Apollo: An SjN Perspective

I wrote this piece quite some time ago and with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing tomorrow, I felt it appropriate to post this to make one clear point -

On July 20th, 1969, man stepped foot on the moon.

No conspiracies, no trickery of light and shadow, no secret movie set. That event was the result of hard work & human ingenuity. The same traits that built the pyramids, that created the Great Wall of China. Humans are smart. Nothing can stop human ingenuity. It's time to give credit where credit is due. So without further adieu, I give you - My Perspective:

Okay, let's see if I have this right:

NASA spends some twenty billion dollars (in 1960's dollar values) on the Apollo program.

NASA has, at the time, some 35,000 employees, and is directly involved with hundreds of contractors and sub-contractors, ranging from Lockheed/Grumman to GM and IBM, involving some 100,000 more people.

NASA launches NINE Saturn boosters, the most powerful on the planet at the time. These launches are watched by tens of thousands of civilians live and in person, plus millions more via TV. Each launch consumes some $25 million in fuel alone. Two were manned flybys, six were successful landings, and one was an incomplete landing.

HAM radio hobbyists worldwide listen to the direct broadcasts from the spacecraft as it makes its journey.

Our direct competitors in the "Space Race", Soviet Russia, has the ground listening stations- for their own (unmanned) Lunar missions- and can listen in on our radio signals and telemetry in "real time".

To properly track the craft, listening stations arrayed literally around the world are involved- Hawaii, Australia, England, Europe, etc- to not only track trajectory, but to relay signals and telemetry, etc. These stations are for the most part NOT manned by Americans and not under NASA's direct control.

Due to the weak nature of the radio signals- it's a 240,000-mile trip- high-gain "dish" type antennas are needed for high-quality signal reception (though HAM operators could listen to the voice-only channels on less powerful Arial type antennas) and transmission of the video and telemetry signals. If these dishes were not precisely aligned- in other words, pointed directly at the moon, the signal would be lost.

(Got a dish-type TV antenna for satellite TV? One can't just point it in a random direction and get a signal- it has to be rather precisely aligned. Roughly half a degree of arc in any direction and the signal is lost, and the satellite is only about 24,000 miles up.)

Astronauts visit the Moon SIX times. Not just once, and each MONTHS apart- and each flight is watched by millions of TV viewers and monitored by thousands of amateur and professional personnel. During these six flights- and indeed the seventh ill-fated flight- literally millions of feet of film are brought back, hours of TV images are beamed back, and the astronauts bring back some 800 pounds of rock, soil and dust samples.

Of the pictures taken, thousands of photos and hours of film were released to the public. Those pictures have been studied, published, republished, studied again, and broadcast around the World. Some of the finest minds of the 60's, '70's, '80's, '90's and today have looked at these photos, watched the video and film and studied them carefully. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking saw the photographs- are you smarter than they?

Of the samples, thousands of geologists and specialists quite literally worldwide have studied them for some forty years. Geologists in Australia, England, France, Germany, Russia and Canada have studied them, as well as Americans from nearly every major scientific institution in America from CalTech and MIT to the University of Michigan. Any one of these geologists can tell that a "moon" rock is entirely different from a "meteor" as collected on Earth. For one thing trace elements and crystalline growth point to extremely slow cooling- as in many years- in an oxygen and nitrogen-free environment. Meteors get red-hot on reentry, where the surface both melts and oxidizes. Moon rocks also show no signs of weathering or erosion, other than by actual impact damage. All of which is beginner's course data for a geology class, and extremely easy to prove or disprove. If you know what you're looking for.

Of the science experiments performed on the moon, several laser reflectors can STILL be utilized by any observatory with a sufficiently powerful telescope. These reflectors allow a measurement from the Earth to the Moon, with accuracy down to centimeters.

When the modules returned to Earth, they were tracked on radar, again by dozens of radar installations, only a few of which were American, and splashed down near, and were recovered by, aircraft carriers that themselves crewed some 5,000 men. On radar, a module dropping from a reentry trajectory is quite different from a "bomb drop" trajectory had the module been dropped from an aircraft.

All through the flight, hundreds of people directly tracked the flight's every system and every move: from the fuel level, to the Astronaut's heartbeat and body temperature, to the direction and orientation, to the cabin temperature to cabin oxygen pressure- and everything in between. These people were watched basically 24 hours a day in Mission Control, by literally thousands of TV, radio and newspaper reporters.

