NASA Mooned America

[nasamoonedamerica]

Hi.

I was a sceptic until I started to read NASA Mooned America" by Ralph Rene. Has anyone read that book ?

In my opinion he has several unbeatable proofs that NASA did "Moon America"..

Other "Hoax authors" are more or less entertainers and mostly concentrate on photos, flag wavings etc...

I'm not photography expert and I'll not argue the photo evidence. I would like to argue from scientific standpoint that lunar mission was and still is impossible and that we are at least 20-30- years behind any kind of manned lunar mission.

If someone did read Rene's book, i would like to discuss the "temperature on the moon" issue and how the astronauts were "cooled" during the alleged "Moon walks" and about the evidence about the lenght of the shadows.

Rene pinpoints dated photos he ordered from NASA, calculates the angle on that date that the Sun was on the Moon's horizon and proves that the lenght of the shadows were incorrect.

Hope to have civilized discussion based on scientific facts and evidence.

[Al Johnston]

Temperature and cooling were pretty much done to death in the various stargazer and moon man threads.

Suffice to say, a temperature has to be of something, objects have a finite heat capacity, and heat transfer occurs by a limited number of fairly well-understood processes; all of which appears to be beyond Rene's ken...

[gwiz]

Astronauts on the moon were cooled using exactly the same sublimator technology as astronauts doing spacewalks in low earth orbit.

To calculate the length of a shadow, you also need to know the slope of the ground. Where did Rene get that data?

[Ranb]

One thing you can do to help your cause is to not use the name of any of the popular hoax proponents as your authorities on Apollo. They are considered to be either willfully ignorant, liars, or idiots here. I certainly think of them this way if others do not.

It would serve you well to learn details about how the technology worked before passing judgement on it. One thing that most honest hoax believers have in common is their young age or unwillingness to learn much about photography, radiation, engineering, history, heat transfer, and critical thinking.

Ranb

[JayUtah]

I was a sceptic until I started to read NASA Mooned America" by Ralph Rene. Has anyone read that book ?

Sigh. Yes. I don't currently own a copy of it, but I read it some time ago with great amusement.

In my opinion he has several unbeatable proofs that NASA did "Moon America"..

Well and good, until you realize that Ralph Rene is no "engineer" or "physicist" as he claims, but merely a construction worker forced into retirement by disability. He has no training in any of the sciences he pretends to employ. He also, for example, claims that pi is exactly some certain decimal value.

I and others here are professional engineers with experience in space engineering. We're not impressed by Rene's vague handwaving and vague allusions to science. They are clearly intended to fool the layman, but provide no actual scientific insight.

I'm not photography expert and I'll not argue the photo evidence.

I am, and I will. I am an avid photographer, and my training includes some aspects of photographic analysis -- which actually requires very different skills than photography.

I would like to argue from scientific standpoint that lunar mission was and still is impossible and that we are at least 20-30- years behind any kind of manned lunar mission.

Fine. My job includes helping Boeing and others build spacecraft. Present your case. This should be entertaining. BTW, I don't consider Rene an expert, so if you plan to regurgigate what he says under the notion that he's an expert, please reconsider.

I will probably agree that we are now about 15 years out from a manned lunar mission, but that's not because we lacked the skill to do it in 1969. We did. But that kind of expertise quickly becomes stale if left fallow. In 1972 we quit doing it because of political reasons. And if you leave that alone for 30 years, you really do lose the ability to do it again quickly. Aerospace really is a "use it or lose it" proposition.

Congress learned that the hard way. Wasteful as it seems, my client Boeing is now engaged in some government-funded projects whose only purpose is to keep certain kinds of technology alive.

If someone did read Rene's book, i would like to discuss the "temperature on the moon" issue and how the astronauts were "cooled" during the alleged "Moon walks"

Easy. Ralph Rene doesn't know the first thing about thermodynamics or heat transfer. He throws a few random equations out there, makes some colossally naive and wrong assumptions, and then pretends he has "proven" something. Pretty convincing if the reader also knows very little about heat transfer.

What specific arguments did you have in mind?

His analysis of LM heat transfer and thermodynamics is simply laughable. He ignores the primary principle of radiant heat transfer, which is that the heat loading is a factor first of the optical properties of the materials in question, and second of the angle with which the sun strikes each individual facet. Having gotten that wrong, anything he says following it is pure malarkey. A bit later he does run up against the need to know the emissivity of the LM skin, but he simply guesses it! That is the all-important factor in his computation and he simply plucks a number out of the vacuum and then claims this "proves" the LM's thermodynamics were incredible.

As for space suits, the outer layer has a reflectivity of about 80%, making solar influx fairly negligible. The key problem is rejecting metabolic heat to the tune of 80 watts at rest and more than 100 watts under exertion. This was done using sublimation of water, a tried and true technique. The basic thermodynamics of this method are well within the capacity of a high-school physics student to compute.

Rene pinpoints dated photos he ordered from NASA, calculates the angle on that date that the Sun was on the Moon's horizon and proves that the lenght of the shadows were incorrect.

Rene, with no training or experience, invents his own method for computing sun angles which has no basis in geometry or photogrammetry. Based on this unfounded and untested method, Rene "concludes" that shadows are wonky. Imagine that! His own method manages to arrive at his own predetermined conclusions!

