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Post by echnaton on May 18, 2006 15:42:35 GMT -4
Turbonium,
Have you ever paused to think that there are people who know a lot more about this than you do and are able to make reasonable judgments based on imperfect information? Even to a non scientist/engineer like me, your attempt to tie the effect of microgravity and radiation together is mere grasping at straws. NASA’s actions not conforming to your opinions does not make you right. Rather the actions of people that know their subjects show your opinions to be fantasies.
You have discussed you belief in the hoax at length, and we all have been following this thread, waiting for you to post something substantive about radiation, as you seem to think that space radiation is the key reason for a hoax. Yet the best you have offered is the faulty recollections of an old man and some outdated second hand quotes. Is this the evidence by which you came to the conclusion that the Apollo program was a hoax?
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Post by sts60 on May 18, 2006 16:30:58 GMT -4
First, consider that microgravity and space radiation exist together in the deep space environment.
But microgravity and radiation are basically decoupled, biologically speaking, in any environment. So that doesn't mean anything. It's like saying there was great danger potential from the combination of radiation and a low-pressure environment, or free-fall and a dark sky over more than 180 degrees of arc around you. You're just abitrarily inventing combinations without biological justification.
Second - unknown, or poorly known, deep space hazards. For example, microwave radiation was only detected in 1965.
No. Perhaps you mean the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, but microwave radiation was well known before that.
In pure form, it is non-ionizing and not detectable with the MG counters used by Apollo, and as mentioned earlier, by Van Allen.
"Pure form" is meaningless. They're either microwaves or another type of EM radiation. Microwaves are non-ionizing, period, and so are all the other bands near the microwave band (of course, all of them below the band).
But it certainly is capable of being lethal to living organisms under certain conditions, as we are aware of today. If the levels of microwave radiation had been lethal in deep space,
FUD. Microwave radiation is "capable of being lethal" only in the sense that infrared light is "capable of being lethal" if one takes up residence in an oven.
we would quite easily have not known about it during Apollo missions.
Absolutely wrong. You yourself stumbled across this above - the discovery of the CMB. It is precisely because the microwave environment around Earth is so quiet that the CMB had not been previously detected.
(P.S. This quick post doesn't mean I've forgotten the other topics I said I'd get to with specifics.)
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Post by JayUtah on May 18, 2006 17:12:19 GMT -4
We did not know, when Apollo's manned missions began, what the effects of space radiation were on living organisms in a weightless environment.
False: Biosatellite 2, operated in 1967. The results are that microgravity has no significant effect on a primate's response to ionizing radiation. None was suspected.
Second - unknown, or poorly known, deep space hazards.
Okay, but you don't discover or study those using biological specimens. If you send up a monkey and he comes back dead or sick, how do you propose to know what caused that? If he comes back with a bone marrow mutation, how would you know whether that was caused by ionizing radiation or, say, some certain chemical?
You are presuming (wrongly) how science goes about looking for previously unknown phenomena. The scientific search for hazards more frequently involves machines than monkeys. Science is not just a random, pointless groping in the dark. It involves hypothesis, falsification, and frequently rigidly controlled empiricism.
FUD.
For example, microwave radiation was only detected in 1965. In pure form, it is non-ionizing and not detectable with the MG counters used by Apollo, and as mentioned earlier, by Van Allen.
LOL! Are you suggesting there is an "impure" form of microwave energy that is ionizing? If so then you will have trumped a great number of professional physicists and engineers over the decades. Microwave energy is absolutely non-ionizing and, as such, differs very markedly from ionizing forms in its biological effect.
Your propensity to reach for the hyperbole where unwarranted is nothing short of amusing.
But it certainly is capable of being lethal to living organisms under certain conditions, as we are aware of today.
Artificially-generated microwaves are hazardous only in extreme amounts and at certain wavelengths. You could leave the door off your microwave oven with few serious biological effects. Those products are heavily shielded because of product liability concerns, not because there is lethal danger. You'd have to be standing within arm's length of a powerful radar array of a certain type in order to get a lethal exposure to microwaves: and death would come from purely thermal effects, not from ionization.
