The moon landing

[Anti Federalist]

https://twitter.com/i/status/1752090483319263594

 

[unknown]

I may actually be on team We Never Went to the Moon.

This is about 3.5 hours long.

A couple of years ago I watched the entire thing, made notes, marked key time stamps etc. Will try to find if anyone is interested.

I thought it was pretty good. Its compelling regardless of what someone believes because they address both sides of the arguments.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpuKu3F0BvY

 

[ClaytonB]

I don't care.

The traitors in DC are daily perpetuating hoaxes a thousand times worse than hoaxing the Moon Landing would have been. If you cannot believe it is possible that the Moon Landing was hoaxed, you'll never be able to believe what they're actually doing, every single day, all day in Washington, DC right now.

I believe that classic American can-do was able to get us to the Moon. I also believe that the DC overlords who have seized control over every square-inch of the United States are committing hoaxes (fake news) on a scale that even the most paranoid are unlikely to be able to imagine. You -- yes you, the government-skeptic libertarian -- almost certainly underestimate just how much you are beling lied to. You are being lied to more than can even be expressed in words. Until you understand that fact, you too are deceived!

 

[jkr]

Van Allen has entered the chat...

 

[sparebulb]

 

[unknown]

Our dog ate our homework.
- NASA

Astronaut Donald Pettit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16MMZJlp_0Y

 

[fisharmor]

I may actually be on team We Never Went to the Moon.

This is about 3.5 hours long.

A couple of years ago I watched the entire thing, made notes, marked key time stamps etc. Will try to find if anyone is interested.

I thought it was pretty good. Its compelling regardless of what someone believes because they address both sides of the arguments.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpuKu3F0BvY

A friend at church has swallowed this kool-aid and I literally just watched this last week to see where he's coming from. I had looked into the hoax theory 20 years ago, reviewed all the hoaxer positions, and found a site (probably long gone) that adequately addressed all of the hoax claims. I became pretty convinced we had actually done it.

I don't have a lot of time to spend listening to Matt Walsh (I find him moderately less insufferable than Ben Shapiro), but regarding American Moon, I have notes of my own.

The biggest issue with it is that unlike the site I found 20 years ago, there doesn't seem to be anyone today who is taking the hoaxer arguments seriously. I might be wrong but it would be my expectation (and intellectually consistent for Walsh) if the OP video doesn't address many of the arguments in American Moon.

Which is a shame, because some of the arguments in this show are just straight garbage. There's a part of the video where they insinuate that because one guy said the official DVD set is the authoritative record of the moon landings, there can't be any conversion or compression artifacts in the evidence they use that they were using wires to mimic low gravity on a set. Well, guess what - DVD by nature has conversion and compression artifacts in it. It doesn't matter whether everyone in NASA signs an affidavit calling it authoritative (and all they have is one guy who is an armchair defender saying this) - it's not authoritative for that very reason. This is the same argument they were making 20 years ago when they were saying crosshairs were obscured by foreground images and this was proof of fakery - the American Moon video is forced at one point to admit this was erroneous and an artifact of converting film to early crappy jpeg and was a bad argument, but still brazenly says the DVD footage is authoritative. DVD is even a much older format now than JPEG was when they were making the JPEG based arguments.

The part about the Van Allen belt is completely unconvincing, too. NASA has had it documented forever that they took a curved approach to the moon that would go around the worst of the radiation.
The other thing they didn't consider is that they TOTALLY would have just shot men through the radiation, damn the torpedoes. There was a known program in the 1960s where the Air Force was trying to build a nuclear bomber. A plane powered by a nuclear reactor that could stay in the air for days, ready to make a nuclear strike. Well everyone knew this thing was going to be spewing radiation everywhere and that they'd be exposing pilots to it, because you can't line a plane with lead no matter how much power it has. And their answer at the time was "well let's just pick older pilots who have already had their children". That was literally their pitch - let's go ahead and bathe them in radiation knowing full well that there would be a mile-long line of 40 year old pilots who just had their wings clipped who would have voluntarily gotten cancer if it kept them flying for a couple more years. (Luckily the bit about spewing radiation on the rest of us was considered a problem and it got cancelled.)

