Moon Missions Faked?

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by zadojla

Rapid calculations would have been done with a slide rule, which could calculate to three significant figures very rapidly in the hands of an expert.

Yep, my dad made me learn how to use a slide rule before he let me have his trusty hp! Those little sticks were amazing!

Originally Posted by zadojla

Computers from the late 60's would have had cycle times much less than one megaHertz. A large mainframe from that time might have had one megabyte of memory.

My understanding is that the nave computers had a few k of core (yah, those little donuts on a grid of copper!) and ran at a few *kilo*cycles! not much but way more than what you could do with a slide rule (which could be a dangerous projectile at zero G!) The thing was about the size of a large safe deposit box...

Cheers,
Buffy

[zadojla]

Originally Posted by Buffy

Yep, my dad made me learn how to use a slide rule before he let me have his trusty hp! Those little sticks were amazing!

I still have my Post Log-Log Deci-Trig slide rule. The log-log scales allowed you to raise any number to any power.

Originally Posted by Buffy

My understanding is that the nave computers had a few k of core (yah, those little donuts on a grid of copper!) and ran at a few *kilo*cycles! not much but way more than what you could do with a slide rule (which could be a dangerous projectile at zero G!) The thing was about the size of a large safe deposit box...

Yup, that's my understanding also. Core was cool. I'd still bet no astronaut/engineer worth his salt left his 6" pocket sliderule home. Suppose there was a power failure?

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by zadojla

I'd still bet no astronaut/engineer worth his salt left his 6" pocket sliderule home. Suppose there was a power failure?

Like Apollo 13? You bet! But while Buzz Aldrin wrote his doctoral dissertation on orbital mechanics (basically worked out how to actually do orbital rendezvous), most astronauts in the old days were stick and rudder guys (Neil Armstrong was they guy with the hand on the stick landing the Eagle, even though Buzz was nominally the Lunar Module pilot), and really relied on the folks back in Houston. If you look carefully at the old footage though, you'll see lots of slide rules in Mission Control!

Cheers,
Buffy

[maddog]

I just the moon landing faker theorist are reincarnations of the old Flat Earth
Society...

Maddog

[maddog]

Originally Posted by Aquagem

For years I kept a copy of a Back to Godhead (Krishna) magazine from the early 70's with a cover article entitled, "We never went to the Moon". I kept it because it shows how religious thinkers often come to their conclusions about reality. Being from a different culture, the story didn't raise hackles like confronting your own dominant culture's ideas.

How did they know the whole thing was a fake? Simple. The holy Vedas state that the moon is seven (or so) times farther away from Earth than the Sun. We know the Sun is 93 million miles away, so the moon is much too far for us to have reached it. Good deductive reasoning from an unimpeachable source. (Good example of "begging the question" - reasoning logically from an unsupportable position to an irrelevant conclusion.)

...

Having the wrong theory really matters.

How did/does the author explain how Newton could get orbit of the moon so wrong ?
I mean, if it is really 7x farther away wouldn't Newton's Law of Gravitation show that,
or is it flawed as well. Jesus... Thanx, Aquagem for contibuting this silly gem.

Maddog

[maddog]

Originally Posted by Buffy

No question. My dad had an ancient hp programmable calculator from the 70s (able to do 100, count em *100* instructions), and it had a program you could enter by hand that did a moon landing simulation. And if you've dug up any of the details on how these nav computers worked, they were basically programming in machine language, with buttons for "verb" and "noun" to indicate if a number was an instruction or a byte of data. Wild! Works, but man, having to fiddle with something like that while you're 60 seconds from running out of fuel is mind boggling...

Ya, that was back in the days when men were men ... and Real programmers could
assemble code in their head! BTW, I had an HP 45 that I got back while going
through Freshman Physics. I was darling cause it helped me do the Standard Deviation
in my lab reports instead doing the calculations by hand. Shheesh!!! I even think there
is a museum of calculators somewhere on the web. I found it a long time ago.

Maddog

[Tormod]

First of all, the hoaxes often seem to "forget" that there were not one, but 8 manned lunar missions. Of these, Apollo 10 was the first manned mission to orbit the moon (about 10 orbits, IIRC). Apollo 11 was the first lunar landing, whereas Apollo 13 famously failed to get far (although it was a truly heroic rescue - and the first space mission ever to need help to land). The last manned lunar mission which also landed was Apollo 17.

Here is an interesting page from NASA about the Apollo 17 CSM:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1972-096A.html

The astronauts who have walked on the moon are:
Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, Charles Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Gene Cernan, and Harrison Schmitt

Also, the software used in the command modules during the Apollo missions was called "LUMINARY" and came in differet revisions. LUMINARY 1A Revision 99 was the one used onboard Eagle, the landing module in the Apollo 11 mission.

It is possible to download Luminary and compile it:
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Luminary.html

[Stargazer]

Originally Posted by Buffy

Want a religious experience? Go to a shuttle launch. I always thought that no one could be a skeptic about the moon landings after having seen a launch. From 5 miles away on the beach in Titusville, you feel the ground shake. While there's not really a shock wave, from that far away its LOUD! Do this after having gone by on the tour bus to see this GIGANTIC thing sitting there on the lauch pad. If that's what they have to do to fake it, heck they might as well not fake it and just go to the moon. This is really awe inspiring stuff.

I love watching shuttle and rocket launches, never seen it on anything but on TV, but still it's something extraordinary. Still to see it on TV must be nothing compared to real life!

No question. My dad had an ancient hp programmable calculator from the 70s (able to do 100, count em *100* instructions), and it had a program you could enter by hand that did a moon landing simulation. And if you've dug up any of the details on how these nav computers worked, they were basically programming in machine language, with buttons for "verb" and "noun" to indicate if a number was an instruction or a byte of data. Wild! Works, but man, having to fiddle with something like that while you're 60 seconds from running out of fuel is mind boggling...

Indeed it was probably as simple as the computer could have been to even go to the moon. I suspect it might've been possible to use other means of navigation and perform calculations on the back of the envelope, but it would take too much time. Anyway, I'm impressed by the programmers who wrote the software for the AGC. I wonder what kind of shipcomputer they will have in the CEV...

[little cloud]

I never have and never will believe that the moon mission was faked.
Why would anyone fake something like that?
That mission was probably the greatest thing that has happened in a very long time.

[orbsycli]

*sigh, that's how i felt.
until i read that austrailia saw a coke bottle on the moon from their televisions. and the different light sources...