Microwaves are considered so generally harmless that we use some wavelengths of them as regular radio transmission frequencies, beaming them through your house, body, car, and pets without a second thought.
Just because we artificially generate phenomena that occur in nature and put them to good use doesn't mean that all the properties and effects from the artificial forms are found in the natural forms. We use x-rays to inspect closed containers and diagnose illness, but those x-rays are considerably more powerful, for example, that those occurring naturally in space. We generate ultraviolet light to kill pathogens in isolated air-handling systems, but that doesn't mean it's equivalent in all respects to the UV you get naturally from the sun.
If the levels of microwave radiation had been lethal in deep space, we would quite easily have not known about it during Apollo missions.
Hogwash. Microwaves of a magnitude and wavelength necessary to cause detectable biological damage cause secondary effects in machinery that would have been observed long before Apollo.
The reason we didn't discover the microwaves until relatively late is because they occur in quantities that are biologically inconsequential. We suspect there are a very many things out there in space that we don't yet know about, but it's not a given that simply because we don't know about them they are necessarily dangerous to us.
FUD.
How would it make sense to not find out if living organisms get sick or die in this environment before sending humans out?
Interpretational bias. You don't question the validity of your layman's personal notion of appropriate method, which leads you to assume that a different method is automatically wrong or insufficient. You did this with FEA validation and you're doing it now. You haven't wrapped your mind around the concept that you have to know how something works in order to know whether it's working properly.
Because a different method was used than one you envision, you argue that it was reckless and doesn't "make sense". Yet several people have tried to show you how your notion of what "makes sense" ignores some important realizations that scientists all know about. You're imposing your layman's rationale -- "I wouldn't know what to look for, so I'd better just play it safe and test everything" -- on people who simply don't need to think that way.
Your personal opinion cannot be used as an evidentiary standard were expertise is required, nor can you simply deny the need for expertise. You don't know what you're talking about, and this leads you to interpret and assume things without even realizing you're doing it.
The questions facing space engineers are, "What hazards exist in space?" with the goal of protecting against them or mitigating their effects. You propose that the only way reliably to investigate that question where biology is concerned is by sending sacrificial biological samples to all contemplated destinations. In fact, that method doesn't provide the answers we need (causation, mechanism, and therefore mitigation), nor does it give scientists credit for knowing anything ahead of time that would guide their investigation.
It's not FUD - it's common sense...
When you have no expertise, appeals to "common sense" are exactly FUD.
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Post by Jason Thompson on May 18, 2006 18:31:39 GMT -4
First, consider that microgravity and space radiation exist together in the deep space environment.
But there are no physical connections between the two either in their causes or their physiological effects. There is little reason to suspect that the two would combine. If you test every possible combination of factors you'd never leave the ground. We did not know, when Apollo's manned missions began, what the effects of space radiation were on living organisms in a weightless environment.
Bzzzt. Wrong again. Every single manned spaceflight prior to and including Apollo included dosimeteres and biomedical data were telemetered back to Earth, most specifically during the 14 day Gemini VII flight. Before the first manned Apollo mission, NASA had data that said humans could survive 14 days in space, with the combination of particular radiation levels and microgravity. Two of the later flights adjusted their altitude so that they spent some time in a higher radiation environment. Apollo 8 went round the Moon and the crew showed no ill effects. And would you please acknowledge and comment on Zond 5, which indicated that biological samples were more than capable of surviving the cislunar environment?
Second - unknown, or poorly known, deep space hazards. For example, microwave radiation was only detected in 1965. In pure form, it is non-ionizing and not detectable with the MG counters used by Apollo, and as mentioned earlier, by Van Allen.
Microwave radiation is non-ionising, full stop. It may not be detectable by Geiger-Muller counters, but it does have other effects that allow it to be detected even if the specific equipment to measure it accurately was not present.
But it certainly is capable of being lethal to living organisms under certain conditions,
So is water. So what?
