Radio signals from the Moon

[PeterB]

G’day Margamatix

Here’s something else you might like to consider about whether Apollo was real.

NASA and the astronauts communicated via radio (well, der!). For missions orbiting the Earth, NASA used a huge number of ground stations all around the world, with each station remaining in contact for only a few minutes at a time. For missions to the Moon, NASA used three ground stations roughly 120 degrees apart on the Earth – Goldstone in California, Madrid in Spain and Honeysuckle Creek, just outside Canberra in Australia.

While Apollo was in the vicinity of the Moon, each station was in contact with the astronauts for about 8 hours as the Earth rotated on its axis.

So if Apollo was faked, you need to explain how the conversations between Mission Control and the astronauts were faked. You have to take into account the following matters:

1. The conversations weren’t pre-recorded. When the astronauts woke up, Mission Control would give them a brief news summary. This occasionally included sports scores. In some cases, the scores were from games which were in progress. There’s no way anyone could know these scores ahead of time.
2. The astronauts weren’t orbiting the Earth. Their spacecraft would have been clearly visible from Earth, the same way the Shuttle and ISS are these days. Also, if the spacecraft was orbiting the Earth, there’s no way a single ground station could keep in contact with them for 8 hours at a time.
3. The astronauts couldn’t be on the ground with a relay on the Moon, as the delay in the radio signal is appropriate for the distance from the Earth to the Moon, not from the Earth to the Moon and back to the Earth.
4. The crews of the ground stations couldn’t be fooled. Most of the staff at Honeysuckle Creek were Australians (I’ve met a few). They knew their equipment, and they knew that they were receiving signals from the Moon – which is what they were pointing their dish at. There’s no way that someone could have secretly fed them a signal from another source, and they had no reason to collude with the Americans in a fake. I dare say you could say the same about the staff at Madrid.

The only logical conclusion is that the astronauts had to be on the Moon, talking live to Mission Control on the Earth. The only alternative is a conspiracy involving thousands of people.

You might like to watch the Australian movie “The Dish.” It’s a fairly reasonable summary of the Australian role in Apollo. Unfortunately, it makes a number of simplifications for dramatic purposes, some of which have annoyed the staff who worked at Honeysuckle Creek, because it implies that all the serious work was done at the Parkes Radio Telescope. But it also shows that people who were entirely outside NASA (the staff at Parkes) assisted NASA.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Cheers

[PeterB]

Here's an example of some real-time sports scores (I assume American football). Just over a day into Apollo 12, and the spacecraft is over 100,000 miles from Earth. The crew have just woken up and the Capcom is giving them the news.

This is from the Apollo 12 Flight Journal.

Cheers

= = = =

027:57:59 Weitz: Okay. Whoever answered me that time was way down in the mud and hardly readable. World attention is on the Flight of Apollo 12. The Soviet Union held the crew as courageous; and Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported the start of the mission and a brief factual report in both of its Russian and foreign language reports. Czechoslovak television carried a live coverage of the lift-off, complete with an explanation of technical details. In West Germany, all radio and television networks carried the launch live, as did the Japanese Broadcasting Company. The launch is being described by such adjectives as "spooky" and "cliff hanging." Even President Nixon, a one-time Navy man himself, admitted he had some anxious moments but added, "I'm really proud of those three men up there." Weather is a news item in Houston where temperatures are expected to dip into the 20's tonight. Automobile owners are being advised to put anti-freeze in their car radiators. Today's a voting day in Houston as Houston picks a mayor, eight councilmen, four school-board members, and decides upon a number of special issues. In sports, Houston Oiler Woody Campbell ended rumors and speculation yesterday by strolling into the Oiler training room and putting on his uniform. He says he's in good shape after 10 months as an MP with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam and hopes to be in action very soon. We're working up some ball scores for you; the only one available right now is a halftime score, it's Ohio State 28 and Purdue 7.

[margamatix]

Can you provide a checkable reference for any of this?

