Will man return to the moon??

[Natsarugiy]

You want to talk science? Then please repeat the experiment. PLEASE look at the pictures I cited.

Unfortunately, we won't be able to repeat any of the experiments without first returning to the moon. The closest we'll get without visiting the moon is creating accurate models based on the science, just like how K^2 did in it post earlier. In fact, if we don't perform any other experiments, all we'll be able to do is just review and analyze the data from the previous experiments, which brings us to the pictures. This is the data we need to analyze to find the answer. If you want an answer, you must look at the data and figure out why it happened the way it did, not think of reasons to explain how it may have never happened in the first place. The photos aren't supposed to be a solution, they are the data; they should raise questions for any scientist.

It has to slow down and not gain velocity.

This is actually incorrect. Due to Newton's first law, an object in motion will remain in motion until acted upon by an external, unbalanced force. After the particles leave the engine, they will only be acted upon by the moon's gravity until they collide with the surface. The moon's gravity will act upon the particles in a direction parallel to the particles downward motion, so the particle will actually accelerate to the surface. It will not slow down, it will indeed gain velocity (only for a few fractions of a second before they hit the surface, but still, physics).

I expect to see some pattern or design, or a clearing away; some evidence of a recent change. You never see any of that.

"I expect" is exactly the bias that is ruining your analysis of these photos. You're expecting something similar to what would happen on Earth. You need to try to completely ignore this bias. The moon is a far different environment than that of Earth's surface. If I had the rocket engine underwater near the ocean floor when I turned it on, would you expect to see the same results you see on the surface? No, that would be a ridiculous assumption, you would expect to see something different. That is exactly the same with the rocket engine on the Moon. Do not try to predict the results, and then compare the results to your prediction. Instead, view the results with an open mind if you really want to find the answer.

In fact the Apollo 11 pic I cite looks like rain droplets have hit the thick dry dust, not a directed blast of some pressure level.

This is actually a more accurate description of what is happening, believe it or not. Do not think of the thrust as a wall of pressure. It is made up of individual molecules (K^2 pointed out exactly which ones in his stoichiometric equation a few posts ago) that will individually bombard the surface of the moon much like rain drops will. On Earth, these individual molecules will in turn push the air along with them towards the surface, which will greatly increase the amount of particles that collide with dust. On the Moon, far fewer particles will be involved with the surface collision, resulting in far fewer interactions with the dust.

I think someone suggested that the LMs came down with some lateral motion. If so, then those 5' probes should have made some short lines in the ground until the vehicle started dropping straight down. You don't see any indication of lateral movement from that perspective either.

Do not believe that we would be so confident with our LM to allow it to perform such a risky maneuver so close to the surface. The LM would be required to terminate it's horizontal velocity well before the probes touched the surface. And once the probes touched the surface, that would signal the shutoff for the engine, so no more flight operations could be performed after they touched the ground. This can be seen in the videos of the landings: at about 2 minutes in, you can visually see the horizontal velocity change, and then the vehicle pitch downward once the horizontal velocity has completely terminated. Shortly after this an altitude of 120 feet is called, which is well out of reach of the probes.

If science says there should be a change, then WOW, I don't see it! That's where I was at when I came in here.

The change will, and did, happen. You obviously have enough of a grasp of physics to know this. But to assume that it should be something extremely noticeable is just straight bias. I know that when I jump upward into the air while standing on a boat, the boat MUST also move downward as the counterpart to Newton's third law of motion (obviously a simplified example). If I were to jump again upwards while standing on Earth's surface, I also know the Earth must move downward as well, in accordance to the third law. Just because I don't see the Earth move doesn't mean it didn't. Again, some dust DID move, we know it had to. But it just isn't a enough to be visually apparent from such poor photographs. If you want to see the different, you'll need better cameras, and ideally a High res image of the location prior to the landing.

"It looks like the LM's were set in place by a crane, due to the lack of any visual disturbance to the areas immediate to the nozzle."

This is an accurate description of the event. With zero background information, if you were to show me those images and make that claim, I would have no reason to refute your statement. But with the knowledge that it was a Lunar landing, it becomes an inaccurate description. And I should refute your claim, especially since physics does actually support the photos.

However, the photos raised more questions than they solved. I am curious about a few other things too, but will probably no longer ask about them.

I have been intentionally ignoring all conversation regarding a hoax until this comment. I do not intend to participate in a conversation about if the events did or did not happen. I will however do my best to help answer any questions I feel I have the answers to. I may not be able to answer all of them, and I may not be able to answer them 100% accurately, but I encourage you to ask your questions regardless. If I can't answer them, someone else may be able to. Perhaps your questions would be best suited for a different thread though, as this conversation borderline off topic with regards to this thread.

Finally, in an effort to bring this back on topic. As apparent with the questions LunaTrick has, and the questions of many others (some of which may not have been alive to see the moon landings), another mission to the moon can produce answers to these many questions. These are reasons to return, even if they may not be strong enough reasons to justify the cost of the trip to the moon. Hopefully, with SpaceX's plans for reusable rockets, we may have a solution to the high costs. I see this as an opportunity for a potentially immediate robotic return to the moon's surface (not including LADEE's planned crash landing). Another man landing though might be many many years away.

