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Post by Mr Gorsky on Apr 11, 2006 6:21:16 GMT -4
Personally, I'm looking forward to revealing my deathbed confession ... which is already written and stuffed in an old sock, beneath the squeaky floorboard behind the kitchen dresser. Bring it on.
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Post by Jason Thompson on Apr 11, 2006 7:20:08 GMT -4
All this equipment had to interact with other equipment, thus communication between the various departments and companies was absolutely vital.
Some examples of this:
Every stage of the Saturn V was constructed by a different company, yet they all had to fit together.
The instrument unit, built by IBM, had to be compatible with instruments in all three stages.
All three stages need connection points and fuel supply systems for engines built by Rocketdyne
The LM has to sit on top of the SIV-B stage.
The CSM has to sit on top of the Saturn V.
The LM and CSM, built by different companies, have to be able to dock with each other and allow crew transfer.
The SPS has to be designed with the combined mass of the CSM/LM stack in mind.
The CM display has to include status indicators for the Saturn V during powered flight.
Everyone has to be aware of weight restrictions, since a gain in weight on one system would require a reduction elsewhere.
If there is no communication between the various contractors and subcontractors then the whole thing simply will not work.
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Apr 11, 2006 7:39:41 GMT -4
It might be a more appropriate analogy to use an electrical contractor. As she installs, she knows intimately the service, what it can do, what it is spec'd for, and all the details of what she put in. Although she may have journeyman who know only that the wirenuts go on the tails and the green lead screws to the box, the "Contractor" knows much more. You missed the latter part of my analogy. That is, the actual environment that the machine or device will be operating within, and what is required for it to perform as intended. The electrical contractor can see how his services are a success first-hand when the stove works and the doorbell rings. How do the contractors who worked on the lem know it was a successful project except by saying they watched it on TV, from images provided exclusively by NASA? Well, when they built it they included all manner of instrumentation to monitor what the spacecraft was doing and transmit the information to Earth where anyone with a receiver could pick it up.
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Post by scooter on Apr 11, 2006 7:40:17 GMT -4
Please correct me if I go astray here... I am replying to Turbo's responses over on the Dark side thread (hope to pull him here where the topic is). He seems to be putting way too much design and engineering in the hands of NASA, and not with the contractors. Perhaps a current analogy will help. Consider the current effort to return to the Moon. NASA determined the overall "concept", the "shuttle derived vehicle" as well as the spacecraft approach ("Apollo on steroids" vs the "lifting body"). They determine the mission requirements (X crewmembers for Y days, lander performance capabilities, RM performances and velocity change capabilities, etc. CONOPS, RFPs etc go out and are responded to by the various contractors. NASA carefully outlines exactly what the hardware must be able to do under what conditions, and the contractors create proposed hardware solutions to satisfy the requirements. This includes temperature and radiation mitigation, consumables, weight, and the like. Once the contractor is chosen for the particular hardware, they work closely with NASA engineers, as well as the engineers of other parts of the mission, to assure hardware compatability. NASA determines the "big picture" requirements, and the various contractors work to fulfill it. Sub contractors were chosen through a government process to build sub assemblies for the contractors, again with strict specifications as to the operating environment. The Apollo experience has taught us a great deal about working on the Moon, the Shuttle/ISS has taught us much more about living and working in space.
For Apollo, the Lunar environment, as well as the cis-Lunar (including the Van Allen belts), was understood by the contractors, not just NASA. They knew what they were building for. There was no place for the compartmentalization that you speak of. All the parts had to work, together, coming from companies all over the world. Very precise specifications were essential. As the program progressed, hardware was modified and "tweaked" based on experience. Everything from the Saturn boosters to the sunshades on the EVA helmets were modified based on performance on previous missions. All done with close coordination between NASA and it's contractors. The space and lunar environment were understood, we had been there with satellites and landers. The radiation was a known, as were the temperature issues. The hardware was built by the contractors based on this. North American Rockwell, Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, Rocketdyne, Douglas, and so many more. They knew space, they had built things that went there before Apollo. There were no "secrets" to be kept from them by NASA. Make sense?
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Post by Jason Thompson on Apr 11, 2006 8:46:17 GMT -4
So when solid evidence is uncovered that proves "This is NOT what happened", one can be upset or even traumatized, if one has a personal or emotional attachment to the event. The person may go into denial, and say the new evidence is fake - no matter how solid that evidence is. Or one can become angry that these "nutcases" with phony "evidence" are trying to alter "Historical and globally accepted fact", probably "to make money" or "get attention".
