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Post by tofu on Oct 25, 2006 14:04:58 GMT -4
I signed up for an account, but didn't get the confirmation email. I don't think I feel like making a second attempt. Perhaps you can ask him for me:
Why is it that only hoax believers say this? Why is it that my high school science teacher believed the radiation risk was managable? Why is it that none of my college science teachers, many of whom were apollo geeks, couldn't see that radiation was an insurmountable obstacle? Are they in on the hoax? Or is possible - is it just remotely possible that they have the education and experience to know what they are talking about
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Post by echnaton on Oct 25, 2006 14:26:30 GMT -4
Of course the full extent of radiation was not known, one can never know everything. So that is a straw man. What he needs to tell you is how much was known about the radiation environment, what the dangers are and why the knowledge at the time was insufficient. I bet he can’t.
Secondly, Kennedy did not launched eh Apollo program. It had been underway during the Eisenhower administration. Kennedy grasp the political power of space exploration and put it to use. That argument ignores the growth in knowledge about the Van Allen belts during the intervening years. Such as the Gemini missions that flew into the belts.
The main problem is that he doesn’t know jack about the radiation environment either. Few people do. So while he can bluster all he can’t give any concrete answers as to why it was impossible.
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Post by cameron on Oct 25, 2006 16:46:09 GMT -4
Hi tofu, Sometimes the Email takes a while. I PM'd the admin and asked him to sort it out. Look forward to you input. Ok he just sent me this: I have no record of anyone registering with that username, sorry. Have your friend try to register again. Do try again tofu your questions about HB's need to be asked.
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Post by gillianren on Oct 25, 2006 18:17:41 GMT -4
"Tantamount." Why can't HBs spell?
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Post by Count Zero on Oct 25, 2006 19:34:16 GMT -4
So are you saying the light is 20-40% brighter on the moon? That's what I'm saying. I know that it wasn't a lot more than what we see on Earth, because the camera exposure settings they used on the Moon weren't much different from what we use here. It would be nice to have some empirical data to back this up. A camera light meter could measure it. Ideally you would take the measurement by pointing the meter at a piece of white cardboard that is face-on to the sun (don't get your shadow on the cardboard!). If you don't have a light meter, you could get a photovoltaic cell (or even a cheap solar cell, which is essentially the same thing) and hook it up to a volt meter. Take readings in the morning, at noon and in the afternoon on a clear day. Sounds like a good science fair project...
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Post by PhantomWolf on Oct 26, 2006 4:27:12 GMT -4
I think HC is confusing UV with IR, different ends of the spectrum.
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Post by Kiwi on Oct 26, 2006 5:27:31 GMT -4
One thing worth pointing out is that hoax-promoters sometimes create their own Radiation Boogey Man by overemphasizing and even falsifying the effects of radiation between here and the moon by showing burn victims from Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Not radiation victims; burn victims. You might like to refer your radiation "expert" to this page www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a15/a15.eva1post.htmland tell him to page down to 130:54:42 where Dave Scott, of Apollo 15, talks about radiation and how wimpish everyone is these days. I certainly don't get the message from it that Scott thought anyone was trying to "tantermountly" murder him. The last time I looked at Dave Scott at 0:11:06 in the documentary Lost Moon: The Triumph of Apollo 13 on the DVD of the movie Apollo 13, he had white hair but otherwise looked fairly fit, healthy and alert for an old bloke who went to the moon 35 years ago. The Radiation Boogey Man doesn't seem to have got him. 130:54:42 Parker: Roger, Dave. [The following comment relates to the risks the crews were willing to take, as symbolized by the Personnel Radiation Dosimeters.]
[Scott - "Sights, smells, and sounds are different on the Moon than the Earth. We've talked about the smell of gunpowder in the cabin. And the sound taking off. Yeah, it's a totally different environment. And the radiation environment, which is another interesting thing. Man, everybody is really turned on about rad-hard things these days. And I don't think we had a lot of that discussion in those days, even though we were during a period of pretty high solar activity. In fact, we were peaked in the cycle; and I don't remember a discussion comparable to today's where everything's got to be rad-hard and it's a big deal. They bought our watches off the shelf. I don't think they were rad-hard. And I don't know how much protection we actually had."]
[Jones - "Not much."]