Edited October 15, 2013 by Natsarugiy

[jwenting]

another mission to the moon can produce answers to these many questions.

and those same people will claim those new missions are faked too...

[Nibb31]

I don't understand everything NASA writes, and neither will the next new comer. So please chill out. And you are, gradually. So thank you for that. Let's leave a complete record for you guys to point to, when the next curious person comes along.

I'm sorry, but it's not our job to do the research for you or for any other people who question the veracity of accepted historical events. Ever since the Moon hoax web sites started cropping up, there have been web sites devoted to debunking those theories. Like this one, which answered the points that you brought up back in 2001:

http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo/moon_hoax_FAQ.html

The problem when debating these issues is that each time you debunk a wacky claim, hoaxers come up with another hoax. This is simply because the burden of proof lies on the person making the hypothesis. Extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence and it's impossible to prove a negative.

Now, I'm not claiming you are a hoaxer. You seem to have a more open mind and I think you are genuinely puzzled by some of the things that you have seen and are just curious about the explanations. However, this is a sensitive subject, for reasons that I have already discussed.

I have looked into terrestrial radiation sources, including isotopes found in nuclear fallout, how to shield from that, half-lives, where my local nuke plants are located, what the seasonal prevailing winds are for my state. OK? But I don't know jack about space radiation other than high energy radiation like xray and gamma rays are the worst, and of course what I have read about the Van Allen belt, and the cross section pictures of it. Van Allan and NASA disagree on facts. I just know that kind of radiation is never good for humans and there was zero shielding, except for the mass of the ship itself.

If you have studied radiation, then you should know that radiation tolerance levels are measured in Sieverts, which is a cumulative value that measures the concentration of ionizing radiation absorbed per unit of a material's mass. In other words, it depends on both the level of radiation that you are exposed to AND the duration of the exposure. It works a bit like a photographic film, where the exposure depends on both aperture and speed, or like a sunburn. As long as you don't bask in the cosmic rays for too long, you should be fine. The Apollo astronauts didn't spend enough time exposed to high cosmic radiation to be negatively affected. Similarly, the vast majority of the "liquidators" at Chernobyl haven't died from cancer from the cleanup work because although the radiation levels were high, they were only exposed for short periods.

To sum it up, there is zero evidence that the Apollo astronauts couldn't have survived the trip. Not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper has ever been published with that claim. Yet there is ample evidence that they could, because most of them are still alive today to tell the story, with their medical records, photographs and all the documentation, archives, and published scientific results from the Apollo project.

To put it another way, on one side of the scales there is your own personal hunch on a subject where you have no real expertise, and on the other side there is the word of thousands of direct witnesses, many of whom are scientists, engineers, military and intelligence personnel from all over the world, and literally tons of documentation, science publications, and historical evidence. Do you see the disconnect here?

It just looks damn odd and unexpected to my eye.

Yes, because a lot of the physics involved are unintuitive because our experience as human beings is mostly limited to our specific environment. The same is true for quantum physics or relativity. Most of it is unintuitive and demonstrates unexpected results.

It's a bit like KSP. Stuff like orbital rendez-vous is pretty hard to explain to a new player because it is unintuitive that you need to decelerate to catch up with your target and to accelerate to let it catch up with you, yet that's how it works and we have to explain it over and over again, because it's that hard to believe. There is nothing wrong with not knowing what to expect, but phenomenon like how rocket plumes affect dust on the Moon are simply not areas that you or I have any daily experience with, so we are simply not equipped to argue about it.

However, when you see something that doesn't fit your expectation, the most logical reaction should be "there must be something going on here that I don't understand" rather than "someone must be playing tricks on me". The former is healthy curiosity. The latter is mild paranoia.

Personally, my usual first reaction is to pull up good old Wikipedia and have a quick read about the subject. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays

The photos of the LM don't add up. That just says the photos are in question - not the landing. And that we probably landed on the moon, but I suggested that maybe it wasn't Neil. Patriotic men will do what their country asks them to do. All that suggestion requires is a swap of personnel and following orders.

If there actually was a swap of personnel, why would they need to fake any pictures of the lunar surface? If you accept the fact that they did send men to the Moon, they did openly talk with them during the missions (the communications were monitored by foreign agencies after all), they did leave stuff on the surface, and they did bring back rocks, then they were also quite capable of taking real EVA pictures and only the pictures from inside the vehicles would have needed to be faked.

Even if they did fake these pictures and they did actually put the LM in the middle of a Hollywood sound stage with a crane, do you really think they would have forgotten to dig a crater underneath the LM if that is what they expected? Do you really think they could have got everything perfectly right in those pictures and movies except for that one single detail? Have you ever seen a large budget science fiction movie that didn't have at least dozens of glaring mistakes or impossibilities? Even Kubrik's "2001" has dozens of glaring errors in it, although it was state-of-the-art in the day and folks from NASA contributed to make it as realistic as possible.

