Moon landings---a partial 'hoax'?

[SonicG]

Besides the boondoggle of the stranded astronauts, there's this recent story.

NASA Scrapping Finished $450 Million Moon Rover, Will Send Dead Weight "Simulator" to Moon in Its Place
NASA's $450 million lunar explorer, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), will not be going to the Moon. Something else will be taking its place, though — and given the costs involved, the decision is bound to raise a few eyebrows, if not serious questions about the space agency's budget situation.

The rover, which is already fully built, was originally going to be stowed aboard a lunar lander called Griffin, which was developed by the private firm Astrobotic for another $323 million.

Griffin will still go to the Moon. But instead of taking VIPER, the lander will lug along a "mass simulator" in its place — a jargony way of saying that NASA is swapping VIPER out with a nonfunctioning hunk of material that weighs the rover's roughly 950 pounds.

To sum it up, borrowing from Scientific American's reporting: "if VIPER fails to fly, the agency will have spent about $800 million to send literal deadweight to the Moon instead."
***
Rather than getting seven percent more, NASA got two percent less, and it's now stuck with a $24.8 billion budget. That resulted in layoffs and belt-tightening across a number of programs. And it's likely that the budget situation won't improve next year, leaving the fate of ambitious efforts like the Mars Sample Return mission in limbo.
https://futurism.com/nasa-scraps-rover-sends-deadweight

So, around 1/25th of it's budget for this half-ass unmanned lunar explorer. The remaining 24 billion wouldn't be enough for a manned expedition I guess.

[DrEvil]

Not with the SLS at least. It's already cost over 20 billion to build it (that's just the rocket, not the currently stranded capsule, which cost several billions more. And because Boeing is run by MBA fuckheads, they're using people with little to no experience to build the damn things. See also: airplanes falling out of the sky), and each launch is estimated to cost somewhere between 2 and 4 billion dollars.

[BenDhyan]

Chinese VTO, still a little work to do on the L.

[DrEvil]

The Polaris Dawn mission went into the Van Allen Belt recently with four people on board, and... no one died. I'm confused. I've been told repeatedly that we can't go there.

[BenDhyan]

The Chinese will put the radiation CT to rest...

China Unveils its Lunar Spacesuit

China have a roadmap to sent astronauts to the Moon in 2030 and when they do, they are going with a very definite nod to the Chinese origins to the rocket! Their officials have unveiled the new look Chinese space suit with all the mod cons but with a design that is somewhat reminiscent of Chinese armour. There will some fabulous features like the close and long distance field of view visor, a chest control panel and a protective material to shield against the harmful lunar environment.



Think of space exploration and it won’t be long before images of astronauts in space suits appears in your mind. The puffy looking outfits are of crucial importance to human space flight for they are the life-support system, enabling an astronaut to stay alive in space! Providing protection against extreme temperatures, the suit is also able to maintain a constant pressure around the astronaut to protect from the vacuum of space.

[SonicG]

The Polaris Dawn mission went into the Van Allen Belt recently with four people on board, and... no one died. I'm confused. I've been told repeatedly that we can't go there.

Make no mistake, the VA Belts are deadly. The moon missions had to go through the weakest parts:

Further, knowing the belts’ absence above the poles, the altitude of the lower edge of the inner belt being ~600 km (well above the LEO) and the location of the South Atlantic anomaly, where doses are at a high 40 mrads/day at an altitude of 210 km allowed NASA to design the Apollo translunar injection (TLI) orbit in a way that the spacecraft would avoid the belts’ most dangerous parts.

Apollo 11 bypassed the inner belt and only passed through the weaker part of the outer belt (Fig. 4). According to NASA’s ‘The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology’, the high-altitude nuclear tests would have had a significant impact on Apollo orbits but NASA scientists had accounted for this possibility in radiation-protection planning.

It's interesting to ponder that the Earth is protected from deadly rays and radiation by belts of deadly radiation. It's also good to ponder how the Sun is related to all of this...

Sidenote: I don't remember ever hearing about these nuke tests:

In 1962, Van Allen – believing that protons of the inner belt could seriously threaten human spaceflight missions – suggested clearing them away by setting a nuclear bomb off near the outer belt. The particles would then have the extra energy to escape Earth’s magnetic field.

The Americans conducted a series of nuclear tests in the 1960s called Operation Dominic. It included a group of atmospheric tests called the Fishbowl events, designed to understand how nuclear weapon debris would interact with Earth’s magnetic field in the event of a nuclear war. The highest of the Fishbowl events was called Starfish Prime – a 1.4-megaton nuclear bomb detonated at 400 km on July 9, 1962. However, instead of clearing the inner Van Allen belt, it actually added more radiation to it. The Soviet tests in the same year increased the intensity of the inner belt by a million-times, and also destroyed several satellites that were already there.

