21) During the Apollo 14 flag setup ceremony, the flag would not stop fluttering.
During the setup ceremony? You mean during the time one astronaut had his hand on the pole and was putting it in the ground?
Yeah that's a real puzzle. Why would a flag that had a rod across the top be fluttering while the pole was being put in the ground?
22) With more than a two second signal transmission round trip, how did a camera pan upward to track the departure of the Apollo 16 LEM? Gus Grissom, before he got burned alive in the Apollo I disaster A few minutes before he was burned to death in the Apollo I tragedy, Gus Grissom said, 'Hey, you guys in the control center, get with it. You expect me to go to the moon and you can't even maintain telephonic communications over three miles.' This statement says a lot about what Grissom thought about NASA's progress in the great space race.
Who said it was controlled from Earth? Go back and
watch the video again the camera pitches up and then zooms back to keep the ascent stage in view. That was all predetermined.
Since the LEM had to launch at a very specific time, and follow a very specific trajectory, to rendezvous with the CSM, it is very easy to predict how it will move relative to the Moon. If you pick a spot a certain distance from the LEM, you can determine with very good accuracy how one will have to move the camera to follow the LEM.
As far as Gus is concerned, yes the Apollo 1 ship had major issues. The HBO series
"From the Earth to the Moon" covered this incident in an episode. IIRC, such speech by Gus was characterized as
"Gus being Gus"
23) Why did NASA's administrator resign just days before the first Apollo mission?
From
here
At the height of the Apollo program, Webb was responsible for 35,000 employees and more than 400,000 contractors working for thousands of companies and universities across the United States. When NASA and all of America were shaken by the deaths of the three Apollo 1 astronauts in a pad fire at Cape Kennedy in January 1967, Webb assumed much of the responsibility for the disaster. For the next year and a half he worked tirelessly to restore confidence in NASA, among the general public and within the agency itself. His efforts succeeded with Apollo 7, America's successful return to space, launched on October 11, 1968, just three days after James Webb resigned from NASA.
That would suggest that he felt responsible for the Apollo 1 fire, but stayed on to try and repair the damage before leaving.
24) NASA launched the TETR-A satellite just months before the first lunar mission. The proclaimed purpose was to simulate transmissions coming from the moon so that the Houston ground crews (all those employees sitting behind computer screens at Mission Control) could "rehearse" the first moon landing. In other words, though NASA claimed that the satellite crashed shortly before the first lunar mission (a misinformation lie), its real purpose was to relay voice, fuel consumption, altitude, and telemetry data as if the transmissions were coming from an Apollo spacecraft as it neared the moon. Very few NASA employees knew the truth because they believed that the computer and television data they were receiving was the genuine article. Merely a hundred or so knew what was really going on; not tens of thousands as it might first appear.
From
here
NASA used its TETR-A training satellite to relay voice, pictures, and telemetry data to ground controllers as if it were real data coming from the spacecraft. This way the controllers didn't have to know it was a hoax; they thought they were running a real mission. [Bart Sibrel]
There were two groups of people that dealt with telemetry during Apollo. The operators of the MSFN collected the radio signals from space and relayed them over land lines to the Mission Control Center (MCC) where they were collated and displayed. At MCC, the flight controllers interpreted the data and made decisions affecting the mission.
Because of the design of the MSFN, a satellite was not required to train the MCC controllers. Simulations were easy to set up. The instructors simply disconnected the outlying stations from the MSFN hub and substituted an equivalent stream of simulated data created by their own ground equipment. The controllers at MCC didn't know or care where the data came from. It was specifically designed this way so that simulations would be indistinguishable from the real thing.
So Sibrel can argue it was possible for the ground controllers to be fooled by simulated data. But it doesn't take a satellite to do it.
MSFN Antennas must be precisely aimed, and a low earth orbit satellite cannot mimic the sky position of a translunar spacecraft.
The MSFN operators absolutely can't be fooled by a satellite. Their antennas must be precisely aimed, and a satellite doesn't follow the same path in the sky as an outbound or inbound Apollo spacecraft. They'd know. Their ability to locate the spacecraft in the sky is nothing short of legendary. They took great pride in being able to use the Doppler shift of the radio signal to determine the flight path of the spacecraft. When compared later with flight records, the MSFN ground station operators were proud to have observed motion of the spacecraft due to such subtle effects as waste dumps and sublimator operation.
As seen from earth, an Apollo spacecraft on a translunar trajectory would always be in roughly the same direction as the moon. But the TETR-A satellite was in a 172 × 294 mile (287 × 490 km) orbit that required only 92 minutes to complete one revolution. From a point on earth it would appear to streak across the sky in a matter of minutes.
Mike Dinn, an Australian scientist who worked at the MSFN tracking station in Australia, writes
"It [the TETR-A] had little more than a transponder and some housekeeping telemetry and limited life. It wasn't really needed as we had Lunar Orbiter and Surveyor spacecraft which were used from some training."