[gdwarf]

margamatix said:

Can you provide a checkable reference for any of this?

He did, the apollo lunar surface journal. Besides which, all you'd have to do is find the e-mail address of any of the non-USA ground stations and e-mail them about it. Besides which, are there not recordings of the astronauts talking about current events that happend after they left the earth? As for the delay, you have the word of several non-US citizens/Ground bases, plus however many people with a radio managed to tune in that the delay was correct.

[PhantomWolf]

Margamatix, I strongly, strongly, strongly, suggest you go and read the information from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.

There is a huge amount of information in these pages, not just transcripts, video and audio files of the missions. You'll get excerpts from the post mission debrief as well as further interviews and reviews of the journals by the Astronuats themselves. Added to this there are images, press kits, flight plans, mission reports, overviews, crew information and far more. It will take a while to get through it all (I haven't managed it yet) but it's well worth it and by the time you have finished it all, you might be able to claim to be very well educated about Apollo. If you go and read up on it all, even just Apollo 11, and you still believe it was faked, come back and ask us questions about things then.

[sts60]

1. The conversations weren’t pre-recorded. When the astronauts woke up, Mission Control would give them a brief news summary. This occasionally included sports scores. In some cases, the scores were from games which were in progress. There’s no way anyone could know these scores ahead of time.

<Shakes head ruefully>

Peter, Peter, Peter... the teams were in on the hoax.

I'm certain the '69 Mets were part of it. I strongly dislike the Mets anyway.

[Kiwi]

gdwarf said:

margamatix said:

Can you provide a checkable reference for any of this?

He did, the apollo lunar surface journal...

Tut, tut, tut. The Apollo 12 Flight Journal.

As Margamatix is talking about doing some real research, I guess we'd better give him all the help and encouragement we can. He only has to use Mr Google, but in any case, here are links I recorded some time ago for the
Apollo 8 Flight Journal - history.nasa.gov/ap08fj
Apollo 15 Flight Journal - history.nasa.gov/ap15fj
and Apollo 16 Flight Journal - history.nasa.gov/ap16fj
so it shouldn't be too hard to find the one for Apollo 12.

[Kiwi]

phantomwolf said:

Margamatix, I strongly, strongly, strongly, suggest you go and read the information from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.

There is a huge amount of information in these pages.... press kits...

If Margamatix or anyone else sends me a personal message with their email address I'll email them something I spent months on about a year ago -- a typescript of the Apollo 11 Press Kit. It is stunningly detailed and full of heaps of fascinating information, such as the list of over 100 scientists worldwide who wanted to examine the lunar rocks and soil that I posted in another thread.

Because it has none of the pictures or diagrams the transcript is a tiny fraction (413,213 bytes) of the size of the massive PDF copy of the original. On top of that, I have corrected dozens of errors in the electronic text of the PDF, so you can search for any word and be pretty-well guaranteed to find it.

For instance, in the electronic text, kg = kR, Korean = Koryan, LM = LM, I&l, IM, LFI and LPI, and MCC = DiCC. Without knowing that, you might never find every instance of "LM" via a simple text search.

[papageno]

sts60 said:

1. The conversations weren’t pre-recorded. When the astronauts woke up, Mission Control would give them a brief news summary. This occasionally included sports scores. In some cases, the scores were from games which were in progress. There’s no way anyone could know these scores ahead of time.

<Shakes head ruefully>

Peter, Peter, Peter... the teams were in on the hoax.

That's what they want you to think.
But it is obvious that NASA can send radio signals faster than light, because the astronauts never left low Earth orbit, and the radio transmissions were relayed by unmanned probes on the Moon.

[PhantomWolf]

Actually this transcript from about an hour later than peterb's is better for having the conversation both ways. Again found in the Apollo 12 Flight Journal

For the uneducated on Apollo.
-Conrad is Charles "Pete" Conrad, Mission Commander.
-Bean is Alan Bean the Landing Module Pilot (LMP)
-Gordon is the Command Module Pilot (CMP). Richard Gordon.
All three are onboard the CSM.
-Weitz is the Goodnight and Wake CapCom, Paul Weitz who is in Mission Control in Houston.

