Reflecting Signals

[Jairo]

What would be the hoax signs in the transmissions if the Apollo were unmanned ships bouncing signals back from Earth?

[JayUtah]

Some signs would depend on further assumptions.

The orbital behavior of the spacecraft will need to be carefully controlled. The ability to receive signals from a spacecraft depends on the ability to locate it precisely in the sky. The apparent position of a spacecraft in the sky depends entirely on orbital mechanics. One tenet of orbital mechanics is that a sequence or pattern of observations in the sky corresponds exactly to one orbital geometry. That is, it is not physically possible to put a spacecraft in one orbit and purport that it is instead in an entirely different orbit while allowing anyone to locate it from time to time in the sky.

What this means is that an Apollo facsimile will have to perform the maneuvers specified in the Apollo flight plan in order to mimic Apollo's path in space. There is no other way. Generally this runs counter to the claim that Apollo spacecraft were not possible given the existing technology; in fact such an unmanned facsimile would require more of the allegedly impossible technology.

If the appearance of real-time ad hoc communication is desired, then the actual location of the astronauts becomes important. If transmissions containing astronaut voices are to be heard coming from the relay, then they must either originate there as a recording or be transmitted up from Earth.

The former requires the recording to be placed on board at launch, precluding discussion of later headlines, sports scores, and Earth weather. These were frequent topics of conversation, with the astronauts' voices clearly responding with content that cannot have been anticipated prior to launch.

The latter incurs the problem of transmitting the Earthbound astronauts' voices up to the relay.

In the simplest case, the crew would be secreted in a room away from the controllers. The controller speaks, and the voice is ostensibly transmitted to the spacecraft, requiring time T = d*c, where d is the distance and c is the speed of light. A crew response would be expected roughly 2*T after the ground transmission. The isolated crew instead hears the controller instantly, then makes a response that is transmitted to the relay (requiring time T) and then is sent back down (requiring additional time T, for a total of 2*T).

Unfortunately the simple case rarely occurs. More common is overlapping and aborted communications caused by respondents hearing delayed transmissions. That is, the controller and the crew being to speak roughly simultaneously; the signals cross in mid-space and each stops talking when he hears the arrival of the other's statement.

Further, this requires either the collusion of the ground crews to uplink the relay, or else a completely parallel ground communication network. Since the network we know about, the MSFN, used a variety of privately owned circuits we know it would be largely impossible to hide nefarious uplinks or build a different network.

[Fnord Fred]

Would it be correct to say that if there was a ground transmission that it could be picked up as well, or was there a way to direct ground communications in such a way as to avoid being picked up by radio enthusiasts in the area?

It seems to me that if NASA tried to relay the message, there would be 'echoes' - the message coming back from Apollo would partially overwrite the message that was being sent to it for broadcast when listened to if one had both a radio capable of picking up Apollo transmissions and one for ground transmissions.

[JayUtah]

It is generally advantageous to transmit in a tight beam in order to preserve radiative power as much as possible. This has the happy side effect of making it difficult to intercept the signal. So it would be possible to transmit to the relay without much fear of interception on the ground. However such a transmission would be visible to any receiver located in space, such as a satellite or a moon probe.

Overwriting is generally not a problem as uplink and downlink occur on different and non-harmonic frequencies.

[Jairo]

Jay, couldn´t the overlapping communication effect be achieved by introducing a delay for the astronauts on Earth?

[JayUtah]

Yes, but then that delay would compound as you transmitted it to the relay and it would be overall too long a delay. The only way you get an appropriate 2*T delay is if you transmit the astronauts' statements immediately as they say it, so that a round trip via the relay takes time 2*T. If you introduce an arbitrary constant delay, U, to create the overlap, the observed delay is now 2*T+U, which becomes embarrassing as U approaches T -- 3*T. U would have to approach T in order to produce credible interruption patterns.

[Fnord Fred]

Has there been any experimental research into engineering a means of relaying messages this way and making them appear to come from somewhere they don't? Perhaps something similar to this was tried in another field...

[JayUtah]

I'm told that Mike Dinn and another Apollo enthusiast came up with a way specifically to mimic Apollo signals, but it was way complicated. In general when you're dealing with directional signals it's hard to redirect them undetectably.

[brotherofthemoon]

I think the fact that we got jovial, real-time commentary from the astronauts about the previous night's baseball game sure sign that the transmissions are real.