One of them was Telstar 1, which had been launched just the day after Starfish Prime. It relayed the first TV pictures, fax images and the first-ever transatlantic TV feeds. By October, the increased radiation from the Soviet test had burnt Telstar‘s transistors and it went out of service in 1963.

https://science.nasa.gov/biological-phy ... len-belts/

There are proposals today to try to affect the VA Belts by decreasing their size in order to allow more satellites to orbit in safety.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
The DrEvils and those of his ilk will simply subscribe to the latest update Re: space travel at face value, with minimal/zero discernment or scrutiny.

NASA/SpaceX issue a press release indicating they traversed the Van Allen belts? Yep, that's exactly what happened!

There is no '3rd party' that can corroborate these claimed events.

Meanwhile: the "conspiracy theorists" will doubt these stories and call them out as likely embellishments, etc.

Neither party can know for certain.

Enjoy the narratives.


Note: according to the press releases the primary funder (and one of the passengers/astronauts) is a billionaire by the name of Jared Isaacman, who also owns Draken International (a provider of military aircraft to 'defense industry customers'), which in turn has Blackstone as its parent organization.

[DrEvil]

The Polaris Dawn mission went into the Van Allen Belt recently with four people on board, and... no one died. I'm confused. I've been told repeatedly that we can't go there.

Make no mistake, the VA Belts are deadly. The moon missions had to go through the weakest parts:

Further, knowing the belts’ absence above the poles, the altitude of the lower edge of the inner belt being ~600 km (well above the LEO) and the location of the South Atlantic anomaly, where doses are at a high 40 mrads/day at an altitude of 210 km allowed NASA to design the Apollo translunar injection (TLI) orbit in a way that the spacecraft would avoid the belts’ most dangerous parts.

Apollo 11 bypassed the inner belt and only passed through the weaker part of the outer belt (Fig. 4). According to NASA’s ‘The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology’, the high-altitude nuclear tests would have had a significant impact on Apollo orbits but NASA scientists had accounted for this possibility in radiation-protection planning.

It's interesting to ponder that the Earth is protected from deadly rays and radiation by belts of deadly radiation. It's also good to ponder how the Sun is related to all of this...

Sidenote: I don't remember ever hearing about these nuke tests:

In 1962, Van Allen – believing that protons of the inner belt could seriously threaten human spaceflight missions – suggested clearing them away by setting a nuclear bomb off near the outer belt. The particles would then have the extra energy to escape Earth’s magnetic field.

The Americans conducted a series of nuclear tests in the 1960s called Operation Dominic. It included a group of atmospheric tests called the Fishbowl events, designed to understand how nuclear weapon debris would interact with Earth’s magnetic field in the event of a nuclear war. The highest of the Fishbowl events was called Starfish Prime – a 1.4-megaton nuclear bomb detonated at 400 km on July 9, 1962. However, instead of clearing the inner Van Allen belt, it actually added more radiation to it. The Soviet tests in the same year increased the intensity of the inner belt by a million-times, and also destroyed several satellites that were already there.

One of them was Telstar 1, which had been launched just the day after Starfish Prime. It relayed the first TV pictures, fax images and the first-ever transatlantic TV feeds. By October, the increased radiation from the Soviet test had burnt Telstar‘s transistors and it went out of service in 1963.

https://science.nasa.gov/biological-phy ... len-belts/

There are proposals today to try to affect the VA Belts by decreasing their size in order to allow more satellites to orbit in safety.

I'm well aware, it's not somewhere you want to hang around. It just frustrates me that so many people see "dangerous radiation" and immediately translate it in their heads to "impossible/death". It's a problem they worked their way around in the Apollo era, and they can work their way around it today.

As for atmospheric nukes, I'm just happy Teller's proposal for a 10,000 megaton bomb was scrapped.

Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons. Most of Teller’s testimony remains classified to this day, but other scientists at the meeting recorded, after Teller had left, that they were “shocked” by his proposal. “It would contaminate the Earth,” one suggested. Physicist I. I. Rabi, by then an experienced Teller skeptic, suggested it was probably just an “advertising stunt.”[4] But he was wrong; Livermore would for several years continue working on Gnomon, at least, and had even planned to test a prototype for the device in Operation Redwing in 1956 (but the test never took place).[5]

All of which is to say that the idea of making hydrogen bombs in the hundreds-of-megatons yield range was hardly unusual in the late 1950s. If anything, it was tame compared to the gigaton ambitions of one of the H-bomb’s inventors. It is hard to convey the damage of a gigaton bomb, because at such yields many traditional scaling laws do not work (the bomb blows a hole in the atmosphere, essentially). However, a study from 1963 suggested that, if detonated 28 miles (45 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, a 10,000-megaton weapon could set fires over an area 500 miles (800 kilometers) in diameter. Which is to say, an area about the size of France.[6]

https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-unt ... lear-bomb/

[DrEvil]

.
The DrEvils and those of his ilk will simply subscribe to the latest update Re: space travel at face value, with minimal/zero discernment or scrutiny.

