quote:

---

Is it just hard for them to believe we could accomplish such a feat?

---

quote:

---

It was the rocket technology of Wernherr von Braun and his team

---

A bunch of shade-tree mechanics in Huntsville, Alabama.

"Dewayne get yore ass offa that damn simulator and come on with that cheater bar!"
 

---

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-06-2003, 03:08 AM:
 
William, what's up with all of the useless posts lately?

Michael, by "we" I meant "humans".
 

---

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 10-06-2003, 04:55 AM:
 
Yous are all soooo gullible. The whole moon landing was all done on a soundstage here at Fox in Hollywood. I have a friend who's mom knows a grip that was there and told her. She is an emergency-room nurse so I know it's all factual and reliable information.

And Mike, while Wernherr may have been the father of modern rockets, he certainly was no brainiac. His best move was to replace the manual lighting of the fuse with a Zippo for remote electric ignition.

>>> Phil
 

---

Posted by Bob Maar (Member # 763) on 10-06-2003, 06:57 AM:
 
There is no question that we did land on the Moon. I have seen the Moon rocks that were brought back. Therefor it is true.

I have a friend who is an emergency room doctor in Los Angeles and he told me that all the nurses on every shift have never been able to tell the truth.

Imagine that.
 

---

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 10-06-2003, 08:18 AM:
 
FWIW -- when I read "we" I also inferred "mankind" but -- since Michael is determined to take us through it -- I have to chime in and say that a lot of American vision, ingenuity and manpower went into the lunar landing. That cannot be understated.

To date, the accomplishment of the USA in space exploration has not been topped -- or even matched, for that matter -- by any other country.

But, as Neil Armstrong put it:

"That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind."

And, since somebody mentioned Apollo 13, I think that mission is important as it demonstrates the scope of just how intelligent, flexible and well-prepared NASA was.

If, as some have indeed suggested, the lunar landings were faked then why would they bother doing repeat visits? Why would they go to the trouble of doing it all over again? And why would they have chosen to "visit" other parts of the moon when they could've gotten away with reusing the same set? It doesn't make any sense.

If the landings were faked then why go through the entire ordeal of bringing the Apollo 13 crew back alive?

Capricorn One , anybody?

Oh...and I suppose the Space Shuttle program is a fake, too? That technology doesn't just come out of thin air. It evolves. If the lunar landings did not happen then a lot of what we are witnessing today shouldn't be happening, either. Like the probes on Mars or the photos from Voyager and Hubble.

I guess there are people who don't believe those photos are real, either.

As someone suggested -- there would be far too many people with the "real story" to keep something like that a secret.

I suppose all those nurses in emergency rooms were probably the same ones who pulled the gerbil out of Richard Gere's ass, right?
 

---

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 10-06-2003, 09:43 AM:
 
"...like why when the rocket landed, was there no disturbance under it..."

Actually there was, it just looks different in a no atmosphere situation.
What we're used to seeing is a bunch of dust and debris being blown up into the "AIR" which then supports the dust and debris as it (relatively) slowly settles back to earth. Without the air to support it, the dust and debris drops like a rock back to the moon. People just aren't used to seeing it this way and mistake what they see.

Have we been to the moon? You bet. I was there just the other day
 

---

Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 10-06-2003, 09:49 AM:
 
If it wasn't for the space missions of the 60's and early 70's you wouldn't have microwave ovens today.

One reason you didn't see a lot of disturbance when the lander landed is because of lack of atmosphere on the moon.

Why do people want to question these things? I am guessing these are the same people who claim that Andy Kauphman and Elvis are living together in some undisclosed location.
 

---

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 10-06-2003, 12:58 PM:
 
Kodak played a large role in paving the way for, and documenting, space exploration:

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/government/ias/heritage/orbiter.shtml

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/government/ias/heritage/apollo11.shtml

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/government/ias/heritage/surveyor.shtml

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/government/ias/heritage/rover.shtml

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/government/ias/heritage/quickbird.shtml

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/government/ias/heritage/ikonos.shtml

Art Cosgrove, one of the lead engineers on the Kodak Lunar Orbiter program, is one of my co-workers.
 

---

Posted by Sam Hunter (Member # 1119) on 10-06-2003, 01:35 PM:
 
I know for a fact that we didn't go to the moon. We went to Venus.

I have the film to prove it.

First Spaceship on Venus is the title.

Seriously though. I used to be in the NASA Science club as a kid and followed the space program the best I could at the time. I remember at the time some talk about the moon missions being fake and that we should be spending all that money on things on earth. I never once thought it was fake and one day I hoped to be an astronaut. Didn't make it so I guess that makes me an ASTRONOT. Anyway, if we faked it we sure spent a lot of money on the system to do it and risked a lot of lives in the process.
 

