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Post by twinstead on Aug 3, 2005 14:50:19 GMT -4
You know what I did when I saw that Fox special? The first thing I did was get to the Internet and libraries to find out everything I could find out about the issues brought up in the show. It is what turned me on to studying conspiracy theories in general.
I was obsessed for weeks, and was amazed to find out how bogus every single piece of 'evidence' that was presented on that show was, yet also amazed to find out how information and science can be twisted and manipulated in such a way to totally convince some people; especially those who are predisposed to believe in conspiracies.
So, the rational thing to do after seeing a show like that is to do some personal investigation and education, and make an informed decision about it, instead of just slapping your forehead the second the show was over and becoming a life-long hoax believer, no questions asked.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 3, 2005 14:55:23 GMT -4
I had heard about the Moon hoax theory before the Fox special, but that's when I became active in debunking it. After the special aired for the first time (in February 2001) I joined the message board on the Fox website and debated the theory with none other than Bart Sibrel. Most of his responses were to "buy my video for the answers you seek". He eventually put me on "ignore". Last time I checked the Fox message board all of the messages regarding the Moon hoax special were still there, you just have to do a bit of digging.
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Post by margamatix on Aug 3, 2005 14:58:43 GMT -4
The sunlight reflected off of the moon's surface in front of the astronaut and lit his front side. Simple as that. The program fed you a piece of incorrect information and you swallowed it without thinking. . OK, so if I placed a large mirror on the ground in front of me, it would illuminate my frontal aspect if someone then took a photograph whereby the sun was directly behind me? I don't think so.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 3, 2005 15:00:46 GMT -4
Try it.
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Post by sts60 on Aug 3, 2005 15:06:14 GMT -4
So the Fox drivel got ya, eh? Thanks for clarifying the influences. That's been dissected in several places, including Jay's site, Bad Astronomy, etc. Links have been posted to these places earlier, and I'm sure you'll read them so as to get the rest of the story.
I was wrong, and I'm man enough to admit it.
Good for you! Then you shouldn't have a problem reading explanations which shred the Fox special like tissue paper and realizing just how high they piled the bulls**t.
Some of the Fox stuff was just misrepresentation (like the "two different images" part). Some was just ignorant. Some was amazingly, breathtakingly, silly, like the non-parallel shadows argument. Cripes, you can go out, find some uneven terrain, and see non-parallel shadows cast by the Sun for yourself!
A lot of Sibrel's claims (some shared by other HBs) were in that show. So he influenced you even if you weren't aware of him at the time.
Now, since you've talked about what set you on this path, we can discuss the validity of the claims. For instance, you yourself said you reject the "waving flag" argument which was part of the Fox special. What does such a silly mistake suggest to you about the reliability of the rest of that show?
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Post by twinstead on Aug 3, 2005 15:08:13 GMT -4
The sunlight reflected off of the moon's surface in front of the astronaut and lit his front side. Simple as that. The program fed you a piece of incorrect information and you swallowed it without thinking. . OK, so if I placed a large mirror on the ground in front of me, it would illuminate my frontal aspect if someone then took a photograph whereby the sun was directly behind me? I don't think so. You wouldn't even need a mirror. A light gray or white surface would do the same thing, I'm pretty sure. You see, you just AREN'T interested in learning the facts. If you were and really dived in and educated yourself, you would have found in your travels photographs made on earth at night that demonstrate stuff like this. Jay and others on this board, for example, have MANY examples of reproducing so-called impossible photographic effects easily and in a way that really is eye opening. Parallax, 'impossible' shadows, etc are all explained in a visual way that makes sense. Ask for some links from them. Sir, many folks on this board know about photography. A LOT. It is pointless to simply claim they don't know what they are talking about unless you can prove it.
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Post by margamatix on Aug 3, 2005 15:17:57 GMT -4
I am sure that at the very least, you understand how light travels. If the sun was behind me, a mirror placed flat on the ground in front of me would make no difference whatsoever to my frontal illumination. The light would be reflected away from me, not back towards me.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 3, 2005 15:22:48 GMT -4
The ground is not flat, but even if it was some light is bound to be reflected in your direction. The fact that I can see the flat floor in front of me is proof of that.
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Post by margamatix on Aug 3, 2005 15:33:45 GMT -4
So the Fox drivel got ya, eh? Thanks for clarifying the influences. It was a British-produced and narrated programme.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 3, 2005 15:37:03 GMT -4
Some I have given to you. You may disagree with my views, and that is your opinion.
Views are one thing. Allegations of fact are another. If you allege fact, your statement is either right or wrong regardless of anyone's belief. Most of the claims made against Apollo are putative matters of fact. They are either right or wrong and can be subjected to testing and observation. Showing that someone's allegation of fact is contradicted by evidence is not persecution on the basis of belief.