NASA/SpaceX issue a press release indicating they traversed the Van Allen belts? Yep, that's exactly what happened!

There is no '3rd party' that can corroborate these claimed events.

Meanwhile: the "conspiracy theorists" will doubt these stories and call them out as likely embellishments, etc.

Neither party can know for certain.

Enjoy the narratives.


Note: according to the press releases the primary funder (and one of the passengers/astronauts) is a billionaire by the name of Jared Isaacman, who also owns Draken International (a provider of military aircraft to 'defense industry customers'), which in turn has Blackstone as its parent organization.

Do you have any evidence to back your claims? Isaacman is an aerospace junkie. He flies fighter jets because he loves it, and made a business out of training pilots. He's exactly the kind of person you would expect to fund a private space mission (twice. This was his second mission). He's basically a civilian version of the test/fighter pilots that crewed the Apollo program.

I'm all aboard with the possibility there were aspects of the mission we aren't aware of, but to immediately jump to "didn't happen" is ridiculous. At least come up with a plausible explanation for why they would lie about it.

[Belligerent Savant]

What 'evidence' do you have they actually performed the feats advertised in the press clippings?

---------

As a related aside, the following video clip is circulating in social media, inspiring -- as one would expect -- a range of reactions (on one end there are those 'marveling' at the view and one the other end those calling out skewed dimensions, inauthenticity, etc.).

As depicted in the imagery, the storm formation appears to be almost 1/3rd the size of the Earth, and the Earth's curvature appears far more aggressive than expected, among other issues observed when viewing the video clip

One of the more common retorts to the scrutiny (at least as observed online) is that the 'fish eye' lens claimed to be in use to film this imagery -- and other factors -- cause visual distortions. Unfortunately we have no way to verify or corroborate independently.

Leave it to you all to interpret as you deem fit. A Rorschach test of sorts.

Sample still image:


One of the links available of the video clip (i opted for a link absent of editorials/interpretations of the video clip to keep it relatively neutral, but you can find plenty of examples of pro/con arguments out there):

https://x.com/MAstronomers/status/1843901283285324155

[DrEvil]

What 'evidence' do you have they actually performed the feats advertised in the press clippings?

---------

As an (allegedly) normal person, I don't start with the assumption that everyone is lying to me, because that's insane and/or massive levels of projection. If there is zero evidence to suggest someone is lying I tend to assume they're not, because I'm not clinically paranoid. Show me some evidence, or at the very least a plausible theory for why they would be lying and I'll listen. You've done neither.

As a related aside, the following video clip is circulating in social media, inspiring -- as one would expect -- a range of reactions (on one end there are those 'marveling' at the view and one the other end those calling out skewed dimensions, inauthenticity, etc.).

As depicted in the imagary, the storm formation appears to be almost 1/3rd the size of the Earth, and the Earth's curvature appears far more aggressive than expected, among other issues observed when viewing the video clip

One of the more common retorts to the scrutiny (at least as observed online) is that the 'fish eye' lens claimed to be in use to film this imagery -- and other factors -- cause visual distortions. Unfortunately we have no way to verify or corroborate independently.

Leave it to you all to interpret as you deem fit. A Rorschach test of sorts.

Sample still image:


One of the links available of the video clip (i opted for a link absent of editorials/interpretations of the video clip to keep it relatively neutral, but you can find plenty of examples of pro/con arguments out there):

https://x.com/MAstronomers/status/1843901283285324155

Why would they be lying about this? It's a time-lapse taken from the ISS. Big deal.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

As an (allegedly) normal person, I don't start with the assumption that everyone is lying to me, because that's insane and/or massive levels of projection.

To the contrary:
There is AMPLE evidence -- and over the past ~year, even acknowledgement from mainstream sources and govts -- that BIG lies have been told to justify IMMENSE harms to populations. Even the most benign interpretations of these acknowledgements point to various levels of greed, power accumulation, arrogance and/or incompetence (and often all of the above, excluding for the moment indications of more nefarious aims).

This includes false justifications for war, false justifications for lockdowns/mandates, poor disaster management (and worse: explicit efforts to restrict aid to benefit certain parties, to the detriment of victims), mass-scale human/child trafficking cover-ups, "climate alarm" (or if you prefer instead, 'Big Oil') scams enriching the very few, numerous large-scale Ponzi schemes and monetary fraud carried out with complicity by govt representatives and/or previously 'trusted' financial services firms, pharma-related fraud, blackmail (and related criminal) operations in the govt and entertainment sectors, etc, etc.

