|
Post by sts60 on Apr 10, 2006 10:28:06 GMT -4
I thought that was a reasonably catchy title.
This to continue the discussion from the "mockumentary" thread, specifically addressing how he claims he's not really trying to denigrate most of those involved in Apollo, and it was just a small group of people who knew what was going on, etc.
|
|
|
Post by sts60 on Apr 10, 2006 10:29:05 GMT -4
My post in italics, turbonium's in boldface:
You cannot avoid the fact that by claiming Apollo was a hoax, you are of necessity calling many thousands of people liars and incompetent of carrying out the task they set out to accomplish. I have had the privilege of working for and with some of the men who made Apollo possible. You are directly impugning their competence and integrity with this claim, and you may not simply say "no offense intended!" and think that makes it just another opinion of how things went.
As I said, that is not my intent. But I cannot, in good conscience, say I believe in the landings if I do not, simply because it implies that those involved are lying or incompetent.
Diversionary. I'm not ordering you to say something different. I'm simply pointing out the fact that you cannot decouple the claim that Apollo was hoaxed from categorizing many people as liars and cheats.
But I strongly disagree that thousands of people would have had to be involved in a hoax. NASA, is not vastly different in structure than the standard military branches,
Wrong. NASA, or more properly the government and contractor combination that makes up what you are lumping together as "NASA", is distinctly different. There's NASA HQ and a relatively small number of major field centers, each of which is rather famous for acting as its own fiefdom. There's no real parallel in USAF and its large number of AF bases. The various directorates in NASA are maybe the closest to the various USAF commands, but that's not very close either.
More importantly, It's simply the nature of any large organization to have such functional and geographical groupings. You might as well say that USDA (Agriculture Dept.), or IBM, or Greenpeace, are "not vastly different" than military branches; each has a headquarters, field locations, and functional branches.
and of course is directly connected to the USAF anyway.
Meaning what? That NASA and USAF share facilities and resources for launch on the East Coast? Why should that not be the case? That USAF officers were tapped for astronauts? Why would that not be the case when they were looking for the "right stuff" test pilot types?
This is simply guilt by association when you haven't even established guilt on the party you're associating with.
Have you ever worked with NASA, USAF, or contractor personnel? I have. Have you spent time working at NASA or USAF facilities? I have.
That means a pyramidal, compartmentalized structure, rigidly defined working parameters and SOP's,
Sheer handwaving. What large technical project can not be described in such terms? You are simply attempting to make it sound sinister.
Have you ever worked on a large technical project? I have.
a strictly "need to know" protocol, and so on.
False. Other than Chapel Bell data, personal medical data, and some aspects of some of the camera technology - none of which were fundamental aspects, and altogether a very small part of the whole - there was no secrecy and no concommitant "need to know" approach. Scientists and engineers routinely shared data to solve problems, and the program was deliberately conducted in an open atmosphere to contrast with the Soviet's secretiveness. Vast amounts of documentation were available to anyone who cared to go to a library, or write the Government Printing Office, or visit a NASA center.
Have you ever worked on a project that really has a "need to know" basis? I have. 'Taint like Apollo.
Feeding false data to unaware control room technicians could certainly have been done.
Bulls**t. Have you ever been in a flight control room during a mission? I have. Have you ever been in a flight control room during a simulation? I have. The idea that you can just feed bogus data to flight controllers and have them believe it is laughable; it reflects your Hollywood-level understanding of how space flight works. The controllers, both the ones people see in the FCRs (flight control rooms) and the many more in the "back rooms" across the hall live and breathe the systems; they've studied and trained at great length. They know the environments, and how the systems respond to the environments, and they are the ones who have to create the systems to perform simulations too.
turbonium would have you believe that the controllers are just some schlubs plunked down there who would believe anything fed to them by the invisible hordes of sooper-seekrit engineers and scientists who were faking all that data. Ridiculous to anyone who's actually been there and done that.
The entire, overall operation was under the solitary, strict control of top level NASA administrators.
Standard conspiracist "iron-fist" handwaving. I can say that any large project is/was "under the solitary, strict control of top level [fill in the blank] administrators."