If the levels of microwave radiation had been lethal in deep space, we would quite easily have not known about it during Apollo missions.
Nope, sorry. You seem to be arguing that microwaves could not be detected until we went looking specifically for them. In that case, how would anyone have known how to build detectors for it?
Additionally, microwaves being EM radiation and not particle radiation, the levels in deep space would be little different from those in Earth orbit, and see above regarding the empirical demonstration that humans could survive for 14 days there. How would it make sense to not find out if living organisms get sick or die in this environment before sending humans out?
Zond 5. Zond 5. OK, it wasn't a NASA flight, but all the data collected by NASA indicated that people could function out there. Had they been wrong they would have found out with Apollo 8, and the whole program would have been cancelled as unachievable, and PR would suffer as it became perceived that NASA had not taken adequate precautions before sending men out into deep space. It's not FUD - it's common sense
Common sense serves poorly in highly technical fields such as space flight. And what you are doing here is FUD in its purest form. Your layman expectations are held up as a basic fact, and anything that does not conform to those expectations is reason for doubt. You are not considering that your whole foundation may be flawed.
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Post by JayUtah on May 18, 2006 19:00:27 GMT -4
Stepping back I see little but additional layers of FUD.
Why are we talking about microgravity at all? Because I or someone else made the statement that animal testing isn't all that useful. Of course that was intended in the context of space radiation, where it's valid enough. But Turbonium has taken it to a different context solely to try to cast aspersion on it. He painstakingly laid out examples of animal testing that were deemed quite valuable -- although for a completely different purpose that has nothing to do with radiation or the original statement.
Why? Because it's about the FUD. It doesn't matter that microgravity and radiation have almost nothing to do with each other. It matters only that Sts60, Jason, and I can be shown to have opinions that don't appear to be supported by fact. Turbonium latches onto the simplified notion: "These sources show animal testing in space is valuable, contrary to what you said." And that's the idea he deploys, ignoring the important distinctions between radiation testing and what the animals were used for.
Now that the disctinctions have been carefully explained, he has to tap-dance in order to post-justify his invocation of microgravity.
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Post by Jason Thompson on May 18, 2006 19:47:45 GMT -4
A key point that seems to have been missed in all this is that turbonium's argument seems to have shifted from the radiation in space being a genuine obstacle to NASA taking unjustifirisks because they did not know about the radiation levels. Several examples have been given of subsequent or concurrent tests that showed the environment was not lethal, yet he has refused to address these, preferring instead to bring up pointless side issues.
So, let's drag it back on topic and cut to the chase. What evidence do you have, turbonium, that shows that the radiation would have been such an impediment as to render a manned lunar mission impossible?
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Post by turbonium on May 18, 2006 21:17:37 GMT -4
NASA’s actions not conforming to your opinions does not make you right. Rather the actions of people that know their subjects show your opinions to be fantasies.
NASA went from taking careful baby steps to jumping the Grand Canyon. The leap in going from orbiting Earth to landing men on the Moon is, to you, reasonable and logical. To me, it' s prepostorous.
You have discussed you belief in the hoax at length, and we all have been following this thread, waiting for you to post something substantive about radiation, as you seem to think that space radiation is the key reason for a hoax. Yet the best you have offered is the faulty recollections of an old man and some outdated second hand quotes. Is this the evidence by which you came to the conclusion that the Apollo program was a hoax?
"Faulty recollections of an old man"? LOL! Of course, you can try to dismiss his account as the ramblings of a semi-senile fogey, because it devalues your argument to consider the possibility that he truly is of sound mind and perfectly lucid.
He showed no sign of a diminished intellect in the interview whatsoever. If you claim otherwise, you have the burden of proving he is not in full possession of his faculties.
"Outdated second hand quotes"? As in the Van Allen statements? That has yet to be proven true or false. I hope to locate the relevant articles soon for further clarity.
And no, the issues discussed to date in this thread were and are not my main reason(s) for being convinced it was a hoax. The best evidence exists in other areas not related to radiation.
