Rocks from the Moon

[Mr Gorsky]

Without wanting to stray too far off topic, I just thought it might be helpful to nail margamatix' red herring here concerning "experts".

It is true that Sir Roy Meadow was struck off the medical register for giving misleading evidence in child death cases, leading (wrongly) to the incarceration of several parents for many years.

However, his misleading evidence was not founded on a failure of his expertise as a doctor, but as a statistician (something he never claimed to be, and has no "expert" status in whatsoever). He was passed a bunch of statistics which he misinterpreted and then testified to the court on the basis of his misinterpretation.

So, far from demonstrating that you cannot trust experts to get it right, margamatix actually reinforces the point that if you want to understand something properly, and get to the truth, you need to speak to those who know what they are talking about - and in Apollo's case that means rocket scientists, physicists and geologists and not pension specialists (like me) or truck drivers (like margamatix).

[margamatix]

peterb said:

Hi Margamatix

. And anyway, an unmanned Lunar Module couldn’t collect rocks, so how does that answer my original question?

Surely you are not suggesting that it would be possible to build a rocket which could carry a vehicle 240,000 miles into moon orbit, it would be possible for a part of that vehicle to detatch itself and make a 60 mile controlled descent to the moon surface, it would be possible for this lander to then take off from the moon, go back into moon orbit and dock with the mother ship, and return 240,000 miles to Earth.....


And yet it would not be possible to build a machine which could pick up rocks?

[gdwarf]

margamatix said:

peterb said:

Hi Margamatix

. And anyway, an unmanned Lunar Module couldn’t collect rocks, so how does that answer my original question?

Surely you are not suggesting that it would be possible to build a rocket which could carry a vehicle 240,000 miles into moon orbit, it would be possible for a part of that vehicle to detatch itself and make a 60 mile controlled descent to the moon surface, it would be possible for this lander to then take off from the moon, go back into moon orbit and dock with the mother ship, and return 240,000 miles to Earth.....


And yet it would not be possible to build a machine which could pick up rocks?

Those are completely unrelated fields. Just becuase we can build a car and we can build planes doesn't mean we can build a car that can fly.

[Bob B.]

margamatix said:

Surely you are not suggesting that it would be possible to build a rocket which could carry a vehicle 240,000 miles into moon orbit, it would be possible for a part of that vehicle to detatch itself and make a 60 mile controlled descent to the moon surface, it would be possible for this lander to then take off from the moon, go back into moon orbit and dock with the mother ship, and return 240,000 miles to Earth.....

And yet it would not be possible to build a machine which could pick up rocks?

It is not good enough simply to suggest such a robotic vehicle could have existed. You have to provide evidence that it actually did exist. There are mountains of evidence demonstrating the existence of manned Apollo missions, but not one piece of evidence indicating that an unmanned robotic sample return program ever existed. On the basis of evidence, the manned mission hypothesis wins in a landslide over the competing hypothesis. If you want us to believe other wise you had better start producing hard evidence rather than idle speculation.

[sts60]

Of course it was possible to build a machine which could scoop up a lunar sample. The Soviets did so, and returned a little bit - still quite valuable scientifically.

Apollo was designed for humans to collect the samples. It's a lot of work to get humans to, onto, and back from the Moon safely, but when they're on the surface they are far better at collecting a large amount of varied samples than any machine. That's why we have hundreds of kilograms of samples, instead of less than a single kilogram. And it's why the samples include not just stuff dredged up from the surface in a limited area, but a wide variety from geologically interesting places that the astronauts could get to, including drill samples.

You seem to be implicitly acknowledging that the samples did indeed come from the Moon. That's good; we're making some progress. However, if you think that they were somehow retrieved via machines rather than by the Apollo missions, the burden of proof is on you to (a) disprove the ability of the Apollo program to retrieve them and (b) demonstrate the existence of a completely separate sample-retrieval mission of a scale orders of magnitude greater than the Soviets'. It's no good to just say "it could have happened that way".

[TaeKwonDan]

margamatix said:

peterb said:

Hi Margamatix

. And anyway, an unmanned Lunar Module couldn’t collect rocks, so how does that answer my original question?

Surely you are not suggesting that it would be possible to build a rocket which could carry a vehicle 240,000 miles into moon orbit, it would be possible for a part of that vehicle to detatch itself and make a 60 mile controlled descent to the moon surface, it would be possible for this lander to then take off from the moon, go back into moon orbit and dock with the mother ship, and return 240,000 miles to Earth.....


And yet it would not be possible to build a machine which could pick up rocks?

Interesting. So you're saying that we could build a lunar lander that was stable enough to land and then take off from the moon? Doesn't that kind of invalidate your favoritist quote by Mr. Sibrel?

