snort
Johnny L.A., Where did you gakk that list from? I spotted at least one swapped name:
LM-7: Aquarius. Flew on Apollo 13.
LM-8: Antares. Flew on Apollo 14.
*** Ponder
Well since the question I was asking with this post has been answered, and we’ve moved on to other moon topics, I have a question. What is the reason for NASA wanting to send people to the moon again?
Shrinkage! ~George Costanza
OP, tell your friend you’ve already notified the secret police that he has discovered the ruse and that they’ll be rounding him up shortly.
So, if Apollo 10 had been the first manned craft to land on the moon, one of the most famous quotes of all history would be “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Snoopy has landed”?
You are correct. I inadvertently swapped them when I typed it up. :smack:
Mine was adapted from Coupling. 
What do you mean? NASA is chartered, in part, with the responsibility of learning about heavenly bodies of all stripe. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the moon – we’ve never been to the dark side (sic), for instance, although crews from several Apollo missions overflew it. There’s still a lot to learn about the moon’s composition – we gathered only a small sampling of rocks from a half-dozen sites.
Moreover, space exploration has always (properly, in my view) been justified with less concrete ideas about man’s natural drive to explore and understand. And the space program has always been in large part about national prestige and an excuse to do weapons research (rocketry, guidance, etc.). Those reasons remain, even if they’re not as pressing as they once may have been.
The Bush Administration established the program to return to the moon in part, it said, as it can serve as a launch pad for Mars and beyond. From what I understand, that’s not an efficient way to run things. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still worthwhile science to do on the moon, as well as lots of other places too of course.
–Cliffy
Thank you Cliffy. That’s the kind of answer I was hoping for. I’m sure I could have looked into it myself, but since there seem to be some bonafide “moon people” here, I figured I’d ask here. So for anyone following this thread, I presented all the facts on the fuel. My buddy’s new defenses are that there’s no way that just a suit would keep you safe freom the extreme temperatures on the moon. We looked the suits up, but he doesn’t seem satisfied haha. I’m trying to find info on the types of temperatures that there are for shuttle astronauts that do space walks, but haven’t come across any good answers.
Temperature is mentioned on the second page:
A couple of pages later it goes into the Apollo suit and lists, among other things:
[quote]
[ul][li]Five layers of aluminized Mylar interwoven with four layers of Dacron for heat protection[/li][li]Two layers of Kapton for additional heat protection[/ul][/li][/quote]
From Wiki:
(Note that temperatures are ºC, not ºF.)
Hollywood sucks. They havn’t had an original idea in many years and could never have been in on the NASA program. After 40 years' reflection, laser moon mirror project is axed | Space | The Guardian ,Sad.
Anyway back to the OP. Everyone knows the damn thing was full of Mentos and diet Coke.
It was known well in advance that Apollo 10 would not be a landing mission. I’m sure the crew would have picked a more pretentious name otherwise. Since it was not, they were free to be more whimsical. (IIRC, I’m pretty sure it was the crews who actually picked the individual spacecraft names). The command module of Apollo 10 was called Charlie Brown.
As an aside, I remember hearing a tale, which my google-fu was unable to confirm, about how the Apollo 10 crew were emphatically told not to go off-mission and attempt to land ahead of Apollo 11. To make sure they didn’t try it anyway, their LM fuel was restricted so they didn’t have enough to actually land and/or take off again.
*** Ponder
I found this… A Space Junkie's Space Junk: Apollo 10 to the Moon!! See paragragh 3.
OK, this is the point where you call him on his BS. Anyone can, for whatever reason, find it hard to believe one particular point about something as incredible as landing a man on the moon. But when that point is explained to them, and they then decide there’s another point they don’t believe, then they don’t want to understand.
Talking about technical details of suits is a complete waste of time, until you get an answer as to why he wants to believe in the conspiracy.
Bingo.
And the very fact they are coming from it from a “I don’t believe” mindset rather than a “I can’t** understand **how” mindset is damning.
As you said, once one major point has been explained and they immediately jump to the next one with a mindset of disbelief rather than intelligent inquiry its time to move on. Show him the websites that explain all this stuff in gory detail and be done with it.
Hell, most things about this world I don’t understand. To not believe its true because I don’t understand it would be assinine.
Interesting thread. As a space mad teenager in the late 60s, I just expect “everyone” to understand how the Apollo missions worked, from the size of Saturn V to the liquid cooled undersuit 
One brilliant source of information, not only on what the kit was but how it was developed, is the NASA Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual: 1969 (including Saturn V, CM-107, SM-107, LM-5)
The Chiltons manual is better but they are hard to find these days 
Thanks, Claude Remains. That confirmed my memory of the story, but also claimed it wasn’t true. Interesting.
One thing that puzzled me, from the linked blog post:
This seemed odd to me. If Apollo 10 was intended to be a full-on dress rehearsal for the full landing mission, why would they deliberately change an important parameter like the LM mass? So now armed with a new keyword I didn’t know before (“overweight”), I googled and found this:
Apollo 10: NASA’s controversial dress rehearsal
So they tested the overweight version anyway, trusting that the changes they’d made to reduce the mass of the next lander in line would work out. I’m glad they were right.
To get back onto the OP’s topic: This kind of detail is something the moon hoax adherents love. They can point to this and claim that NASA never actually solved the LM mass problem, so of course they had to fake the landing.
*** Ponder
I’m pretty sure Gene Kranz (who would be in a position to know) wrote in Failure Is Not an Option that the LM for Apollo 10 did not carry enough fuel for a landing. I don’t remember if he said this was specifically to prevent them from landing on the Moon, but he did mention that reason. I’ll look it up later and provide a quote.
Gene Cernan, LMP on Apollo 10 (who later walked on the moon on Apollo 17), told that story in the recent-ish docuseries When We Left Earth.
Yep. The evidence suggests he doesn’t want to know the truth; he wants people to think he’s cool because he’s so cynical and knowing. That said, Shig, I’m still happy to address other questions you have about the program. (One question – does he think the Shuttle and ISS are all a hoax, too? Because they use similar suits – more advanced, but the engineering challenges are much the same in low Earth orbit as on the moon.)
It’s surprisingly tough to find a description of the Apollo mission profile online, at least pitched to a lay audience. Really, the best stuff I’ve found is the press materials NASA published at the time, some of which are available. Things are either written for the complete space novice, or they assume a certain base level of understanding that was probably common for Americans who lived through the late '60’s, but which younger folks just never picked up.
–Cliffy
Thanks Cliffy. The answer to your questin is no. Shuttles and the ISS are real haha. He has no problem believing that we could get up 100-200 miles like shuttles and the ISS, but “there is no way there could have been enough fuel on there to get them almost 239,000 miles away and back again.” It’s almost as if he’s picturing an engine using gasoline. I’ve given up. Now I’ve become fascinated by these people claiming that the Chinese faked their moon walk. I am fascinated by conspiracy theories. Not because I believe them, I really don’t know what it is about them. One of my favorite books is “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer.It’s all about skepticism when it comes to pseudoscientific beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc.