November
22, 2009
by David McGowan
“Whenever I saw a model of the lunar module, it
had these rigid sides and [it] really looked strong. Turns out that external
portions of the lunar module are made up of Mylar and cellophane and it’s put together
with Scotch tape and staples. We had to have pads on the floor ‘cause if you
dropped a screwdriver, it would go right through the floor.”
Jim Lovell, Astronaut (Gemini 7, Gemini 12,
Apollo 8, Apollo 13)
A quick note before moving on: a little research
has revealed that NASA now acknowledges that maintaining clean-room conditions
on space exploration vehicles while performing EVAs on planetary bodies poses a
bit of a problem. The agency’s solution is something known as a ‘suitport.’ The
basic idea is to design a rear-entry spacesuit that will remain attached to the
exterior of the vehicle when not in use. The astronaut will enter through the
rear of the suit and then detach himself from the vehicle. Reentry will require
reversing the procedure.
NASA has even generously provided an image of a
proposed lunar rover with two integrated suitports, as seen above. The agency
feels that such technology will be required for any ‘return’ trips to the Moon
or for landing on and exploring other planets. As with the space radiation
shield that will also be required for any ‘return’ trips to the Moon, NASA
offers no explanation for why such technology was not required back in 1969.
Moving on then to the lunar module’s propulsion
system, we are informed that “the LEM was equipped with two very different
rockets. The first, the so-called descent engine, would take the LEM from the
command module down toward the lunar surface. It was an entirely new and
untried piece of technology.” Adds talking-head Stoff, “Up until this point
in history, no one had ever built a rocket engine with a throttle. Either they
were on or they were off.”
Since the LEMs never had to actually perform as
advertised, it’s doubtful that they actually had a throttle. It’s doubtful that
they even had engines. We’re going to play along though and pretend as though
they did.
Lynn Radcliffe, who managed the facility at
White Sands that was specially constructed to test and develop the LEM’s rocket
engines, describes the technology required to land the lunar modules: “This was
an unbelievable maneuver when you stop and think about it. You’re
sitting on a column of thrust, just hovering there, like a, a helicopter, and
then as you let it go, the throttle, a little bit, you lower it just a few feet
per second until you make contact. All of this is an amazing set of
requirements to put on anyone trying to design a rocket.”
Radcliffe is absolutely right; I did stop to
think about it and it is unbelievable. What’s interesting here though is that
when I described the technique that would have been used to land the
modules as being very similar to the landing of a helicopter, some of the
‘debunkers’ got their panties all in a wad over it. And yet here we have the
guy who oversaw the development of the rocket engines describing the alleged
landings in exactly the same manner, so I guess we can safely conclude
that he really doesn’t know what he is talking about either.
And Gene Cowart, who served as Boeing’s chief
engineer on the lunar rover project from 1969 through 1971, didn’t know what he
was talking about either when he noted that the “LEM, when it comes down over
the Moon, does not immediately just set down. It hovers over the Moon.” And
Charlie Duke, the alleged pilot of the Apollo 16 lunar module, was no doubt
mistaken as well when he recently told James May (James May on the Moon)
that flying the lander “was like flying a helicopter.”
Amusingly enough, while the landing of the
lunar module was being described on Moon Machines, vintage animation
from the gang at NASA/Grumman was displayed on the screen. Below are a couple
of screen-caps of that animation. As with the verbal descriptions, of course,
I’m sure that this is just another case of the folks who actually designed
and/or operated the technology being clueless about how it was supposed to
work. As many readers are surely aware, the only people who really know
how all that technology was supposed to work are modern-day heroes like Phil
Pliet and Jay Windbag.
As it turns out, designing that
throttle-equipped descent engine was child’s play compared with the task of
perfecting the spacecraft’s second rocket engine. As our narrator solemnly intoned,
“it was the module’s second rocket, the so-called ascent engine, that caused
Grumman the most lost sleep. It didn’t need a throttle, but it did need to work
with absolute reliability.”
As Lynn Radcliffe noted, “You’re totally
dependent on the ascent engine to work to put you back in orbit. If for any
reason the ascent engine failed to work, the astronauts are doomed.” Dick
Dunne, Grumman’s Director of Public Relations during the time of the alleged
Apollo missions, described the astronauts’ predicament in stark terms: “Two
astronauts were going to climb into this thing and essentially they were going
to press a button, and if it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t, there weren’t
many things that they could do about it.”
To keep the operation of the engine as simple
as possible, so-called hypergolic propellants were used – which is to say, a
fuel and an oxidizer that explode on contact. That simplicity though came at a
price: “the fuels were extremely toxic.” What most concerned Grumman’s
engineers was “that the fuel was so corrosive that at the end of a test, each
engine had to be rebuilt. It meant the final assembly of an engine could
never be tested!”
“Unbelievably,” explains Radcliffe, “the first
time these engines would ever have been fired, ever – no
check-out at the factory – the first time would be when they were fired on
their mission.” As Dunne noted, “I don’t think that anyone could, at that time,
tell you 100% that it was gonna work.”
Seeing as how the engines were completely
untested – both in terms of being able to operate within the environment of the
Moon and in terms of the individual engines being factory tested to see if
they worked at all – Dunne’s evaluation would seem to be a bit of an
understatement. Luckily though, none of the landers actually made it to the
Moon, so whether the engines worked or not is a bit of a moot point.
Another problem the Grumman team faced was how to adequately insulate
the vehicle from the intense heat of the unshielded sun (there was, curiously
enough, no mention throughout the hour about the necessity of shielding the
craft from space radiation). As Stoff noted, “You have to insulate the
spacecraft as well as possible because there’s huge fuel tanks in there and the
fuel’s gonna boil [if not adequately protected].” Also, we are informed, the
huge temperature variations on the Moon “could also cause the craft to buckle.”
Unmentioned was that it could be a wee bit uncomfortable for the astronauts as
well.
Since weight was an issue, heavy heat shields
could not be used. Luckily though, “Dupont had developed this new material – it
was aluminized Mylar. It was a gold color, and they found if you built it up to
perhaps twenty-five layers, it’s an excellent insulator.” Dupont’s space-age
material, as we all know, can be obtained pretty inexpensively these days. And
it’s still a very lightweight material. I wonder why it is then that you rarely
see spaceships wrapped in it anymore?
Meanwhile, down in
Of course it was. Why waste time with a
simulator when the real thing was going to be so much easier? And NASA, no
doubt, knew that that would be the case before we even faked going to the Moon.
I’m pretty sure that Armstrong was pulled aside and told: “Don’t worry about
almost being killed in that simulator. The real thing is going to be so
much easier. You’ll see when you get up there. Just trust us on this one. And
we’re fairly certain that there is at least a slim possibility that the ascent
engine will work when it’s time for you and Buzz to come home. Unless, you
know, you guys happen to get a dud. There’s really no way for anyone to know
for sure until you get there and try to fire it up. Have a safe trip.”
In the summer of 1967, the first space-ready
LEM was delivered to
The lunar module never made it aboard that
impressive looking rocket ship. Upon delivery, the module was found to have
“hundreds of problems,” including bad wiring, faulty parts, an abundance of
poor workmanship, and, most alarmingly, serious leaks throughout the fuel
system. Grumman had neglected, it seemed, to perform any pre-flight checks.
Worse yet, as Grumman’s team raced to correct the numerous problems, a pressure
test caused a window to blow out, blasting jagged holes in the skin of the
craft and sending debris flying throughout the formerly dust-free module.
The cause of the blowout was never determined. NASA
and Grumman though decided to take the “Fuck it! What’s the worst that could
happen?” approach and merely replaced the window and ignored the failed
pressure test, making no design changes to the modules. After all, there was a
timetable to adhere to.
In the end, as we all know, the lunar modules
performed flawlessly. According to legend, Neil Armstrong, ever the cool one,
set the first LEM down with barely fifteen seconds of fuel remaining in the
tank. And when he and Buzz fired up that ascent engine for the very first time,
it popped them off the surface of the Moon as if they were riding on a
champaign cork. As it turned out though, the lunar module had not yet faced its
toughest challenge.
In the spring of 1970, fittingly enough on
April 13, Apollo 13’s command and service modules were allegedly rendered
powerless by an explosion on the ship while cruising through space some 200,000
miles from home (though in official NASA footage, the windows of the module are
filled with blue light, not the blackness of space). The oxygen tank explosion
was allegedly powerful enough to do serious damage to the exterior of the
craft, but apparently not powerful enough to alter the course of the ship. That
was a lucky break for the guys.
The three-man crew allegedly retreated to the
two-man LEM, which, as we know, had its own oxygen and fuel supplies. Not only
did the LEM allegedly keep the brave trio alive, but its descent engine was
allegedly used to ‘slingshot’ the crippled spacecraft around the Moon and set in
on a course back to Earth!
Their ordeal wasn’t over though. While camped
out in the LEM, the Apollo 13 astronauts were allegedly faced with another
life-threatening situation: carbon dioxide was rapidly building in the ship’s
confined airspace. Lithium hydroxide cartridges were supposed to remove the
carbon dioxide, but there was a limited supply of said cartridges in the LEM.
Luckily though, there were additional cartridges in the command module. But
they were incompatible; the command module’s cartridges were square while those
in the LEM were round.
What to do then? According to Moon Machines,
the brain-trust down at mission control had a brilliant idea: “NASA suggested
using duct tape and tubing from the spacesuits to jury-rig a connection …
(dramatic pause) … It worked!”
I, needless to say, was just being a smart-ass when I said that all we
needed back in the 1960s was a roll of duct tape and we could MacGyver those
spaceships to the Moon and back. NASA, on the other hand, is dead serious when
it says that it was indeed a roll of duct tape that got the Apollo 13 crew home
safe and sound – with, needless to say, a huge assist from that spunky little
lunar module, which not only powered the flight home but also kept three
astronauts alive for nearly 100 hours when it was only designed to keep two men
alive for 50 hours!
There seems to be some controversy, however, on
exactly how the cartridges were MacGyvered. According to Lovell, who was on the
Apollo 13 flight, “we did it with duct tape, with a piece of plastic, and a
piece of cardboard, and an old sock.” The key ingredient here seems to be the
duct tape. It would probably be fair to say that with a roll of duct tape and
any other two random items, you could fix most problems that might arise on a
spaceship.
Moving on then to the other Science Channel
offering, a 2005 effort entitled First on the Moon: The Untold Story, we
learn that Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas “was
not as high-tech as it looked.” On television, it looked pretty damned
impressive, for the era at least. As anyone alive at the time recalls, what the
world saw was an enormous room filled with computer consoles, each staffed by a
key member of the Apollo team diligently monitoring his computer screen for any
signs of trouble.
But in reality, as Apollo 11 computer engineer
Jack Garman clues us in, “the computer screens that we looked at in Mission
Control weren’t computer screens at all. They were televisions. All the
letters, or characters, [they] were all hand drawn. I don’t necessarily mean
with a brush, but I mean they were painted on a slide.” But they sure looked
pretty damned impressive.
Jack Garman, by the way, was not just some
random, low-level computer hack recruited by the Science Channel to
offer commentary. According to the official legend, Garman was the guy on the
Apollo 11 crew who cleared the Eagle to land despite the fact that multiple
alarms were going off. That would tend to indicate that he was a pretty
important player at Mission Control.
Every one of those consoles on the floor of
Mission Control was powered by a single mainframe computer – a single mainframe
computer that had the computing power of a single laptop computer. Actually,
make that a 2005-era laptop computer. And the spaceship itself, that
multi-staged engineering marvel, carried a computer roughly equivalent to what
powers a modern digital watch. Total memory capacity was about 72 kilobytes, or
just about enough to hold one of the smaller images on this page.
As I was typing these very words, I realized
that I was doing so on a genuine, vintage 2005 laptop computer. If I were
inclined to wear digital watches, which I am not, I would now be holding in my
hands all the computing power needed to get me and a couple friends to the Moon
and back. If we utilized the power of my desktop computer as well, and went
down to the Party Store to get a few rolls of Mylar, we could probably make it
all the way to Mars and back. How cool is that?
Another curious fact that First on the Moon
made note of was that, according to Harold Loden, Apollo 11 mission controller,
“The skin on the crew cabin [of the lunar module] was very thin, and that was
all done because of weight savings.” Another talking-head added that, “If you
really took your finger and poked hard at it, you could poke right through the
outer skin of the spacecraft. It was about the thickness of two layers of
aluminum foil.” Project Manager Thomas Kelly concurred, noting that “the skin,
the aluminum alloy skin of the crew compartment was about 12/1000s of an inch
thick. That’s equivalent to about three layers of Reynold’s Wrap that you would
use in the kitchen.”
It’s difficult to see then why that window
would have blown out during the LEM pressure test. You would think that the guys
at Grumman would have securely duct-taped it to the, uhmm, fuselage. And I’m
also sure that, had the window not blown out and released the pressure, the
rest of the ship would have passed the pressure test with flying colors.
It would appear that what was deployed by the
mother ship to shuttle our guys down to the Moon was essentially an oversized
Jiffy-Pop container (with the brainpower of a digital watch). The show’s
narrator was quick to point out that the astronauts had to be very careful
while moving about in their bulky suits lest they puncture or otherwise damage
the delicate skin of the craft. What wasn’t pointed out was that the vacuum of
space had to be very careful as well – careful not to rip the pressurized craft
to shreds the instant it was deployed!
One would logically assume, by the way, that
the LEMs would have been kept safely tucked away within the mother ship until
lunar orbit was achieved. But according to NASA, that’s not the case. The
official legend holds that the lunar modules were deployed shortly after
leaving Earth orbit, about three hours after blasting off, and that they then
docked in a nose-to-nose configuration with the command and service modules
while both spacecraft were flying through the vacuum of space at either 17,000
or 25,000 miles per hour, depending on the source.
In other words, for virtually the entire
234,000-mile journey from the Earth to the Moon, that flimsily constructed
lunar module essentially served as the front bumper of the mother ship. Other than
to allow for the creation of the “little engine that could” fable surrounding
Apollo 13, which holds that the conjoined spaceships flipped over and the front
bumper became the engine, it makes little sense why that would have been done.
Not only would it have exposed the fragile lunar modules to the hazards of a
lengthy space flight, it would also have required a docking maneuver in outer
space (one that seems to go unmentioned in the majority of the Apollo
literature).
Amazingly enough, not only were the lunar
modules capable of making soft manned landings on the Moon, and of
blasting off from the surface of the Moon, and of rendezvousing and
docking with the mother ship while in lunar orbit, but they were also capable
of docking with the mother ship while cruising from the Earth to the Moon! By
my count, those spunky little modules had to dock no fewer than seventeen times
during the various Apollo missions, and they performed perfectly every time
(twice in Earth orbit on the Apollo 9 mission, and twice on each of the Apollo
10-17 missions, except for Apollo 13, which did not complete the second docking
maneuver).
Let’s pause here for a brief moment to reflect
on the alleged plight of the unlucky Apollo 13 crew. There were no seats in the
LEM as it had been decided that they would just add unnecessary weight. And
there is just barely room for two guys in the space allegedly being occupied by
three. All three, had this have been a real life-and-death situation, would
have been wearing bulky spacesuits, boots, gloves and helmets. Somehow, they
had to coexist for four days. During that time, all that would have separated
them from the extreme hazards of outer space was a double layer of aluminum
foil. One micrometeorite or one misplaced elbow would result in immediate death
for the trio.
As the narrator informs us during When We
Left Earth, “If the flight suit fails or even tears a little, the
difference in pressure will cause the astronaut’s blood to boil, killing him
instantly.” The same would be true, of course, about the skin of the
spacecraft: the smallest tear would mean instant death for all three. Of
course, their suits would have allegedly provide a second line of defense,
except that, as can be seen in one of the handful of Apollo 13 mission photos
released by NASA, the astronauts weren’t bothering to wear their suits as they
cheerfully went about the business of MacGyvering their spaceship.