Secondly, we could build a machine that does that, but prove to me that we could build one as discerning as a human being. That was part of the advantage of sending a person. They could decide which rocks to keep and which to throw away. Something noticeably absent with the recent Mars rover.

[JayUtah]

We have the technology to send unmanned vessels to the moon.

We do now. We had very limited capacity in 1969. Keep in mind you can't bluff your way through this kind of argument. You're talking to people whose jobs are, or have been, to build and operate spacecraft.

Although it would have been extremely difficult to do in 1969...

More, or less, difficult than sending a spacecraft with a skilled human pilot? Please answer.

...it falls within the realms of possibility that such a vessel could have collected rocks and returned to Earth with them at this time.

It is irrelevant whether it "falls within the realm of possibility." This is not an exercise where you get to deny one pre-rejected conclusion just because you can think up some hairbrained alternative. You're trying to lay on us a burden of proof whereby we have to show that Apollo is not just the best explanation for the moon rocks, but the only possible explanation. That is a completely unreasonable standard of proof.

If you suspect a witness in court is lying, you don't get to impeach his testimony against you simply by suggesting he's lying. You have to prove it. He only has to show that it's likely he's not lying, not that it's utterly impossible under any circumstances for him to be lying.

The Apollo samples are not just "rocks". They are differentiated samples, documented samples, and specially extracted samples such as core samples that still cannot be done by remote probe even with today's technology. Some individual Apollo rocks weigh several kilograms.

It's worth pointing out here though, that the USSR did not find it possible to do this until the Luna 20 project in 1972.

The Soviets collected a grand total of 10 ounces of lunar material from their sample-return missions, and got no large rocks. Assuming NASA would have had approximately the same capacity to obtain samples as the Soviets, then obtaining their 840 pounds of lunar material would require approximately 2,700 missions. That's more space missions than have been flown for all purposes since American space travel began.

If we say, just for giggles, that all 840 pounds had to be collected between 1960 and 1975, that means a successful sample-return mission had to launch once every two days. Where is your evidence for such a vast fleet of little robot spacecraft plying the cislunar ocean? Where is your evidence for all those launches?

Which is more likely: that the lunar samples were picked up by the astronauts we saw doing it on television, having traveled there in spacecraft whose designs and principles of operation are well-documented and affirmed by all qualified experts today, and examples of which have survived for our inspection? Or that the samples were obtained via an unmanned program of still-unprecedented scale and scope, which has remained totally, utterly secret for 40 years with no trace whatsoever that it actually existed?

You can't avoid having your hypothesis pitted against all the others. It doesn't matter whether your sample-return theory is possible. It matters only whether it's more likely or less than the other hypotheses that have been considered. Just like the notion that they were fabricated doesn't measure up, the notion that America got its moon rocks via sample-return missions just doesn't measure up either.

If it had all really happened, don't you think we would have landed and returned an unmanned craft before trying with a manned one?

No.

First, you don't learn what you need to know about solving problems by designing a machine to do it without human intervention. Typically automated means are possible only after a human pilot has acquired his expertise.

Second, if NASA's goal had simply been to get rocks from the moon, they might have considered a sample-return mission. But their goal was to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth. There was no room in such a program for a duplicate effort involving different, unmanned technology. As long as you're committed to sending a human pilot, might as well have him get some rocks too, as long as he's there.

[sts60]

Now that margamatix apparently agrees that it was possible to soft-land on the Moon and take off from it again, and that the lunar samples are genuine, we only need to consider the claim that they were somehow returned robotically.

Unless margamatix has some really spectacular evidence, this proposition fails immediately for two main reasons:

1. It is unparsimonius. Apollo was supposed to get lots of lunar samples and bring them back. There is a staggering amount of documentation, hardware, testimony, and other historical evidence consistent with just that happening. There is no need for an alternate explanation.

2. Subversion of support, or more properly absence of support. There is no evidence - none - for the alleged robotic retrieval program. As far as I know, the hoax believers haven't even tried to make any up - just vague references to "black" programs and the like.

It seems to me that we could move on with the other threads. margamatix seems to agree that soft landings and returns from the Moon were possible, and that the lunar samples could not have been faked; and there's no viable alternate explanation to the retrieval method of record (i.e., Apollo landings).

[JayUtah]

Surely you are not suggesting that it would be possible to build a rocket which could carry a vehicle 240,000 miles into moon orbit, it would be possible for a part of that vehicle to detatch itself and make a 60 mile controlled descent to the moon surface, it would be possible for this lander to then take off from the moon, go back into moon orbit and dock with the mother ship, and return 240,000 miles to Earth.....

You left out a very important feature: a highly-skilled, well-trained human pilot.

Without a pilot, Apollo 11 would have crashed on the moon. Apollo 14 would have crashed. Apollo 16 would have failed to initiate descent.

And yet it would not be possible to build a machine which could pick up rocks?