[Scott - "Was the Rover rad-hard? Because, now, when people talk about sending objects to the Moon, one big requirement is that they have to be rad-hard. And I keep thinking, is that another overkill? Especially things like little Rovers which are only going to be there for one lunar day. How much rad-hard do you have to have?"]
[Jones - "Something's that's going to be sitting there for a few years, you'd want it to be rad-hard. Well, you'd want to stick it underground for starters."]
[Scott - "Or, if you're going to get some big solar flare - which you probably don't know you're going to get...This (subject) just occurred to me in recent discussions about all these things having to be rad-hard. I know we had our personal dosimeters, and I wonder, are those the levels (300 millirad exposure during the entire mission, mostly due to passage through the van Allen belts) that give you great concern, or requires focused protection?"]
[Jones - "It depends on the level of risk you are willing to accept. And, for whatever reason, I don't think we are as willing to accept risks these days, as a society. To hell with what the pilots are willing to accept. If the media and the public won't accept it, it isn't going to happen."]
[We then looked in the Mission Report for the radiation exposure experienced by the Apollo 15 crew and saw that it was comparable with allowable exposures by radiation workers and "well below the threshold of detectable medical effects.']
[Scott - "This has to do with what we do next. And, as you say, we are no longer risk takers. Are we boxing ourselves into an intolerable canyon where we can't get out because we have so many requirements and so much protection and it gets to the point where it costs too much money? If I have to make everything rad-hard, then you're never going to go everywhere. It was not a big deal, as I recall. Did my helmet have a lot of lead in the top to protect me? I don't think it did. But, now, if you send a robot to the Moon, by god, everything had better be rad-hard. And people spend a lot of money on that."]
[Dave then switched to the subject of conservatism in other aspects of space operations.]
[Scott - "People are putting a lot of conservatism in for orbit-maintenance propellant (in the context of operations in low-earth-orbit, in lunar orbit, or in Mars orbit) because of all these maintenance maneuvers you're going to have to make to stay in the proper orbit. I don't remember that being a big deal, after the mascon thing was resolved early on. I happened to be talking to our (Apollo 15) Flight Director (Gerry Griffin), and I said, 'Gerry, do you remember any orbit maintenance to keep the orbit right? I don't remember that.' And he said, 'Well, I think maybe we sent you guys up a couple of maneuvers but less than a foot per second. And we were there for six days. But, today, you talk to people and they put lots of propellant in to maintain an orbit. Maybe it has to be more precise. But we had to be pretty precise to find the landing spot."]
[Jones - "And to make sure Al was in the right place to pick you guys up."]
[Scott - "Sure. Today's mindset just seems to be more and more restrictive, more conservative, riskless - to (the point) where you're never going to do anything. Or maybe we were just all stupid. Right? Like rendezvous. Today, it's all got to be closed-loop, autonomous, precise. Where ours was sort of back of the envelope. And I've been asked, 'Boy, didn't you guys worry about rendezvous on the lunar mission?' No, not really. And we nailed it. And Al could come get us if we didn't."]
[Jones - "You basically had to launch in the same plane that he was in and at the right time, within a second or three. And that was it."]
[Scott - "Yeah. I've also been looking at that. And I went through some of the old rendezvous documents and found that, on 15, during our training Jim and I had this time problem on our (lunar) work day. And part of the last work day (after EVA-3) was the typical lunar rendezvous, which took, I guess, four maneuvers. And Jim and I worked in the simulator to cut it down. Instead of four maneuvers, we cut it to two maneuvers, because we wanted to save two hours, maybe one rev difference. We figured by shortening the rendezvous, we could save two hours of our work time. And we took that from the simulator to the mission planning and analysis guys and they liked it and, in fact, they liked it so much that they used it on 14. So everybody went from the four impulse to the two impulse rendezvous which, in the beginning of Apollo, wouldn't have been heard of, because you'd never make it. And, yet, I think we all nailed it. I don't think anybody had any real problem with rendezvous.]
["And, yet, today the Shuttle has problems with their rendezvous. They've almost blown a couple. They've had serious problems because they've changed the rendezvous procedures. Shuttle rendezvous technique and procedure is different from Apollo. It's like, 'Wow, guys, where are you all going?' In fact, the story goes, when they started the development of the Shuttle rendezvous, John Young was in a meeting and said, 'Why don't we just do it like we did on Gemini and Apollo?' 'Oh, no, no, no. You can't do it like that. The Shuttle's different.' And they swept John to the back of the room, again. Anyway, this discussion drags out a lot of stuff, and that's why it's useful.]