As we already know,
their cockiness was entirely justified since that aluminum foil capsule
provided all the protection the astronauts needed to get home safely. No fewer
than eight lunar modules allegedly made the hazardous voyage to the Moon, and
all of them arrived in immaculate condition. The Apollo 13 lunar module was
exposed throughout virtually the entire mission – all the way to the Moon and
all the way back. In all, the eight LEMS allegedly logged some 2,000,000 miles
of unprotected space flight and not one of them suffered so much as a scratch.
That, my friends, is 1960s technology at its finest.
Wagging the Moondoggie, Part IX
November
29, 2009
by David McGowan
“During the flight of Gemini 7, the crew will
remove their lightweight spacesuits and fly in their underwear.”
James V. Correale, Jr., the head of the Gemini
Support Office
“There’s no question in our minds; the only way
to fire these things is without pressure suits … I’m convinced we could run the
whole works without suits. All we need is a suit for reentry and emergency
stored on board somewhere.”
Astronaut Frank Borman, in voice transmissions
from the Gemini 7 capsule
Before moving on to some of the other amazing
technology allegedly developed for the Apollo missions, I must digress here to
discuss a screamingly funny episode of a ridiculous little show known as Mythbusters
that my DVR obligingly recorded for me the other day (it knows that I like that
kind of thing). In this particular episode, the hosts took a look at the Apollo
Moon landings – with some help behind the scenes from none other than Phil
Plait and Jay Windley, who were thanked in the closing credits.
Have I mentioned, by the way, that Plait
currently serves as president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, helmed
by the very same James Randi who sat on the board of the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation (alongside a truly vile collection of CIA-funded psychiatrists and
people accused by their own children of being pedophiles), and who was once
caught on tape soliciting sexual favors from young boys? Randi is, in other
words, just the kind of guy who should be running an educational foundation,
and just the kind of guy you would expect someone like Phil Plait to cozy up
to.
Anyway, the two jokers who co-host the Mythbusters
show took on five of what were purported to be the most common claims of
‘conspiracy theorists’: non-parallel shadows appearing in NASA’s Moon photos;
objects in the shadows of those photos appearing to be lit with a secondary
light source; the astronauts’ boot prints being too well defined to have been
left in dry soil; the video footage appearing to have been faked by altering
the playback speed; and, of course, the flag appearing to wave.
Though the ‘debunkers,’ as I’ve mentioned
before, just can’t get enough of the waving flag, I am pretty sure that I have
already stated that I don’t really care so much about it, so I am going to skip
it once again. As for the boot prints, the Mythbusters gang ‘debunked’
the claims of skeptics by producing a distinct print in ‘simulated’ lunar soil
that was provided to the show specifically for this little demonstration by the
helpful folks at – where else? – NASA. Unfortunately, this demonstration taught
us nothing about the Apollo missions, but it did conclusively prove that NASA
has a synthetic material that will produce a boot print in a vacuum chamber.
In attempting to ‘debunk’ the claim that, in
the alleged Moon photos, there are objects lying in the shadows that are far
too well lit, the hosts cynically proclaimed their experiment to be a success
despite the fact that the results clearly indicated that their demonstration
had actually failed. And they had failed in spite of the fact that they had
given themselves two huge, and entirely unmentioned, advantages: the
reenactment was photographed here on Earth, where air causes light to scatter,
and the image was deliberately overexposed.
This seems like a good time to note that HJP
Arnold, who provided the Kodak film for the mission cameras and later created a
photo library devoted to space photography, said that on the Moon, “where you
have no atmosphere, shadow is very black and highlight is really violent
highlight, so you have an enormous contrast problem.” I have to keep throwing
those quotes in, you see, because if I say stuff like that, then for
some unexplained reason a cabal of ‘debunkers’ will quickly form a circle and
begin furiously jerking
each other off (if you need a laugh, by the way, their stuff is funnier
than mine, and they’re not even trying to be funny).
Anyway, the point here is that the Mythbusters
gang had the advantage of scattered light. And as is clearly visible in the
screen-cap below, they also deliberately overexposed the photo in an obvious
attempt to further lighten the shadows. Even so, the astronaut in the Mythbusters’
image is significantly less illuminated than is NASA’s astronaut. NASA’s
astronaut, though standing completely within the shadow of the lander, is
nearly as bright as the sunlit background of the image. In the Mythbusters’
image, on the other hand, the astronaut is nowhere near as bright as the
overexposed background.
Had the guys taken the shot in NASA’s vacuum
chamber, which they had access to but chose not to use in their demonstration, their
astronaut would have been even darker. To claim then that a ‘myth’ has been
‘busted’ when the results of their own biased demonstration clearly suggested
otherwise says much about the integrity of this show and the ‘consultants’
behind the scenes. And since we’re on the subject of curiously illuminated
shadows, take a look at the shot below and to the right, which was allegedly
taken moments before the shot used by Mythbusters.
As can be seen in the shot to the left, the
egress side of the LEM was supposed to be the shaded side. And yet, in the
photo to the right, that entire side of the module is gloriously lit, and we
are apparently supposed to believe that that is entirely the result of
reflected light. Aldrin is even very well lit and he hasn’t even climbed out of
the hatch yet!
Moving on, the guys also tried to ‘debunk’ the
claim that NASA’s Moon photos shouldn’t depict non-parallel shadows. The hosts
took a rather novel approach though: they used a single studio light source in
close proximity to the subjects to reproduce an image that had been created by
using a single studio light source in close proximity to the subjects. They
then, of course, proclaimed that yet another ‘myth’ had been ‘busted.’ Nice
work, guys.
The most revealing segment of the show
concerned the way that the astronauts moved in NASA’s video footage. The hosts
picked out three brief clips showing the astronauts running, skipping and
jumping. One of the two hosts then donned a spacesuit and was filmed recreating
the movements. That tape was then played back at half-speed and compared to the
original. The same would-be actor then performed the same movements while
suspended from cables. In both cases, the new footage did not match the original.
It was perfectly obvious, however, that the
awkward movements by Mythbusters’ fake astronaut were very different
than the movements by NASA’s fake astronauts. A much easier, and far more
relevant demonstration would have been to simply speed up the original footage.
When this was done, albeit very briefly, it was perfectly obvious that the
astronauts were moving in normal, earthly ways. But because the hosts couldn’t
reproduce the footage using a hack who appeared to be doing a deliberately
piss-poor job of reproducing the motions, the demonstration was deemed to be
inconclusive.
The only way to resolve the issue, according to
the hosts, was to do a demonstration in a 1/6 gravity environment. Luckily for
the guys, they had access to a ‘vomit comet.’ While normally used to provide a
zero-gravity environment for training purposes, by slightly adjusting its
flight path the plane can also simulate the Moon’s gravity. But by filming this
demonstration, the show unwittingly showed viewers how the Apollo crews would
have really moved if they had been on the Moon.
As the spacesuited host informed viewers, “at
1/6 my weight, I felt pretty weightless. I felt like I could jump ten feet in
the air.” And indeed it was perfectly obvious that, had he not been in a plane
with very limited headroom, he could have effortlessly jumped ten feet
in the air. Hilariously, the uninhibited support crew can be seen in the
background easily performing dazzling acrobatic feats, such as the guy to the
left of the frame effortlessly balancing on one hand, and the other guy in the
background floating through the air in a ninja pose.
These are the types of movements that the
Apollo boys would have been able to perform with ease had they actually been on
the Moon. And yet we saw nothing of the sort in any of the alleged transmissions
from the lunar surface. Nevertheless, the Mythbusters gang haughtily
declared that they had successfully ‘busted’ yet another ‘myth.’ What they had
actually done, thus far, was to perform three completely meaningless
demonstrations (the flag, the boot print, and the non-parallel shadows
simulation) and two more demonstrations that, despite the hosts’ contentions to
the contrary, clearly confirmed claims made by ‘conspiracy theorists.’
In the show’s final segment, they presented
what was billed as the “ultimate proof of man’s Moon missions” – which turned
out to be nothing more significant than laser ranging targets.
Really, guys?! That’s the best you can do? After
failing throughout the hour to ‘debunk’ a single ‘conspiracy’ claim, you’re now
going to brazenly claim that the existence of man-made artifacts on the Moon is
the “ultimate proof” that Apollo astronauts walked on the lunar surface? Are
you fucking kidding me? There are manmade artifacts on Mars and Venus as well,
so I guess we have “ultimate proof” that NASA has secretly sent men to other
planets. And my kid’s ball is over in the neighbor’s yard right now, so I guess
we have “ultimate proof” that she’s been there.
I’d have to say that, while I obviously would
have done things a little differently, overall the guys did a pretty good job
of busting that ridiculous myth about man walking on the Moon.
Let’s now turn our attention to some of the
other technology that had to be developed for the Apollo program, beginning
with those magic suits. “In the early 1960s, as NASA began training astronauts
to meet President Kennedy’s challenge, it realized there was one key area of
expertise it knew nothing about. Nobody knew how to build a spacesuit that
would enable a human being to survive in the lethal lunar environment.”
So begins Moon Machines: The Space Suit. As previously noted,
Alan Shepard had ridden the first manned Mercury capsule into sub-orbit just
before Kennedy’s announcement. The Mercury program, launched in 1959, just after
the formation of NASA, was
But now, with Kennedy’s commitment to the
Apollo program, our astronauts were going to need suits that provided their
first and only line of defense. NASA did not yet have suits that could operate
off the ship’s life support systems through umbilical cords (such as would be
needed to perform space-walks) and now it needed suits capable of providing
fully independent life support. In other words, starting essentially from
scratch, NASA was going to have to come up with one of the most technologically
advanced spacesuits ever conceived. And it was going to have to do it very
quickly.
Eight companies reportedly submitted proposals
to NASA for consideration. Almost all were companies that were known within the
aerospace industry. One, however, was known for its work in a somewhat
different field of endeavor; the International Latex Corporation was best known
as the manufacturer of Playtex bras and girdles. Improbably enough though, it would
soon be adding Apollo spacesuits to its product line.
(Wikipedia,
it should be noted, contains a much different version of events than what was
provided by Moon Machines, including a claim that ILC began designing
spacesuits “as early as 1955.” The version provided by the Science Channel,
however, came directly from the people who were involved in the project. And
the company’s own promotional materials hold that “ILC started designing suits
on 1961; started making test and prototype suits in 1964; and started
delivering suits for use by Apollo astronauts in 1966.”)
In April 1962, NASA awarded the Apollo
spacesuit contract to ILC. Hamilton Standard, a company known for manufacturing
aircraft propellers, was assigned to oversee the project. ILC quickly put its
bra and girdle seamstresses to work cutting and sewing Apollo spacesuits.
Meanwhile, Hamilton Standard went to work designing and building the
life-support packs, known as PLSS units.
Amazingly enough, the first spacesuits to roll
off the line were delivered to NASA for testing in 1963. ILC had designed and
built the suits in just over a year. Unfortunately though, they had a major
flaw: astronauts testing them quickly overheated in the Florida sun, which is
roughly 160° F cooler than
the surface of the Moon. NASA issued an ultimatum to Hamilton Standard: solve
the cooling problem and do it immediately or the contract would be cancelled.
The solution was to design a water-cooled
undergarment. By early 1964, just two years after the awarding of the contract,
the redesigned suits were being shipped to NASA for testing. NASA, however, was
still not impressed with what Hamilton and ILC had come up with. The suits were
deemed to be too heavy, extremely difficult to move around in, and intensely
uncomfortable to wear even for short durations.
In the fall of 1964, NASA canceled the
contracts with both ILC and Hamilton Standard. With just five years left to
fulfill Kennedy’s dream, NASA had no working spacesuits and no contract with
anyone to design and build working spacesuits. After briefly experimenting with
so-called ‘hard suits,’ NASA decided in the spring of 1965 to reopen the
bidding on the spacesuit contract. Both Hamilton and ILC again submitted
proposals, and again the contract was awarded to the makers of Playtex bras.
Hamilton was awarded a separate contract to design and build the life support
packs.
Just weeks after NASA awarded those contracts,
Gemini astronaut Ed White allegedly became the first American to perform a
space-walk, despite the fact that NASA did not yet appear to have a suit that
would allow for such a maneuver. Nevertheless, on June 3, 1965, White allegedly
performed a successful 22-minute EVA (extra-vehicular activity, in NASA jargon)
which was yet another “We can do it too!” response to the Soviet Union’s first
space-walk.
As astronaut Gene Cernan recalled, Leonov’s
space-walk on March 18, 1965 “shocked a lot of people. It caught us totally
unexpected, and, you know, we were just barely flying in space in our own
little capsules. They weren’t even big enough to be called spaceships.” Indeed,
the United States hadn’t yet gotten its first two-man capsule into space. The
Mercury program, which had ended nearly two years earlier, had only gotten four
single-occupancy capsules into orbit. NASA’s plan had been to attempt a
space-walk on the fourth manned Gemini flight, and it had not yet gotten the
first Gemini capsule off the ground.
NASA’s plan apparently changed rather abruptly
and a few days before the launch of Gemini 4, which was only the second manned
Gemini mission (the first having completed just three orbits), it was announced
that White would be performing an EVA while Jim McDivitt piloted the capsule.
According to astronaut Frank Borman, “NASA scrambled around kind of hurriedly
and, in my estimation, without a great deal of safety factor, had Ed go EVA on
Gemini 4.”
As McDivitt recalled, “Our EVA was very
confidential at the time. We had not announced we were gonna do this, and we
were doing all of our training at night, and only a group of maybe 30 or 40
people even knew we were gonna try it.” Translated from NASA-speak, what that
very likely means is that a select group worked covertly with the astronauts to
fake the space-walk footage prior to the launch of Gemini 4.
Notably, NASA did not attempt the maneuver
again for an entire year, until June 3, 1966, despite the fact that four Gemini
capsules were launched during the intervening year and those four spent a
combined total of twenty-three days in low-Earth orbit. Yet none of those four
crews, it would appear, had time to practice space-walking, even though
practicing and perfecting EVAs was one of the primary goals of the Gemini
program. Not even Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, who spent nearly two weeks
orbiting Earth in a tiny capsule with virtually nothing to do for the majority
of their mission, had time to perform a space-walk.
It was not until Gemini 9 that NASA attempted
to duplicate White’s alleged performance. But that ‘second’ space-walk, by Gene
Cernan, was by all accounts a complete failure that almost cost Cernan his
life. Problems began almost immediately, with Cernan’s heart rate at times
soaring as high as 170. His visor became fogged, leaving him blinded and disoriented.
His breathing was labored and he was sweating profusely. Doctors on the ground
monitoring the situation feared he would not make it back in alive and would
have to be cut loose.
The next two EVA attempts, by Michael Collins aboard
Gemini 10 and Richard Gordon aboard Gemini 11, were failures as well. As 1966
was drawing to a close, three astronauts in a row had failed to replicate what
Ed White had supposedly easily accomplished over a year earlier. But then, in
November 1966, a year-and-a-half after White’s alleged space-walk, none other
than Buzz Aldrin performed a wildly successful EVA during the Gemini 12
mission. Aldrin had come through just in time – Gemini 12 was the last Gemini
mission.
In sum, the Gemini program resulted in one
faked EVA, three failed EVAs, and one presumably successful EVA. Even if we
give the agency every benefit of the doubt, the record would be three failures
and only two successes. And with that impressive record, we were ready to send
our guys off on a series of EVAs of a complexity that remains unmatched to this
day. Have I mentioned lately, by the way, that America totally kicked ass in
the 1960s?
Curiously, the footage of White’s alleged space
walk is characterized by the very same slow-motion photographic technique later
employed on the alleged Moon missions. The footage released by the Soviets of
Leonov’s EVA, on the other hand, does not appear to be slowed down. The logical
conclusion to draw, of course, is that moving in slow-motion in space is more a
matter of culture than science.