Produce the solid evidence that proves Apollo was a hoax then.
The evidence for the authenticity of Apollo is nebulous at best, imo.
Lol! What exactly would you class as hard evidence? And is the evidence for suich events as World War II not equally as nebulous, or even more so? After all, what evidence do we have that Hamburg was destroyed by a firestorm in the wake of a major bombing campaign now that the city has been rebuilt? What evidence is there that Hiroshima was flattened by an atomic bomb? Why is any of this evidence better than that for Apollo?
Unmanned craft and lunar meteorites can account for the actually available (to analyze) moon rocks.
No they cannot, for reasons that have been dealt with many, many times here and elsewhere. There is NO evidence whatsoever for any unmanned sample return mission, and plenty for a manned sample return mission.
And as I mentioned in my earlier post, there is no way to independently verify, or authenticate first-hand, the Apollo missions.
That same is true for every historical event. Can I reasonably dismiss the American War Of Independence on the basis that I have no first hand evidence for it? What about the two World Wars? Can I doubt that Nelson fought at Trafalgar on the HMS Victory because I cannot verify it myself? How about Vietnam? Korea? Can I reasonably doubt the existence of countries I have never visited and which are beyond my current means to visit?
The imaging projects have failed to do so, despite several efforts. You claim they only failed for technical reasons, but the fact still remains that they did not provide evidence for the landings.
Images of the landing sites have been released. The question is what you expect to see at those sites. You’ll need a much higher resolution imaging system to produce images that are recognizable as Apollo hardware.
However, this raises the question of exactly why anyone should expect you to accept any new images as authentic when you already dismiss a vast amount of evidence.
The mirrors could have been placed on the moon without human presence.
Again, a hypothesis that fails because of a complete lack of evidence.
Nor does the authenticity of an event correlate to the "amount" of information recorded about it. Writing 60,000 pages of documentation about an event does not make it more authentic and authoritative an account than an alternative account of the same event which is substantiated by only 1,000 pages of documentation. The former could contain 1% factual information (600 pages) while the latter could contain 100% factual information, and be much more relevant in content as well.
The it falls upon you, as the challenger of the content of that record, to demonstrate which parts of it are non-factual or fabricated.
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Post by sts60 on Apr 11, 2006 10:11:17 GMT -4
Indeed, the hardware and parts that were designed and built by the many contractors was "real" or authentic. That is not the issue. If I hire a contractor that, for example, I need to cast 3 aluminum extrusions, and provide him with the neccesary engineering drawings, he will undoubtedly be able to fabricate my parts within spec.
You don't understand how it works. You're trying to extend your "a few guys at the top pulling all the strings" view to the contractors, but it's just as much fiction there as in your original use.
Subcontractors for various parts and materials may not be clued in on all the details, but they must have some idea of the application, and in particular their parts and materials must be rated for the working environment. In fact, a great deal of environment-specific expertise resides with the vendors, and in real (not Hollywood) aerospace the subcontractors work with engineers and scientists "up the food chain" and across other organizations (universities, national laboratories, etc.) to characterize the response of their product to the application environment.
But the "beta" Apollo machines cannot be assessed in this manner. The actual working environment - space and the moon - is completely inaccessible to everyone on Earth . There is simply no way to actually observe whether or not what is going on is in fact going on. I would have no way of knowing if radiation was a hazard, because I would be unable to conduct tests within the actual environment. The only thing I could do is watch it all from Earth on my television. I could never know for a fact that what I was seeing was genuine.
Utterly, absolutely wrong. The U.S. and the USSR in particular collected a great deal of environmental information before the manned flights. What do you think all the unmanned missions (from high-altitude balloons to lunar orbiters and landers) were for?
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Post by JayUtah on Apr 11, 2006 10:25:26 GMT -4
Turbonium, all you've done is elaborately restate your wishful thinking that aerospace works the way you need it to be in order for your conclusion to hold. You're stuck on trying to imply that the majority of Apollo workers are low-level grunts -- machinists and fab workers. It just ain't so.
How do the contractors know their machine has functioned proplerly? Because the contractors are the ones operating them at Mission Control. For each NASA controller you see in the MOCR trenches there are 5-20 contractor employees in back rooms watching the exact same data and passing recommendations and warnings up to the controller.