The Manhattan Project had 200,000 employees by 1945 (compared to only 31,000 NASA employees in 1969), yet very few knew what the entire operation entailed, or what the ultimate goal of the project was.
Red herring. About 400,000 people were involved with Apollo, the vast majority of which were contractors; they did virtually all the metal-bending. And everyone knew what the ultimate goals were, and what the entire operation entailed.
And your claims that only a relatively few people could tell what was really going on is utterly absurd. You are claiming that a few scientists knew about the "searing radiation hell" - sorry, I just love stargazer's phrase - but all the other scientists in the world, who had access to the same data, couldn't figure it out. And that includes all the Soviet scientists, not to mention scientists from other countries. You're claiming that engineers who had to design for vacuum, radiation, thermal, micrometeroid environments, could be fooled into thinking their systems would work when they couldn't? You're claiming that technicians who cut the metal and soldered the wires and ran the tests could be fooled into building a stage prop?
Have you ever worked on space flight hardware, or seen space environment telemetry live? I have. Your idea that all those people could be fooled by a few people "at the top" is laughably divorced from reality.
Nobody leaked any secret information out, and nobody on the outside was aware the project even existed. Most Manhattan Project employees didn't even know what they had been working on until after the two bombs were dropped on Japan.
And I can come up with much smaller projects which had plenty of leaks. But Apollo, which involved not only far more people, was somehow utterly leakproof - including all the engineers, technicians, and scientists across the world who were involved in planning, tracking, and analyzing data and samples - and has somehow remained utterly leakproof for decades?
No, you cannot make inoffensive your claim by saying that they were great guys but also frauds and liars. And that is exactly what you are claiming, no matter what sort of window dressing you hang on it.
Sorry, but I can make that claim, and I won't waver from my opinion because someone tells me I can't. They were accomplished pilots, with years of experience, and were chosen by NASA for their professionalism. That is something I do not dispute, and will not change despite being, imo, unwittingly put into compromising positions by their superiors. I don't denigrate someone and call him a fraud if I believe he is faced with the choice of either lying or having his family and/or himself disappear in the Mojave Desert.
Oh, I see. So the astronauts have simply gone along with the fraud for decades, and it's simply all the NASA administrators and generations of security agents who are the ruthless would-be murderers? So is it like a union thing, where the job of killing the astronaut's family if he says a word is passed on from father to son? Are the grandchildren of the original assassins responsible for killing the grandchildren of the astronauts? Do they have a separate Apollo Assassins detachment for all the anonymous scientists and engineers who pulled the wool over the eyes of all the scientists and engineers worldwide, not to mention their progeny? Do they contract out the job of ransacking their personal effects when they die to keep the deathbed confessions from coming to light?
Fortunately, the legacy of several hundred thousand people who worked so hard to make the dream a reality will outlive you and me.
I think the true legacy of Apollo has yet to be realized. Imo, it will one day be seen as trying to accomplish what was many decades from being technologically possible, and they were faced with the choice: either continuing to build from the previous technological advancements in a fundamentally sound but very difficult progression, requiring an unpredictable number of years to accomplish; or fabricate the accomplishment, controlling all aspects of the operation in order to deceive the entire world.
Except that you clearly have no idea how the operation worked, no idea how impossible it would have been to control "all aspects", no idea how impossible it was to "deceive the entire world", and no evidence whatsoever for the existence of legions of eeevil gubmint agents and mad scientists necessary to fake the whole thing and to suppress revelation of the fake for all these years.
On that basis, I'm most interested to see you lay out in detail what you think made it "many decades from being technologically possible", specifically the exact radiation threat. But that's another thread.
|
|
lonewulf
Earth
Humanistic Cyborg
Posts: 244
|
Post by lonewulf on Apr 10, 2006 10:31:33 GMT -4
I couldn't resist. I had to respond to this:
That means a pyramidal, compartmentalized structure, rigidly defined working parameters and SOP's,
So what Turbonium's basically saying is that SOPs are for SAPs?