The final spacesuits sent by ILC to NASA were
supposedly composed of three layers: the water-cooled undergarment, a
pressurized inner suit that featured flexible, bellows joints, and a white
outer covering made of an experimental fabric known as Beta cloth. The bra and
girdle manufacturer, which I’m guessing must have had a large engineering
division, designed and built the entire integrated suit, including the helmet
and visor and the specially designed boots and gloves.
The Apollo spacesuits supposedly weighed in at
180 pounds each, including the PLSS backpacks. You would think that with the
advanced technology now available, NASA would have been able to streamline the
package. To the contrary, the suits now worn aboard the space shuttle weigh in
at 310 pounds each. And ILC claims that it takes three months and 5,000
man-hours to produce each one. Back in the ‘60s, they claimed to be cranking
out a minimum of nine of them for each Apollo flight.
One final note on the magic suits: they also
were allegedly designed for what was euphemistically dubbed “sanitation
management.” According to the designers, the suits contained urine bags
attached to the astronauts via what were described as condoms. How that would
have possibly worked is anyone’s guess. The existence of fecal bags was also
alluded to, but no details were given.
For what it’s worth, NASA says that its
astronauts now wear what are euphemistically dubbed ‘MAGs,’ or Maximum
Absorbency Garments, under their spacesuits. The same product is more commonly
referred to as an adult diaper. And that is likely what the Apollo crews would
have worn as well had they actually gone on their alleged missions. That would
though, I suppose, have taken a bit of the glamour away from the romanticized
notion of being a space traveler.
Another piece of advanced technology that had to
be developed for the Apollo program was the command module – the cone-shaped
tip of the Saturn V rocket that was to be the only piece of the original launch
vehicle that returned to Earth. To this day, the Apollo command modules remain
the only capsules ever designed that were allegedly capable of keeping
astronauts alive while reentering the Earth’s atmosphere from outside of
low-Earth orbit.
According to those who claim to know about such
things, reentering from beyond low-Earth orbit is an exponentially more risky
maneuver than reentering from Earth orbit. First of all, the Apollo capsules
were allegedly traveling at 25,000 mph at the time of reentry as opposed to the
17,000 mph that spacecraft travel in Earth orbit. That additional speed results
in a doubling of the already intensely high temperatures experienced during
reentry.
In addition, the returning Apollo command
modules had to enter Earth’s atmosphere at precisely the right angle. If they
hit at too wide an angle, the spacecraft would essentially bounce off and veer
off into space. And if they hit at too sharp an angle, the spaceship and it’s
crew would not survive the impact. The capsule also had to be in the proper
orientation, with the bottom, and thus the heat shield, pointing down. Luckily
though, all nine of the Apollo modules that allegedly returned from the Moon
hit that narrow window in the proper orientation, despite the fact that the
command modules, having jettisoned the attached service modules, had no
propulsion or steering capability.
The contract to design and build the command
modules was assigned to North American Aviation, whose engineers, it’s safe to
say, had quite a formidable task before them. As noted on Moon Machines,
the combined command and service modules would require a propulsion system, a
navigation system, an environmental control system, plentiful supplies of
oxygen, water and food, heat shields capable of handling reentry temperatures
beyond anything before experienced, parachutes capable of performing
near-miraculous feats, a human waste disposal system, shaving supplies, hygiene
supplies, life preservers, protection from micrometeorites, and, for reasons
left unexplained, machetes.
What also wasn’t explained was why the lunar
modules, which would be exposed throughout the flight to the Moon, didn’t need
that very same “protection from micrometeorites.”
By the end of 1966, naturally enough, North
American already had a prototype command module ready for NASA to put through
the pre-flight test regimen. As designed, the command module featured living
space measuring roughly 6’x6’x6’. On January 27, 1967, Gus Grissom, Roger
Chaffee and Ed White squeezed into that confined space for what was dubbed a
‘plugs out’ test, to verify that the ship was capable of running under its own
power. There was another test scheduled that day as well – a pressurization
test of the cabin.
Allegedly to “save time,” NASA opted to conduct
both tests simultaneously. So once the astronauts were in place, the cabin was
filled with 16 PSI of pure oxygen. With the inward-opening hatch sealed by the
interior cabin pressure, the astronauts never had a chance to survive the
‘test.’ All it took was a spark, allegedly from some faulty wiring, to turn the
capsule into a crematorium. In a pressurized oxygen environment, even aluminum
will ignite. The crew reportedly were dead within 30 seconds of the onset of
the fire. It took rescuers five minutes to pry the hatch open.
Weighing in with perhaps the most appalling
quote to make it into these articles, George Jeffs, the chief engineer of the
command and service modules, had this to say: “From a technical point of view,
I think the fire had a, a very beneficial final effect on the program. It
enabled the program to stop and re-review exactly where we stood on every
element of the system and to fix every problem that we saw in the system.” Of
course, roughly the same effect would have been achieved by burning up the
module while the astronauts weren’t in it, but there is no need to quibble over
minor details, I suppose.
It took eighteen months to redesign the command
modules. Over 100 design changes were made to correct various shortcomings.
This redesign process was undoubtedly made more difficult by the fact that no
paper records had been kept of what had been installed in the module. As we
have already seen, the Apollo program didn’t place a high priority on record
keeping.
One bit of technology that had to be developed
for the command modules (presumably for the lunar modules as well) was what Moon
Machines described as “an environmental control system designed to cope
with the most extreme environment ever encountered by humans.” Cliff Hess was
an environmental systems test engineer with NASA during the Apollo days, and he
described the challenge they faced as follows: “You can go from +250° F down to -250° F, and it can happen just as you cross
the line of a shadow … so you can instantaneously go from one extreme to the
other and have like a 500° F change.” Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman described his alleged flight
to and from the Moon in precisely the same terms: “You’d be 250° plus on the sunny side, and once
the spaceship rotated and you were in the shade, [then] you’re minus 250°!”
This is yet another example of a claim that I
previously made that was ridiculed by the ‘debunker’ brigade as being
ill-informed. And yet here we see once again that the very same claim has been
made by one of the guys who actually worked on that aspect of the project, as
well as by one of the guys who allegedly flew the missions. It’s rather
shocking to find that so many of the people who developed and/or utilized the
Apollo technology actually know significantly less about it than the
‘debunkers.’ Before running their mouths off to documentary film crews, these
old-timers really should visit a couple of ‘debunking’ websites.
I wonder why it is, by the way, that the Apollo
13 astronauts were said to have been very cold throughout their return flight
in their allegedly crippled spaceship? As recalled by Jim Lovell, “The trip was
marked by discomfort beyond the lack of food and water. Sleep was almost impossible
because of the cold. When we turned off the electrical systems, we lost our
source of heat, and the sun streaming in the windows didn’t much help … It
wasn’t simply that the temperature dropped to 38° F: the sight of perspiring walls and wet
windows made it seem even colder. We considered putting on our spacesuits, but
they would have been bulky and too sweaty … We found the CM a cold, clammy tin
can when we started to power up. The walls, ceiling, floor, wire harnesses, and
panels were all covered with droplets of water.”
There is so much wrong with that brief
description of the flight that it is difficult to know where to begin
critiquing it, but let’s start by pondering why they would have been short on
food and water. The mission ended up returning a few days early, so unless they
overindulged the first few days, there should have been more than enough food
and water for the trio in the conjoined command and lunar modules. And as for
the cold, how could that 250° F “sun streaming in the windows” not help much? What does Lovell use to
warm himself at home – a blowtorch?
As for the water droplets covering the interior
of the command and lunar modules, wouldn’t many of those droplets have been
airborne if they were in a zero-gravity environment? Wouldn’t the inside of the
module have looked something like a snow-globe? And as for opting not to don
the spacesuits, that is just laughably absurd. As already noted, without the
suits the only thing that would have been protecting the astronauts from the
hazards of space was a double layer of aluminum foil. For that reason alone it
is inconceivable that they wouldn’t have been wearing them. And now we find
that they were also facing near-freezing conditions and yet they still chose
not to utilize the suits – because the suits were, you know, a little bulky,
and it is much better to nearly freeze to death than it is to break a little
sweat.
Anyway, returning more or less to where we left
off, Apollo 7, equipped with the redesigned command module, became the first
manned Apollo flight to triumphantly lift off from Cape Kennedy on October 11,
1968. Three previous flights had gone up unmanned. This one wasn’t quite a real
Apollo launch, however, since it was powered by the smaller Saturn 1-B rocket.
No one had yet ridden a Saturn V rocket off the launch pad, and there was just
one year to go to meet Kennedy’s goal of landing men on the Moon.
Apollo 7 was the first of a series of Apollo
launches that came in incredibly rapid succession. Just 71 days after Apollo 7
took flight, Apollo 8 lifted off. Apollo 9 followed just 72 days later,
followed by Apollo 10 only 76 days after that. A mere 59 days later, Apollo 11
took flight. In just nine months, NASA assembled and launched five incredibly
complex, multi-staged rockets (and ILC provided at least forty-five
spacesuits). Three of those ships allegedly flew all the way to the Moon.
Apollo 8 would be the first to
allegedly do so.
Wagging the Moondoggie, Part X
December
7, 2009
by David McGowan
“The mission of Apollo 8, quite apart from its
significant scientific meaning, stimulated an immense rejuvenation of the
spirit of mankind, and that spirit needed rejuvenation. A year featured by two
grim assassinations [MLK and RFK], by riots, by racial and social strife, and a
baffling attempt to end the war left men with a dull sense of frustration. Then
at the end of such a year came the Apollo 8, an incredible adventure.”
Dr. Norman Vincent
Peale, 33° Scottish Rite Freemason
Apollo 8 was the
last Apollo flight to leave the ground during the Johnson administration. A
decade before the launch, LBJ had laid out
I thought it was
global warming that was supposed to be causing most of that, but I guess that
is a bit off-topic.
To anyone paying close attention in the 1960s,
the ridiculously improbable flight of Apollo 8 should have sent a clear signal
that the Apollo Moon missions were going to be seriously lacking in
credibility. Launched on the winter solstice of 1968, Apollo 8 was only the
third launch of a Saturn V rocket, and the first to carry a crew. The first two
Saturn V launches, Apollo 4 and Apollo 6, were what NASA referred to as
“all-up” tests of the three-stage launch vehicle. Those tests didn’t go so
well.
The team of rocket
scientists who had developed the F-1 and J-2 rocket engines that powered the
flights – most of whom were former Nazis recruited through Project Paperclip
and relocated first to White Sands and then to the Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama (one of the best sources of information on this is Linda
Hunt’s Secret Agenda, St. Martin’s Press, 1991; see also Tom Bower’s The
Paperclip Conspiracy, Little, Brown, 1987) – had assumed that each stage of
the craft would be tested separately. They were reportedly horrified to find
that NASA was bypassing such tests and proceeding directly to an ‘all-up’ test
of Apollo 4 – but probably not nearly as horrified as the American people would
have been had they known the truth about the past lives of NASA’s rocket
scientists.
Nevertheless, the
launch of Apollo 4, the very first Saturn V launch, was allegedly a smashing
success. That claim seems rather dubious, however, given that the next all-up
test, of Apollo 6, was marked by multiple malfunctions. The first-stage burn
had serious vibration problems, and two of the second-stage’s five engines cut
out, throwing the ship seriously off course.
According to Moon
Machines, NASA was undeterred by the serious problems encountered during
the flight of Apollo 6: “Despite the near loss of Apollo 6, NASA was pushing
ahead with Apollo 8, the third flight of the Saturn V and the first to carry a
crew.” NASA was so confident, in fact, that they decided to throw caution to
the wind and swing for the fence with Apollo 8: “The third flight of the Saturn
V would carry astronauts not to orbit the Earth, as everyone had expected, but
to orbit the Moon.”
Had the Apollo
program been a real space exploration endeavor, the first manned flight of the
Saturn V would obviously have gone no further than low-Earth orbit, as had been
planned. This would likely have been followed by an unmanned flight to the
Moon, and then possibly a flight ‘piloted’ by a dog or some other such
mammalian life form. But taking logical, methodical steps toward achieving
goals in space was for those pussies over in
Without taking any
of the preliminary steps, and with a launch vehicle that had failed on its last
outing, and without knowing if the ship itself could make the journey there and
back,
Not to worry
though: NASA was confident that all the problems with Apollo 6 had been
diagnosed and fixed, and in record time. Despite the fact that the failed
stages of the aircraft weren’t available for inspection, NASA’s crack team was
able to expertly pinpoint and correct all the deficiencies so thoroughly that
the new and improved Saturn V rocket didn’t even need a test flight to be sure
it was working correctly. Indeed, it was ready to go all the way to the Moon!
Given
The
Once NASA’s
engineers turned their attention to the Moon as a target of unmanned space
flights, ‘disappointment’ continued to be the operative word. Beginning in
August of 1961, the
Finally, on July
31, 1964, nearly three full years after the first launch, Ranger 7 successfully
impacted and photographed the Moon. Rangers 8 and 9 followed in February and
March of 1965. The three successful probes gathered a combined total of roughly
17,000 images, which didn’t change the fact that the Ranger program overall had
a 67% failure rate.
The next year, NASA
launched two new lunar reconnaissance programs: Surveyor and the Lunar Orbiter
Program. The first Surveyor blasted off on May 30, 1966, with six more to
follow, the last on January 7, 1968. The goal of the program was to attempt
‘soft landings’ on the lunar surface. Two of the missions, Surveyor 2 and
Surveyor 4, crashed, leaving the program with roughly a 29% failure rate. The
Surveyor and Ranger programs had a combined failure rate of 50%.
NASA had much better luck with the Lunar
Orbiter Program, which involved putting five satellites into lunar orbit
between August of 1966 and August of 1967. Each of the five orbited the Moon,
capturing high-resolution images, for an average of ten days each. In addition
to mapping the lunar surface, the Orbiters also sent back the first images of
Earth from space and the first photos of the Earth rising over the lunar
horizon. In all, some 3,000 images were beamed back – officially at least.
The problem here,
of course, is that NASA’s numbers don’t seem to add up. Does it make any sense
at all that the three successful Ranger missions, which flew directly to the
Moon and immediately crashed, sent back 17,000 images, and yet the five
Orbiters, which spent a combined total of fifty-three days orbiting the Moon,
sent back just 3,000 images? That’s a capture rate of just over two images per
hour. And the Orbiters had multiple cameras on board.
There is little
doubt that the Orbiters returned far more images than claimed, of which only a
select few (relatively speaking) were released. What then happened to the rest
of them? I’m going to go way out on a limb here and guess that NASA needed
those images for another, more important project: faking the Apollo Moon
landings. All of those glorious shots of Earth from space, and of Earth-rises,
and of superimposed spacecraft in lunar orbit were undoubtedly created from
unreleased imagery captured by the Orbiters. As were, no doubt, the fake lunar
sets and the fake lunar backdrops.
One final note on
the Lunar Orbiters: during their flights to and around the Moon, the five
satellites recorded twenty-two “micrometeoroid events.” The eight lunar modules
that made the trip to the Moon apparently recorded no such events. Or maybe the
guys just put some duct tape over the holes.
Meanwhile, NASA’s
manned space programs were having trouble as well. In the beginning, of course,
there were the Mercury 7, the nation’s first space-age celebrities.
Immortalized in The Right Stuff, the first seven astronauts were hand-picked
from among hundreds of the nation’s finest fighter pilots. Six of those seven –
Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and
Gordo Cooper – would become the first Americans in space, but for most of them
it would not be an entirely smooth ride.