The length of shadows as they appear in photography almost never provides an actual basis from which to reason about lighting. However, the correspondence of certain points in the shadows with their points on the object casting them can provide a basis.

Hope to have civilized discussion based on scientific facts and evidence.

Then you'll have to leave Rene behind because he knows nothing about any of that.

You didn't mention this, but I'll bring it up. Rene, among other things, claims that a certain photo found in Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire represents an attempt by NASA to fake a picture of Collins on his Gemini spacewalk. In my edition the picture appears as a frontispiece, and it is quite obviously an altered version of Collins in the zero-G airplane. That photo is clearly captioned, so no chicanery there. But Rene says that the frontispiece is a NASA fake.

The problem is that nowhere in any edition I have been able to find of the book is the altered photo attributed to NASA or claimed to be Collins on his spacewalk. It's simply an uncaptioned frontispiece. This was brought up to Rene. He stammered for a while and then claimed that his edition of the book contained a caption that made such a claim. MSNBC writer and former engineer James Oberg offered Rene $10,000 to produce his edition of the book that substantiated his claim, where upon Rene quit the debate and has not been heard from since.

Why do I bring this up? Because it substantiates the likelihood that Rene knows he is presenting arguments that can easily be shot down and simply wants the notoreity. I doubt he really believes his own hype.

Of course if you have some scientific or factual arguments, I'll be glad to address them. That's primarily why I'm here.

[dwight]

welcome nasamoonedamerica,

I strongly urge you to mosey on over to www.clavius.org and have a read through the responses to points raised by Rene, Sibrel, Kaysing et al.

I was at a point several years ago where I began to question the authenticity of the landings, but now I am firmly convinced they took place.

As far as the TV science goes, I have heavily researched that aspect of the Apollo missions, and it indeed checks out. And no there was no telecast in Australia at the time claimed by "coke bottle watcher" Una MacDonald of the A11 moonwalk. Neither has any search of newspaper archives revealed any evidence of people writing in saying they saw a coke bottle being kicked along the ground. Indeed the Australian original telecast was archived, and that kinescope shows no bottle.

cheers
Dwight

[brotherofthemoon]

If this isn't a case of shameless self-promotion, I don't what the heck is. Seriously, nasamoonedamerica? Nothing suspicious there...

[bazbear]

nasamoonedamerica said:

Hope to have civilized discussion based on scientific facts and evidence.

Just as long as you know Rene's book is very thin on facts and credible evidence; using his book as your sole reference in this matter is going to leave you defending an untenable position. If you search around the forum, you'll find a good deal of Rene's work has been discussed and debunked previously.

[sts60]

Hi there. Welcome to the board.

I'm not photography expert and I'll not argue the photo evidence.

Neither am I, so neither will I (usually).

I would like to argue from scientific standpoint

Please, go right ahead. I have an undergraduate degree in space physics (a real degree, not like the late unlamented stargazer's), masters in electrical and systems engineering, and about 15 years experience as a full-time space engineer. So I'll be happy to argue it from a scientific standpoint.

Meanwhile, I'd like to second Jay's comments about knowledge and know-how retention, not to mention government "keep-alive" efforts, in the aerospace field. Such issues are very real, and I run into them fairly often in my own job.

that lunar mission was and still is impossible and that we are at least 20-30- years behind any kind of manned lunar mission.

This is an interesting statement, because it implies that at some future date such a mission might be possible. What exactly would need to change to make such a mission possible 20-30 years from now?

[nasamoonedamerica]

Wow I didn't expect all these answers right away.

Since I'm currently at my office and the bosses arround don't like when workers spend time on interent forums (I wonder why ;D), I will present my arguments later tonight from home....

[Bill Thompson]

One thing I can say about shadows is this. For the fun of it, I conducted my own experiment with lighting objects with multiple light sources. No matter how I tried each object would have multiple shadows. I never saw a photo from the moon where thre were multiple shadows from one object.

[nasamoonedamerica]

alasdhair said:

Temperature and cooling were pretty much done to death in the various stargazer and moon man threads.

Suffice to say, a temperature has to be of something, objects have a finite heat capacity, and heat transfer occurs by a limited number of fairly well-understood processes; all of which appears to be beyond Rene's ken...

Can you please point me to the actual threads. Or tell me the thread names so I can research this board before I continue.

Thanks

[Al Johnston]

It may take some time:

stargazer

moon man

[JayUtah]

Wow I didn't expect all these answers right away.

I hope you didn't expect a greater mix of answers. Just to give you fair warning: you're probably outnumbered here about five to one. That's not meant to intimidate you or anything, but the people who post here habitually generaly don't believe in any of the conspiracy theories. So if it seems like we're ganging up on you or something, that's not mean-spiritedness -- it's just the demographics.

[sts60]

Wow I didn't expect all these answers right away.

Since I'm currently at my office and the bosses arround don't like when workers spend time on interent forums (I wonder why ;D), I will present my arguments later tonight from home....

Don't go asking for sympathy here - just get yourself a high-paying official super-duper-above-top-secret NASA-CIA-NSA-Illuminati-Freemason-MenInBlack Paid Debunker job like we have, complete with sleek cars and sleeker women. Then you can just lounge around the workplace all day drinking martinis and suppressing The Awful Truth(tm).