The above examples are the opposite of "projection"; they were demonstrable events and actual exposures. And these examples are all within the last ~4-5 yrs alone. To act/think as if we haven't been -- and continue to be -- in the midst of egregious levels of deception/criminality is the height of delusion.

As such, operating with an assumption the Space industry -- heavily funded by the Military Industrial Complex, govt militaries and private enterprises -- deserves a blanket assumption of good faith operation is, at best, highly idealistic.
(Doubly so given the justifable scrutiny of their claimed feats over the past 50+ years)

But anyone is entitled to believe what they choose, for as long as their belief systems can contain such narratives. Even if the narratives begin to unravel there is always delusional, cognitive dissonance and other forms of coping mechanisms a human will endure to refuse consideration of other explanations.

This applies to me as well, of course. I may be wrong about this.

But the passage of time has only heightened the level of scrutiny rather than abate it. And it appears this scrutiny is gaining momentum, more broadly, across a number of issues/topics. One can argue the primary drivers of this increase in distrust is social media algorithms & rampant, "dis/misinfo", which certainly has impacted the signal to noise ratio. This is why certain entities are attempting to justify censorship.

There remain 'plausible denials/explanations' for the increased volatility out there.

[DrEvil]

Other people lying about other things isn't an argument in favor of space activities being lied about; that's just a blanket excuse to disbelieve anything and everything you don't like with no further thought required. It's lazy, and you have yet to come up with a good reason for why exactly they're lying about the Polaris Dawn mission (or why they would be faking the hurricane footage from the ISS, or the images from the James Webb telescope for that matter).

Why are they lying about it?

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Those that provide massive funding to the 'Space Race' have LIED, demonstrably, about many things.
Besides the fact that, as mentioned previously and as demonstrated many times here in RI, there are myriad plausibly dubious aspects of the claims made about 'Space Travel' since the early 1960s.

Of course, you and those that share your sentiments are essentially subscribing based on FAITH, not based on any objective assessment (by a truly neutral outside party) or first-hand corroboration.

It's a Modern-Day Religion for the secularists.

(and along parallel tracks: I and others like me expressing cynicism & doubt about 'Space Travel' -- along with many other topics du jour situated on increasingly wobbly foundations -- cannot know with certainty, in all instances, whether or not the cynicism is at least partially off the mark. That said: the passage of time is making the cynics look better with each passing year; arguably, the pace of 'vindication' among cynics seems to be accelerating since ~2020)

Enjoy.

[BenDhyan]

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Of course, you and those that share your sentiments are essentially subscribing based on FAITH, not based on any objective assessment (by a truly neutral outside party) or first-hand corroboration.

It's a Modern-Day Religion for the secularists.

Ahem BS, I've explained before of my first hand experience of working in the space industry during the days of Apollo, link here.
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22930&p=248929&hilit=NASA+Parkes+Satellite+Station+Apollo#p248929

People, I am now retired but spent most of my life in space related satellite communication systems and remote sensing imaging facilities.
During the late 60's, I personally was involved in the relaying of Apollo voice and video links from the Oversea Telecommunications Comission satellite ground station at Moree in NSW Australia, to the Comsat Oakland ground station in California.

Australia played a a vital part in the Apollo missions through the link from the Parkes 200ft diameter radio telescope used for communications between earth and the moon when the the alignment was appropriate. It was voice, data, and video to/from Parkes that was being relayed through the Moree/Oakland satellite link to complete the end to end link, Goddard Manned Space Flight Center to the Apollo Orbiter and Lander. We also relayed data from the Canberra NASA Tidbinbilla space acquisition complex.

During the Apollo missions, on shift we monitored on speakers all voice communications between the astronauts and Goddard space flight controllers while we worked, a remarkedly fascinating and awesome experience for me at the time.

I was also assigned on two occasions to OTC's W.A. Carnarvon satellite ground station that was located adjacent to the NASA's Carnarvon Apollo tracking station complex. The NASA complex was huge with over a hundred Australian technical staff present during the Apollo program, operating and maintaining the Apollo S-band communication links, Data recording and Relay, Apollo Laser Moon Experimental research, High Power Radar Facility, etc.. The OTC facility was staffed 24/7 and served no other purpose to exist than relay Apollo voice and command, control, and telemetry data for NASA Apollo program. I also had friends who worked at the NASA Apollo complex and got to see much of the operations and equipment on my visits.

To suggest that all the money spent on the creation of the Apollo earth wide data acquisition system for support the Apollo moon landing missions, and the good money every one got paid during those years was somehow a part of a hoax is absurd, forget it!