Shepard was the
first to take flight aboard the Freedom 7, launched on May 5, 1961. His was an
uneventful, 15-minute sub-orbital flight. Grissom followed on July 21, 1961 in
the Liberty Bell 7, and things didn’t go so well for him. As with Shepard, his
was just a sub-orbital flight, but it nearly cost him his life. Immediately
after splashing down, the hatch blew on his capsule and it began taking on
water. Grissom got free, but his suit, which was supposed to serve as a
floatation device, also began taking on water, pulling him under.
Grissom’s plight
did not improve with the arrival of a rescue helicopter, which concentrated
exclusively on trying to save the capsule, ignoring the struggling Grissom who now
also had to contend with the helicopter’s rotor wash. Grissom was pulled to
safety only when a second rescue helicopter arrived. The capsule sunk to the
bottom of the sea, three miles below.
Glenn was up next,
and he was slated to be the first American in orbit. Riding aboard the
Friendship 7, launched on February 20, 1962, Glenn did indeed make it into
orbit, but NASA was not at all sure that they were going to be able to get him
back. The launch had been delayed for a month as NASA worked out various
problems, but there was still a serious glitch: during Glenn’s second orbit,
technicians on the ground determined that the heat shield, essential for
reentry, had come loose.
Glenn’s capsule was
seriously damaged during reentry, but he survived unharmed and became an
instant national hero.
Next up was
Carpenter, who orbited the Earth three times aboard the
Schirra was up to
bat next, and he blasted off on October 3, 1962 aboard the Sigma 7, completing
six orbits in just over nine hours. His was the first flight since Shepard’s,
and the first orbital flight, to be free of any significant malfunctions.
The final Mercury
flight was helmed by Cooper, who lifted off on May 15, 1963 inside the Faith 7
capsule. Cooper completed 22 orbits and was the first American to sleep in
space. Problems arose in the final hours, however, when the capsule’s automatic
controls failed and Cooper had to execute the first fully manual reentry. It
would be nearly two years before the next Americans followed Cooper into space.
Overall, the
Mercury program was largely a success in the sense that everyone made it back
alive and well, but
Next up was the
Gemini program, featuring a larger, two-man capsule. Gemini, which ran from
March of 1965 until November of 1966, had very specific goals: testing man’s
ability to survive in space for up to two weeks; testing rendezvous and docking
procedures; performing EVAs (space-walks); and making orbital adjustments. All
of these were to be practiced until they became almost second nature.
The Gemini capsules
were launched into orbit with Titan rockets, which proved to be a bit unstable
at first. The first launch attempts blew up on the pad. Eventually NASA
successfully launched two that didn’t blow up, and those were christened Gemini
1 and Gemini 2. Those were followed by ten manned Gemini flights, beginning
with Gemini 3 launched on March 23, 1965, and concluding with Gemini 12, which
took flight on November 11, 1966.
The flight of Gemini
3 was a short one – completing three orbits in just under five hours. Due to an
equipment malfunction, pilots Gus Grissom and John Young had to manually
control their reentry and splashed down some sixty miles off target. Other than
that, the first manned Gemini mission was successful. Gemini 4, launched on
June 3, 1965, remained in orbit for just over four days and featured the
alleged space-walk by Ed White (NASA’s photos of which are, needless to say,
spectacular).
After a successful
lift-off on August 21, 1965, Gemini 5 remained in low-Earth orbit for nearly
eight days, completing 120 orbits. The flight was largely successful, though a
malfunctioning fuel cell and faulty thrusters did cause some problems for the
crew.
Upon their return,
it should be noted, the Gemini 5’s pilots, Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad, looked
tired, haggard and unshaven, with their hair greasy and matted. In other words,
they looked exactly as you would expect guys who had just spent a week in a
cramped spaceship with no means of attending to basic matters of hygiene to
look. Below, left to right, are photos of Conrad after returning from his
eight-day mission, Lovell after returning from a four-day mission aboard Gemini
12, and Lovell again toward the end of his fourteen-day flight on Gemini 7.
The Apollo
astronauts, on the other hand, all arrived home looking rested, shaved and
fresh faced, as though they had just returned from a day at the spa. Apparently
they found room to include a shower and various other amenities on those Apollo
spacecraft.
The next scheduled
launch was Gemini 6, set to take flight in late October of 1965. The flight was
postponed, however, due to the failure of an unmanned Agena craft launched as a
docking target. On December 4, Gemini 7, with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell on
board, began a grueling fourteen-day stay in low-Earth orbit. About a week
later, Gemini 6 was once again ready for launch, but that launch was aborted
when an engine shut down, narrowly averting a fatal explosion on the pad.
Gemini 6 finally
got into low-Earth orbit on December 11 and remained there for just over one
day. During that time, Gemini 6 allegedly performed a rendezvous maneuver with
Gemini 7, the two spacecraft remaining side-by-side for some 5.5 hours while
traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. Curiously, there was a launch of a military
rocket in between the launches of Gemini 6 and Gemini 7, and Lovell has said
that that launch was connected in some unspecified manner to the mission of
Gemini 7.
Gemini 8, helmed by
Neil Armstrong and David Scott, blasted off on March 16, 1966. The goal of the
mission was to test rendezvous and docking procedures and to achieve the first
successful docking between a Gemini capsule and an unmanned Agena craft.
Curiously, the two pilots chosen for this complex mission were both rookies.
The crew that had originally been slated to fly the mission, Elliot See and
Charles Bassett, were killed on February 28, 1966, just days before the launch,
when See, one of the nation’s top pilots, slammed a T-38 Talon into the side of
a building in
Gemini 8 reportedly
succeeded in docking with the Agena target, but trouble began almost
immediately. The conjoined spacecraft began to tumble violently end-over-end,
forcing Armstrong to jettison the Agena. That, however, only caused the Gemini
capsule to tumble even more violently. Armstrong finally had to resort to
firing the rockets used for reentry positioning to stabilize the craft, which
necessitated immediately aborting the mission. The capsule splashed down in the
Pacific, a half-a-world away from its target in the
On June 3, 1966, Gemini 9, piloted by Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan,
took flight. The launch had been postponed due to the failure of another Agena
target. The goal was, once again, to dock with an unmanned Agena craft. That
docking failed to materialize, however, when yet another Agena target
malfunctioned. This was also the flight on which Cernan took his nearly fatal
space-walk (there was debate on the ground over whether he should be cut loose
to drift in space or left tethered to burn up upon reentry if he couldn’t make
it back in).
Following Gemini 9,
there were only three manned Gemini missions left and the United States had
thus far failed to come anywhere close to mastering either docking procedures
or EVAs, both of which would be absolutely essential for the success of the
proposed Apollo missions.
Gemini 10, with
John Young and Michael Collins at the wheel, lifted off on July 18, 1966 and
remained in orbit for just under three days. Young and Collins reportedly
achieved the first successful, stable docking of a Gemini capsule with an Agena
target. Collins also performed a largely unsuccessful EVA, though not as
disastrous as Cernan’s on the previous flight.
Gemini 11, piloted
by Charles Conrad and Richard Gordon, took to the skies on September 12, 1966
and, like Gemini 10, remained in orbit for just under three days. And like
Gemini 10, the mission included a docking maneuver with an Agena target and a
less than fully successful space-walk (by Gordon).
The final Gemini
mission, Gemini 12, put Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin into low-Earth orbit for
just under four days. Aldrin completed the first fully successful space-walk
and the two pilots once again practiced docking with an Agena target. NASA had
come a long way since shooting Alan Shepard out of a cannon in May of 1961, but
the Moon still seemed like a far-off goal. The progression from Mercury to
Gemini – from a single-occupancy capsule to a somewhat more sophisticated,
double-occupancy capsule, requiring a somewhat larger launch vehicle – was a
natural one. NASA’s next step, however, was going to be more of a quantum leap.
The Saturn V rocket
bore little resemblance to any previous launch vehicles. As Apollo flight
director Gene Kranz observed, “It was a new spacecraft. It was something that
we had to learn from the ground up – that we had to learn from scratch.” It was
a massive, and massively complex, spacecraft. The Saturn V was so much larger
than its predecessors that all previous manned launch vehicles – the six
Mercury and ten Gemini vehicles – could fit inside a single Saturn V casing.
A fully assembled,
launch-ready Saturn V stood 363 feet tall and weighed in at roughly 6,000,000
pounds, 90% of which was fuel weight. Depending upon who is telling the story,
it contained either 6,000,000 or 9,000,000 parts. There were three disposable
launch stages, atop which sat the lunar, service and command modules, which was
then capped with a launch escape system that was jettisoned shortly after
lift-off.
The 138-foot tall
first stage featured five massive F-1 rocket engines, each of which consumed
three tons of fuel per second. They were fed by a 331,000-gallon tank of liquid
oxygen and a 203,000-gallon tank of refined kerosene, all of which was consumed
in just two-and-a-half minutes, generating some 7,500,000 pounds of thrust
(160,000,000 horsepower).
After that first
stage fell away, at an altitude of approximately thirty-five miles, the 82-foot
long second stage, powered by five J-2 rocket engines, took over. The J-2s
burned a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, propelling the ship
to an altitude of 115 miles. After the second stage dropped away, the 61-foot
long third stage, powered by a single J-2 engine, took over, putting the
spacecraft into low-Earth orbit.
As Time-Life
noted, the third stage “will not be jettisoned at this time; instead, three
hours later it will be restarted to fire the Apollo toward the moon. At 10,350
miles from Earth, the command module, powered by its service module, will
separate from the third stage, make a half-circle turn back toward the third
stage, as the lunar module shroud of the third stage opens. The command module
will dock with the lunar module, which is to ferry the astronauts between the
command module and the moon, then back it free of the third stage. After
completing another half-circle turn, the two modules, nose to nose, will head
toward the moon.”
Sounds easy enough.
I can see why they were able to nail it every single time, unlike the problems
they had with those troublesome Agena craft. Time-Life also fills us in
on the details of the “probe and drogue” docking mechanism: “The probe, a
10-inch cylinder extending from the nose of the command module, must be
inserted into a cone-shaped receptacle, the drogue of the LM … As the probe
finds its mark, automatic spring latches lock the two together. The whole
probe-and-drogue assembly will be removed, clearing the tunnel through which [the
astronauts] will enter the LM. Inside the command module, [the command module
pilot] flips a switch that frees the LM.”
Pictured below are
the command module’s docking probe, the LEM’s drogue (with the LEM allegedly in
Earth orbit on the alleged Apollo 9 mission, in yet another spectacular shot
from NASA’s collection), and a close up of how the mechanism was supposed to
work. Curiously left unexplained was how, with the probe-and-drogue assembly
having been removed, the LEM was able to dock with the command module the
second time, upon its return from the lunar surface.
I am sure though
that the pud-pullers over at the BAUT
forum will be able to explain it. Maybe they can also explain why it is
that the space shuttle never went to the Moon. I was thinking about that the
other day as I was reading another heaping pile of ‘debunker’ blather about
how, once you’re into low-Earth orbit, 90% of the work of getting to the Moon
is already done.
The ‘debunkers,’
you see, claim that comparing the distance astronauts travel into space today
(200 miles) with the distance they traveled back in the magical 1960s (234,000
miles) is entirely unfair because it is, as any fool knows, during that first
200 miles that all the heavy lifting is done. Once you’re in low-Earth orbit,
it is a fairly easy matter to briefly fire the engines and ‘slingshot’ out of
orbit and set a course for the Moon. And getting back is just as easy – just
‘slingshot’ around the Moon and cruise on back to Earth. It hardly even
requires any fuel. It’s just a matter of, you know, falling through the void of
space.
If that is the
case, however, then how come none of the space shuttles, during the more than a
quarter-century that the program has been in operation, has ever done a fly-by
of the Moon? The Apollo 13 crew allegedly made the flight in a lunar module
composed of Popsicle sticks and Scotch tape, and yet the obviously vastly more
sophisticated space shuttle can’t make it there and back? Really?!
Why couldn’t it, on
any one of its missions, have just used the old ‘slingshot’ approach to go to
the Moon and back? And please, let’s not trot out the old “there was no reason to
do that as there was nothing to gain” excuse, because that is clearly a
complete load of horseshit. The space shuttle is far better shielded than the
Apollo craft were, it carries plenty of fuel and plenty of provisions to last
for the duration of the trip. Indeed, today’s astronauts should be able to
travel to the Moon and back in relative comfort.
So why has it never
been done? Apollo 8 did it all the back in 1968, which I started to talk about
at the top of this post, before getting hopelessly sidetracked. More on that
next time.
Wagging the Moondoggie, Part XI
December
30, 2009
by David McGowan
“To see the Earth as it truly is,
small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see
ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness
in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
Archibald
MacLeish, Skull & Bonesman (and uncle of Bruce Dern, for you LC fans),
reflecting on the alleged flight of Apollo 8
In the first of this series of posts, I
mentioned that the Apollo story was connected to the
On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11, the flight that
would allegedly land men on the Moon for the first time, took flight. Five days
later, on July 21, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin allegedly first set foot on
lunar soil. Three days later, the trio of Apollo astronauts triumphantly
returned home to a hero’s welcome. Exactly one week later, the first letter
from the so-called Zodiac killer was received by authorities. Eight days after
that, on the night of August 8, 1969, Sharon Tate and four others were
slaughtered in Roman Polanski’s
It was a time of supreme weirdness, with
extreme and very high-profile violence weaving its way through the flower-power
scenes in both
Anyway, I think when we left off we were
discussing the highly improbable flight of Apollo 8, the very first manned
launch of a Saturn V, which took flight, as I previously mentioned, on the
winter solstice of 1968. The mighty Apollo spacecraft, which had failed on its
last unmanned outing, purportedly flew all the way to the Moon, did ten quick
laps around Earth’s nearest neighbor, and then flew back home, with every one
of its 9,000,000 parts performing flawlessly.
Thanks for that was due in part, according to
the official Apollo legend, to a band of surfers in
NASA claimed, by the way, to shoot for 99.9%
accuracy in the manufacture of its Apollo spacecraft, which shouldn’t have been
a problem for a workforce composed of Nazi rocket scientists, bra seamstresses
and surfers. Even if that lofty goal had been attained, however, that would
still have left 9,000 defective parts per launch vehicle (6,000 if the figure
of 6,000,000 parts is correct).
The first alleged live broadcast from the Moon
came during prime time hours on Christmas Eve, though I’m sure that was just a chance
occurrence. The three astronauts allegedly riding aboard Apollo 8 (Frank
Borman, William Anders, and the ever-popular Jim Lovell), in what was billed as
a purely spontaneous gesture, took turns reading aloud ten verses from the book
of Genesis, which they followed up with: “Good night, good luck, a Merry
Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.” Obviously
the Gideon people had thoughtfully left one of their bibles in the capsule
sometime before launch.
The impeccable timing of the ‘historic’ Apollo 8 broadcast, reportedly
heard by one of every four people on the planet, would set a standard that
would be adhered to by all subsequent Apollo flights. The very first Moonwalk
by Neil and Buzz was broadcast (‘live’ of course) at 9:00 PM Eastern time, as
though it were a Monday Night Football game. Prime time Moonwalks became a
staple of the Apollo program, to such an extent that it was not at all uncommon
for the networks to be deluged with complaints when a popular weekly sitcom was
preempted for yet another fake ‘live’ Moonwalk.
After the second fake Moon landing, NASA began
adding exciting new elements to the Apollo missions to combat public apathy.
Apollo 13, of course, added the element of danger. Apollo 14 brought us the Moon
in Technicolor, with the first color video broadcasts. Apollo 15 kept us
entertained with the addition of a Moon buggy. And Apollo 17 featured the
first, and only, spectacular night launch of a Saturn V rocket.