Contractor involvement in the operation of contracted technology is extremely commonplace.
Look at the film of the astronauts suiting up. Only a couple of those guys are NASA guys. The rest are contractors from ILC and Hamilton Standard, the builders of the space suit and life support equipment. They're the ones putting the astronauts in the suits that they made for NASA.
My team and others are currently designing a large supercomputer for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. That serves as a good analogy. Is NASA sitting in my bull pen telling my designers and programmers what to do? No. They simply say they want a computer that will do certain things. It's up to us to know how to make the computer do it. They aren't just presenting us with finished drawings and asking us to make them. That's why my company has about 6 engineers for every fab worker. The actual fabrication of the machine is straightforward. We are the ones doing the drawings and block diagrams. We are the ones with the expertise that NASA needs for this particular operation.
And what do we need from NASA? We need the engineering drawings of the building in which this machine will live. That forces NASA to come up with a credible scenario for the environment in which this machine will live. And I will know whether the expression of the intended environment is credible. How? Because i do this a dozen times a year. It's my job to identify constraints or shortcomings on the customer's part that will hamper or hinder on-time on-budget delivery, so that we aren't held accountable for them unexpectedly.
When this thing gets put on several semi-trucks and sent to Maryland, a small army of our installers will go with it. NASA won't know how to put our technology together. They won't have the benefit of our hard-won expertise in supercomputer assembly and checkout. That's in fact why they hired us. And since I have people permanently stationed in Maryland, part of the contract requires me to have people onsite for critical operations and emergencies.
That's how real engineering operates, and that's how NASA works with contractors. The contractors do quite a lot of the work -- most of it, in fact. I don't think you realize the sheer arrogance you're displaying. You are literally trying to tell people who work in an industry how that industry operates, with absolutely no personal knowledge of it at all.
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Post by sts60 on Apr 11, 2006 10:35:01 GMT -4
So when solid evidence is uncovered that proves "This is NOT what happened", one can be upset or even traumatized, if one has a personal or emotional attachment to the event. The person may go into denial, and say the new evidence is fake - no matter how solid that evidence is. Or one can become angry that these "nutcases" with phony "evidence" are trying to alter "Historical and globally accepted fact", probably "to make money" or "get attention".Better yet, one can look at the evidence based on actual knowledge and experience, rather than one's opinion. That's what I do, anyway. The evidence for the authenticity of Apollo is nebulous at best, imo.Your opinion is of no value if you don't understand how anything works. The "kind" of evidence is questionable: it is based on one type of physical evidence - the moon rocks.No, of course not. There are hundreds and hundreds of tons of flight hardware - some of which has been flown and recovered - which matches the engineering record - tons and tons of technical documentation, which shows exactly how things are designed to address the requirements of flight and the challenges of the environment. There is the personal experience of tens of thousands of people who flew to the Moon, who designed and built the spaceships, who collected and analyzed the data, who tracked the crews to, around, and on the Moon (people from countries around the world, including our Cold War enemies). There are thousands of still images and motion imagery, including imagery unmistakably filmed in free fall - long stretches of it - and in vacuum and in 1/6 G. There is all the data unmistakably transmitted from the Moon for years by the ALSEP packages, which had to be deployed by hand. And there is, of course, the ongoing investigation of the Moon which matches up with what we learned from Apollo. There are several problems I find with that being "conclusive proof" of Apollo landings. For one, because only a very small percentage of the entire collection will ever be released for analysis (the rest has been declared "Set aside forever for posterity", whatever that's supposed to mean). I'd like to see your reference for that. In any case, NASA routinely loans and gives out lunar materials for education and research: From How to Request Lunar Samples: "NASA provides lunar rock, soil, and regolith-core samples for both destructive and non-destructive analysis in pursuit of new scientific knowledge. Requests are considered for both basic studies in planetary science and applied studies in lunar materials beneficiation and resource utilization."Of course, if one believes that not doling out a pound or two to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who thinks it would be neat to have a chunk of Moon in their aquarium is sinister, I guess that's a pretty sinister policy. In any case, "a very small percentage" already released has been analyzed in countries around the world, and compared to samples returned by Soviet landers and to lunar meteorites. That has been more than enough to satisfy the international geological community. (Of course, they're either too dumb to figure it out, or all of those scientists and families are knuckling under to the seekrit Apollo Ninja Assassin Army, right?) Unmanned craft and lunar meteorites can account for the actually available (to analyze) moon rocks.Wrong. Twice. The total amount returned by the Soviet unmanned missions is about 300 grams. That's orders of magnitude less than that returned by Apollo, and less than that already distributed for analysis. Or are you proposing some other, secret, unmanned project for sample retrieval? Where exactly is your evidence for such a project? (sound of crickets chirping) Secondly, lunar meteorites are unmistakably different than samples collected in situ. They bear unique signatures such as fusion crusts, weathering, and infiltration. Only in the HB world can one just be substituted for the other and fool all the scientists.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Apr 11, 2006 10:44:04 GMT -4
From the Dark Side of the Moon thread…But the "beta" Apollo machines cannot be assessed in this manner. The actual working environment - space and the moon - is completely inaccessible to everyone on Earth. There is simply no way to actually observe whether or not what is going on is in fact going on. I would have no way of knowing if radiation was a hazard, because I would be unable to conduct tests within the actual environment. The only thing I could do is watch it all from Earth on my television. I could never know for a fact that what I was seeing was genuine. It sounds like you are saying the hardware was designed and built to work in the environment reported to the contractors by NASA, but NASA either lied about or simply did not know what the actual space environment was. Is this what you are saying? If so, - What did all those space probes of the 1950s and 1960s do if not collect data on the environment of space and the Moon?
