment sounds very condescending.
Indulge - : to take unrestrained pleasure in : gratify. 2a : to yield to the desire of
Are you implying that since you have "cleaned your machine and woke up" others with a different opinion on this subject are liars ?? Unless you are in possession of first hand knowledge regarding the "Moon Walk" I'd say you are in no position to judge who is or is not a liar.
This is an odd comparison for you to make. The NASA photo you offer, as you indicate, WAS a studio-lit shot. It is not representative of the moon landing pictures in any way other than the equipment. The lighting in it looks completely different when compared to any of the actual pictures brought back from the Moon. Why did you offer it and not one of the pictures from the Moon?
I thought that photo was claimed to have been made on the Moon. Anyway I found an authentic Moon photo!! Here:
I checked out the Apollo-11 gallery and I think, unfortunately, they are all Hollywood studio photos, except the above maybe, if it was taken by a remote-controlled probe flying close to the surface.
I think these Moon surface images aren't faked on the 1st page of the gallery that shows photos taken from On Moon Orbit, except NASA artists might have been told to airbrush out the alien vessels / probes / power plants.
I'll never believe the moon landings were real after watching the videos. The last video is really nice and believable, I think. Thank You, Woodsman! Thank You for the info-bit about that I forgot to mention the too small landing module and one astronaut couldn't have taken on/off his bulky suit there anyway. Plus that interview with the Apollo astronauts and the journalists were told "NO MOON LANDING QUESTIONS!!" (IIRC). Holy Cow! And I see those astronaut faces and I read them with my sensitivity and I get flashes of these thoughts that they were thinking right there at the interview table on camera:
- "GUILT, LIE LIE.. we weren't there, but we are now forced to give an interview, LIES, SORRY.. SORRY.. WE ARE EMBARRASSED, NDA, NDA, WE CANNOT TELL THE TRUTH."
I finally had a further peak at this series of videos. I very nearly didn't bother, feeling conflicted, but I'm glad I did. Lies should not go unanswered, and you, a site admin, are specifically tuned to the modes of learning used here and I hope will take this in the spirit it is supplied.
I dropped in at the point where Richard Hall mentions that Front Screen Projection was used to create a Moon Landing backdrop for the photographs.
-For me, being a fan of film making, and sci-fi film especially, the claim that a Front Screen Projection system was used to fake the Moon Landing shots (a claim I didn't even realize was in common circulation among conspiracy theorists) is immediately obvious as flat out wrong. If you know how the technique works, then you have also been exposed to the information required to recognize the several fatal flaws in the theory. However, the presenter appears to be suffering from a case of severe "blind spot"; that is, he regularly allows his enthusiasm for a fantastic and exciting conclusion to get in the way of fact checking.
I noticed in looking through the internet search returns that a fairly presentable lie has been constructed surrounding the claim, one which neatly evades the prescient facts of the tech. This seemed more than just a case of ignorance, since to understand the technology well enough to write about it convincingly would also require that one knows precisely why it wouldn't work. I have to assume that whoever constructed the claim wasn't ignorant but actually malicious.
Thus it came as no surprise to see Jay Weidner's name credited on one of the more prominent documents circulating in support of this claim. That creep is infamous and well known to this site from its early days during some of the original attempts to destroy Laura.
Put simply, Front Screen Projection, as perfected during Stanley Kubrick's reign during the shooting of "2001: A Space Odyssey", is a technique, while providing impressive benefits, is saddled with several extreme limitations which would have made most of the shots brought back by the Apollo missions flat out impossible.
Basically, the system requires that a large image projector and a film camera shoot in conjunction with a big sheet of 1-way glass mirror against an enormous screen.
Critical to its function, the camera lens and the projector lens must be locked in millimeter perfect alignment, or the shadows cast by the actors will stand out against the back drop screen, betraying the illusion. The entire rig takes up a few meters of space and requires careful adjustment to get just right. Stanley Kubrick pushed the available lighting and lens technology to its breaking point, using a very large sound stage for his famous "Dawn of Man" sequence.