(I'm gonna go delete my signature now. I'm really not that much of an attention whore)
|
|
|
Post by JayUtah on Apr 10, 2006 11:01:50 GMT -4
I have to agree with sts60. I have been in similar circumstances and can make substantially the same observations.
Further, you have to understand that Apollo is just one of many collaborative projects in the aerospace industry. It's not as if everyone came together unprecedented to do Apollo and then went their separate ways. There is a history of collaboration and therefore protocols that apply.
Apollo was not in any way a "need to know" thing. What we now call cross-training was absolutely required in Apollo. If you were, say, a control systems engineer for something, you would be questioned for your competency if you couldn't also describe key elements of, say, hydraulic, propulsion, and life-safety systems.
Turbonium, it really is not too strong to say that you're proposing an alternate reality here.
|
|
|
Post by scooter on Apr 10, 2006 11:06:55 GMT -4
I would venture a guess that, had the astronauts been put into a compromising position of faking a mission, they would not have simply rolled over and played along. These are fiercely determined and competent professionals, not at all afraid to speak their minds. I just don't see them possibly doing that. Edit: Pete Conrad, Commander of Apollo 12, is about at the top of the list of guys that would NOT accept a faked mission. He was very outspoken, and would demand whatever needed done to get the mission going. He would NOT have played along with a hoax.
|
|
|
Post by sts60 on Apr 10, 2006 12:37:36 GMT -4
Nor would the Apollo engineers I've worked for/with.
And the alternative, that they were simply fooled into thinking their systems would work, is Hollywood vaporing. You can't design a system without understanding the environment in which it must function, and without predicting and testing how it will respond to that environment. Yet somehow the only engineers and scientists smart enough to figure it out are the in the phantom army which produced all the faked data and samples?
Uh-uh. Not in the real world.
And, as I pointed out above, his premise, fatally flawed to begin with, inevitably cascades into ever-greater avalanches of absurdity, with ever-greater resources required to track and suppress all those who might spill the beans, their progeny who might reveal the deathbed confessions, and the new science which must conform to Apollo's scientific harvest lest it reveal the hoax. I mean, it's good for a giggle, but that's about it.
|
|
|
Post by JayUtah on Apr 10, 2006 13:09:31 GMT -4
The engineers I have worked with and for, and who work for me, include Apollo and non-Apollo engineers. Engineers are by nature straight-shooters. They generally despise any kind of measure that amounts to intentional deception or an intentionally inaccurate depiction of the situation. I have had the misfortune of working for companies in which there was management indiscretion, and it was the engineers who blew the whistle. Engineers have a deep and abiding distrust of management if they feel that the managers are behaving inappropriately.
To say that engineers would have gone along with the hoax is simply ignorance in the extreme, and to say that they weren't in a position to recognize that a hoax was being perpetrated is to completely misunderstand how engineers and engineering work.
Turbonium is simply listing the premises that would have to hold in order for his conclusion to make sense. Then he goes on to assume that those premises were actually satisfied. Begging the question.
|
|
lonewulf
Earth
Humanistic Cyborg
Posts: 244
|
Post by lonewulf on Apr 10, 2006 13:53:32 GMT -4
Here's what I don't get, and this really boils down to the heart of what is so ridiculous about this claim. Yes, I know everyone knows this, but really, it seems like it really needs to be spelled out. The next time someone comments on an engineer not knowing their trade and being spoon-fed by management, bring this topic up.
An engineer is a man who knows engineering.
Okay, what does that mean? Well, that means high school education, college education, and specializing in their field throughout a good amount of their life. Several years learning the subject of what they know. Throughout this period, they learn geometry, trigonometry, physics, thermal dynamics, and various other fields that are absolutely essential for understanding the properties of matter, construction, mathematics, and whatever else happens to be necessary.
So, according to the theory...
People go through college, and then get out, become engineers, get hired by NASA, and fall under the wing of some manager, who tells them to construct the shuttle, LLM, satellites, or various other moon-landing equipment... which is (according to the HBs), entirely unsound physics?
Perhaps the conspiracy falls as far back as getting a college degree? And they learn bad physics there?
But then, what about other countries? Do they all learn bad physics?