---

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 10-06-2003, 06:09 PM:
 
Actually, the microwave oven came long before the space missions. It was invented way back in the late 40's /early 50's accidentally while doing reseach on microwave communications.

The 1st commercial "home" oven was the Amana "Radar Range" and was available in the 50's. It used really cool 866 vacuum tube HV rectifiers that would give off an eerie blue glow.

>>> Phil
 

---

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 10-06-2003, 07:56 PM:
 

quote:

---

you wouldn't have microwave ovens today.

---

That would be great! I hate microwaved food.
 

---

Posted by Martin Brooks (Member # 1269) on 10-06-2003, 10:09 PM:
 
I think I read that the Chinese are going to be launching something soon that will fly by the moon and be able to take photographs of the "junk" we left there. That should settle the issue once and for all of whether we went to the moon.

Personally, I think it's the FOX documentary that was faked.
 

---

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-06-2003, 10:10 PM:
 
Actually it's the Japanese. Not sure when it was supposed to be launched or if it has already. It's supposed to map most of the moon.
 

---

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 10-07-2003, 03:22 AM:
 

quote:

---

To date, the accomplishment of the USA in space exploration has not been topped -- or even matched, for that matter -- by any other country.

---

Please don`t forget that the Soviets were the first to bring a satellite (Sputnik) into space, the first to bring a living being (Laika), and the first to bring a man (Yuri Gagarin) into space.
As big and exciting an adventure as the moon landings were - did they actually serve any purpose other than sticking the flag into the moon to make up for the fact that the US had been outpioneered by the technologically inferior SU several times?
 

---

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 10-07-2003, 04:31 AM:
 
I don't have proof either way, and I haven't seen the pictures for twenty years or more, but I think that, on balance of probability, they were genuine.

Apart from the reasons which others have given, I can think of another one. In the early '60s, the Russians had a clear lead in space technology, and, at least here in Europe, it was expected that they would be the first to reach the moon. This was still in the Cold War era, and the Russians can have been none too pleased at being overtaken. I'm sure that they would have examined all of the evidence in great detail, and would have been very quick to have exposed the whole thing as a fake if they had been able to do so. They didn't.

I'm sure that NASA could have put together a fake which would have fooled most of the public, but to fool some of the worlds leading space scientists would be a different matter.
 

---

Posted by Mike Pennell (Member # 1692) on 10-07-2003, 04:31 AM:
 
I would think that shooting an object into the earth's orbit as the soviets did vs. actually going to the moon and returning as we did would be totally different in the magnitude of human history (not just flag planting) but i could be wrong.
 

---

Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 10-07-2003, 09:52 AM:
 
The microwave oven did not come about as a result of someone trying to find a better, faster way to cook. During World War II, two scientists invented the magnetron, a tube that produces microwaves. Installing magnetrons in Britain?s radar system, the microwaves were able to spot Nazi warplanes on their way to bomb the British Isles.
By accident, several years later, it was discovered that microwaves also cook food. Called the Radar Range, the first microwave oven to go on the market was roughly as large and heavy as a refrigerator.

The idea of using microwave energy to cook food was accidentally discovered by Percy LeBaron Spencer of the Raytheon Company when he found that radar waves had melted a candy bar in his pocket. Experiments showed that microwave heating could raise the internal temperature of many foods far more rapidly than a conventional oven.
The first Raytheon commercial microwave oven was the 1161 Radarange, which was marketed in 1954. Rated at 1600 watts, it was so large and expensive that it was practical only for restaurant and institutional use.
In 1967, Amana, a division of Raytheon, introduced its domestic Radarange microwave oven, marking the beginning of the use of microwave ovens in home kitchens. Although sales were slow during the first few years, partially due to the oven?s relatively expensive price tag, the concept of quick microwave cooking had arrived. In succeeding years, Litton and a number of other companies joined the countertop microwave oven market. By the end of 1971, the price of countertop units began to decrease and their capabilities were expanded.

