Thanks!
Oh, it’ll get better from here on out. I am redesigning the site a bit in anticipation of shamelessly plugging my book due out next spring (and it’s called “Bad Astronomy”, natch). I can’t wait to install a better bulletin board; the Moon Hoax Believers have become very tiresome, and are now joined by geocentrists, anti-relativists and even creationists.
And by the way, I’ve been a Doper for quite some time now. 
[hijack] How kind of you to include us ignorant creationists, Doc :D. I guess I can forgive you so long as you debunk moon landing hoaxers.[/Hijack]
…or at least they LOOKED like rockets. Saturn Vs were BIG rockets, too.
I have lived in FL my entire life. Space shots are not secret things. You can see them for HUNDREDS OF MILES! Even today, “secret” spy sattelite missions go up, and can be seen on the WEST coast of FL on a clear day.
To even suggest that they faked the moon landings requires extraordinary proof. The shadow “evidence” only shows that many things REFLECT light. I am so not convinced.
There are hours and hours of film and videotape of astronauts walking on the moon, collecting samples, looking back at the earth…etc…None of it looks faked.
If we have the technology to recover a Russian nuclear submarine out of the deep ocean, which we have for decades, it is not the least bit difficult to imagine the United States putting men on the moon.
OK people, extinguish the flaming torches, cancel the lynchmob. Seriously, we must commend gavster for saying this (as long as he means it, that is).
Awwww. <Petulently extinguishes torch>
Better put away those feathers and that bucket of tar too.
Can we still break out the grease and spoons?
Wasn’t Velikovsky the guy that said Venus emerged from Jupiter 12,000 years ago and swung by the Earth several times before settling in its current orbit, causing several events recorded in the Bible?
How exactly is Velikovsky’s viewpoint backed up by evidence? I’m especially interested in evidence that can account for the appearance of resurfacing Venus’ crust every few hundred million years (the current crust is estimated at about 500-600 million years old, IIRC) if Venus is only 12,000 years old, evidence that the Earth’s rotation was stopped without catastrophic geological and biological consequences, etc…
I’m sorry, is this a total hijack? Should we take this to another thread? It just kinda seemed like no one’s debating the moon thing here…
Oh, I don’t necessarily agree with Hogan or Velikovsky’s viewpoint. I was merely distinguishing it from the situation with the moon.
The moon landing can be proven through so much evidence it would make your eyes bleed to view it all. Questions about Venus’s origin, however, are still speculative. That’s the difference.
I really haven’t read enough evidence on Venus’s origin on ANY side of the debate, so I really can’t debate it. But since there is no hard and fast answer, I’m not willing to dismiss an assumption based solely on it being the minority’s opinion. I’m also not willing to dismiss it because it seems silly to contemplate.
gavster wrote:
Then I suppose you believe that Gemini VI through XII were faked, too – because they did exactly this kind of orbital rendezvous on those Gemini flights.
Furthermore, they did it from *Earth-*based launch sites, and the Earth is a much bigger gravity well than the moon is.
True, orbital rendezvous is not easy, but it can be done, and is still done today whenever the Space Shuttle goes up to grab a satellite or dock with a space “station.” In the Apollo missions, the Lunar Module’s ascent stage used up most, but not all, of its juice getting off the moon – the remainder it used to circularize its orbit when it was at altitude, and to make the itty bitty course corrections on its way to dock with the Command-and-Service Module.
You can’t orbit the Earth at a paltry 1000 miles per hour, unless you’re way way far away from it. Low Earth orbital velocity is about 17,500 miles per hour.
You can, however, comfortably orbit the moon at 1000 miles per hour, only 60 miles or so above the lunar surface.
The Bad Astronomer wrote:
Just wait until hear you hear from us Square Earthers!
Sorry, Ender I disagree: I think there’s more than enough evidence to disprove Velikovsky’s silliness.
Venus was not and could not have been spit out of Jupiter 12,000(?) years ago it would have taken far too much energy to do so, and it certainly has been in it’s orbit longer than 2000 or so years.
I’m not up on my orbital mechanics, but I know enough to know that orbits can’t work in the big zig-zags that Velikovsky has them in when he had Venus bounding around the solar system.
Planets can NEVER be comets. Velikovski says Venus used to be one
Velikovsky is somewhere between a “scientific” creationist or a creation literalist: Vel. believes that Venus the Happy Comet Venus was bouncing around the solar system and somehow managed to:
[ul]
[li]part the Red Sea just at the moment that Moses lifted his staff,[/li][li]drop the plagues on on Egypt,(A chunk of his…um…theories…involve Jupiter(!) being populated with “vermin” that hitch-hiked on the comet.)[/li][li]stop the Earth and/or set it spinning backwards temporarily,[/li][li]Possibly create Noah’s flood (I’m not positive about that)[/li][li]Drop Manna on the Israelites (since all comets are loaded with hydrocarbons and hydrocarbons=carbohydrates, right?! :rolleyes: )[/li][/ul]
Where’s the evidence for this sort of nonsense? The geological strata doesn’t show that there was the sort of huge extinction-level event of Venus whacking into us hard enough to disrupt the Earth’s rotation not once, mind you, but twice. The fragile formations in Carlsbad seem to have weathered this catastrophic event pretty well.
Hell, if he’s right we should have seen a huge population drop and mass extinctions in about 1000 BC (give or take 500 years). I’m talking FAR greater than the Dinosaur extinction or ummm…the other one that wiped out the trilobites.
I’m still stunned that Hogan’s fallen for this guy.
The “Moon Hoax” has easy first-hand evidence you can use to disprove it, but Velikofsky’s gibberish is probably dumber.
Fenris
[ul]Pass through President Kennedy and Gov. Connelly…[/ul]
I think gavster’s challenge of the procedure arose from a misconception that the return of the LM Ascent Stage was something in the style of a skeet-shoot (with the CSM as the “clay”), not realizing that it involved the LMAS actually achieving a (temporary) orbital configuration.
The Apollo landings were not a HOAX, though they were a CONSPIRACY of epic proportions. Click here for the dramtic proof.
There is one seemingly irrefutable question that I’ve never seen answered: "If they actually did go to the Moon, then why has NASA never gone again? 
There is a lot of exploration to be done on the Moon (to say nothing of the possible usefullness of establishing a base). If NASA really could go (and did), then why haven’t they done it again and again?
Answer that one, if you dare. 
(For if you try and fail, you’ll look pretty stoopid.)
Sea Sorbust: *There is a lot of exploration to be done on the Moon (to say nothing of the possible usefullness of establishing a base). If NASA really could go (and did), then why haven’t they done it again and again?
Answer that one, if you dare. (For if you try and fail, you’ll look pretty stoopid.)*
Even as “stoopid” as people who ask elementary questions that a simple Internet search could answer, and think they are posing daring challenges? Oh-oh.
In the first place, you do know that they did go “again and again”, right? That is, there were six Apollo lunar landing missions between 1969 and 1972. Since then, human space flight development has been concentrated mostly on the orbital space stations. Planetary and satellite exploration relied on the cheaper and more expendable unmanned spacecraft. But NASA is apparently still committed to the idea of human voyages to bodies other than the earth: as this NASA history factsheet says,
Oh, please.
“So, this is the Sea of Tranquility, eh Meriwether?”
“Yyyyyup. Seems to be, William.”
Come on, what needs to be explored? It’s the moon. Rocks. Dust. Golf balls.
There is nothing useful enough about establishing a lunar presence that justifies its expense.
Do you have any conception of how expensive the moon shots were?