Mostly though, because I am not the only person to see something, you simply say "Oh, you got that idea from so-and-so"
When you give us four or five arguments from Bart Sibrel's Top Ten list, and Sibrel is the only one to make those specific arguments, and you quote directly from him in other cases, why would we not draw the conclusion that you are copying from Bart Sibrel? Granted you may be consulting other sources as well, but you are -- without any doubt whatsoever -- copying claims made by Bart Sibrel.
Not all the conspiracy theorists say exactly the same thing. It is actually not very hard at all to tell from whom you are copying. We have been around these arguments for years and we know whose "fingerprint" is on them.
it is the sheer weight of circumstantial evidence that will finally shatter the Great Moon Lie.
A thousand bad arguments are no better proof than one bad argument.
Again, you're not the first to try to take the "big picture" approach. That simply tries to focus attention on the multitude of claims and distracts from proof of any one claim. How do you know that those many claims are valid unless they are tested?
You've presented perhaps half a dozen claims so far. They've all been fairly easily disproved because they aren't, objectively speaking, very good arguments. What does that say for the likelihood that all the rest of your claims have merit? Sure, they might. But if we're considering these few claims as an indication of what the rest of the case might hold, then you're not doing well in the aggregate either.
But in any case I will not simply roll over and accept a case based on prolific claims if those claims -- however many of them there are -- do not stand up to scrutiny. It may be tedious, but careful scholarship differentiates itself from hackery by means of thorough examination. Pseudoscholarship relies on drawing hasty conclusions.
President Kennedy announced- rather foolishly- that the USA would send a man to the moon and bring him back by the end of the decade. He did this in May 1961.
Why do you say it was foolish? It was NASA's idea in the first place! The conspiracy theorists try to tell you that Pres. Kennedy just announced this plan out of the blue and that NASA was taken by surprise and had to scramble to meet it -- all wide-eyed and scared.
What really happened was that in 1960 or 1961 Kennedy solicited from government agencies some program of exploration or study or other pursuit that would demonstrate the technical pre-eminence of the U.S. over the Soviet Union. NASA had already begun the Apollo program before Kennedy's call. They proposed it to the Kennedy administration and were rejected. They proposed it a second time and were accepted.
Within nine years, we had landed on the moon.
Yes, and there is a very detailed, very lengthy, very plausible record of everything that was done during those nine years, including an entire project (Gemini) that was for no other purpose than working on the individual skills and concepts that would be needed for a moon mission: rendezvous, steering, navigation, endurance, radiation protocols. The conspiracy theorists almost completely ignore this program because they want to make the case that Apollo "suspiciously" succeeded. If they were to tell their readers about Gemini, the reader might get the wrong impression that serious study and development was undertaken to make Apollo work.
If one is willing to acquire the expertise required to understand and evaluate the pre-Apollo record, one finds it to be a completely plausible, very admirable record of design, development, testing, and revision.
Technologically, by 1987, we had moved on by a quantum leap.
Possibly -- but socially and budgetarily we had not.
The conspiracy theorists want to make a return to the moon only about technology. They omit entirely the notion that the Nixon administration completely slashed the budget for NASA and that public opinion about space travel waned considerably after Apollo's initial successes.
In 1987 and again in 2004 the relevant administrations proposed returning to the moon. The response from the public was, generally, "Why would we want to do that? We already did that back in the 1960s."
And in fact not all technology advanced at the same rate. Surely things like computers advanced radically, but computation is only one small part of space flight -- not a very important one, actually.
American manned space flight from 1975 to 1980 was non-existent. Manned space flight from 1980 to 2005 has been wrapped up in the space shuttle, with the notable exception of SpaceShipOne. We haven't maintained the technology for manned planetary landings since 1972. That technology did not advance at all, and in fact regressed -- as technology always does after it goes fallow.
Further, the shuttle program shut out competing unmanned boosters as a matter of policy. This wasn't actually remedied until after 1987. So the Saturn V was retired in 1974 and there were no follow-on programs to it.
When NASA were asked if they could send a man "back" to the moon, they said that if they were fully-funded they might be able to do it by 2010.
You still have to provide a source for that quote. It would be nice to hear it in context. Was the proposal simply to duplicate the Apollo landings, for example, or was it to perform extended exploration? More on this below.
Well, why would that be then? Why so much longer. I'll tell you. Because we never went there in the first place.
That's your interpretation. Would you like to hear mine?
1987 was a key year in manned space travel. Why? Because NASA was still recovering from the Challenger disaster. It was, at the time, operating on a very low budget with no prospects of starting a new major program. Yes, the promise of future dollars is something of a remedy for that, but not a complete remedy for the lack of dollars in preceding years. It is much easier to ramp up a continuing program than it is to restart one that has lain fallow for 20 years. In the latter case much of your budget and schedule is involved in retracing earlier steps.