["We may be drifting down paths and roads that, in whatever number of years when somebody wants to go back to the Moon, they won't be able to; and they'll have to go back to this to find out how it was done. Because they won't be able to do it with the conservative mindset and all that. They get too precise and too mathematical and they get afraid to do any serious engineering; whereas a great deal of what we did was serious engineering. I mean, engineers got in there and they made engineering judgments and built things that worked. And it may well be that, with the mindset and technology in 50 years - or 150 years - it won't be possible. And they'll have to go back to this and discipline themselves to throw all the conservatism and rad-hard and precision and whatever, 'cause it won't work. And go back to the stuff that, at least in one program, worked pretty well.]
["This is a sidelight but, these days, every time I run into something, I wonder if it's me or...And that's why this (mission review) is good, 'cause I'd like to go back and see what we really did. Like the radiation stuff. I say to myself, 'What are these guys talking all this rad-hard stuff? I must have missed something back in Apollo."]
[Jones - "Well, it must be easy enough to calculate the probability of losing a piece of equipment if you don't rad-hard it and compare the cost of all your rad-hard efforts. And I suspect the answer is that you don't gain a lot. 'Cause you waste a lot of money, and you make things heavier and more expensive."]
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Post by sts60 on Oct 26, 2006 9:14:01 GMT -4
We showed him the Clavius pages he described them as a load of crap. More madness You might point out to him that James Van Allen himself specifically repudiated the notion that the Van Allen Belts were some sort of insurmountable barrier to manned spaceflight; that Van Allen himself (who later on grew to believe that manned spaceflight was wasteful) helped NASA design the Apollo trajectories; that astronauts in the Shuttle and ISS regularly traverse through a low-hanging area of the belts known as the South Atlantic Anomaly. You might also ask him what relevant expertise he has to make such judgments, and if it is so obvious to him why it is not obvious to every health or radiation physicist and every nuclear engineer on the planet. Or why commercial satellite operators rely succesfully on NASA space environment data which was originally developed back in the late '50s and early '60s. Or you might just want to wish him well in his determined ignorance and move on to more fruitful endeavors.
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politik
Venus
on a crusade against ignorance
Posts: 83
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Post by politik on Oct 27, 2006 16:48:11 GMT -4
I think I scared HC off!
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Post by cameron on Oct 28, 2006 21:01:20 GMT -4
He's hiding under his tinfoil hat.
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Post by cameron on Oct 29, 2006 15:40:19 GMT -4
The Earth is in fact not round, it is a spheroid torus; this means that it is hollow with two openings, about 1000 miles across, at each of the poles. It's like a scooped out Halloween pumpkin without a face, but with both ends cut away. HC
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politik
Venus
on a crusade against ignorance
Posts: 83
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Post by politik on Oct 29, 2006 19:08:14 GMT -4
ok, I lost it. HC is beyond hope. I can't debate him anymore.
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Post by grashtel on Oct 29, 2006 19:21:13 GMT -4
The Earth is in fact not round, it is a spheroid torus; this means that it is hollow with two openings, about 1000 miles across, at each of the poles. It's like a scooped out Halloween pumpkin without a face, but with both ends cut away. HC Please tell me you are joking, the magnitude of any conspiracy able to hide such a thing is so huge that it would have to involve almost as many people as there are outside it.
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Post by Nowhere Man on Oct 29, 2006 19:29:59 GMT -4
No, no, that's not cameron saying that. He's quoting some moke calls himself Hagbard Celine, HC for short. Cameron just hasn't figured out quoting yet.
Fred
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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 Oct 29, 2006 19:35:17 GMT -4
The Earth is in fact not round, it is a spheroid torus; this means that it is hollow with two openings, about 1000 miles across, at each of the poles. It's like a scooped out Halloween pumpkin without a face, but with both ends cut away. HC Please tell me you are joking, the magnitude of any conspiracy able to hide such a thing is so huge that it would have to involve almost as many people as there are outside it. I've only come across the idea in the works of Richard A Lupoff. Never realised anyone would believe it wasn't fiction...
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