- What makes you think NASA had sole control over all the data collected by these space probes?
- Why do satellites today work successfully in the same environment as reported during the time of Apollo?
- If NASA knew the actual conditions in space, why would they not report this to the contractors so it could be adequately designed for it?
- How where the contractors fooled even when they worked hand-in-hand with NASA throughout spacecraft integration, testing, launch, telemetry monitoring, and mission analysis?
- What purpose was served by lying, and what was so important about it that lying was considered the best option?
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Post by sts60 on Apr 11, 2006 10:44:05 GMT -4
And as I mentioned in my earlier post, there is no way to independently verify, or authenticate first-hand, the Apollo missions.
Wrong. International users still perform laser ranging using precisely-hand-placed Apollo retroreflectors. International teams tracked the missions, and received and analyzed the data from the ALSEP science laboratories. International scientists studied (and continue to study) the samples and other data. You can't get more "independent" than scientists and engineers around the world.
As for "first-hand", you are free to build your own spaceship and fly there, or build the giant telescope necessary to resolve the LM descent stages. Otherwise, you're simply whining that no one is spending the resources to apply balm to your personal disbelief.
The imaging projects have failed to do so, despite several efforts.
Pure misrepresentation. No imaging project has been undertaken with the goal of imaging Apollo artifacts, but rather for doing actual scientific research.
You claim they only failed for technical reasons,
No. We showed explicitly why it is impossible to resolve Apollo artifacts with any ground or space instrument currently operational.
but the fact still remains that they did not provide evidence for the landings.
They weren't made for the purpose of satisfying your deliberately and wrongly narrow definition of "evidence".
The mirrors could have been placed on the moon without human presence.
Not to the degree of accuracy with which they were set. And exactly how were they set there, if not by Apollo? Where exactly is your evidence for such secret unmanned missions?
(sound of crickets chirping)
And the ALSEP lunar packages could not have been set up without human presence. They required hand set up of experiments (connected to a central station) over spans up to the length of a (U.S.) football field. And they required hand-removal of the radioistope power supply from its cask and hand-fueling of the central station. (It so happens my boss was in no small part responsible for that power supply.)
The astronauts are the only first-hand eyewitnesses, and as I said before, they could be compromised into declaring the missions were authentic.
Right, of course. The secret Astronaut Assassin Army, which keeps track of them and their progeny so that no one ever, ever, spills the secret. The AAA is just one branch of the Apollo Assassin Army which keeps the screws on tens of thousands of NASA and contractor personnel and their progeny; tracking station personnel (and their progeny) from Australia, Chile, the Bahamas, the USSR, etc.; and of course all the international physicists and geologists, and their progeny.
Nor does the authenticity of an event correlate to the "amount" of information recorded about it. Writing 60,000 pages of documentation about an event does not make it more authentic and authoritative an account than an alternative account of the same event which is substantiated by only 1,000 pages of documentation. The former could contain 1% factual information (600 pages) while the latter could contain 100% factual information, and be much more relevant in content as well.