Further, as I said, in order to increase acceptance of the shuttle, competing boosters were curtailed. Specifically, no agency of the U.S. government was allowed to contract for heavy-lift boosters for payloads that could be launched on the shuttle. And so all other heavy-lift boosters -- whether man-rated or not -- had a hard time finding customers.
In 1987 the government was just warming up to the wisdom that they needed big boosters in addition to the shuttle. But because they had not contracted for any in many years, the aerospace companies that produced them had essentially stopped producing them. Here too the problem is one of discontinuity and regeneration.
The Saturn V design line was closed, never to be reopened. This was a matter of policy. Very misguided policy, in my opinion, but there it is.
The Atlas, Delta, and Titan design lines were essentially downscaled. They were resurrected beginning in 1987 and 1988 and now enjoy a healthy design, but this would not have been known to space policy analysts in 1987.
In aerospace, once a design is fallow for five years or so, it's effectively dead. The non-documentary aspects of it simply leave the corporate consciousness by that point. And because those designs are always tightly-coupled to production methods, and because production methods change over time, designs become unmanufacturable if left fallow for that long. There are also regulatory and vendor issues.
So by about 1980, Apollo was no longer manufacturable or flyable, having been abandoned (unwisely) in favor of the shuttle.
This argument is in the form of your standard pattern, where you measure some observation against your expectation and then stand ready with some conspiratorial explanation for the discrepancy. And as always, the justification of your expectation is largely missing.
Here you seem to say that given adequate funding, the return to the moon should take no longer than it did originally. On its face that seems a reasonable expectation. But it must assume that the new goal is the same as the original goal -- i.e., that "returning to the moon" is simply to do what Apollo did. If the new missions have different or additional goals, then the time to complete them cannot be compared directly. This is why we want you to look more closely at the 1987 proposal.
If the new missions are indeed going above and beyond Apollo -- as the 2004 proposal certainly establishes -- then we must factor in the time and effort necessary to resurrect the Apollo skills and add that to the development time required for the new capability.
That is one fault with your assumed equivalence.
Another is the notion that the new missions will be a race. Apollo was definitely a time-pressure project. They were racing to meet Kennedy's "end of the decade" deadline, but they were also racing against the Soviets. As such they were simply working as fast as they possibly could -- too fast, as indicated by the Apollo 1 fire.
This took an enormous toll on people. A toll they were, for the most part, willing to pay, but not one that we need necessary extract in future. Most Apollo workers went for years working 12-18 hours a day, seven days a week, with almost no rest. This is unhealthy and unsociable. The cost in dollars of Apollo is well known. The cost in divorces, suicides, and other mental health issues is only recently studied.
The next missions to the moon won't be a race. We can afford to take our time and do it safely. A recurrence of Apollo 1 is not acceptable.
In short, your comparative expectation just isn't valid. It presumes way too much that simply doesn't hold between the two endeavors. I can understand why you made the comparison: because you don't have firsthand knowledge of the characteristics and capabilities of the aerospace industry historically and now, it's the only justification you can apply. But just because that's all the logic you can bring to the table doesn't mean it's sufficient to answer the question.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 3, 2005 15:38:01 GMT -4
Sometimes programs will re-dub the narration, or even change the title, when they get sold to other networks.
For example, there was a program produced in the UK called "Voyage to the Planets and Beyond", but when it came to Canada it was renamed "Walking with Spacemen".
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Post by skinbath on Aug 3, 2005 15:41:50 GMT -4
The programme details given by Margamatix make me think that it`s the same programme that I watched some years ago,(I don`t recall whether it was the Fox thing or not but I`ve seen all the issues raised in the programme (shown here in the U.K ) comfortably rebuffed.
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Post by margamatix on Aug 3, 2005 15:44:41 GMT -4
Views are one thing. Allegations of fact are another. . I thought I had made this clear. That we did not land on the moon is my opinion only
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Post by margamatix on Aug 3, 2005 15:52:14 GMT -4
Some I have given to you. You may disagree with my views, and that is your opinion.Why do you say it was foolish? It was NASA's idea in the first place! The conspiracy theorists try to tell you that Pres. Kennedy just announced this plan out of the blue and that NASA was taken by surprise and had to scramble to meet it -- all wide-eyed and scared. . Why? That's exactly what happened when President Reagan made his big speech announcing the "Star Wars" strategic defence shield. I once heard a programme on BBC radio in which a then NASA described listening to that speech. He then turned to his colleague (since both of them would have been in the front-line of developing and building such a thing) and he said "Would you know how to do that?" After a long pause, came the answer... "Nope".
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Post by ottawan on Aug 3, 2005 16:03:16 GMT -4
Well, (to quote President Reagan)
Perhaps your "then NASA" person was not in the upper levels of management and therefore not in the "front-line" until they were told what to develop.
Hence the "Nope"
Or they could have been clerical employees. A writer of history perhaps. Not a re-writer.
It was new to a lot of people at the time, and materials and technology had yet to be invented.
This is how history is made.
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