It is still impossible to build a machine that can have collected the Apollo samples. The Apollo lunar surface samples are not just a big undifferentiated vat of rocks and dirt.

Further, to perform reliably a complicated mission like the Apollo landings unmanned (as opposed to sample-return missions, which have a simpler profile and a much higher failure rate) would require considerable automation, since the key manuevers happen on the far side of the moon, out of radio contact.

You just got done telling us the computers that were provided -- even for the manned mission -- were inadequate just for that task. Now you're trying to tell us that it was possible for NASA to create and rely on even more automation than that. How do you propose to perform an LOR mission -- unmanned -- with no more automation than a pocket caculator?

This is why I have a hard time believing you are sincere. You just change the rules whenever you need to. Your assessment of NASA's capability changes willy-nilly depending on what you need to be true in order for your conclusions to hold. If you're talking about Apollo then NASA is inept and unequal to the task. If you're talking about your hypothetical secret missions to get moonrocks, then NASA are all of a sudden geniuses again.

[sts60]

One of the things people don't seem to consider (especially HBs) is the question of useful power on the surface.

It takes a lot of energy to do work on the surface. Picking up and carrying samples is a lot of work. Just because I can shove around tons of Earth easily with a bulldozer or front-end loader doesn't mean it's easy for a machine to pick up many kilograms of rocks on the Moon's surface. Last time I checked, Diesel engines ran poorly in a vacuum.

There were five energy sources on the Moon:
1. Rocket propellant. Very powerful for short durations. Useful only for generating thrust in rockets.
2. Batteries. Fairly powerful for short durations. Useful for powering drills, instruments, and rolling things like the LRV.
3. Solar cells. A small amount of power lasting for a lunar day. Useful for low-power sensors and radios. Nighttime put an end to them - the temperature cycle trashed the solar cells.
4. Atomic decay (direct conversion to electricity). A moderate amount of power for long durations. Used exclusively to power the ALSEP science packages.
5. Biochemistry. The astronauts converted food, water, and oxygen into muscle motion. Much better for a couple of days of reconaissance, digging, sample collection, etc. Tightly coupled with the complete package of realtime vision, analysis, and decision-making that only humans have.

This is still true more than three decades later. Getting humans to another celestial body is expensive and takes lots of spectacular rocketry - more than is necessary to get a machine there. But the human is still far more suited to the task of large-scale, selective sample retrieval than any machine. And far more powerful than any machine yet built to operate on a planetary surface*. Even the Volkswagen Beetle-sized, radiosotope-powered Mars Surface Lab currently scheduled for a 2009 launch won't have the combination of brains and brawn that a five-foot-nine-inch astronaut had in 1969.


*other than Earth, of course.

[Bob B.]

margamatix said:

It's worth pointing out here though, that the USSR did not find it possible to do this until the Luna 20 project in 1972.

Luna 20 was the second Soviet sample return mission. The first was Luna 16 in September 1970.

jayutah said:

The Soviets collected a grand total of 10 ounces of lunar material from their sample-return missions, and got no large rocks.

The total amount of lunar material returned by the three Soviet sample-return missions (Luna 16, 20 & 24) has an equivalent mass of a single tennis ball-sized rock.

[Mr Gorsky]

Hang on a second ... so margamatix argument has now shifted from

It was not possible for the Apollo craft (containing a skilled human pilot) to land on the moon because the computers of the day weren't up to it.

to

The computers of the day were good enough to allow a completely robotic mission to retrieve lunar rock samples

?

Seems to me it would be far easier (even today) to build a spacecraft that could be piloted by a human being than to build one that had to do everything for itself, or through some kind of remote instructions from an earth bound station.

[margamatix]

mrgorsky said:

Hang on a second ... so margamatix argument has now shifted from

It was not possible for the Apollo craft (containing a skilled human pilot) to land on the moon because the computers of the day weren't up to it.

to

The computers of the day were good enough to allow a completely robotic mission to retrieve lunar rock samples

?

.

Neither scenario was possible at the time, but the latter would have been the easier to develop.

The most difficult part of any moon landing, should we ever do one, will be in keeping the human beings alive.

[Bob B.]

margamatix said:

Neither scenario was possible at the time, but the latter would have been the easier to develop.

If neither was possible, then where did the 840 pounds of rock, soil, and core samples come from? And please provide the evidence to support your explanation.

[JayUtah]

Neither scenario was possible at the time, but the latter would have been the easier to develop.

How many automated systems have you personally designed and built? Please answer. How many man-rated technology projects have you designed and built? Please answer.

The most difficult part of any moon landing, should we ever do one, will be in keeping the human beings alive.

How many space systems have you personally designed and operated? Please answer.

Since you seem to be trying to educate us on how crewed systems work, how space travel works, and the various issues involved in automation versus pilotage, you must now establish your expertise to speak authoritatively on these topics.