All electromagnetic energy can be characterized as waves with a specific wavelength and frequency distributed over a continuous range known as the electromagnetic spectrum. For example, some radio waves have a wavelength of 6 feet (2 meters) and a frequency of 50 million hertz (Hz-cycles per second). Visible light waves have a wavelength of 400 to 700 millimicrons, and typical X-rays have a length of 0.01 millimicrons and a frequency of 30 x 1012 millions. Microwaves (short waves or high frequency radio waves) are the shortest of radio waves, with a length of 0.1 millimeter and a frequency of 3 x 101 Hz. They are found in the non-ionizing portion of the energy spectrum, between radio waves and visible light. "Non-ionizing" means that microwaves do not detach charged particles and produce atoms with an unbalanced plus or minus charge. Microwaves can therefore safely produce heat and not cause food to become radioactive. Microwaves are reflected from most metals but they produce inductive resonance's in the atoms of many other substances. It was the discovery of their reaction to metals that led to the invention of radar. It was their ability to produce resonant coupling that led to the invention of the microwave oven


ideafinder.com

It was MRI/CATSCANS that were developed using technology from the space program not the microwaves as I mentioned before.

AT THE HOSPITAL...Body Imaging
In the mid-1960's, as NASA prepared for its Apollo moon landing program, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) developed the technology known as digital image processing to allow computer enhancement of Moon pictures. This technology later became the basis for the NASA Landsat satellites.

Digital image processing is now being used by doctors and hospitals to record images of organs in the human body. Two of the most widely used body imaging techniques are computer-aided tomography (CATScan) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

CATScan image data is collected by aiming a fan-shaped x-ray beam from a number of different directions around the body. A tomographic (slice-like) image is reconstructed from these multiple views by a computer. MRI uses a magnetic field and radio waves to create images, rather then x-rays.

In most cases, CATScan is used for bone, while MRI is used for soft tissue (such as the liver shown above). Both methods are often used to obtain a complete diagnosis for a patient. Doctors and engineers are working to combine the best features of MRI and CATScan. One of their research tools is a computer program originally developed by NASA to distinguish among Earth surface features in Landsat image processing.



body imaging
 

---

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 10-07-2003, 09:59 AM:
 
MRI (just awarded a Nobel Prize):

Washington Post

Birmingham News

Fort Wayne News

History of MRI
 

---

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 10-07-2003, 10:22 AM:
 
The thing I always found interesting about the Rooskies is their desire to win at any cost. I believe Laika died during the trip right? And then there was those 3 soviet astronauts that died during their trip. And then there was the soviet space station problems. And those are the ones we know about. I guess you can just package up living beings and shoot them into space and call that winning but it's a little to rich for my blood. Maybe an expensive way to kill things but not winning
 

---

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 10-07-2003, 10:51 AM:
 
Space exploration is dangerous. Accidents happen. I don't think any astronauts (regardless of nationality) were deliberately put at undue risk for the sake of "winning".

That's not to say that space programs can't be made safer, or less subject to political cost-cutting or scheduling pressures that compromise safety, as NASA is learning again, unfortunately.
 

---

Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 10-07-2003, 02:58 PM:
 
The moon landings were the frosting.

The cake is that I have Sirius Radio in my car, Dish Network TV in my home and a GPS receiver in my backpack. I can see when Boris Yelson scratches his ass on live TV. I can fly in an airplane and be assured that it well land at the appropriate airport. Heck, I'll bet that the tiny little cell phone in my pocket benefited from the space program.
 

---

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 10-07-2003, 03:36 PM:
 
Showing my age, but I still remember the excitement of the first intercontinental television broadcast on the Telstar 1 satellite in 1962:

http://www.loral.com/inthenews/020710.html

quote:

---

During its seven months in orbit, Telstar 1 dazzled the world with live images of baseball games, plays, musical performances, news broadcasts, scenes of the World's Fair in Seattle and a U.S. Presidential news conference. More than 200 million people watched as the United States and 16 European countries exchanged numerous live video signals of national monuments and famous images, including the United Nations building, Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty.

---

Society of Satellite Professionals International

Telstar 1 Specifications

Telstar 1

Telstar Ground Station Dedication

"We stand on the shoulders of giants to touch the sky".
 

---

Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 10-07-2003, 03:48 PM:
 
RAYMOND DAMADIAN

John's fourth link on the history of MRI mentions Dr.Raymond Damadian as one of the inventors. I always thought he was THE
inventor, as his biography, "A Machine Called Indomitable" by Sonny Kleinfiled credits him as the inventor of the first full-body MRI scanner. In the final race, one workable device was produced by a competing team, but their magnet was so small it could only scan a body part the size of an arm.

Dr. Raymond Damadian grew up in the house next door to me, actually in the same semi-detached Tudor house where I live in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, New York City. As a boy his father was snatched from the Turkish death march against the Armenians, through diplomatic intervention, and made his way to the U.S., where he married an Armenian-American and raised two children. Raymond was born in 1936 in Forest Hills.

Raymond studied the violin and taught tennis at the West Side Tennis club, and thought seriously of becoming a concert violist and tennis pro, but instead studied science and medicine, becoming a doctor with two PhD's.