I don't find the "we were desperate for a win" argument convincing either for two reasons. First, it's well known at this point that the Soviets had lots of spectacular space race failures that we have only known about for 10-15 years. It's difficult to follow the history of their progress on Venus missions, for example, because every time there was a failed launch or something blew up before leaving the atmosphere or stopped responding before getting there, they just memory-holed the entire mission and started over again with Venera 1.
Well if we were that desperate for a win, why is it that all the Gemini missions were unmitigated successes and then suddenly things start going wrong with Apollo? Why didn't they just memory-hole the problematic parts like the Soviets did?
Second, if we were looking for a win, why is it that they let it be known that three astronauts burned to death as the first thing they were doing with Apollo?
When they got to the point of sending men to orbit the moon with Apollo 8, why was there extra tension involved due to the known compressed timeline they were operating under? Why were we allowed to know the Apollo 8 astronauts all kissed their families goodbye because they knew what they were doing was batshit insane, that they weren't as ready as they should have been, and that there was a nontrivial chance that they would end up flying off into space and suffocate?
We have a gigantic problem with Hollywood today - people who have trained as writers and do it professionally - not understanding that conflict and risk is necessary for a compelling story. How the hell did NASA understand this to such a degree in the 60s? The idea that they were able to balance the actual science they were doing (which the hoaxers even admit to in this video) and also put on a production that is better than what professionals are capable of currently, is simply farcical.

On the other hand, there are parts of the video that are compelling. The one that sticks out the most is the "hotspot" theories on the photographs. I knew about some of the lighting issues 20 years ago, but this video goes into much greater depth as to what those problems are. I do think it's amusing that all of the professionals they got are these fabulous old Italian fashion photographers. But they do know their craft and that comes through.

The "wire work" section is more compelling than I thought it would be. I admit every time I saw some video of someone on the moon falling and springing back up, I took it to be a consequence of being in 1/6 gravity and human muscles being to accomplish much more. It's true those suits were incredibly heavy, but they'd have to have like 1200lbs of equipment on them to get close to the strain they'd experience in 1g. The fact that they're just popping back up isn't the weird part - the weird part is that whenever they do, it's consistent with what it would look like if they're getting picked up by a wire by their backpack antenna.
That said, I don't know if this was cherry-picked. Someone would have to review all of the footage available to find out whether every single fall is consistent with being raised up by a wire.

But that's not going to be me, because (to bookend this tl;dr post) of the DVD artifact argument mentioned earlier. The other "wire" argument is the flashes that happen directly above the antenna as a rule. Well, if we take it for granted that the flashes always happen directly above (I don't, but for the sake of argument...), it just so happens that just yesterday I as talking to a godson who just got his PhD last summer in Math, who wrote his thesis on video algorithms, and I asked specifically about this. He agreed with my comparatively unlearned assessment that it doesn't make sense that flashes always happening above would be compression or conversion artifacts - and went further to state that compression artifacts usually manifest where there is motion. If there's black directly above a figure in a digital file, there is zero reason for any algorithm to touch it, for any reason.
However, he also agreed that the DVD cannot be authoritative - and then we get into the same argument the hoaxers of 20 years ago didn't, which is let's take a look at the original media. As another side-note, they do bring up in the American Moon video that the Apollo 11 original footage is lost, and because they're not as skeptical of government as we are they think there's some nefarious reason for it (while we all know it's sheer incompetence). But there is still original media for the examples they were showing, as far as I know - and again, it really requires someone who cares more than I do to go find that media and do an analysis on those flashes that takes that media into consideration.

 

[TheTexan]

Only an idiot would believe we landed on the moon. It was all just a giant hoax to fool the Russians into thinking the earth is round, and the hilarious part is, they still do.

 

[unknown]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ether-us-moon-landings-happened-10327714.html

 

[unknown]

A friend at church has swallowed this kool-aid and I literally just watched this last week to see where he's coming from. I had looked into the hoax theory 20 years ago, reviewed all the hoaxer positions, and found a site (probably long gone) that adequately addressed all of the hoax claims. I became pretty convinced we had actually done it.

Its been a minute since Ive watched the documentary, I dont recall all of their arguments.

For me personally, one of the issues that stood out was how the program was progressing.


There was the Philips Report released in 1966, essentially saying that there were countless issues, both safety and budgetary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Report


Thomas Baron conducted a follow-up report confirming Philips findings and was even more critical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Baron


Rockets were exploding in 1965 and in 1966.

Finally in 1967, they BBQ'd 3 astronauts to death: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1


But miraculously, a year later in 1968, flawless execution of Apollo 8, astronauts are orbiting the moon. A few months later, theyre bouncing up and down in dune buggys...