The conversation takes place nearly 28 hours 40 minutes after launch, around 110,000 miles from Earth. The crew woke up at around fifty minutes previously and were given the local Houston news (peterb's quote) about 10 minutes after that (which Weitz had to repeat because the crew changed atenna's and missed half of it.)

-----------------------

028:38:48 Weitz: 12, Houston. We've got a half dozen or so scores of all games in progress, if you're interested.

028:38:56 Conrad: Okay. Go ahead.

028:38:58 Weitz: Okay. Final score, Syracuse beat Navy 15 to O; in the third quarter, Yale is leading Princeton 14 to 7; in the first quarter, Texas 21, TCU nothing. In the third quarter, Houston's ahead of North Carolina State 34 to 7; in the third quarter, Michigan State is leading Minnesota 7 to nothing; and that big game in the Big 10, in the third quarter, it's now Ohio State 40 and Purdue 7.

028:39:35 Conrad: Okay. Thank you.

028:39:38 Gordon: [Garble] Paul, this is thingy. I understand that the University of Washington's homecoming's this weekend; will you wish them well for me, please?

028:39:46 Weitz: Okay. Sure will. We'll pass that on.

028:39:51 Conrad: Sounds like I should have [clearing throat] wished Princeton well a little earlier; maybe it's not too late.

028:39:57 Weitz: No, it's only the first quarter. Maybe it will still work.

028:40:01 Conrad: Okay.

028:40:04 Bean: And I guess Texas doesn't need any help.

028:40:07 Weitz: Apparently not.

------------------

I'm going to guess that Margamatix still won't be able to argue against it, but he won't accept it either. It'd be damaging to his tidy world views.

[PeterB]

margamatix said:

Can you provide a checkable reference for any of this?

G'day Margamatix

Are you asking me whether I checked those half-time scores from newspapers of the time?

No, I haven't. I live in Australia, so I don't have easy access to American newspapers of 1969 with college football scores. However, I dare say I could visit the National Library, which does have some old overseas newspapers. I might get lucky.

If you're asking me for a source of the statements, you'll see that others have provided links to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and the Apollo Flight Journals.

I find reading old newspapers a fascinating hobby. You get to see history in a whole new light when you read it as the news of the day after. In terms of Apollo, you can see the massive interest which climaxed in Apollo 11, had a brief surge again with Apollo 13, and sadly tailed off for the later missions.

So, if you'd like me to chase it up, let me know, and I'll see what I can manage.

[PeterB]

G'day Margamatix

Any thoughts on the radio communications?

Cheers

[gwiz]

The latest number of the Russian magazine Novosti Kosmonautiki has the following article

www.novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/content/numbers/271/03.shtml

which gives a brief history of Soviet tracking of Apollo missions. I'm basing my interpretation on running the article through babelfish, which isn't too hot on technical text, but it seems that they got their tracking system for their own manned lunar programme working in time for Apollo 8. They got good voice and telemetry, but TV quality was poor because their antenna wasn't big enough. The article seems to say that the last mission they tracked was Apollo 12.

[Martina W.]

gwiz said:

The latest number of the Russian magazine Novosti Kosmonautiki has the following article

www.novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/content/numbers/271/03.shtml

which gives a brief history of Soviet tracking of Apollo missions.

I just sent the link to a Russian friend and asked him to translate it. It may take a while though, as he is currently writing his bachelor's thesis.

[JayUtah]

Thanks, that would be an important piece of evidence.

I am also still working on finding evidence of Soviet infiltration of Apollo. I have it on confidential authority from former U.S. security people that there were indeed Soviet spies sufficiently well-placed in the Apollo program to determine whether or not the program had succeeded. I believe their reports on Apollos 8, 9, and 10 contributed to the cessation of the Soviet moon landing initiative in early 1969.