Secrecy? Compartmentalization? I would reference the Manhattan project. Arguably the second most important thing that America ever did. Keeping big secrets is a piece of cake, when you do it like they did.

The Manhattan project was kept secret for all of 4 years, and even though people didn't know what the goal was, they did know that they were working on a secret project and they did know about the compartmentalization and the reasons for it. And it was all fully declassified decades ago, and so have all of the other government secrets from the Cold War era, including the U-2, SR-71, Hexagon... even though these projects contain information that even today, we wouldn't like some people from getting their hands on. The F-117 or B-2 were kept pretty much under wraps for a decade each, but there were still leaks and it was public knowledge that there were secret stealth aircraft projects going on.

People who work on classified projects know that they work on classified projects, and so do their families. Usually, when asked decades later, they don't hide the fact that they worked on classified government projects even if the project is still classified. Governments can keep a project secret, but it's hard for them to hide the fact that there is a secret project. If only because the decision to keep a project classified as top secret involves a lot of people at the political level.

If there was any secret around Apollo, they couldn't have kept the secret (or even the secret that there was a secret) for 45 years in the current information-driven world. People who were working on the project would have known that there was a secret to keep, they would have been aware of any compartmentalization or areas where they were not allowed to ask questions. The Soviets would have noticed that the communications were not coming from the Moon, that the orbital tracking data did not match up with NASA's claims or that their were anomalies in the published photographs. Yet not a single NASA employee has ever mentioned that there were parts of Apollo that were secret and no foreign government has ever stated that something was fishy about their observations.

This is why people get defensive when you bring up stuff like this, because basically you are calling all of these people liars. There are many people who have an interest in space who lurk on these forums, including some who might work at NASA or whose parents might have worked on Apollo. You are portraying these thousands of people as government spooks who are still today actively lying to the general public, when they are mainly motivated by noble dreams of science and exploration. If you even looked, you'd be surprised at how open NASA is about everything, how much documentation is available, much more so than any other space agency. It is far from a covert organization and there is simply no evidence that anyone has ever been covering up anything.

Edited October 16, 2013 by Nibb31

[Nibb31]

I'm sad that this thread got derailed by conspiracy mumbo jumbo.

Actually, I find it quite interesting and a lot of good information has been brought to the thread. We have done our best to keep it civil and everybody seems to have an open mind, so I would be disappointed if the mods closed the thread.

[check]

Actually, I find it quite interesting and a lot of good information has been brought to the thread. We have done our best to keep it civil and everybody seems to have an open mind, so I would be disappointed if the mods closed the thread.

Sure the discussion has been civil, but this should be in its own thread, IMO. If anyone wanted to contribute to the original discussion, their post would get buried in the long-reply back and forths with LunaTrick.

[K^2]

If science says there would be no change to the surface, fine. I'd find that hard to believe, but would try.

Science says that the change is going to be very small and gradual. Unless you have pictures of before the landing and after the landing, you will not be able to see what changed.

The main reason for it is that the Lunar surface isn't covered by a fine dust, like flour you compared it to. It's covered by Lunar rigolith. It is best comaprable to a coarse sand. Except, unlike sand, the grains are not smooth. Because there is no erosion on the moon, thesese are tiny jagged shards of rock. Because of their shapes, they form a layer that leaves very good imprints, and is also very tough to actually blow free. You need to physically dig into that soil, like the wheels of the rovers do, to really make a change.

That said, thrust of the lander would still lift some of that up. And it would drop right back down as soon as the engines would be shut down. It would not leave any sort of impression that you would be able to detect on the photographs.

And that's all there is to it. This is what science tells us, and a lot of it has been tested by many different groups. Experiments with simulated rigolith, based on samples brought back from the Moon, have been performed. We know how it behaves. We know what sort of conditions rigolith under the lander would be subjected to. And pictures from Apollo missions are consistent with what should have happened.

[Seret]

and those same people will claim those new missions are faked too...

That's the enduring beauty of conspiracy theories. They can't be falsified, because anything that contradicts the "theory" can simply be declared part of the conspiracy. It's like a self-healing meme. Elegant and simple, you have to admire it really.

[VanHalenBelt]

Greetings. Soon to be KSP owner here. I came here to find out more about the radiation challenges involved with moon travel. I am hoping to learn more from this community and from KSP itself about what it takes to make trips to the moon an easy matter. On my way here I had this sneaking suspicion there would be an endless debate on the topic, and a lovely page 16 it is. I, like many of you, feel very uncertain about the Apollo program's history. Well, off to watch the Soyuz return.

[Nibb31]

There was really no need to necro a year-old conspiracy thread just to say hello.

And nobody with an IQ over 10 is "uncertain about the Apollo program's history". It was one of the most documented projects in History. There are literally terabytes of recorded data on the internet that is freely accessible if you just bother to look elsewhere than Youtube.

[Vanamonde]

Let's let sleeping threads lie.