On a side note, Thomas Baron leaked his safety report to the press.

He was fired on January 5th, 1967.

On April 21st, 1967, Baron revealed his findings during Olin Teague's NASA oversight hearings.

Six days later, he and his entire family were smooshed by a freight train.

 

[TheTexan]

So many moon landing believers in this thread. SAD.

 

[unknown]

So many moon landing believers in this thread. SAD.

Depressing.

 

[unknown]

Woops.

 

[Matt4Liberty]

This is one of those things that nobody without direct knowledge will know what really happened. There's too much mud thrown around and too many questionable things being thrown around for both sides of the argument.

My hunch is that it didn't happen because of the of my lack of trust of the government. In reality who knows.

 

[sparebulb]

I really don't care if we landed on the moon or not.

If we did, we did it with technology not shown to us.

It serves my purposes to believe that the 'gubmint faked it because it strikes at the heart of the dishonest nature of 'gubmint.

Plus, Matt Walsh is a neocon in soy-boy drag.

 

[unknown]

 

[Invisible Man]

I'm certain we went to the Moon.

But I just watched Apollo 13 and a little detail was cool, which was that at one point Jim Lovell had to calculate a trajectory change using paper and pencil while in space, and call down to Houston to have them check it. I know it's a fictional reenactment, but I imagine details like that were meant to be historically accurate. It's incredible how difficult and costly landing on the Moon is with today's technology and how ancient the technology was when it was actually accomplished.

 

[sparebulb]

Hmm...

When THEY want moon deniers to look like this.

But people who think that they can transport themselves to the moon and beyond actually look like this.

 

[fisharmor]

There was the Philips Report released in 1966, essentially saying that there were countless issues, both safety and budgetary.

I wasn't aware there were so many coincidences like this.
However, it's also well documented that there were internal shakeups after that. The impression I've always gotten, from the 'court historian' side of things, is that there was a ton of work that had been done and they brought in some whip-crackers to keep everyone focused on putting the pieces together in correct order and safely.

The other problem with this part of the hoaxer theory is the computer programming. The Apollo computers are fascinating for computer types because not only was the whole thing a pioneering effort to do things that had never been done before (writing bespoke programs to interact with hardware to accomplish a physical task that was in process was very bleeding edge at the time), but they did it in a way that has not been used before or since, using core rope memory that used magnetic induction in custom woven wire to store the programs in physical form as ROM modules.

That part of the project was one that was woefully behind. They had given the task to MIT and MIT was treating it like a research project. They needed a similar shakeup where people who had actually done something with their lives had to get involved and kick all their egghead asses into shape and get them making accomplishments - and it is the same type of story, where it happened at the eleventh hour.

But this is a place where the hoaxer claims break down. We actually do have the program modules for Apollo still. Some of them have made their way into private hands. And there are computer professionals and hobbyists who have custom built readers to hack into these goofy format computer programs and read them and some of them have actually written simulations that use that code.



We have an identical story about one of the parts of the Apollo program (the computer) being hopelessly behind schedule - but not just any part of the Apollo program. It was a dealbreaker part, every bit as important to the plan as the engines. Without the computer, I'd agree with the hoaxers ten thousand percent.

But we have the computer. And it's kind of a bullet through the roof of the mouth for the hoax theory.

 

[fisharmor]

I don't remember the term for this but there's definitely a term for attributing attitudes or understanding to historical figures that are based on our modern understanding.
In the minds of the archivists in charge of tape at NASA, what possible reason could there be to save the recordings?
The recordings were in a video format that does not exist outside the Apollo program. It was a low-raster-line format that was designed to save bandwidth so they could actually do it.
(Another point in favor of it actually happening - what other reason would there be to invent a doesn't-exist-anywhere-else TV signal?)

The literal only reason in the mind of 1970s archivists to save those tapes is if they somehow anticipated that there would be a conspiracy theory about the landings not happening and needing those tapes to debunk the theories. They likely didn't even have a way to read them. If they had put them into a reader and piped it into a regular TV set it would have displayed garbage.

So 10+ years after Apollo 11, people who couldn't even watch the footage and who had a documented process in place to recycle tape and who knew there were recordings out there of what actually got displayed to the public, were somehow supposed to be clairvoyant and know that in another 10 years people would start doubting it even happened and there would be a bunch of people interested in custom fabricating conversion electronics to get the signal on those tapes converted.

That's the hoaxer position.