Of course, NASA might have sent time travelers into the future to gather important data on sporting events. Heck, if they lob telepathically lob their ex-astronauts from motorcycles, time travel wouldn't be out of the question.

[JayUtah]

Yeah that's the key. Any scenario you come up with to fake Apollo radio traffic has to be less difficult to accomplish than a genuine Apollo mission. The goal is not to come up with something that mimics it, no matter how complicated you have to make it.

[Fnord Fred]

brotherofthemoon said:

I think the fact that we got jovial, real-time commentary from the astronauts about the previous night's baseball game sure sign that the transmissions are real.

Of course, NASA might have sent time travelers into the future to gather important data on sporting events. Heck, if they lob telepathically lob their ex-astronauts from motorcycles, time travel wouldn't be out of the question.

The brother's got a point there. Heck, they might have been able to send three guys on a rocket to the moon.

On second thought... nah. That's crazy.

[dwight]

While John Saxon was driving me to both Tidbinbilla and the former HSK site, we touched upon the whole "hoax theory". John's attitude was thus: those folk won't believe what you say no matter what, so why bother?. He knows he was conducting real tracking of a real spacecraft on the real lunar surface. He knows all about the nuances of tracking that the likes of Sibrel and his ragamuffin mates will never even have a cursory grasp of, therefore why should he even waste his time arguing with them.

As someone who deals with satellite TX daily, I can say I was humbled being shown the tracking stations by Mr Saxon. The guy knows more about tracking than I ever possibly will, and that includes burying my head in the documentation for weeks on end. Hardly a suspect for being rused don't you think?

I neglected to ask Mike Dinn about his "fake" tests as I was not aware of them at the time. However, I can surely ask him should anyone require specifics of the tests.

Curiously neither man was evasive about any question I posed to them. And trust me I asked them everything from the hoax, to my German ancestry (remember these guys were British and lived through WW2), to the real time print outs of Ed Fendell's video camera commands at HSK. They answered all questions with openness and clarity that was a refreshing change to the pontification I hear from pop stars (on a daily basis).

While John and Mike might not want to argue the hoax, I certainly do, and happily I have a nice supply of tracking facts from people who sat at the consoles. I just wish I had Jay's ability to avoid spontaneous age regression when dealing with the merda-stirer hoax crowd out there.

[PeterB]

I've been covering points related to this in my discussions with Co(s)mic Dave.

I pointed out that the the tracking stations pointed their dishes straight at the Moon and got a signal. This meant the signal had to be coming from the Moon.

Dave suggested there could be a satellite up there broadcasting a signal from a Secret Faking Base on Earth. But Dave appears to have been assuming that the satellite would be in Earth orbit. I pointed out that the way a satellite could permanently remain between the Earth and the Moon was if it was located at the relevant LaGrange point, more than 300,000 kilometres from the Earth. If it was relaying signals from the Secret Faking Base on Earth, that would cause longer than recorded signal delays.

[gwiz]

peterb said:

I've been covering points related to this in my discussions with Co(s)mic Dave.

I pointed out that the the tracking stations pointed their dishes straight at the Moon and got a signal. This meant the signal had to be coming from the Moon.

Dave suggested there could be a satellite up there broadcasting a signal from a Secret Faking Base on Earth. But Dave appears to have been assuming that the satellite would be in Earth orbit. I pointed out that the way a satellite could permanently remain between the Earth and the Moon was if it was located at the relevant LaGrange point, more than 300,000 kilometres from the Earth. If it was relaying signals from the Secret Faking Base on Earth, that would cause longer than recorded signal delays.

Further difficulties with Dave's theory include Doppler shift due to the orbital motion of the spacecraft and the timing of signal cut-off due to the spacecraft going behind the moon. Not only would a fake have to get these right for both CSM and LM, but also have to send different corrections to different parts of the earth to compensate for the additional Doppler (vector addition, that is) due to the earth's rotation.

[gezalenko]

Presumably the delay also varied from ~short in earth orbit to ~long in lunar orbit and gradually growing in between on the Trans Lunar Coast, and vice versa on return.

OT - I just Googled TLC to make sure that was the right term, and discovered the Passive Thermal Control maneouvre, which I didn't know about before. It never occurred to me that it would be needed, but when you think about it, it's obvious. Boy, that was one thorough hoax !