Quote:
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Doug Trumbull: "During the testing of this front-projection system, it was found that the intense light and heat being poured through the transparency would burn off layers of emulsion in a matter of minutes. Additional heat filters were installed but the only real solution was to expose the plate only during the critical moments that the camera was running. Duplicate plates were used for various line-ups, tests, and rehearsals. Even with such an intense light source, the long throw from projector to screen required lens apertures of around F/2."
The size of the "Dawn of Man" set, according to Richard Hall, was just a fraction of the size the Moon set would have had to have been. When it comes to calculations involving light, the formula used to determine the necessary brightness is a geometric equation, that is, every time you double the distance between light source and screen, you have to multiply by the square of the distance. Numbers get really big, really fast.
The magnification of errors increases in kind. The tiniest fraction of misalignment between camera lens and projector lens would result in a failure of the illusion. But such technical limitations are mere quibbles compared to these important elements:
1. Long panning shots with a fixed projection rig were not possible with the available technology. (The Apollo mission provided plenty of long panning shots, taken with the video camera.)
2. Multiple angles and perspectives are likewise impossible without moving the set and/or camera rig for each additional angle. -For reference, the entire Dawn of Man set was placed on a giant rotating platform for this purpose, but that system was tiny compared to the rotating set the Moon would have had to have been. Even then, this would only allow for flexibility along a single axis. (Every photograph taken by the handheld cameras on the Moon was from its own unique angle, and not restricted to the X axis.)
3. Light from the rig would have been very bright, casting right on top of the subjects. White surfaces would have acted as small screens for the projected image, and the actual light source itself would have been easily visible in any reflective surface, like the astronaut's helmet visors. (This didn't occur even once in any of the hundreds of pictures.)
4. You can't shoot stereoscopic (two images side by side to simulate 3D effects) pictures. It's not possible. (The NASA mission brought back lots of stereoscopic pictures.)
I did manage to find a single decent video on the subject, offering examples:
More double shadows, Apollo 11 Lunar Module post EVA however this time it's a 16mm movie reel. Note the washed out appearance of Old Glory. The camera pans towards her then back and the double LEM shadow has changed. This happens in 8-9 seconds between 00.33 and 00.42.
It's moved to the left (below)
Shortly after, at about 00.42 there's cut in the film and Old Glory is restored (below)!
The LM now appears to have a single shadow until 01.28 when it reappears and once more Old Glory has once again a bleached appearance.
The Earth was high when the images were taken so I doubt its Earthshine causing this double shadow and shadows move slowly on the moon.
Cheers, Brewer
Those pesky shadows are a little like the"moon" dust.
In December 1972, Schmitt landed in the Moon’s Valley of Taurus-Littrow, surrounded by mountains and endless stretches of moondust. During their first moonwalk, the lunar roving vehicle lost a fender. The tires spun, and the rover kicked up a cloud of dust.
The sediment got lodged in every wrinkle, fold, nook, and cranny of Schmitt’s spacesuit. The dust “gummed up the joints” of his suit so badly that he had trouble moving his arms. The powder chewed up his footwear, too. “The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on Jack’s boot,” Taylor said.
When the astronauts returned to the lunar module, it took forever to brush the dust off. Schmitt later complained [PDF] of “a lot of irritation to my sinuses and nostrils soon after taking the helmet off ... the dust really bothered my eyes and throat. I was tasting it and eating it.” The symptoms lasted for about two hours. His condition was consistent with the findings of Dr. Bill Carpentier, a NASA doctor who had evidence suggesting the dust could cause allergic responses [PDF].
Those pesky shadows are a little like the"moon" dust. Blowing in the lunar dust
There are no joints in a space suit which would result in having "trouble moving his arms".
