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Post by echnaton on Feb 21, 2011 23:18:27 GMT -4
Earth to JW: You can't handle the truth!
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Post by gillianren on Feb 22, 2011 0:26:24 GMT -4
You know . . . I think it's yet another example of not knowing how science works. It's not just saying something and having people believe you. It's showing your work and having other people examine it. Disinterested people, people who don't care if you're right or wrong but just want the science to work. It's true that scientists all pretty much accept Apollo, but that's because NASA and various related scientists already showed their work.
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Post by chew on Feb 22, 2011 9:15:50 GMT -4
And none of the 400,000 people who built and/or assembled the parts for Apollo said, "The part I built and/or assembled wouldn't work." In other words, they built spacecraft capable of missions to the Moon.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Feb 22, 2011 9:48:23 GMT -4
And none of the 400,000 people who built and/or assembled the parts for Apollo said, "The part I built and/or assembled wouldn't work." In other words, they built spacecraft capable of missions to the Moon. If Bill Kaysing were still alive, I'm sure he'd be able to quote an anonymous friend who once knew a guy that worked for an unnamed NASA subcontractor who once told his friend in secrecy that the part he worked on didn't work.
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Post by gillianren on Feb 22, 2011 13:32:26 GMT -4
Frankly, I do believe that some of those people, possibly even most of those people, wouldn't have known. More would have than the HBs believe, but I think those people on the assembly lines would have had no idea. What we're looking at is the engineers, the people who designed them and did the more fiddly work. On the other hand, there are also all sorts of people not involved in Apollo who would have to be lying or fooled.
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Post by randombloke on Feb 22, 2011 21:04:05 GMT -4
That's the thing; there was no "assembly line" in the way you get armies of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in a modern car factory; each item of Apollo hardware was unique and almost entirely hand-built. I think the closest you'd get is the space-suits which were, as I recall, assembled by teams taken from existing lines.
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Post by lukepemberton on Feb 23, 2011 21:08:02 GMT -4
That's the thing; there was no "assembly line" in the way you get armies of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in a modern car factory; each item of Apollo hardware was unique and almost entirely hand-built. I think the closest you'd get is the space-suits which were, as I recall, assembled by teams taken from existing lines. Am I correct in saying that each LM had its own team assigned to build it? So it was hardly an assembly line.
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Post by lukepemberton on Feb 23, 2011 21:08:28 GMT -4
Earth to JW: You can't handle the truth! Did you order the code red?
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Post by Jason Thompson on Feb 24, 2011 8:33:36 GMT -4
I think those people on the assembly lines would have had no idea. There were no assembly lines. The numbers were too small for that. Everyone building their little bit made sure it worked as it was supposed to, from the guys in the subcontractors who made individual switches through to the guys at the factory who assembled each subsystem right up to the final testing crews. The end result of that is that either they know and deliberately build something that won't work (and fake all the attendant paperwork), or they don't know and build something that will, and if they build something that will, there seems little reason for faking anything. The construction process of a spacecraft like Apollo is so full of integration and testing at component, subassembly and final product stages that virtually everyone would have to be in on it in order to not build something that would do the advertised job of actually going to the Moon.
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Post by gillianren on Feb 24, 2011 12:41:38 GMT -4
That seems . . . odd to me. That every single tiny little component was not merely built but put in place but someone who knew whether their bit would work or not. I mean, logically, the people in charge of certain bits didn't have to know one way or another. Does that figure include the people who made mission patches, for example? The women who sewed--but didn't design--the suits? I've read a bit of an interview with one of those women, and she knew for sure it was air-tight, but she really seemed to be taking their word for it that it fit all the proper requirements. She was a seamstress, not a rocket scientist.
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Post by randombloke on Feb 24, 2011 13:29:07 GMT -4
...which is why I specifically excepted the suits, because they were made by people who had other, only tangentially space-related, jobs before and after.
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Post by gillianren on Feb 24, 2011 14:36:34 GMT -4
Were the people who made the suits the only people with jobs like that? I mean, what about things like rivets and other physical components like that?
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Post by lukepemberton on Feb 24, 2011 14:38:04 GMT -4
...which is why I specifically excepted the suits, because they were made by people who had other, only tangentially space-related, jobs before and after. If I recall though, they weren't just run of the mill 'knock some Marks and Spencers knickers up' seamists. They were the very best. There's an episode in the series 'Moon Machines' dedicated to space suit fabrication.
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Post by gillianren on Feb 24, 2011 16:07:29 GMT -4
Oh, I don't dispute--I don't think any of us dispute--that they were very good at their jobs. Just that they didn't really know what it took to make a man safe on the Moon.
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Post by Obviousman on Feb 24, 2011 18:43:20 GMT -4
But the suits were also tested; they didn't have to 'trust' that people did they're job - everything was tested.
Trust, but verify.
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