The Soviets were also working on several unmanned missions, a few of which have also returned with soil samples. It's a given they, too, tracked the craft and listened in on transmissions- after all, it was indeed a "race", Russia already had the telemetry receiving stations up and running for their own missions, and, of course, there was the possible angle of political embarrassment had they detected any "fakery".

The Soviets have also been allowed to study our soil samples, to compare them with the small samples their automated systems returned. Seems it would be tough to 'fake' moon soil well enough to fool those that had "the real thing". (Moon soil, by the way, is not "dirt"- it's primarily micro meteoroid particulate, with a lot of pyroclastic material (lava) that's been pummeled to dust by tens of millions of meteor impacts over the last few billion years, as well as particles from the impacts themselves, often in the form of tiny beads of a glassy substance that comes from fused rock blown out by the heat and force of the impact.)

And now, after forty years...

Countless so called "armchair astronauts", skeptics, conspiracy theorists & FOX, the guys who bring us "When Animals Attack", eight weekly versions of cop-chase and car-crash videos, and who *produced* and then marketed and sold the "Alien Autopsy" videos as "the real thing", tells us it's all "fake" because they don't understand the simple technology behind a camera F-stop or a wide-angle lens, we're to believe THEM and ignore all the rest?

Who's kidding who here?

Comments

[Kristyn]

This post is great!! I totally learned something reading this. I've never been a huge space enthusiast, but I enjoy learning about the universe. I love to look up at the evening stars and marvel at the distance the light had to travel so I could peer at it in he night sky.

Where we live, outside a tiny little town, the sky is pitch black and the stars and amazingly bright. I love the sky here (Deep in the heart... Clapclapclapclap... of TEXAS -- sorry, couldn't resist). Sometimes, I find it so completely overwhelming and wonder how anyone could think there's no life out there, somewhere. Trillions of zillions of stars in our solar system alone, never mind all the other solar systems and galaxies in the universe and people are naive enough to think there's nothing out there, in all that, but us?

Anyway, thanks for the work-up on the Apollo 11 -- 9 years before I was born. I have a new found appreciation for what happened there. I've never been one of those nutty people who tried to deny it; I shake my head at those people.

[SjN]

Thanks Kristyn!

I remember July 20, 1969. I lived in Ramstein, Germany. When Neal Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, I recall a knock at the door of you apartment. My dad opened it and there, in the doorway were around 15 Germans. Standing there bawling!

"You Americans are so great! You make us all proud!" they repeatedly said. They came in and watched the rest of the broadcast with us. It was pretty amazing.

I have a close affinity to the Space program. Apollo 1 Astronaut Gus Grissom was my great, great uncle. He died on the launch pad on January 27th, 1967. Ever since I was able to understand space and Gus, I have followed the Space program closely. It's a personal thing for me.

It hurts me when I hear people say "The Moon Shot was a complete hoax!" All of the hard work, countless hours and achievements... Not to mention my uncle's death seem like they were for nothing.

For me, it's personal.

I'm glad I could pull you away from your normal stresses and get you to 'Wonder"...!

[Kristyn]

That's really amazing that Gus Grissom was your uncle! I've never been the biggest science person and, for me, space represents a whole heck of a lot of science. I'm taking Geology right now and we're talking about the solar system, galaxies, the universe, dark matter & dark energy, the Law of Redshifts, and all that. It's interesting, even if I'm not equipped to understand it 100% of the time.

I can see why it would be personal for you. For me, it's just plain foolishness for them to say something so blatantly stupid as the moon landing was a hoax. Conspiracy theorists always make me laugh, and not in the good, amused kind of way. The ones who spout off about the moon landing being a hoax are clearly idiots, most of them don't have a hell of a lot of education, or at least not in the fields they'd need to say something like that.

Recently, I was looking at a blog and a commenter was spouting off about the moon landing being a hoax. A lot of the other commenters called him a dumbass (pardon my French). The guy actually came back saying that not only did he think that the moon landing was a hoax, but he also thought that the holocaust was too! Ugh. Idiots abound.

Don't listen to the doubters, they're just looking for something to have be negative about. I think it's great that you have so much interest in this, as well as a personal investment. I also think it's fantastic what they're doing with the space program, trying to bring it up to date. Though, I'll miss the shuttle.