In the real world, not the HB alternate reality where someone can fool all the engineers by slapping a few diagrams on top of the Chicago White Pages, one can examine that documentation for engineering and scientific soundness. In fact, people have been able to do that for decades, and will continue to be able to do so, because Apollo was an open project, paid for by the taxpayers.
All that record is consistent and shows a detailed evolution both programmatic and technical over the years. Your attempt to wave this massive record away is ludicrous because you seem to think that no one ever bothers to look at it, or that no one is competent to evaluate it against known scientific, technical, managerial, or historical principles and facts. Utter baloney.
Or perhaps you'd like to pick some particular chunk of documentation and explain exactly why it is not believable?
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Post by sts60 on Apr 11, 2006 10:52:05 GMT -4
I don't think you realize the sheer arrogance you're displaying. You are literally trying to tell people who work in an industry how that industry operates, with absolutely no personal knowledge of it at all.
What do you do for a living anyway, turbonium?
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Apr 11, 2006 11:56:11 GMT -4
Here is a hypothetical question for turbonium. Let’s say you are in change of NASA in the 1960s when it is realized a manned landing on the Moon is impossible within the decade either due to technical hurdles that cannot be solved within the allotted time or to the discovery of harsher than expected environmental conditions. You have three options:
1) Level with the American public and tell them it can’t be done. 2) Tell them you think it can be done but you need more time. 3) Lie to the entire world and spend billions of dollars to fake it.
Which option would you choose and please explain why you think it is the best course of action? If you select an option other than #3, please explain why you believe NASA selected such an ill-advised option.
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Post by gwiz on Apr 11, 2006 12:25:13 GMT -4
Turbonium, you still haven't answered Phantomwolf's question:
"And what would it take for you to decide you were wrong?" We wan't to know what you consider decisive evidence. If you can't give us an answer to this question, what hope is there that this discussion can make any progress? In fact, this would indicate that your opinion has no rational basis but is more of the nature of an article of faith.
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Post by sts60 on Apr 11, 2006 13:02:32 GMT -4
One has to wait for turbonium's reply, of course, but the impression I've gotten is that he wants to see unambiguous images of Apollo artifacts on the Moon - e.g., an LM descent stage that is unmistakably an LM descent stage, not just a bright pixel or two.
If this is indeed his condition, then I would like to know why he would accept an image which was taken by a spacecraft he hasn't personally inspected and tracked to the Moon, using an electronic imager and a long chain of detection, storage, processing, compression, enoding, transmission, reception, error correction, decoding, decompression, further storage and communication, and finally displayed on a computer screen somewhere. Why would he accept that as hard evidence?
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Post by nomuse on Apr 11, 2006 14:07:45 GMT -4
The goal posts will move again, of course. No possible image or mission will ever satisfy.
I wonder if a bit from my own experience might be helpful. When I do FOH mixing I can't see the stage very well. I do not have direct control over the microphones. It is technically feasible for someone to go up there and switch the mics, the leads, even substitute a tape deck or some other feed for one of the mic signals.
The point being, in practice I'd know about it within a few seconds. What is coming into my deck shows complex and consistent patterns. I understand the behavior of my gear, the total sound environment of the stage, and I have a fair amount of experience with the sorts of things that can happen when you let musicians run around without supervision. Very few people without FOH experience can understand why I would suddenly stop sound check and tell the base player his cab mic just fell off it's floor stand. But to me...to someone with the specific day-to-day experience...it is immediately obvious when something falls outside of expected parameters.
Everyone catching the telemetry feed, everyone getting the thousand pieces of paper back after every inspection, every test, every flight, knows the patterns that the data should fall into. And these patterns are so bound up in the specific technical field and the experiential base -- the in-house experience that contractor has with working with that sort of system -- it would be very hard for an outsider to fake those patterns believably.
Oh, yeah. And any scheme that involves some cabal creating consistent data with which to fool the visible contractors and lower-level NASA personnel (as well as the general public and the scientific audience) is a bit of a turtle scheme. So you are going to make up an internally consistent, physically workable description of the Van Allen belts that will fool Dr. Van Allen, his co-researchers and grad students. So...how many top-flight physicists do you hire to do this? If you need to create a fake lunar subsystem good enough to fool the Grumman contractors...how many engineers do YOU need to hire?
The turtle scheme is, of course; what do you tell _these_ guys and how do you buy them off? Is there another, infinitesimally smaller group of scientists and engineers involved in pulling the wool over _their_ eyes? Turtles, all the way down.
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