If so, how can all these people know bad physics, yet construct things that actually work? The same people that end up in NASA are the same ones that end up in other construction and engineer fields (including automobile engineering and such).
The entire idea is completely flawed from the get-go; either you have many many many thousands of people that would have to be "in on" the conspiracy, or you have many many many thousands of people making technology that works, and being lied to when it's supposed to ship out. Which leaves the question of, "If it was built, and it worked, where did it go?"
Either that, or you get the truth. I.E., the moon landings and lunar launches took place.
What it boils down to: An engineer has the potential to convince the layman that something that can't work can, and something that can work can't.
A manager has the potential to be deceitful about management commands and decisions to an engineer.
A manager does not have the potential to be deceitful about engineering to an engineer.
Just like an engineer can't convince a McDonald's worker that big macs are really 10 cents instead of the proposed price (or anyone else, but that shows how ludicrous this whole proposition is, doesn't it?)
|
|
Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
|
Post by Bob B. on Apr 10, 2006 15:01:37 GMT -4
The entire scheme proposed by turbonium is really quite absurd. The thousands of engineers working for the dozens of contractors around the nation were busting their humps to build the equipment that would fly men to the moon. All this equipment had to interact with other equipment, thus communication between the various departments and companies was absolutely vital. To suggest that one hand didn’t know what the other was doing and that everything was controlled by a small circle of administrators at the highest level is laughable. It was the men working in the trenches that got things done, and they did everything within their power to make sure the equipment they built really worked. If it didn’t work, they’d be the first to know about it and the word would quickly leak out. There is really no way so many diverse people could be controlled and knowledge of the failure suppressed.
Let’s say for a moment that things really were compartmentalized as turbonium suggests and that all information flowed through a nexus controlled the conspiracy insiders. This means that as requests for information flowed upward from the various departments, the conspirators would have to fabricate replies that would be convincing enough to fool the thousands of engineers working beneath them. A few administrators couldn’t possibly deal with the volume of requests and/or have the expertise to provide the level of detail required by the engineers in the trenches. It would require a whole army of experts to orchestrate such a conspiracy, not the few turbonium thinks is necessary. And even then it is highly unlikely the fabricated information would be convincing to the people at the detail level who actually had to make the equipment work. There would no doubt be inconsistencies and insufficiencies in the data that would signal alarms to those on the lower levels that something was amiss.
In any conspiracy scenario the number of people who had to know about it would be huge. It is inconceivable so many people could be kept silent for so many years.
|
|
|
Post by sts60 on Apr 10, 2006 16:15:12 GMT -4
I have a name for it: The Shadow Army conjecture.
The Shadow Army is headed by the known NASA administrators, Air Force generals, and various other high-level government spooks. But they're just the tip of the iceberg. You have an enormous number of scientists, engineers, and technicians who are in on the plot. They have to come up with a consistent story that will not only fool tens of thousands of other scientists, engineers, and technicians - everything from radiation physics data to spacecraft telemetry, fake tracking signals (never mind that it is physically impossible to fake the origin of a radio signal from the Moon) to fake lunar samples that will not only fool scientists worldwide, but will also fool scientists yet unborn, fitting in with all the new knowledge learned about the solar system. That includes the scientists and engineers from more recently spacefaring nations like Japan, India, and China.
Let's not forgot the crews who faked all the thousands of still images and hours and hours of motion imagery, including long, uninterrupted shots unmistakably shot in free fall, or in vacuum and with a single distant primary light source. And you thought the closing credits for an average Hollywood special-effects spectacular was long!
Kudos to all those maintenance workers who kept the impossibly large vacuum chambers, the size of aircraft hangars, working to make such filming possible. And to the structural geniuses who figured out how to make such monsters, even though decades later no on else has figured out how to do such a thing. Maybe the SA guys got help from the aliens who built the Great Pyramids.