Apollo 8 was quickly followed by Apollo 9,
which was originally scheduled to lift-off on February 28, 1969, just two short
months after the crew of Apollo 8 had splashed down. Luckily, the water in Southern
California is a little cold during the winter months and the waves aren’t so
good, so the surfers down in
Apollo 9 was the first Saturn V flight to allegedly
have a lunar module stowed away onboard. The mission allegedly featured the
first docking maneuvers with, and the very first flight of, a lunar module,
albeit in low-Earth orbit rather than in lunar orbit. Apollo 9 was also
allegedly the first flight whose crew donned the newly-designed Apollo/Playtex
spacesuits.
All things considered, Apollo 9’s ten-day
flight in low-Earth orbit was largely a letdown after the previous crew had
allegedly flown all the way to the Moon and back (and done so, like true
cowboys, without the new magic suits). There was one very odd thing though,
never mentioned in the official histories of the space program, that happened
during the flight of Apollo 9.
While lounging in the command module,
unencumbered by spacesuits, gloves and helmets, and with the luxury of being
able to hold their NASA-issue cameras in their hands, the crew (James McDivitt,
David Scott, and Rusty Schweickart) took photos of each other that are
unfocused, poorly composed, and not particularly well exposed – which is, of
course, exactly the results that one would expect from amateur photographers
using cameras that lacked viewfinders.
However, after those very same astronauts
donned their suits, gloves and helmets, and then ventured out for a spacewalk,
making it rather difficult for them to stabilize themselves (and therefore
their cameras), something truly wondrous and magical happened: the crew of
Apollo 9 suddenly gained the ability to shoot absolutely stunning compositions
that look like they were professionally produced in a studio. Though it’s hard
to pick a favorite, the one featuring the Earth’s reflection perfectly framed
in one of the actor’s helmet visors is pretty impressive.
v
All of the astronauts on future Apollo missions,
of course, proved themselves to be exceptional photographers as well, but only
when operating under the most difficult of conditions. Neil Armstrong, the very
first photojournalist to allegedly work on the Moon, that most foreign of
environments, set the bar exceedingly high for all who were to follow. HJP
Arnold, considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on space
photography before his death in June 2006, once said of the film magazine
allegedly shot by Armstrong:
“That sequence of images on the lunar surface,
taken mainly by Armstrong of course with that one camera … That film probably I
would say has never, ever been bettered, whether on the Moon or subsequently.
Almost every one of those relatively small number of images taken by Armstrong
appear to be splendidly composed. You remember the classic face-on picture of
Aldrin with his visor reflecting the entire landing scene – the lunar module,
the flag, the TV camera, and Armstrong taking the picture, uh, reflected in the
visor? It’s a marvelous picture!”
Despite all the acclaim he has received for his
exploits as an astronaut, Neil Armstrong clearly has been unjustly denied
recognition of his astounding abilities as a photographer. Some may argue that
he clearly was not playing in the same league as, say, an Ansel Adams, but I
beg to differ. Adams created some awe-inspiring work, to be sure, but could he
have done so while wearing a spacesuit, gloves and helmet, and with his camera
mounted to his chest, and while acclimating himself to an environment that
featured no air, greatly reduced gravity, and extreme heat and cold?
I think not.
Speaking of staged photos, by the way, take a
look at the photo below, allegedly shot on the Moon by the last men to set foot
there, the crew of Apollo 17 (Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Jack Schmitt). It
reminds me of something I’ve seen before, possibly some type of a symbol, but I
can’t quite place it. (For more fun with Apollo images, drop by Jack White’s
site at http://www.aulis.com/jackstudies_index1.html,
where you will find a more thorough analysis of photo irregularities than I
have seen anywhere else.)
Just two months after the return of Apollo 9,
NASA sent Apollo 10 off to the Moon, with Tom Stafford, John Young and Gene
Cernan onboard. The space agency obviously wanted to get the fake preliminary
flights out of the way as quickly as possible so as to get on to the main
event. The launch pace would slow considerably once the fake landings began
with the next flight, Apollo 11, which blasted off just seven weeks after the
return of Apollo 10.
Apollo 10, the third manned launch of a Saturn
V, once again allegedly went to the Moon, this time with a lunar module mounted
to the nose of the command module. The Apollo 10 mission allegedly included
everything that later missions would experience short of actually landing on
the lunar surface. Once allegedly in lunar orbit, the lunar module was deployed
and flown down fairly close to the surface, before returning to and
successfully docking with the command and service modules.
Having endured the perilous initial launch, and
then the quarter-million-mile flight to the Moon, followed by the successful
deployment and flight of the LEM, and having gotten to within pissing distance
of being the first men to create those historic first footprints on the Moon,
it would naturally have been tempting to ignore mission control and set down
for a quick stroll into history. To prevent this, according to the official
mythology, NASA diabolically short-fueled the LEM for the Apollo 10 mission.
There was, of course, no possibility that some
unforeseen circumstances might have necessitated the use of that additional
fuel, or necessitated a landing on the Moon, which would have been a bit of a
PR nightmare for the agency. Walter Cronkite would have had to break the news
to the American people: “The crew of Apollo 10 unexpectedly became the first
men to set foot on the Moon just moments ago, and we have been promised live
footage momentarily. Unfortunately, their spacecraft was deliberately
short-fueled so they will not be able to make the return flight to dock with
the mothership and both astronauts will soon die. This should make for some
riveting TV though, so stay tuned.”
The last of the major Apollo contracts to be
awarded was for the ever-popular lunar rovers, aka Moon buggies. The
initial idea for a lunar vehicle is generally credited to Walt Disney’s
favorite Nazi, Wernher von Braun, who envisioned a mobile, pressurized lab
weighing some four tons, capable of carrying enough provisions to keep two
astronauts alive for up to two weeks. The concept, dubbed MoLab, would have
required the launch of a separate Saturn V rocket, so the idea was dropped as
being too expensive (although NASA seems to have had a virtually inexhaustible
supply of Saturn Vs; when the Apollo program was scrubbed, NASA already had all
the hardware built for flights 18, 19 and 20 – and had the crews trained as
well.)
NASA supposedly gave up entirely on the idea of
placing a vehicle on the Moon, but General Motors’ Defense Research
Laboratories purportedly soldiered on, putting the company’s own money into
research and development of the vehicle. As the story goes, NASA told the team
at GM that if they could somehow come up with a way of fitting an operational
vehicle into an impossibly small lunar module equipment bay, the agency might
consider incorporating the vehicle into future Apollo missions.
Speaking of the lunar modules, by the way, I
happened to stumble across the photo below of the LEM’s mighty descent engine,
which, as can be clearly seen, would have hardly taken up any room at all in
the spacious spacecraft’s descent stage. Its fuel tanks wouldn’t have required
much space either, so there should have been plenty of room left to stow a
folding dune buggy in a curiously empty equipment bay.
Below is a NASA-approved image of the rover
folded up and ready to pack into its assigned equipment bay, along with a photo
of the folded rover allegedly stowed away on a LEM that has clearly seen better
days. And here is a brief video
clip of the deployment of the folded rover being demonstrated, presumably
at the manufacturing plant.
As can be clearly seen, particularly in the video
clip, the rover, as initially deployed, was far from complete. It seems to be
missing such things as a floor pan, and seats, and cameras, and antennae, and
battery packs, and various other components – which raises a few questions,
such as where were all the other rover parts stowed? How many empty equipment
bays were available to accommodate all the various rover components? And how
long exactly did it take the astronauts, given the limitations imposed by their
suits and gloves, to deploy and fully assemble a Moon buggy?
GM’s crafty R&D team, led by project
manager Sam Romano and chief engineer Ferenc Pavlics, supposedly came up with
the innovative folding rover concept in less than a month, and, in July of
1969, as Armstrong and Aldrin were allegedly taking man’s first steps on the
Moon, GM was awarded the contract to design and build the rovers. GM quickly
teamed with Boeing and got to work, with two significant challenges to overcome
– the rover must fit into the assigned bay, and the total weight was to be kept
to a maximum of 400 pounds. Also, the team had to move from concept drawings to
mission-ready rover in just 17 months.
As with all other aspects of the Apollo
program, those lofty goals proved surprisingly easy to achieve. By early 1971,
GM and Boeing had already delivered their first mission-ready rover to NASA for
final testing and approval. On July 31, 1971, just two years after the contract
had been awarded, what remains to this day the only manned vehicle to allegedly
land on an extraterrestrial body began kicking up Moon dust.
The finished product looked not unlike an
Earth-based dune buggy, albeit with the unique ability to neatly fold away. The
vehicle featured simultaneous front and rear steering and steel-mesh tires
mounted on wheels that were each driven by their own separate motors. Power was
supposedly provided by an array of batteries mounted on the front end of the
rover.
Since no one really knew what kind of a vehicle
would be required to drive on the Moon, early conceptual rovers ran the gamut
from vehicles with massively oversized wheels to those propelled by tank-like
tracks to Archimedean screws that would be able to burrow through the lunar
dust like mechanical moles. Luckily, through extensive research and
development, the Apollo team was able to deduce exactly which design components
would allow the rovers to operate with maximum efficiency on the lunar terrain.
Or so the story goes. In reality, the rover
team obviously had no time to do much at all in the way of research,
development and testing. The Soviets, on the other hand, took the development
of their Moon vehicle very seriously – seriously enough to spend an entire
decade researching, developing and relentlessly fine-tuning every aspect of
their robotic rover.
Dubbed the Lunokhod (the English translation of
which is “Michael Jackson” … err, wait a minute, make that “Moonwalker”), the
Soviet rover was an engineering marvel that was outfitted with an array of both
still and television cameras as well as a wide assortment of testing equipment,
including an X-ray spectrometer, an X-ray telescope, soil testing instruments,
an astrophotometer, a laser retroreflector, a fluorescence spectrometer, and a
magnetometer.
Lunokhod II, deployed in January of 1973, some
thirty-seven years ago, to this day holds the record for having traversed
further on an extraterrestrial body (about 23 miles) than any other robotic
rover – considerably further than America’s two Mars Pathfinder vehicles
combined.
So serious were the Soviets about testing their
rover that, in the summer of 1968, they built a secret Lunodrom (Moondrome) in
the remote
It’s hard though not to conclude that NASA
basically appropriated the lunar rover research done by the Soviets as their
own. According to a French documentary (Tank on the Moon), the Soviets
did indeed spend many long years researching all the various means of locomotion
that NASA claimed to study as well. And after doing so, Russian engineers (led
by Alexander Kemurdjian, who NASA later consulted with on its Pathfinder
project) came up with many of the same key design elements that would be
utilized on NASA’s lunar rovers, such as the mesh tires and the independently
powered wheels.
The Lunokhod vehicles had eight wheels, each
with its own independent motor, suspension and brake. The rovers were ‘driven’
by a five-man team here on planet Earth, using panoramic images beamed back in
real-time to guide the robotic vehicles. The design team had developed a
special lubricant that would perform in a vacuum and they had enclosed each
wheel motor in a pressurized housing. The vehicle’s batteries recharged via a
collection of solar cells on the inside of the craft’s lid, which was kept open
during the lunar day. During the frigid lunar night, the rover hibernated, kept
warm by an internal radioactive heat source.
Lunokhod I set down on the Moon on November 17,
1970, just a few months before NASA took possession of the first mission-ready
lunar rover. When that first rover allegedly arrived on the Moon eight months
later, in July of 1971, Lunokhod I was still traversing the lunar landscape.
Wagging the Moondoggie, Part XII
February
23, 2010
by David McGowan
“As launch windows open and close,
the next missions move forward. Two test flights of the lunar landing vehicle,
and then the proposed landing on the Moon. And plans are in the making now
which include fly-bys of other planets; visits to what Dr. Bunche calls
neighbors.”
From Debrief:
Apollo 8, a NASA promotional film circa 1968
Just a few weeks
ago, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden boldly unveiled the agency’s new vision:
“Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year, people fanning
out across the inner solar system, exploring the moon, asteroids and Mars
nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts.” (“Launching a Broader
Vision for NASA,”
Yeah, and then
imagine visiting a distant moon populated by ten-foot-tall blue people, which
is slightly more plausible than NASA’s grandiose dreams.
Bolden’s ambitious
proclamation was intended to put a positive spin on NASA’s acknowledgment that
the Constellation Program, which President George W. Jetson had promised was
going to put us back on the Moon by 2020, was being canceled. I’m sure we would
have made it though were it not for the fact that President Blackbush doesn’t
seem to want to fund the effort. Sure, he increased the agency’s budget for 2011,
but he didn’t, you know, increase it enough. So the Constellation
Program, which taxpayers have already reportedly shelled out at least
$9,000,000,000 for, and which will reportedly cost another $2,500,000,000 to
cancel, has been tossed on the scrap heap.
According to
Bolden, things weren’t really going all that well anyway: “Currently, [Bolden]
said, the 5-year-old Constellation program is burning through billions of
dollars and falling further behind schedule. The program couldn’t get American
astronauts back to the moon until at least 2028 … ‘So as much as we would not
like it to be the case … the truth is that we were not on a path to get back to
the moon’s surface,’ Bolden said.”
Well, were we at
least on a path to put together a better simulation of landing on the Moon?
Taking into account
that the Constellation Program was begun in 2005, and that the Apollo program
allegedly landed men on the Moon in a mere eight years, it would appear that it
wouldn’t actually take twice as long to get back to the Moon with today’s
technology, as previously advertised, but would actually take at least three
times as long! If, that is, we were able to man-up and follow through with
the plan, which obviously isn’t going to happen.
But be assured that
that’s only because we don’t have the money. Otherwise, we totally would have
made it back to the Moon. Possibly in less than twenty years. By which time all
the technology that we know and love today will be as obsolete as pagers and
Betamax video recorders, and trips to the Moon will still be something that we
only talk about – sometimes nostalgically, as we fondly recall the fabled glory
days from a decade few will remember, and sometimes with an eye to the future,
a oft-promised future that never seems to arrive.
In May of 1966,
after spending five years working on the Apollo project, we were just
a-year-and-a-half away from the launch of the first Saturn V. In 2010, after
spending five years working on the Constellation project, NASA has nothing to
present to us but a hefty bill – which just goes to show that lack of
technological sophistication and space-flight experience can apparently be
easily overcome with a little determination … and a couple rolls of duct tape.
I was thinking, by
the way, that if the idea of an Apollo reenactment were properly pitched to the
right ‘reality television’ producers, we could probably make it back to the
Moon in just a year or so. There was quite a bit of Apollo hardware that was
left over after the sudden demise of the program, much of which is now in
various aerospace museums – and aerospace museums tend to be run by aerospace
geeks who would like nothing more than to see the
We’re going to need
to assemble all our donated hardware, of course, and for that we can turn to
the guys at Monster Garage, who should be able to slap it together for us
in a couple of afternoons. There will undoubtedly be some missing and/or
non-operational parts, but that shouldn’t slow things down much; we can just
give the guys over at American Pickers a call and they’ll scour
Unlike girlie-men
like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Bear would undoubtedly show us a few
tricks that the Apollo gang never thought of – like fashioning a shelter out of
Moon rocks, foraging for the food and water that others failed to find,
building a roaring fire despite the lack of both air and combustible materials,
and finding several new and creative uses for the urine bags that his
predecessors tossed aside as space trash. He could also probably design and
build his own lunar rover from parts salvaged from artifacts of the Soviet Luna
program. And he could probably do it all without the need for a spacesuit.
Speaking of spacesuits, just a week before NASA
shit-canned the Constellation Program, the agency announced that it had awarded
a contract to Oceaneering International and the David Clark Company to design
and build a brand-new, state-of-the-art spacesuit for use on future manned
missions to the Moon and beyond (“NASA’s Next Space Suit,” Technology Review,
January 25, 2010).