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Post by turbonium on May 18, 2006 21:38:16 GMT -4
But microgravity and radiation are basically decoupled, biologically speaking, in any environment. So that doesn't mean anything. It's like saying there was great danger potential from the combination of radiation and a low-pressure environment, or free-fall and a dark sky over more than 180 degrees of arc around you. You're just abitrarily inventing combinations without biological justification.
The naivete of 1950's and 1960's researchers regarding radiation is well documented by Project Argus and Starfish Prime. The disastrous results of detonating nuclear warheads resulted in the creation of man-made, lethal radiation belts. With such a bold display of ignorance and arrogance, what makes you believe they had soon afterwards determined whether or not radiation had different effects within a weightless environment?
No. Perhaps you mean the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, but microwave radiation was well known before that.
But it wasn't measurable until then, and its effects were not yet understood.
FUD. Microwave radiation is "capable of being lethal" only in the sense that infrared light is "capable of being lethal" if one takes up residence in an oven.
If you have only recently been able to measure microwave radiation , you can't suddenly claim to know enough about whether or not lethal levels exist throughout deep space. FUD for manned spaceflight, indeed.
Absolutely wrong. You yourself stumbled across this above - the discovery of the CMB. It is precisely because the microwave environment around Earth is so quiet that the CMB had not been previously detected.
We are still discovering new radiation hazards, only measurable now because our technological progress has made it possible. Or are you claiming that we knew so much in 1969 that all unknowns were certainly nothing serious enough to worry about?
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Post by echnaton on May 18, 2006 22:40:02 GMT -4
NASA went from taking careful baby steps to jumping the Grand Canyon.
This is your characterization but is it justified?
The leap in going from orbiting Earth to landing men on the Moon is, to you, reasonable and logical. To me, it' s prepostorous.
But that is of course not what happened. NASA went from sub orbit, to low earth orbit, to rendezvous, to docking, to highly elliptical orbits, to orbiting the moon, to practicing a moon landing. All of these steps are needed to do the actual landing on the moon. You tend to overlook those things that are inconvenient to you position.
"Faulty recollections of an old man"? LOL! Of course, you can try to dismiss his account as the ramblings of a semi-senile fogey, because it devalues your argument to consider the possibility that he truly is of sound mind and perfectly lucid.
I never said he was of unsound mind, but he is quite old and was confused about the van Allen belts. I know at 45 my memory for many things is not what it was 15 years ago. Most of the older men I know have a even more difficult time recalling certain details from the past. It is more reasonable to assume that he was just mistaken than that he spilled the beans on some great cover-up.
Why would his statement be more important to you than any other astronaut that claimed to have gone through the van Allen belts?
"Outdated second hand quotes"? As in the Van Allen statements? That has yet to be proven true or false. I hope to locate the relevant articles soon for further clarity.
You are using these quotes to support your effort to impugn many people by calling them liars and you haven’t even looked up the original source! You just throw accusations around without the slightest care for even the most basic research.
Let’s look at the validity of the van Allen quote my point of view, Jay has a letter from van Allen himself refuting this claim. I have read Jays post on various board for several years and found him to be among the most thorough and careful thinkers and writers among all authors I have ever read. From all sources. STS60, Bob, Jason Thompson, Obviousman, and others all make very insightful posts that are full of detail and demonstrate great knowledge in many subjects. All are in close agreement about the major aspects of the Apollo program. What I read here is in substantial agreement with my memories of the space program and everything I have learned over the years form many sources.
On the other hand, I have read your posts on this board and BAUT You’re sources are uniformly suspect and occasionally racist, you evade arguments, avoid detail and make unfounded accusations. And since my background is in finance, I’ll throw in that you don’t even know the definition of money yet argue about it at length.
Now as a non-expert in most of this discussion who should I listen to gain a further understanding of the subject?
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Post by turbonium on May 18, 2006 22:45:13 GMT -4
Okay, but you don't discover or study those using biological specimens. If you send up a monkey and he comes back dead or sick, how do you propose to know what caused that? If he comes back with a bone marrow mutation, how would you know whether that was caused by ionizing radiation or, say, some certain chemical?