And, of course, let's not forgot the army of assassins who have kept all those people from spilling the beans all these years, and the experts who keep scouring all the family heirlooms for confessions and souveniers from the hoax days. And the "Praetorian Guard" inner circle of assassins who keeps watch on all the other assassins so that none of them 'fess up for certain fame and fortune!
|
|
lonewulf
Earth
Humanistic Cyborg
Posts: 244
|
Post by lonewulf on Apr 10, 2006 16:34:18 GMT -4
You know, if all the HBs were really correct on the majority of their claims (not all, as they're often conflicting, of course), I'd be downright amazed at the capability of the U.S., and any "shadow organization". They'd all be so incredibly competent, it's amazing.
Of course, the ones that truly uncover them would have to be lauded about as heroes, and since they seem to be adolescents in the majority, that talked with their friend Bob about the moon...
|
|
|
Post by nomuse on Apr 10, 2006 16:48:47 GMT -4
I have my own take on the theory...I call it the lacunae theory. This requires that 99 and 44/100 of science, physics, the space environment be exactly as described, but something critical and completely different from expectations resides in that last fraction of a percent.
As in, "all the Apollo hardware works, the mission profiles are fine....but the radiation environment is more hostile than anyone other than a few know."
There are two problems with this, of course. The first is; how do you control the gap? Most science is highly interconnected. Cosmic ray flux is not just studied by COBE, it is used as a tool (via neutron emission from bombarded materials, and chemical changes under high-energy impact), in lunar mapping, in atmospheric studies, in extra-planetary material surveys. And so on and so forth. My strong feeling is that if you tried to hide the actual nature of the Van Allen belts there would be an obvious blank page in the materials.
Plus, using this as the show-stopper for Apollo has larger problems. The more spacecraft are flown today, you have to either increase the number of people "in on it," (if the shuttle really does pass through the north atlantic anomaly, then you have to include all of shuttle operations in the conspiracy) -- or you have to redefine the boundaries of the troublesome science, cramming it into smaller and smaller corners like adventure writers in the forties searching ever more desperately for unexplored parts of our planet: and the smaller the boundaries get, the more what is inside is required to not resemble what is outside. Suddenly the Van Allen Belt only a hundred miles above LEO changes rapidly from a well-understood trapped belt of charged particles into some bizarre form of searing radiation hell.
The second is, who is in the know and how did they get in the know? Is there a physics department at Skull and Bones? And even if there is science that is kept from the masses, only a small number of scientists either inducted into the truth or contacted swiftly when they manage to discover it themselves -- who did the original work? Who classified this stuff before anyone knew there was something to classify?
|
|
|
Post by sts60 on Apr 10, 2006 17:05:19 GMT -4
And why doesn't one of these scientists decide to snap up an easy Nobel Prize, plus international fame and lucrative book and interview deals, by revealing it? Oh, right. The assassin army has a special division to keep an eye on the physicists from the Apollo era and all the physicists in all the countries that have explored space in the decades since. International ninja physics assassins - many, many of them. They are so powerful, for example, that China or India or Japan can't reveal the hoax.
BTW, "Searing Radiation Hell" would be a good name for a speed-metal band.
|
|
|
Post by nomuse on Apr 10, 2006 17:28:14 GMT -4
Hmm. We need a whole bunch of 200 pt villians, don't we? I mean, the Men in Black not only have to be cold assassins, masters of stealth, outfitted with technology to cause heart attacks and light plane accidents on demand, but they also have to be leading scientists, able to see when one researcher out of the millions submitting articles to refereed journals -- or merely posting musings on a University intranet -- is on a line of scientific enquiry that will one day lead to them discovering The Truth.
Oh, and as you pointed out above....they have to have the ability to do this in every corner of the world. So add another hunded points of language skills, disguise skills, faked passports and street knowledge.
I still think that Jay Utah and the Babbling Maggots have to cut an album some day. You know, there are whole sites now dedicated to online musical collaboration.
|
|
reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
|
Post by reynoldbot on Apr 10, 2006 18:01:34 GMT -4
Don't forget the HB's. NASA doesn't want anybody sniffing around trying to expose the fraud, right? But they also can't stir up suspicion by killing off people that have publibly criticized the moon landing's authenticity. So they send out droves of high-paid trained disinformationists to lock the HBers in constant never-ending debates over Apollo to keep them out of harm's way. We are now all in on it too. I can't wait for my sweet NASA paycheck.
|
|