They just did a McGuyver and attached a hose to the pressure dump valve leading to the outside! It's why the flag moves in some videos too! . Apparently they did have a space hoover which was also wrecked by dust.
But before the ESA can sign off on lunar dust as a building material, a number of tests still need to be conducted. These include recreating the behavior of lunar dust in a radiation environment to simulate their electrostatic behavior. For decades, scientists have known that lunar dust is electrically-charged because of the way it is constantly bombarded by solar and cosmic radiation.
This is what causes it to lift off the surface and cling to anything it touches (which the Apollo 11 astronauts noticed upon returning to the Lunar Excursion Module). As Erin Transfield – a member of ESA's lunar dust topical team – indicated, scientists still do not fully understand lunar dust's electrostatic nature, which could pose a problem when it comes to using it as a building material.
What's more, the radiation-environment experiments have not produced any conclusive results yet. As a biologist who dreams of being the first woman on the moon, Transfield indicated that more research is necessary using actual lunar dust. "This gives us one more reason to go back to the moon," she said. "We need pristine samples from the surface exposed to the radiation environment."
Do you really think a US government agency would have considered preserving a portion of the mindbogglingly costly specimens transported back for their own research, for a foreign power that might - 50 years in the future from then - conduct radiation tests and 3D printing trial-and-error experiments?
Do you really think a US government agency would have considered preserving a portion of the mindbogglingly costly specimens transported back for their own research, for a foreign power that might - 50 years in the future from then - conduct radiation tests and 3D printing trial-and-error experiments?
Well, NASA is special so I am sure once they looked at it it was flushed. Sort of like the infamous original tapes that weren't needed so to save money they were "reused",
NASA Addresses Controversy Over 'Lost Tapes' of Apollo 11 Moonwalk
By Passant Rabie 2019-07-11T20:49:27Z Spaceflight The agency dismissed claims that it had lost footage of the first moonwalk.
As a former one-time NASA intern prepares to auction off videotapes that allegedly contain original recordings of the first moonwalk, NASA released a statement addressing claims that the agency lost the footage from the Apollo 11 mission.
The search for the "lost tapes" began in 2006, when reports began surfacing that NASA had erased some original footage from the first moon landing. The agency conducted an intensive search at the time, but could not find the tapes.
"An intensive search of archives and records concluded that the most likely scenario was that the program managers determined there was no longer a need to keep the tapes — since all the video was recorded elsewhere — and they were erased and reused," NASA officials said in the statement.
In a Court of Law one would say that the Chain of Evidence is broken. Hence there is no evidence. But then who needs evidence ?
State Release of Files Shows RFK Evidence Destroyed
Associated Press
April 19, 1988, Sacramento
A polka dot dress, bullets taken from victims and a hand-scrawled notation that "RFK must die," were among pieces of evidence put on display today as state officials opened police records on the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
But the state's chief archivist said the release of documents is unlikely to answer the numerous questions surrounding the 1968 assassination, noting that more than 2,400 photographs and other evidence in the Los Angeles Police Department's files were destroyed nearly 20 years ago.
"I've never seen a file quite this large," said archivist John Burns. "This is a very unusual murder file (but) I'm not absolutely satisfied that any questions are answered."
Evidence Destroyed
He said his biggest surprise was the amount of evidence which was destroyed, including the photographs, the subjects of which are unknown.
"What I didn't know, and I'm told others didn't know, was that so much evidence was destroyed." Burns declined to state any conclusion saying he had not had enough time to examine all the evidence, which he predicted will occupy researchers for years to come.
"It has been almost 20 years since that awful night at the Ambassador (Hotel), a night which ended one life and changed so many others," Secretary of State March Fong Eu told a crowded news conference as she formally ordered the materials to be made public.
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And I see those astronaut faces and I read them with my sensitivity and I get flashes of these thoughts that they were thinking right there at the interview table on camera:
. Apparently they did have a 