LOL! Now you're making a sweeping devaluement of the abilities of pathologists. If the monkey comes back with a bone marrow mutation, tests can certainly be conducted to help determine if the cause was related to radiation or chemicals. And it's certainly a preferable alternative to having to conduct an autopsy on humans. A current project is going to place biological samples on the Moon to see what the effects are of short and long term radiation. But you must think they are wasting their time because instruments alone can perform that function much more valuably.....
You are presuming (wrongly) how science goes about looking for previously unknown phenomena. The scientific search for hazards more frequently involves machines than monkeys. Science is not just a random, pointless groping in the dark. It involves hypothesis, falsification, and frequently rigidly controlled empiricism.
See above for one project that is doing just that. (I will find the link soon and post it). Animals are certainly not a replacement for instruments, they are a valuable complement to quantifiable tests. You can't seriously believe that the measuring devices of today (and certainly not of 40 years ago) are fully able to detect any and every environmental factor in deep space that has an effect on biological entities.
Miners only stopped using canaries in 1986.
Artificially-generated microwaves are hazardous only in extreme amounts and at certain wavelengths. You could leave the door off your microwave oven with few serious biological effects. Those products are heavily shielded because of product liability concerns, not because there is lethal danger. You'd have to be standing within arm's length of a powerful radar array of a certain type in order to get a lethal exposure to microwaves: and death would come from purely thermal effects, not from ionization.
Missing the point. It's easy to use 20/20 hindsight today and brush it off as absurd. But we had no idea of what microwave emission levels existed in deep space. We nuked up a few radiation belts back then, remember?
Microwaves are considered so generally harmless that we use some wavelengths of them as regular radio transmission frequencies, beaming them through your house, body, car, and pets without a second thought.
20/20 hindsight again. Harmless? Yes, we eventually found that out. But we didn't know it back then.
Just because we artificially generate phenomena that occur in nature and put them to good use doesn't mean that all the properties and effects from the artificial forms are found in the natural forms. We use x-rays to inspect closed containers and diagnose illness, but those x-rays are considerably more powerful, for example, that those occurring naturally in space. We generate ultraviolet light to kill pathogens in isolated air-handling systems, but that doesn't mean it's equivalent in all respects to the UV you get naturally from the sun.
If the levels of microwave radiation had been lethal in deep space, we would quite easily have not known about it during Apollo missions.
Hogwash. Microwaves of a magnitude and wavelength necessary to cause detectable biological damage cause secondary effects in machinery that would have been observed long before Apollo.
Yes, you don't support the future biological studies on the Moon. Do you claim they are being foolish? For someone who constantly asserts the professionals in a given field are the most credible authorities, you may want to defer to the researchers before continuing to insist on the lack of value in biological studies for deep space...
The reason we didn't discover the microwaves until relatively late is because they occur in quantities that are biologically inconsequential. We suspect there are a very many things out there in space that we don't yet know about, but it's not a given that simply because we don't know about them they are necessarily dangerous to us.
FUD.
"Not necessarily dangerous to us". Agreed. But just as likely to be dangerous. That's exactly my point. And microwaves could just as easily have not been detected until a few decades ago not because of their "inconsequential" size, or amplitude, but simply because we didn't have the technical ability to measure them. Something doesn't have to be the size of an elephant to be considered dangerous. It's usually the smallest, barely detectable entities that are most lethal - like microbes.
Because a different method was used than one you envision, you argue that it was reckless and doesn't "make sense". Yet several people have tried to show you how your notion of what "makes sense" ignores some important realizations that scientists all know about. You're imposing your layman's rationale -- "I wouldn't know what to look for, so I'd better just play it safe and test everything" -- on people who simply don't need to think that way.
And it made sense to create radiation belts? If the leading "scientists" of 40 years ago were capable of those brainstorms, I fail to see how your argument about the superior wisdom you claim they possessed holds a drop of water. They knew what they were doing, not us plain and simple bumpkins!