“If NASA returns to
the moon in 2020 as planned, astronauts will step out in a brand-new space
suit. It will give them new mobility and flexibility on the lunar surface while
still protecting them from its harsh environment … The space agency has awarded
a $500 million, 6.5-year contract for the design and development of the
Constellation space suit.” Astronauts performing EVAs these days currently use
something known as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit: “It has a hard upper
torso, layers of material to protect astronauts from micrometeoroids and
radiation, a temperature-regulation system, and its own life support and
communication system. The EMU weighs over 300 pounds and has limited leg
mobility – astronauts feet are normally locked in place on foot restraints
while performing extravehicular tasks, and during Apollo missions, which used a
different EMU suit, astronauts were forced to develop a bunny hop to traverse
the lunar surface.”
I could, of course,
point out once again the absurdity of it taking about four times as long to
develop a spacesuit now than it did back in the hi-tech 1960s, but I’m pretty
sure I’ve already beat that particular horse damn near to death and then rubbed
salt in the wounds. I could also point out that the Apollo suits somehow
managed to perform all the duties of the current EMUs while weighing about 40%
less, but that’s also already taken a pretty severe beating.
So instead, I’ll
focus on the contention that the Apollo astronauts were “forced to develop a
bunny hop to traverse the lunar surface,” which, as an alert reader pointed
out, flies in the face of numerous past claims in which it was maintained that
the ‘bunny hop’ was found to be the most effective means of locomoting in a
reduced gravity environment, not that it was something forced upon the
astronauts by the limitations of the spacesuits. If I remember correctly, one
of the Mythbusters propagandists claimed that he had verified that it
was the most efficient means of moving in reduced gravity, and he was, by his
own admission, wearing a costume and not a pressurized spacesuit when he
conducted his experiment.
Someone, it would
appear, is doing a little lying here. I am, needless to say, as shocked as all
of you.
“‘When we went
to the moon the first time, we were just trying to get there. Now astronauts
need to be able to explore the surface, harvest resources, and do science,’
says Daniel Barry, vice president and director of research and development at
David Clark Company, and head of the Constellation space suits project.”
So the Apollo
missions, it turns out, were just about getting there. And the reason, I
guess, why we allegedly flew men to the Moon eight times (including the
alleged fly-bys by Apollo 8 and Apollo 13) was to, uhmm, prove that getting
there the first time was no fluke. Sure, we were told that the boys were
sent there to “do science” and that they took along a bunch of scientific
testing equipment – and even, on the last flight, an actual scientist – but
that apparently wasn’t really the case. And the lunar rovers allegedly flown to
the Moon were not brought along to enable the astronauts to “explore the
surface” and conduct additional science projects.
This time, however,
we’re going to do it right … in another 20+ years, that is … if we fast-track
it.
What “resources,”
by the way, are we planning to “harvest”? We’ve already allegedly brought back
numerous samples of Moon rocks, which appears to be about the only resource
readily available, other than the water NASA now claims can be found there. How
much does it suck, by the way, for NASA to have to cancel the Constellation
Program right after the agency had reported allegedly discovering loads of
water on the Moon?
One ‘debunker’
claim that has been made fairly frequently over the years, it should be noted,
is that NASA’s alleged Moon rocks contain no traces of water, proving that they
are not of Earthly origin and could only have come from the surface of a
waterless sphere like the Moon … which isn’t, NASA now claims, waterless. I
have no doubt though that those same ‘debunkers’ will be able to come up with
some convoluted, hackneyed explanation for the apparent discrepancy.
Pictured below is
the evolution of the American spacesuit. From left to right in the top row are
the Mercury suit (1961), the Gemini suit (1965), and the pre-Playtex Apollo
suit (1968); in the lower row are the famous Apollo magic suit (1969), the
first space shuttle suit (1981), and the new suit being produced for the
now-defunct Constellation Program. Below that, believe it or not, is an early
prototype Apollo suit. While it may appear to be a still from some 1950s sci-fi
flick, or a computer generated artist’s conception, it is, in fact, an actual
suit being tested in the
Another thing Bear
Grylls would undoubtedly do is bring us back some of those dazzling lunar
starscapes that the Apollo guys neglected to capture. Presented below, by the
way, is one of NASA’s former astronomy pics of the day.
It carried with it the following explanation: “If you could turn off the
atmosphere’s ability to scatter overwhelming sunlight, today’s daytime sky
might look something like this.” Below that is a shot from deep space,
illustrating that stars in outer space maybe aren’t really as camera-shy as
some would like us to believe.
According to
Bolden, NASA had “focused so much of our effort and funding on just getting to
the moon, we were neglecting investments … required to go beyond.” So while we
don’t have the money required to get back to the Moon, you see, we do have the
money to bypass the Moon and fly our guys to more distant locales, like Mars.
No target date has been set, but I’m guessing that if we focus our attention on
these bolder objectives, we’ll probably succeed by, like, 2050. Or maybe 2060.
Or 2069, on the 100th anniversary of the first alleged Moon landing.
As will be
recalled, we set our sights a little higher in the 1960s. When Kennedy
delivered his famous declaration back in May of 1961 that we were going to the
Moon, he gave the aerospace community less than a decade to make it happen.
Engineers across the country, who were well aware of the fact that the nation
hadn’t even taken its first baby-steps yet, were understandably dismayed.
The first Apollo
contract was awarded just two months later, in July of 1961, for the
sophisticated navigation system that would allegedly guide the spacecraft to
the Moon. In an unusual move, NASA opted not to solicit bids for the guidance
system; instead, the contract was handed directly to MIT, generating “immediate
controversy,” as noted by Moon Machines. As one of the show’s
talking-heads noted, “There was actually a budding industry out there that had
developed guidance systems and people from industry were quite upset. They felt
that they should have been given the chance to bid on the contract – and a
university is not ordinarily what the government contracts out to build
hardware for operational systems.”
There was, alas,
nothing ordinary about the Apollo project.
The man NASA turned to first, long before awarding any of the other
Apollo contracts, was one Charles Draper, who ran MIT’s instrumentation lab,
which would later carry Draper’s name. Draper was generally described as an
eccentric, charismatic, colorful gent whose background was in physics and,
curiously, psychology. He is widely considered to be the father of the inertial
guidance system.
Perhaps
significantly, Bill Kaysing, the first Apollo skeptic to gain prominence, has
claimed that it was MIT (in conjunction with DARPA) that provided NASA with the
blueprint for how to plausibly simulate manned trips to the Moon. If true, then
it of course makes perfect sense that NASA would have turned directly and
immediately to MIT, and would have done so without taking any outside bids.
Until MIT completed their work and provided the space agency with an outline of
the project, it would seem, NASA wouldn’t have known what other contracts to
award.
The fact that the
project landed on the desk of Charles Draper is perhaps significant, given that
the name ‘Draper’ is a rather notorious one in twentieth century American
history – and one that is closely tied to the name ‘Bush.’ It is a name that
appears more than once on the membership list of everyone’s favorite secret
society, Skull & Bones (Herbert Draper Gallaudet [1898], Arthur Draper
[1937], William Draper III [1950]). It is a name that was prominently featured
in the American eugenics movement, with General William Draper, Jr. serving as
founder and chairman of the Population Crisis Committee and vice-chairman of
the Birth Control League (as Planned Parenthood was originally known). General
Draper, a close friend of the Bush family, also helped finance the 1932
International Eugenics Conference. Many years later, during the Apollo era,
Draper advised LBJ on population reduction strategies.
The Draper family
was also, not too shockingly, involved in the financing and maintenance of the
Nazi regime. General Draper joined Dillon Read in 1927 and for many years was
tasked with personally handling the account of Nazi industrialist/financier
Fritz Thyssen. At the close of WWII, Draper was appointed Chief of the Economic
Division of the Joint Allied Control Council for
One final note
about General Draper (whose son, Bonesman William Draper III, served as the
chief of fundraising for George Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign): he was a
member of the Society of American Magicians. In other words, William Draper,
Jr. considered himself to be something of an expert in the art of illusion.
Perhaps the same could be said of Charles Draper of MIT.
According to Moon
Machines, Draper and his team got to work on the Apollo guidance system in
the spring of 1962. Given that Moon Machines also contends that the
contract was awarded to MIT in early summer of 1961, the question that is
naturally begged is: why, with the clock ticking and with an absurdly short
timeframe to pull the Apollo project together, would the MIT team have waited
almost a year to get started? Or did they, in fact, spend that first year
working on their real assignment – mapping out the key elements of the
simulation?
If so, then they
apparently spent a fair amount of time viewing an obscure German silent film by
the name of Die Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon), as noted in the
painfully long documentary, What Happened on the Moon? The German
feature film, released by filmmaker Fritz Lang in 1929, provided the blueprint
for the heavily ritualized launch procedures that were adopted for the Apollo
program. As can be seen in the screen caps below, all of the elements were
there: the unnecessary vertical construction of the spaceship in a specially
built hangar; the grand opening of the massive hangar doors; the excruciatingly
slow roll-out of the upright rocketship from the hangar to the launch pad; the
raucous crowds watching the spectacle live; the now ubiquitous countdown; even
the shedding of two stages of the ship. In other words, the only elements of
the performance that the public ever actually witnessed were all lifted
directly from a forty-year-old silent film.
Fritz Lang’s
technical adviser on the film was Herman Oberth, considered to be one of the
three founding fathers of rocketry. Assisting Oberth on the film project,
according to the previously quoted Time-Life book To the Moon,
was one of his brightest students, nineteen-year-old Wernher von Braun. A
decade-and-a-half later, both Oberth and von Braun would be scooped up through
the Paperclip project and brought to America to work on, among other things,
the Apollo program, whose choreography just happened to very closely match that
of the fake Moon launch Oberth and von Braun had crafted forty years earlier.
Die Frau im Mond, by the way, was
not the only Fritz Lang film that proved to be rather prophetic. He followed it
up in 1931 with M, the tale of a sadistic, pedophilic serial killer
guided by voices in his head. I wonder how he came up with that plotline?
Before moving on, I
should probably point out here yet another brazen lie the ‘debunkers’ like to
tell – the one that holds that von Braun was only a Nazi because he had little
choice in the matter, what with living and working in Germany during the days
of the Third Reich and all. That’s a nice little fable, to be sure, but it is
contradicted in a big way by at least one known photograph in which von Braun
can be seen adorned in the elite Nazi regalia of the Black Order of the SS. As
anyone who has studied the Nazi hierarchy is well aware, Himmler’s elite order
had a ‘no weekend Nazis need apply’ policy.
Anyway, returning
to MIT, the starting point for engineers was to develop a gyroscope-based
guidance system. The problem though was that gyros could not be produced to
MIT’s exacting standards, resulting in gyro after gyro being rejected. Another
problem was that translating data from the gyros into flight instructions would
require, as Moon Machines noted, a “modern digital computer,” and
putting such a beast in a spaceship “was an entirely new challenge.”
“Computers in the
early 1960s,” you see, “were huge. The idea of squeezing such a monster into a
spacecraft seemed preposterous.” But that wasn’t really going to be a problem
since, as we have already seen, clearing seemingly insurmountable obstacles was
something that the aerospace community was uniquely skilled at in the 1960s.
The engineers working on the onboard computer utilized an entirely new
technology known as the silicon chip. The technology was so new though that no
one knew what it could actually do. And as with the gyros, it proved to be
nearly impossible to produce chips of acceptable quality.
At the time,
‘software’ was a virtually unknown concept. As Moon Machines duly
reported, “With nobody clear on exactly what the computer should do, the
software engineers were free to write almost anything they liked.” One of those
flight software developers, Alex Kosmala, made the following remarkable
admission: “There were no specs. We made it up. Uhmm … and it’s always [been]
amazing to me – why was I allowed to program something that hadn’t even
been specified [but] that would be critical in assuring the success of the
whole Apollo Program? I couldn’t believe it, but that’s the way it was. We
made it up as we went along!”
I’m going to take a
wild guess here and say that NASA probably wasn’t unduly concerned since the
functioning of the software would only have mattered if the agency was planning
to actually send guys to the Moon.
The most
complicated aspect of the Apollo missions was the landing of the lunar modules,
which made the software program controlling that part of the mission the most
difficult to design. Amazingly though, that aspect of the software design was
not assigned until after most of the other programs were 2/3 complete – and it
was assigned to a twenty-two-year-old gent named Don Isles who had just
recently started his very first job. According to Moon Machines, “the
program without which it would be impossible to land on the Moon … had been
written almost as an afterthought by a junior engineer.”
It is rumored that
MIT first tried to pawn the job off on a kid who flipped burgers at the local
McDonalds, but he apparently had prior commitments.
By mid-1966,
Draper’s dream of controlling the entire mission via an onboard computer had been
dropped in favor of an Earth-based control system with the Draper system along
as back-up. MIT allegedly produced a computer the size of a small fridge, which
both the command module and the lunar module were outfitted with. Despite the
overwhelming obstacles faced by the MIT team, and the seemingly lackadaisical
approach taken with the project, the Apollo guidance system, as would be
expected, performed nearly flawlessly on every outing.
One final note here on Die Frau im Mond before wrapping up this
installment: the gatekeepers over at the BAUT
forum appear to be in on the joke. Why else would the site's logo contain
not an image of NASA's lunar module sitting on the surface of the Moon, but
rather a rocketship that looks suspiciously like the spaceship from Lang's
film?
Wagging the Moondoggie, Part XIII
July 13,
2010
by David McGowan
“It’s a journey we can’t repeat with
today’s technology, but in 1969, a group of astronauts risked everything to
walk on the Moon.”
When
We Left Earth, Discovery Channel, 2010
Let’s start this final
(for now at least, though I reserve the right to revisit the issue should any
uproariously funny new info become available) Apollo installment off with a
quintet of extremely rare, previously-unreleased Apollo mission photos. In the
top row, from left to right, we get a good view of the sophisticated gyroscopic
navigation system, followed by a shot of Neil Armstrong about to step out of
the capsule and take those historic first steps on the Moon, and then an eerily
familiar shot of a camera set up on a fake lunar surface in front of a fake
lunar backdrop. In the bottom row, we learn that an explosion in the ship’s
oxygen tank has seriously threatened the mission of Apollo 13.
The preceding
images are, of course, yet more screen-caps lifted from Die Frau im Mond,
that remarkably prescient silent film that featured the work of technical
consultants who would later work on the Apollo missions – the same missions
that “we can’t repeat with today’s technology,” though I’m assuming that we
could probably put together much better simulations.
The good news to report here is that, after
giving it a lot of thought, I believe that I may have finally figured out why
it is that we can’t put together a ‘repeat’ performance: the problem, in a
nutshell, is that
It is doubtful, in
other words, that even the mighty Saturn V could handle the additional load
requirements brought on by
Speaking of fecal
collection bags, by the way, Buzz and Neil purportedly left a few of those
behind at the fabled Tranquility Base. I mention that bit of trivia only
because those bags now are – and, as hard as it may be to believe, this is
absolutely true – well on their way to being declared national historic
landmarks! The state of
Due to
international treaties declaring that no country can lay claim to real estate
on the Moon, you see, Tranquility Base itself cannot be declared a historic
landmark. So
The concern, it is
claimed, is that future lunar explorers, either from other nations or on
privately funded missions, will run roughshod over the historic site, looting
the valuable artifacts. The message California wants to send to such potential
hooligans is that bringing home a souvenir sack of astronaut dung will be
treated just as harshly as, say, snapping off a piece of the Great Barrier
Reef. So if someone reading this should have the good fortune to be the first
space tourist to visit Tranquility Base, please do the right thing and cordon
off the area and maybe post a few signs informing people of the status of the
artifacts. And as tempting as it may be, please refrain from bringing home a
bag of astronaut shit as a souvenir.
As the state of
I’m also pretty
sure, by the way, that this is the first time that a movement has been underway
to bestow historical landmark status upon a site that existed only in our minds
and on our TV screens. Should our next goal be to have Mayberry declared a UN
World Heritage Site?