If these people cannot be fooled by a satellite then they have to be included in the conspiracy. But they can simply be told to pretend to track a spacecraft and acquire signals from it. The TETR-A satellite would be completely irrelevant.
So the TETR-A satellite is neither necessary to fool MCC controllers nor sufficient to fool MSFN operators. This charge seems to stem more from the conspiracists' knack for spinning a good yarn than from an effort to formulate a plausible theory for how lunar landings might be falsified.
NASA claims that the TETR-A satellite crashed, but that's a misinformational lie. [Bart Sibrel]
Sibrel doesn't elaborate on how he knows the TETR-A was still orbiting well into 1972, despite NASA's claim that it de-orbited and burned up on April 28, 1968.
Objects already in orbit pose a collision hazard to launches. Spacefaring nations habitually track spaceborne objects that might interfere with their launches. So if NASA claims its satellite burned up, but it was really still up there, the Soviets would have seen it. It's not as easy to hide a satellite as Sibrel believes.
25) In 1998, the Space Shuttle flew to one of its highest altitudes ever, three hundred and fifty miles, hundreds of miles below merely the beginning of the Van Allen Radiation Belts. Inside of their shielding, superior to that which the Apollo astronauts possessed, the shuttle astronauts reported being able to "see" the radiation with their eyes closed penetrating their shielding as well as the retinas of their closed eyes. For a dental x-ray on Earth which lasts 1/100th of a second we wear a 1/4 inch lead vest. Imagine what it would be like to endure several hours of radiation that you can see with your eyes closed from hundreds of miles away with 1/8 of an inch of aluminium shielding!
On what basis do you say the Shuttle has "superior" shielding? Of course I don't think this author has a clue regarding radiation since they think that their eyelids should stop radiation.
Yes, the skin will stop alpha or beta radiation, but so will the outside of the ship. So if we are surprised that it could get through their eyes, why wouldn't the skin of the ship stop it?
For a very simple reason, it's not alpha or beta radiation but gamma.
Have you ever heard of something called Bremsstrahlung radiation? It's a type of gamm radiation produced when high energy particles hit metal (i.e. cosmic rays, alpha and beta radiation).
It just happens to be the case that aluminum is the most efficent element for producing this type of radiation, which is what a good part of both spacecraft are made of, but I digress.
The fact that the astronauts could "see" the radiation on that shuttle mission says nothing about how much dose they received.
26) The Apollo 1 fire of January 27, 1967, killed what would have been the first crew to walk on the Moon just days after the commander, Gus Grissom, held an unapproved press conference complaining that they were at least ten years, not two, from reaching the Moon. The dead man's own son, who is a seasoned pilot himself, has in his possession forensic evidence personally retrieved from the charred spacecraft (that the government has tried to destroy on two or more occasions). Gus Grissom was obviously trying to make a big statement as he placed a lemon in the window of the Apollo I spacecraft as it sat ready for launch!
Uh Apollo 1 was not going to be a lunar landing mission, it was going to be the first test flight of the Apollo and Service Module.
Yes the spacecraft had issues and the lemon was the exact incident that was "Gus being Gus" I referred to earlier.
I also find the suggestion that someone was able to remove anything from the Apollo 1 spacecraft and keep it themselve simply not credible.
27) CNN issued the following report, "The radiation belts surrounding Earth may be more dangerous for astronauts than previously believed (like when they supposedly went through them thirty years ago to reach the Moon.) The phenomenon known as the 'Van Allen Belts' can spawn (newly discovered) 'Killer Electrons' that can dramatically affect the astronauts' health."
I'll see your CNN and raise you a
IEEE Spectrum
31 August 2007—Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, say they have solved the mystery of satellite-zapping ”killer electrons” that are sometimes produced in Earth’s outer atmosphere. These highly energetic electrons—strong enough to damage electronics and human tissue—pose a danger to spacecraft, satellites, and astronauts. For many years, the mechanism by which they are produced has remained little understood, in spite of physicists’ attempts at solving this puzzle.
Note the part in bold. Since they pose a danger to satalites, yet satalites don't all fail all the time, clearly this phenomena is not something that happens all the time but is relatively rare.
Since the apollo astronauts spent only a few hours in Earth orbit, it doesn't require any explination why a rare event didn't zap them.
28) In 1969 computer chips had not been invented. The maximum computer memory was 256k, and this was housed in a large air conditioned building. In 2002 a top of the range computer requires at least 64 Mb of memory to run a simulated Moon landing, and that does not include the memory required to take off again once landed. The alleged computer on board Apollo 11 had 32k of memory. That's the equivalent of a simple calculator.
First, the Apollo computer was the first IC,
according to Wiki.
Second, as I said before, so what if they had limited computing power? Not everything has to be controlled by computers you know.
29) If debris from the Apollo missions was left on the Moon, then it would be visible today through a powerful telescope, however no such debris can be seen. The Clementine probe that recently mapped the Moons surface failed to show any Apollo artefacts left by Man during the missions. Where did the Moon Buggy and base of the LM go?
Someone already posted just such a photo.