Your personal opinion cannot be used as an evidentiary standard were expertise is required, nor can you simply deny the need for expertise. You don't know what you're talking about, and this leads you to interpret and assume things without even realizing you're doing it.
Common sense was scarce, but "expertise" replaced it most admirably!..Yikes...
The questions facing space engineers are, "What hazards exist in space?" with the goal of protecting against them or mitigating their effects. You propose that the only way reliably to investigate that question where biology is concerned is by sending sacrificial biological samples to all contemplated destinations. In fact, that method doesn't provide the answers we need (causation, mechanism, and therefore mitigation), nor does it give scientists credit for knowing anything ahead of time that would guide their investigation.
No, as I said, not the only way - but certainly in conjunction with scientific instruments. They are both invaluable, period.
When you have no expertise, appeals to "common sense" are exactly FUD.
Expertise in nuking our skies versus no expertise, common sense. I guess if I'm FUD, that makes them Elmer Fudd. I can live with that....
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Post by Jason Thompson on May 19, 2006 3:14:03 GMT -4
As interesting as this discussion is, it still ignores the basic premise. Turbonium, do you have any evidence that the space radiation environment actually is dangerous enough to preclude a landing on the Moon? I am not interested in hypothetical unknown dangers, or your perception of NASA's rashness. Is there any evidence that actually states that the radiation environment in space is the impassable obstacle to a lunar landing that made it necessary to fake it?
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Post by AstroSmurf on May 19, 2006 3:24:51 GMT -4
The cosmic microwave background radiation was first detected in 1965. It had been predicted since 1948. The atmosphere causes attenuation of the signal, but it's still perfectly possible to measure at the surface for most frequencies.
There is no significant difference in the microwave radiation environment in LEO or in cislunar space. Thus, anything from Mercury and onwards could provide the data you seem to think were lacking.
If the levels of microwave radiation had been lethal in deep space, we would quite easily have not known about it during Apollo missions.
But we did. Point refuted.
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Post by nomuse on May 19, 2006 3:36:12 GMT -4
I'm still trying to get a handle on this particular walk down the razor's edge. The claim is that there is some hazard in space that was subtle enough to be missed by NASA when they began the long ramp-up towards Apollo, but severe enough to have prevented Apollo from successful conclusion, yet still subtle enough so the fact that Apollo was impossible is not obvious today, with our presumably still-greater knowledge?
Or is the claim a simpler one; that NASA continued to be blind the the hazard and only began work on a belated cover-up when they started getting back dead astronauts?
Me, I'd go for an even simpler one; if our understanding of the hazards could have missed them when we said we'd go to the Moon, then perhaps NASA decided in error that the landings were impossible -- began a hoax to avoid subjecting astronauts to what turned out to be a rather more benign environment then they expected. This theory has the advantage of not requiring some subtle but deadly threat still lurking up there, and some continuing grand conspiracy hiding its existence even today.
Enough of the shadow-boxing. If Turbonium has a claim I'd like to hear it.
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Post by Jason Thompson on May 19, 2006 5:12:38 GMT -4
Exactly, nomuse. The argument seems to be shifting from 'the environment was categorically impassable, so NASA had to fake the landings,' to 'the environment was not well enough understood by the time of Apollo so NASA faked it instead of taking a risk.'
Those are completely separate arguments. One says NASA had no choice, the other brings into question the willingness to risk trying. Only the former of those two necessitates a hoax. The latter leads us around in circles as we assure turbonium that risks were taken and he insists they were unjustified and were not taken.
Either way, turbonium needs to provide some evidence that NASA did not or could not send astronauts to the Moon, not a suggestion that it was too risky so it might have been faked. Either NASA did or did not send men to the Moon. Without evidence, all turbonium has is the FUD argument, which holds no water whatsoever.
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Post by hplasm on May 19, 2006 5:38:32 GMT -4
Even if they were lethal levels, the capsule effectively forms a Faraday cage, which is quite effective in keeping out EM radiation- why do you think you should take food out of a foil container before putting it in a microwave oven (no- it doesn't explode...)?
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