In other news, Aldrin is in full agreement with NASA’s plan to scrap
the Constellation Program and focus on low-Earth orbit flights, with an eye to
sending men to Mars at some unspecified time in the future. According to Buzz
(who couldn’t see stars from the Moon, which may be why he didn’t have much
luck dancing with them), “getting long-range space flight right requires
getting near-Earth orbit perfect … Just as deep sea exploration began with
practice in our littoral waters, a successful Mars mission begins with near-Earth
orbit testing. To get to the final stage, we must perfect all that we’ll need
for the journey.” (“Trading the Moon for Mars,”
The first question that comes to my mind,
obviously, is: when did Aldrin become such a fucking pussy? I mean, we
obviously didn’t have low-Earth orbit anywhere near “perfect” in 1969, but that
didn’t stop him from allegedly blasting off to the Moon, which I would think
would qualify as a “long-range space flight.” And exactly how much “near-Earth
orbit testing” will be required to “perfect all that [they’ll] need for the
journey”? Back in the good ol’ Apollo days, if I recall correctly, we didn’t
need to send so much as a single manned Saturn V into low-Earth orbit
before allegedly sending one all the way to the Moon!
Buzz’s old sidekick, as it turns out, begs to
differ. According to Space.com, Armstrong “blasted NASA’s new plans for
future space exploration … The United States is risking losing its role as a
leader in space exploration with its new plan, Armstrong said, adding that he
was concerned with the looming gap in American human spaceflight.” Fellow
Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan are also unhappy with the change
of direction. Speaking before a Senate subcommittee, Cernan had this to say:
“We (Armstrong, Lovell and myself) have come to the unanimous conclusion that
this budget proposal presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a
blueprint for a mission to nowhere.” (“Neil Armstrong: Obama’s New Space Plan
‘Poorly Advised,’” May 12, 2010)
Cernan and his fellow Apollo astronauts,
needless to say, know a little more than the rest of us do about taking a
“mission to nowhere.”
And now, with that
out of the way, let’s turn our attention to UFOs and aliens (the saucer-flying
kind, not the currently popular jumping-the-border-fence variety), which figure
rather prominently in some Apollo ‘conspiracy theories.’ One such theory holds
that we did indeed make it to the Moon in the 1960s – only to encounter either
active alien colonies or artifacts of past alien colonies. As the story goes,
we were either scared off or warned off and have therefore never returned.
These theories generally hold that the early Apollo missions succeeded but that
the later ones had to be faked – because we were, you know, scared to go back
and piss off the aliens.
We can only hope,
by the way, that the Moon’s resident aliens have little interest in human fecal
matter and have therefore left Buzz’s and Neil’s “historical resources”
untouched. Of course, most readers are probably aware of the fact that many
aliens have an intense fascination with anal probes, so it seems quite likely
that other things associated with the anus would be of interest to them as
well.
The other
predominant alien theory (which often appears hand-in-hand with the first)
seems to be that we did indeed make it to the Moon – but not with the
ridiculous hardware of the Apollo program. That was all for show, you see, to
cover up the real technology that was used, which invariably is said to
be technology that was retro-engineered from the recovered alien spacecraft
that Mulder and Scully keep hidden out at Area 51.
Both theories, in
other words, posit that we did indeed send men to the Moon, though the home audience
was lied to about the details of the missions – specifically, how we got there
and/or what we found there.
Some of these
theories go so far as to say that there are artifacts of alien colonies on Mars
as well, and/or that Mars has already been secretly colonized by us Earthlings.
One of President Eisenhower’s granddaughters, for example, has been making the
rounds lately claiming that she was targeted for some sort of ongoing Mars
colonization project involving all kinds of exotic technology that is in the
hands of various secret societies. Or something like that. The details aren’t
really important.
Many of the folks
who tell such tales also like to claim that it was NASA itself that seeded into
the conspiracy literature the notion that we never made it to the Moon. Better
for the skeptics in the crowd to buy into that scenario, so the story goes,
than to figure out the ‘truth’ – that our Moon has been taken over by hostile
aliens (or whatever other equally dubious alien theory it is that is being
promoted).
To anyone with a
working brain, of course, it should be perfectly obvious that it is actually
the opposite that is true – that it is in fact the alien theories that pose the
least threat to the status quo, for two rather obvious reasons: first, the
alien theories generally hold that we did actually send men to the Moon, so
they pose no direct challenge to the core lie of the Apollo Program;
additionally, these theories contain deliberately outlandish elements that are
designed to marginalize ‘conspiracy theories’ and drive most sane people away
not only from Apollo theories, but from the entire field of conspiracy
literature.
Anyone who has spent time in the conspiracy
trenches should recognize a very obvious pattern, and one which is certainly
not unique to Apollo. A substantial body of solid research on what really
happened on September 11, 2001, for example, has been tainted by the deliberate
introduction of such inanities as ‘pod’ planes, holograms and particle beam
weapons. Compelling evidence of the existence of elite international pedophile
rings, on the other hand, has been marginalized by blending in stories of
shape-shifting alien/human hybrids. And so it goes.
While we’re on the
subject of aliens, I’m sure that it was just a coincidence that Erich von
Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods was released just months before the first
alleged Apollo Moon landing and then relentlessly promoted into runaway
bestseller status (Chariots and its sequels have reportedly sold in
excess of 60 million copies). The book, which purported to present evidence of
alien visitations in days of yore, firmly planted two ideas in the minds of
many readers: long-range space travel was not only possible, but had already
occurred; and aliens were all around us, keeping an eye on the planet.
Interestingly
enough, some of
Why do you suppose it is, by the way, that the
‘debunker’ crowd seems to have little to say about the UFO tales told by
Speaking of the ‘debunkers,’ it appears that
the most prolific of them, Jay Windley (who posts under the nom de poofter
Jay Utah – and undoubtedly under various other pseudonyms as well, thus
creating the appearance of ‘peer’ acceptance of his pompous posturing), has
provided an answer to one of the other enduring mysteries of the Apollo
Program. According to a particularly grandiose claim made on a discussion board
by Windtunnel (he apparently doesn’t like being referred to as Windbag), he
“personally can produce drawings and analysis of the LM (lunar module)
structural, pressure, and thermal designs from memory.”
So it seems that NASA did not, in fact, lose
and/or destroy the original plans and specs for the lunar modules; the agency
instead decided to store that invaluable data in Windley’s spacious head.
Let’s back up now to 1962, to review a bastard stepchild of the U.S.
space program known as Operation Fishbowl, which was without a doubt one of the
most ill-conceived operations ever undertaken by the brain-trust in Washington.
In a nutshell, Fishbowl was a series of rocket launches aimed at detonating
nuclear weapons at high altitudes. Why?
A number of the rockets powering those flights
failed, one quite spectacularly and devastatingly. Four of the launches
succeeded in reaching altitude and detonating, but those ‘successes’ came at a
price, as we shall see. Most of the warheads were mounted on Thor rockets,
similar to the one pictured below. All were launched from
The first warhead, codenamed Bluegill, was
launched on June 2, 1962, but the radar tracking system failed and, with no way
to verify the rocket’s trajectory, it had to be destroyed in flight. The second
warhead, Starfish, took flight on June 19, 1962, but the rocket failed after
burning for just under a minute and the craft once again had to be destroyed in
flight. Missile debris, some of it radioactive, rained down on the island and
the surrounding waters. A couple guys were dispatched with brooms and dustpans
and the project was quickly resumed.
The next launch, on July 9, 1962, was the first
to ‘succeed.’ It was also, according to some theorists, the one that was
supposed to accomplish a key goal of the program: blasting a hole through the
van Allen radiation belts to hopefully allow for the safe passage of the Apollo
spacecraft. Starfish Prime, a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead, detonated at an
altitude of about 250 miles. If theorists are correct about the prime
objective, the test failed miserably. Instead of punching a hole through the
belts, the blast actually created an additional, man-made radiation belt! It
also damaged as many as nine
The next attempted launch – which was
apparently undertaken because, as should be obvious, the program was going so
well – failed on the launch pad and the Thor rocket exploded, causing extensive
radioactive contamination of the area as well as the destruction of the launch
pad. The spectacular failure of Bluegill Prime, on July 25, 1962, necessitated
a brief break.
The launches resumed on October 15, 1962, with
a third attempt to launch the Bluegill warhead. That test, Bluegill Double
Prime, failed when the rocket went into a serious tumble not long after taking
flight. It was, once again, destroyed in flight. Next up was Checkmate, just
four days later. Checkmate detonated at an altitude of about 91 miles,
considerably lower than the previous ‘success,’ and with a smaller payload.
The next launch was the fourth attempt
at Bluegill, dubbed Bluegill Triple Prime. Not many years later, of course, we
would get much better at that whole rocket-launching thing (despite the fact
that the Saturn V’s F-1 engines were notoriously unstable), eliminating the
need for such flights as, for example, Apollo 12 Double Prime (“Goddamnit!! We
lost another one?! How many more crews do we have back there? None?! Shit! Can
somebody run down to the Home Depot and pick up a few guys and get them suited
up?”)
Bluegill Triple Prime detonated on October 25,
1962, at an altitude of only about 30 miles. I think we can probably all agree
that getting an unmanned rocket to an altitude of 30 miles in just four
attempts, at the very same time that the manned Mercury missions were allegedly
attaining low-Earth orbit on every launch, was quite a stunning achievement. In
any event, the last of the Fishbowl launches was on November 1, 1962. Dubbed
Kingfish, it detonated at about twice the altitude of the previous blast. And
so ended a largely forgotten corollary of the
Moving on, I happened to stumble upon a couple
of fascinating articles on Space.com – and by “fascinating,” I mean that
they unintentionally raise questions about the legitimacy of the Apollo
missions, as so frequently happens whenever NASA types talk about going ‘back’
to the Moon.
In one of the articles, we find Michael Wargo,
identified as the “chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA
Headquarters,” contemplating a return trip to the Moon: “’None of our
spacesuits that we currently have would be appropriate for that extreme an
environment,’ [says Wargo]. Any materials built for Earth-like temperatures
won’t work on the moon. ‘They don’t bend anymore, they fracture, and they
fracture brittle-y, and so everything gets extremely brittle at those
temperatures.’” (“Water Discovery Fuels Hope to Colonize the Moon,” November
13, 2009)
And so we discover that there is yet another
piece of 1960s technology that has now fallen into an all-consuming black hole:
non-brittle materials from which to fashion spacesuits suitable for lunar
exploration. Back in the day, it will be recalled, Playtex’s bra seamstresses
knew a thing or two about stitching together a non-brittle spacesuit.
In the same article, Jack Burns, “of the Center
for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy at the
So … what’s that story again that the
‘debunkers’ like to tell about there being no compelling reason to go ‘back’ to
the vast wasteland that is the Moon? Who am I supposed to believe here – the
guy with all the fancy academic titles, or the guys whose primary area of
expertise seems to be mastering the art of self flagellation?
The other article from Space.com details
yet more of the lost technology of the 1960s: “Though engineers are well on
their way to preparing us for life on the moon, some major issues have yet to
be resolved. ‘Something that we’ll have to consider is radiation,’ Zacny (with
Honeybee Robotics, a NASA contractor) said. ‘We can close ourselves in
habitats, but radiation protection requires a lot of shielding. We cannot
solve this problem yet. Radiation can kill us.’ Moon dwellers will also
have to contend with the ubiquitous dust on the surface of the moon, which gets
into everything and can wear down joints and connectors and prevent sealing off
doors. It also poses a health risk to people, as it can cause breathing
difficulties and is difficult to filter out of habitats.” (“How to Build Lunar
Homes From Moon Dirt,” September 3, 2008)
The radiation problem has already been covered,
both here and elsewhere, so let’s focus instead once again on the dust problem.
As previously discussed, NASA nowadays acknowledges that dealing with lunar
dust will require the development of sophisticated new technology. No
explanation has been provided, of course, for why the Apollo astronauts didn’t
have any problems with the dust despite allegedly venturing out on multiple
EVAs during their alleged missions.
During the alleged Apollo 17 mission, for
example, our fearless astronauts supposedly took the Moon buggy out on three
separate occasions, returning each time, by their own accounts, covered from
head to toe in Moon dust, which they necessarily would have brought back into
the lunar module with them, and then ultimately transferred to the command
module when the supposed docking later took place. Why then is there no mention
in the Apollo literature of any health problems arising from this, or of any
problems with any of the delicate instrumentation, or of any problems with any
of the door seals? If it is “difficult to filter out of habitats” even with the
technology we possess today, then how were we able to do it 40+ years ago?
The ‘debunker’ crowd, despite loudly
proclaiming that they have thoroughly debunked every ‘conspiracy’ claim that
has ever been made, has had nothing to say on this issue. I wonder why that is?
No … seriously … I really do wonder why that
is. It would be understandable if there were some requirement that their
‘debunkings’ have some actual merit, but their body of ‘work’ clearly
demonstrates that they are not bound by any such restrictions. So the silence
is a bit puzzling.
Before signing off, there is one final point
that needs to be addressed here – one that has been on my mind since first
undertaking this series. It is generally claimed, as previously noted, that
getting to the Moon from low-Earth orbit is a relatively straightforward
procedure: you simply accelerate enough to ‘slingshot’ out of low-Earth orbit,
thus escaping Earth’s gravitational pull, and then just sort of freefall to the
Moon, firing the engines every now and then to make minor course corrections.
That all sounds just fine in theory … until you
take a step back and realize that the Moon itself is a satellite of the Earth,
held in place by – you guessed it! – Earth’s gravitational attraction. Isn’t
that, after all, what keeps it from drifting randomly about the solar system,
whoring itself out to any planet that would have it? So I guess the obvious question
that is begged here is: when exactly is it, while traveling from the Earth to
the Moon, that one leaves Earth’s orbit?
The answer, quite obviously, is, uhmm, never.
Earth’s gravitational pull would obviously get progressively weaker the farther
out one ventured, but common sense dictates that it wouldn’t just abruptly end
once you got beyond low-Earth orbit. Indeed, an article that appeared in
various newspapers not long ago noted that the satellites that enable GPS
devices to work orbit the Earth at an altitude of roughly 12,000 miles, about
11,800 miles beyond low-Earth orbit. And yet they are, miraculously enough,
still held in place by Earth’s gravity and there have been no reported cases of
one of them suddenly freefalling to the Moon.
There would come a time during a journey to the
Moon when that body’s own gravitational attraction would be stronger than that
of Earth, but given the relative masses of the two bodies, that time wouldn’t
come until the tail end of the trip. You could conceivably freefall most of the
way back, but you would first, of course, have to actually get there.
I guess what I am trying to say here is that
I’m not really buying into the claim that you wouldn’t need much fuel to get to
the Moon after reaching low-Earth orbit. Logic would seem to dictate that the
path to the Moon would not be the largely linear one we have been sold on, but
rather a series of steadily increasing circles (probably ellipses, actually),
requiring the expenditure of considerable amounts of fuel.
Perhaps that is the reason why the Space
Shuttle has never done a lunar fly-by, or left low-Earth orbit for any other
reason. Of course, there are also the problems posed by space radiation, and
extreme temperatures, and micrometeorites, and reentry, and …
Wagging the Moondoggie, Part XIV
May 12,
2011
by David McGowan
Yeah, I know, I know – a lot of you
were expecting, and have been waiting somewhat patiently for, and have probably
even been promised, a new installment of the Laurel Canyon series. And I will
readily admit that I did say, with the launch of the last Apollo installment,
that I was done with this topic for now. But how was I supposed to know that
just four months after that launch, it would be announced, albeit so quietly
that almost all of you probably missed it, that we will be boldly taking
another stab at sending men to the Moon?!
So no, we have not quite resumed our journey through Laurel Canyon, but because
I’m all about the giving, we’re going to take one more quick trip to the Moon!