Dr. Damadian not only invented a workable MRI, but built a factory on Long Island that ships worldwide, and developed scanners that produce color and 3-D images. Constantly perfecting his invention, he now has the first "stand-up" MRI,
in which patients, especially those with spinal problems, can be scanned in walking posture (formerly they were wheeled on a dolly track in prone or supine position.)

Dr. Raymond Damadian spent years and considerable fortune trying to protect his patented inventions from huge corporations in the U.S., Europe and Asia who marketed his inventions as their own. Although he won several times in court, collecting the huge sums awarded him proved very difficult. At present, I believe he has worked out franchise license agreements with his competitors.

His biography is a fun read! A later biography, "Raymond Damadian and the Open MRI" (2002) by Marylou Kille, AKA Marylou Moreno Kjelle, is available from online booksellers. And any web search will turn up his awards, honors, testimony before Congress, etc.

Gerard.

[ 10-07-2003, 05:26 PM: Message edited by: Gerard S. Cohen ]
 

---

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 10-07-2003, 05:09 PM:
 
Ian needs a new pic...already!
 

---

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 10-07-2003, 08:17 PM:
 
"..I don't think any astronauts (regardless of nationality) were deliberately put at undue risk for the sake of "winning"...."

Why would you assume that John? You think the space race was not a big propaganda bonus for the winner?

Whether it is ego on behalf of the Russians or just plain stupidity, the fact is that their stuff is clunky and at best unreliable. It always has been and continues to be so. Submarines, nuke ractors, space stations, rockets. Their stuff has a history of the "quick and dirty" approach. They take a bunch of risky chances and once in a while it works. Look what happens when it doesn't. People die in the Kursk, people die at Chernobyl. They have fires on their space station that cannot be reasonably controlled because instead of doing a proper engineering job and putting cables in conduits, they lay them in hatch ways so that hatch can't close. (nuts) People die in space capsules, because it was a "space race". We'll never know how many. They don't take near the precautions that the US does, but I guess they win once in a while. Think it's worth it?
 

---

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 10-07-2003, 09:30 PM:
 
Pioneers always take risks. The people who settled the lands you now live on also took risks to get there (remember "How The West Was Won"?).
Astronauts and Cosmonauts died in the space programs. American spacecraft, nuclear reactors and submarines also had accidents.
Yuri Gagarin was a test pilot. Risk was part of his job description. He died in a plane crash in 1968, 34 years old.
Everyone knows it was basically just a frenetic race who would get into space first. The Russians won. You should acknowledge the ingenuity and courage of the people involved.
 

---

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 10-07-2003, 11:29 PM:
 
But they didn't win. We beat them to the moon.
Also, if you're dead it doesn't count if you're the first one to die there. The trick is to live. I guess it's because we cherish life more than most cultures.
I guess we could have shoved a sky rocket up some guys ass and shot him off and made him the first guy "up there" but what glory is there in that? Or if he didn't make it we could have got the next guy in line and shoved one up his ass. And on and on until we finaly got one into orbit. Sound absurd? You're catching on
 

---

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 10-07-2003, 11:54 PM:
 
While they were the 1st with the "Sputik", I certainly don't think they "won".

Their careless disregard for both human and animal life still makes me want to barf.

Mike, my great personal friend, you are full of crap!

>>> Phil
 

---

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 10-08-2003, 01:39 AM:
 
All of you have overlooked one important point of proof of the landings...I'm really surprised Greg doesn't know, or forgot about this is that most of the landing sites have been photographed much later on by satellites. I remember seeing a couple of the pics of one the landing sites in which the tracks of the lunar rover were clearly visible. I think Hubble may have also observed one of the sites.

NASA has had thousands of impressive spinoffs that we all take for granted in everyday life today. What I appreciate is the many thousands of lives saved by some of these spinoffs.
Mark @ CLACO
 

---

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 10-08-2003, 01:48 AM:
 

quote:

---

most of the landing sites have been photographed much later on by satellites

---

quote:

---

But they didn't win. We beat them to the moon.

---

See? That`s exactly what I meant.


 

---

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 10-08-2003, 06:31 AM:
 
Brave astronauts and cosmonauts have lost their lives, not because of callous disregard for them, but because of poor schedule-driven decision making and politically-driven cost cutting. The risks of space travel are always high, but these accidents could have been prevented if good engineering judgement prevailed.
 

---

Posted by Hillary Charles (Member # 769) on 10-08-2003, 08:54 AM:
 
The United States put the first humans on the moon, but the Soviets beat us by sending unmanned craft to the moon. They sent back the first photos of the side of the moon unseen by us earthbound people. They landed the first craft on the moon. They also sent the first woman into space decades before us.

I do believe our explorers were treated with more care than the Soviets. Our chimp, Ham, fared better than Laika (although he didn't orbit). When the Soviets wanted to match our Apollo program by sending three Cosmonauts into space, they took (what must have previously been considered necessary) equipment out of their two-person capsule to cram a third person. Seems a little makeshift.

Speaking of makeshift, in the documentary "The Russian Right Stuff" the proposed Soviet lunar lander was shown. I don't know if was a finished version or not, but I shuddered even looking at it. Andy Griffith's cement-mixer spacecraft from "Salvage" seemed safer!

Alien Autopsy---now THAT was REAL!
 

---

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 10-08-2003, 09:38 AM:
 
Each year our astronomy club hosts a booth/display at the local county fair. One year I had a young man walk up and ask if I knew about the radiation belt around the Earth. I guess I looked rather puzzled, because he went on to explain that there was a layer of radiation around the Earth which was lethal to any animal life. He further explained that his dad was in the air force and "they" knew all about it. I finally said something like "so it's impossible to go to the moon?" His eyes lit up and he was obviously feeling very clever. "You should read up on it" he said and walked off. I guess because of the rolling of my eyes.
True story
 

---

Posted by Martin Brooks (Member # 1269) on 10-08-2003, 11:17 AM:
 

quote:

---

Brave astronauts and cosmonauts have lost their lives, not because of callous disregard for them, but because of poor schedule-driven decision making and politically-driven cost cutting. The risks of space travel are always high, but these accidents could have been prevented if good engineering judgement prevailed.

---

There's a great series of books by Edward R. Tufte on presenting information visually. In his book, "Visual Explanations," Tufte devotes 15 pages to the Challenger disaster and how poor presentation of data by the engineers who tried to stop the launch led to the decision to launch.
 

---

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-08-2003, 12:41 PM:
 
The radiation belt is true. It's called the Van Allen Belt.
 

---

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 10-08-2003, 01:10 PM:
 
I first learned about cosmic radiation from a Disney educational short.

Take a look at the following:

quote:

---

The Earth actually has two radiation belts of different origins. The inner belt , the one discovered by Van Allen's Geiger counter, occupies a compact region above the equator (see drawing, which also includes the trajectories of two space probes) and is a by-product of cosmic radiation. It is populated by protons of energies in the 10-100 Mev range, which readily penetrate spacecraft and which can, on prolonged exposure, damage instruments and be a hazard to astronauts. Both manned and unmanned spaceflights tend to stay out of this region

---

quote:

---

...poor presentation of data by the engineers who tried to stop the launch led to the decision to launch

---

Engineers are not always the most articulate, especially when they need to be understood by non-technical people who often make the final decisions.

"We need launch today for the program to stay on schedule" is more understandable than "the measured durometer of the O-rings increases significantly below 0 Celsius".
 

---

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 10-08-2003, 06:51 PM:
 

quote:

---

...the measured durometer of the O-rings increases significantly below 0 Celsius".

---

John, that's absolutely true and spoken like a true engineer.

>>> Phil
 

---

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 10-08-2003, 10:49 PM:
 

quote:

---

I think I read that the Chinese are going to be launching something soon that will fly by the moon and be able to take photographs of the "junk" we left there.

---

quote:

---

The radiation belt is true. It's called the Van Allen Belt.

---

That's correct, & it crashed into the earth & destroyed the planet. I saw the movie they made of it when it happened.
 

---

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 10-09-2003, 05:46 AM:
 
No No No...It was on fire. The Seaview was going to shoot a missle at it and blow it out. But it finally just burned itself out thus allowing mankind to explore space without the fear of being exposed to all that radiation.

To remind us all of the danger that existed, we can now purchase Van Allen belts in sizes 22 to 46.

>>> Phil
 

---

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 10-09-2003, 09:30 AM:
 
Yah yah I know of the Van Allen Belt. But this guys belief was that it was an impenetrable wall that would kill anyone entering, thereby making space exploration impossible.

Actually Phill the Seaview did fire that missile and save the world, much to the chagrin of the United Nations
 

---

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 10-09-2003, 10:27 AM:
 
Didn't Ralph Kramden send his wife Alice to the moon back in the 1950's?
 

---

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 10-09-2003, 10:34 AM:
 
No. Mr. Kramden just threatened to send Alice there, but he was only a poor bus driver, and couldn't afford it.
 

---

Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 10-09-2003, 05:35 PM:
 
Thanks Greg...it's been like 20 years since I've seen that POS film. But my intent was made...

>>> Phil
 

---