And on the way there, there is a very high probability that we will encounter
some advertisements. Because, like I said, I’m all about the giving. And I
thought to myself the other day, “what more can I give them?,” and the answer
that I came up with was, “I know! I’ll randomly and rather awkwardly insert
some cool ads!”
Anyway, as I noted in the last Apollo post, “whenever NASA types talk about
going ‘back’ to the Moon,” they invariably seem to “unintentionally raise
questions about the legitimacy of the Apollo missions.” And sure enough, the
boys over at Lockheed Martin (one of NASA’s longtime partners-in-crime)
certainly didn’t let me down in that regard with this latest proposal.
Before proceeding, I should probably first clarify here that the proposed
missions are not so ambitious as to involve actually landing on the Moon. No,
these proposed missions involve merely flying to the Moon’s far side and then
sort of hanging out in Lunar orbit for a couple of weeks. In other words, all
of the most technologically demanding aspects of the alleged Apollo missions –
like actually landing on the Moon, surviving on the Moon, lifting off from the
Moon, and docking while in Lunar orbit – have been eliminated.
Even these far less ambitious missions, of course, won’t actually happen – but
let’s play along while Space.com’s “Space Insider Columnist,” Leonard David,
fills us in on what we have to look forward to (“Mission Proposed to Send
Astronauts to the Moon’s Far Side,” November 23, 2010):
“While NASA has officially given up its plans to send humans back to the
surface of the moon anytime soon, a contractor is proposing a mission to send a
crew to a stationary spot in orbit over the far side of Earth's neighbor.
Lockheed Martin has begun pitching an L2-Farside Mission using its Orion
spacecraft under development … The Earth-moon L2 Lagrange point is where the
combined gravity of the Earth and the moon allows a spacecraft to hover over
one spot and be synchronized with the moon in its orbit around the Earth. From
a halo orbit around that L2 point, a crew would control robots on the lunar
surface. Teleoperated science tasks include snagging rock specimens for return
to Earth from the moon's South Pole-Aitken basin – one of the largest, deepest,
and oldest craters in the solar system – as well as deploy a radio telescope
array on the farside.”
Everybody got all of that? Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? After all, the bar
has been set substantially lower than it was in the glorious 1960s, when we
easily mastered such things as landing men on the Moon, walking on the Moon,
driving dune buggies on the Moon, and playing golf on the Moon. Nevertheless,
there are some potential problems – just as there are, as is usually the case,
some aspects of these proposed missions that directly contradict the
entrenched, though slightly insane, belief that we sent men to the Moon back in
the days when telephones were heavy enough to be used as lethal weapons.
Let’s begin with one of the stated benefits of these proposed missions, as
listed in a Lockheed Martin ‘white paper’ and laid out by Daniel Bates of the
UK’s Daily Mail (“Astronauts to be Sent to the Far Side of the Moon for First
Time in 40 Years in Pre-Mars Mission,” November 25, 2010): “Both [NASA and
Lockheed Martin] would also have the chance to address the problem of a higher
re-entry speed which is accumulated on trips further away from the Earth.”
There they go again, pretending as though we’ve never done this before! Already
we have heard from NASA types about how we haven’t yet solved the radiation
problem, and how we haven’t yet developed spacesuit materials capable of
withstanding the temperature extremes on the Moon, and how we haven’t yet
solved the problem of how to deal with all that Lunar dust … and now we find
that we apparently also haven’t yet worked out how to deal with the fact that
spacecraft returning from the Moon would have to survive much higher re-entry
speeds than spacecraft returning from low-Earth orbit! And I’m guessing that we
might also have a problem with controlling the all-important reentry angle.
At this point, I really am beginning to wonder if there is any of that classic
1960s space technology that hasn’t been lost? Perhaps NASA needs to hire a
crack team of archeologists to dig through their warehouses.
Another problem arises from the proposed duration and timeline of the missions.
According to Space.com, “Each flight would prove out the Orion capsule’s life
support systems for one-month duration missions.” Later in the same article, we
find that on each mission, our fearless astronauts “would orbit the L2 point
for about two weeks.” It would appear then that Lockheed and NASA are allowing
a full two weeks to travel to and from the Moon – which would be all well and
good were it not for the obvious fact that it is roughly twice the time that it
took for the mighty Apollo craft to allegedly get to the Moon and back!
The 1960s was, as some will surely recall, the era of ‘muscle cars,’ so perhaps
it was the era of ‘muscle spaceships’ as well. But since we have now apparently
sacrificed raw power in favor of fuel economy, I guess today’s spaceships just
don’t burn rubber like the spacecraft of the wild and wooly ‘60s – though there
is, I suppose, an alternative explanation: the last forty years of space
research has taught us that it would actually take twice as long to get to the
Moon as was believed back when we faked the Apollo flights.
According to Josh Hopkins of Lockheed Martin, in order to achieve the
not-so-lofty goal of sending men out to orbit the Moon, the company’s Human
Spaceflight Advanced Programs division has “come up with a sequence of missions
that [they]’ve named ‘Stepping Stones,’ which begins with flights in low Earth
orbit and incrementally builds.” Lockheed views the first Orion missions as
“feasible by 2016 to 2018.”
Do I really need to belabor the point that, back in the days when mankind was
transitioning from the use of stone tools, we didn’t need any ‘stepping stones’
to get to the Moon – the very first manned launch of an Apollo craft allegedly
flew its crew all the way there and back without a hitch! And do I also need to
once again point out that, despite setting our sights much lower, and despite having
vastly improved technology to work with, and despite having an additional fifty
years of spaceflight experience, it will still take just as long to get men
near the Moon as it did in the 1960s to actually walk on the Moon?
Returning now to the alleged benefits of running these missions, we find that
Lockheed’s ‘white paper’ also talks about being able to “measure astronauts’
radiation dose from cosmic rays and solar flares to verify that Orion provides
sufficient protection, as it is designed to do. Currently the medical effects
of deep space radiation are not well understood, so a one-month mission would
improve our understanding without exposing astronauts to excessive risk.”
So despite the fact that some forty-three years have now passed since we first
allegedly sent men into deep space, we still don’t really know anything about
the effects of deep space radiation … but we are pretty sure, apparently, that
a thirty-day dosage is a good, safe place to start! And just to be on the safe
side, we could always pull Buzz and Neil out of retirement to pilot the first
flight. They can’t have too many years left in them anyway.
In all seriousness, NASA initially considered for the Apollo missions,
according to “To The Moon” (a Time-Life Book), “men doomed by fatal disease.”
Also considered were “midget[s], to cut the payload weight.” They said it, not
me. I would have used a more politically correct term. Imagine though, if NASA
had followed through on that idea, what kind of records could have been set in the
Midget Toss?
One final curious aspect of these latest proposed missions that we need to
delve into was explained by Space.com: “The robotic lander and rover would be
launched first on a slow but efficient trajectory to the moon, to ensure that
the rover is on its way before risking the crew launch.”
Say what?! Are you kidding me? What kind of girly-men are these new breed of
astronauts? Stepping stones? Supplemental launches before “risking the crew”?
Can’t we just find some real men like John Glenn and Alan Shepard to pilot the
Orion craft? And what is this nonsense about a “slow but efficient trajectory
to the moon”? “Efficient” in what way? Last time I checked, the ‘debunkers’
were still claiming that getting to the Moon was pretty much a matter of just
free-falling your way there. What could be more efficient than that?
Oh wait … I remember now. As I pointed out in the last Apollo post, getting to
the Moon does not actually involve free-falling. It involves battling the
Earth’s gravity by flying in ever-increasing ellipses. And burning lots and
lots of fuel. And Lockheed’s oblique reference to a “slow but efficient
trajectory” is, in fact, a confirmation of that. And so, by the way, is this
artist’s conception of the proposed Orion missions, which shows the spacecraft
outside of low-Earth orbit and yet clearly still burning its engines.
Following the launch of the lander and rover (both of which, it will be
recalled, stored easily aboard the Apollo flights), “three astronauts would be
launched in an Orion spacecraft. If NASA has built a heavy lift launch vehicle
by then, it would be capable of launching the crew directly to the moon. If
that mega-booster is a no-show, smaller rockets can be used instead, but a more
complex arrangement would be required. First, Orion would be launched to
low-Earth orbit on a rocket such as a Delta 4 Heavy. Then, a modified Centaur
upper stage would launch on a separate rocket. Orion would dock to the Centaur
stage in orbit, and the Centaur would boost Orion toward the moon.”
To briefly recap then, we now know that getting three men near the Moon in
modern times is considerably more difficult than landing three men on the Moon
was in ancient times. It now requires taking a number of baby-steps before
taking the big plunge. And it requires the launch of three separate high-tech
spacecraft. And it will take the astronauts a full week to get there, as there
are now speed limits in deep space that are strictly enforced and the U.S. can
not afford to have another moving violation on its record. The equipment, of
course, will take even longer to get there, because it’s on a slower and more
efficient course. And we may have some problems to work out in regards to deep
space radiation and reentry speed.
And even after all of that, needles to say, we won’t be actually landing men on
the Moon. That would probably require an additional ten years of baby-steps and
the launch of at least five spacecraft. And since we’ll be checking out the far
side on these proposed missions, we still won’t be able to verify all those
Apollo artifacts supposedly littering the Moon. Which is really kind of a moot
point, because we won’t actually be going at all.
Speaking of the far side of the Moon, by the way, the Daily Mail noted that the
“surface was first photographed by Luna 3, a Soviet probe, in 1959 then the
Apollo 8 mission followed in 1968 but there has been scant exploration of it
since.” Translation: there has been no exploration of the far side since 1959,
and it would be nice if the Daily Mail would throw in a comma now and then.
But enough about that. Let’s move on to a different topic. Remember how I
argued that if it were possible to send crews to the Moon, private enterprise
would have a strong financial incentive to have done so to exploit any
available resources? And remember how the ‘debunkers,’ not surprisingly,
claimed that there was nothing much on the Moon to see or do, especially since
the strip club was shut down over some zoning dispute, so there was not really
any compelling reason to go back? Well, it turns out – and this is quite
shocking – that the ‘debunkers’ may be lying once again. As the LA Times
reported on April 8, 2011 (W.J. Hennigan “MoonEx Aims to Scour Moon for Rare
Materials”):
“A team of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are shooting for the moon
with a new private venture aimed at scouring the lunar surface for precious
metals and rare metallic elements. The private company Moon Express Inc., or
MoonEx, is building robotic rovers alongside scientists at NASA’s Ames Research
Center northwest of San Jose. MoonEx’s machines are designed to look for
materials that are scarce on Earth but found in everything from a Toyota Prius
car battery to guidance systems on cruise missiles. While there is no guarantee
the moon is flush with these materials, MoonEx officials think it may be a
‘gold mine’ of so-called rare earth elements.”
The company won’t, naturally enough, be sending any human cargo to the Moon,
because that isn’t really possible, but the point here is that there are in
fact compelling reasons for ‘return’ flights to the Moon, for both financial
and scientific gain, so there is no validity at all to the argument that no one
has been back for some forty years simply because there is no reason to go
back.
Let’s briefly return now to Operation Fishbowl, which was also discussed in the
last Apollo offering. Unbeknownst to me until very recently, NPR decided to
dredge up the nearly fifty-year-old high-altitude nuke tests less than two
weeks before I did (Robert Krulwich “A Very Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs
In Space,” July 1, 2010). And the facts they brought to the table were rather
compelling.
“If you are wondering why anybody would deliberately detonate an H-bomb in
space, the answer comes from a conversation we had with science historian James
Fleming of Colby College.” According to Fleming, who has been busily reading
through James Van Allen’s papers while working on a biography, “a good entry
point to the story is May 8, 1958, when James Van Allen, the space scientist,
stands in front of the National Academy in Washington, D.C., and announces that
they’ve just discovered something new about the planet.”
What Van Allen’s team had discovered, of course, was that Earth is ringed by
belts of high-energy particles, now known as the Van Allen radiation belts. And
what Fleming’s recent research revealed, incredibly enough, is that the “day
after the press conference, [Van Allen] agreed with the military to get
involved with a project to set off atomic bombs in the magnetosphere to see if
they could disrupt it.”
Let’s pause here for a moment to reflect on the almost unfathomable level of
megalomania at play here: immediately upon learning of the existence of the
radiation belts, the military/intelligence complex decided, without even giving
it much thought, that it would be a great idea to attack said belts with atomic
weapons! And the ‘scientist’ who had made the discovery immediately agreed that
that was a swell idea! As Fleming noted, “this is the first occasion I’ve ever
discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow
it up.”
Never mind that the belts are there to shield the planet from incoming space
radiation, and that their existence is one of the primary reasons that
biological lifeforms can thrive on this sphere … let’s just see if we can blow
a big fucking hole in them! It apparently never occurred to the geniuses in
Washington that if you blow a hole in the belts to, say, allow for the safe
passage of spacecraft, you would also presumably allow for the unsafe passage
of massive amounts of incoming, and very lethal, radiation.
This, dear readers, says a lot about the true nature of the men who rule behind
the curtain. What hubris is required to put at risk every living creature on
this planet, and do so without even giving it a second thought, for the dubious
purpose of facilitating space missions that were never going to actually take
place? And bear in mind, by the way, that these ‘tests’ took place during the
tenure of a nearly mythical figure known as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. For those
then who are inclined to believe that the sitting President actually calls the
shots, I would suggest taking a little time to contemplate why it is that the
man who many consider to have been a knight-in-shining-armor was the man who
gave the thumbs-up to the most recklessly arrogant nuclear weapons tests ever
conceived?
The first such tests were conducted in 1958, almost immediately after the
discovery of the radiation bands. But those tests used just lowly ol’ atom
bombs, and according to NPR, “Atom bombs had little effect on the
magnetosphere.” Which is why in 1962, the powers-that-be decided to up the ante
by using hydrogen bombs … really, really big hydrogen bombs. How big? Starfish
Prime, the most ‘successful’ of the ‘tests,’ was tipped with a warhead 100
times as powerful as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima!
As detailed by NPR, “The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher
than the Earth’s atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a
bomb’s radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming
Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby;
c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly
target (Moscow! for example); and – most peculiar – d) if a man-made explosion
might ‘alter’ the natural shape of the belts. The scientific basis for these
proposals is not clear.”
Objective “a” roughly translates to: “we had to do it to protect ourselves from
those crazy Russkies!” Those with atypically long memories may recall that
before the collapse of the international Communist threat neatly coincided with
the rise of the international Terrorist threat, that was pretty much the
all-purpose excuse for all manner of heinous activities undertaken by the
Western powers. The main problem here though is that Starfish Prime was
detonated at an altitude of 250 miles, roughly 50 miles beyond low-Earth orbit,
and I’m reasonably certain that Soviet ICBMs weren’t designed to fly at
anywhere near that altitude.
Moving on to “b,” I feel fairly confident in saying that even back in 1962, at
the tender age of two, I could have provided an answer to that question, and
that answer would have been: “Yes, detonating a very large hydrogen bomb will
cause extensive collateral damage. Duh!”
Proceeding to “c,” I’m afraid I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with
NPR on its decision to label “d” as the most peculiar. Attempting to take out
Moscow in a nuclear holocaust redirected through the Van Allen belts has to
rank pretty high up on the peculiarity scale. And what would be the point?
Plausible deniability? “Looky what just happened to Moscow! It’s as if God
himself struck a blow against the Evil Empire! I damn sure know we didn’t do
it!”
As for “d,” altering the natural shape of the belts appears to have been the
primary goal. Because as we all know, man can always improve upon the natural
order of things. And it was immediately apparent, right from the time of their
discovery, that the shape of the belts was entirely wrong for this planet.
Sure, they would have been fine for, say, Mars or Venus – or even Pluto, before
it was rudely kicked out of the Fraternity of Planets – but they were clearly
unfit to circle this planet. So we had to try to fix them.
Luckily, we failed.