Kingdom Come

After Apollo 11 had flown behind the moon out of contact with Earth…when the LM was behind the moon…Armstrong stepped onto the moon. About 20 minutes later, Aldrin followed him. The camera was then positioned on a tripod about 30 feet from the LM.

But doesn’t the famous picture show that the astronauts are on the side of the moon lit by the sun creating shadows? That’s the side facing the earth.

This can’t be the dark side of the moon.

According to NASA, unlike the earth, the entire moon, even the far side away from the earth, is always lit by sunlight.

Whaaat? That doesn’t make sense in a 5th grade classroom.

At any given point in the moon’s trajectory around the Earth, only half of its surface is facing the sun, and therefore, only half of the moon is lit up.

The other half of the surface faces away from the sun and is in shadow…

At “new moon,” on the other hand, the moon isn’t even visible from our vantage point. This is when the moon is between the sun and the Earth, so that the side of the moon reflecting sunlight is facing away from Earth. 

Don’t be so bedazzled by “astronomy” that your common sense shuts down. And don’t just take everything you are told at face value. NASA itself shows the dark side of the moon. 

Trans-Earth injection of the CSM began July 21 as the SPS fired for two-and-a-half minutes when Columbia was behind the moon…

Armstrong and Aldrin spent 21 hours, 36 minutes on the moon’s surface…Docking with Columbia occurred…at 128 hours, three minutes into the mission….Four hours later, the LM jettisoned and remained in lunar orbit.

How do we know that we went to the Moon?

Every single argument claiming that NASA faked the Moon landings has been discredited.

But even today, 50 years later, people discuss conspiracy claims online, on television programmes and around the dinner table…

Certainly as time passes and our entire society becomes more technologically savvy and equipped, more and more questions are being raised about the validity of NASA’s claim that the US had the capability to fly astronauts to the moon in 1969.

What is NASA’s response?

NASA has released new photos of the Apollo 11 moon landing

Half a century ago, while those on Earth were enjoying a lazy Sunday in the summer of ’69, some 384,000 km away, two men were climbing down the steps of their spaceship – onto the surface of the moon…

Here, shared by NASA for the first time, is a unique glimpse of that extraordinary day in the history of humanity.

Seriously? Kids today can doctor photos on their phones. The ease in which NASA can doctor photos raises a massive credibility problem.

NASA’s multiple explanations on how the low-tech trips to the moon made it through the Van Allen belts raise more questions than they answer.

Lucky escape

Answer #1:

The short answer is they didn’t…the Apollo spacecraft…took them through the inner and outer belts…

Models of the radiation belts developed in the run-up to the Apollo flights indicated that the passage through the radiation belts would not pose a significant threat to astronaut health. And, sure enough, documents from the period show that monitoring badges worn by the crews and analysed after the missions indicated that the astronauts typically received doses roughly less than that received during a standard CT scan of your chest.

But that is not the end of the story. To get to the moon and safely back home, the Apollo astronauts not only had to cross the Van Allen belts, but also the quarter of a million miles between the Earth and the moon – a flight that typically took around three days each way.

They also needed to operate safely while in orbit around the moon and on the lunar surface…As such, they and their crews were vulnerable to unpredictable solar flares and events…

The crewed Apollo flights actually coincided with the height of a solar cycle...solar flares and solar energetic particle events are more common during times of heightened solar activity…

There is no doubt that the political imperative in the 1960s to put US astronauts on the moon “in this decade” was the primary driving factor in the mission timing…

History tells us that the gamble of flying during the years of high solar activity during the Apollo era paid off. None of the Apollo flights were blasted by powerful solar flares or engulfed by clouds of solar energetic particles [or irradiated by the Van Allen Belts.]

What are the odds of that!

So another PR writer gives a different explanation. One clear evidence that something sketchy is going on with NASA is the volume of new and contradictory arguments defending its claims.

Answer #2:

How NASA Worked Around Earth’s Radiation Belts to Land Apollo 11 on the Moon

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the natural satellite and broadcast a live view of the lunar surface, Earth, space and of astronauts working on the surface.

Yet still, there are doubts these days that humans actually achieved this feat.

Are you getting that!! This article actually states that the live broadcast of the lunar event should be convincing enough! I’m speechless at the audacity, no – the arrogance and assumption of civilian gullibility and stupidity – of that argument. Try presenting that in court at your burglary hearing. “Your Honor, I made a video showing my alibi.”  “Case dismissed.”

And that’s without investigating the ability of sending television images 240,000 radiation-filled miles to earth with the broadcasting technology at that time.

Moving on while shaking my head in disbelief AT THE AUDIENCE’S CREDULITY…

Answer #3:

the following question appeared on Quora on August 23, 2018:“When will the existence of the Van Allen belt and our inability to penetrate its harsh radiation with today’s technology force NASA to admit it faked the moon landing?”

Some people believe we never went to the Moon because of the existence of the Van Allen radiation belts. The idea is that any astronauts en route to outer space has to pass through these belts and, in so doing, they would receive a lethal dose of radiation.

So engineers fashioned shielding that consisted of a spacecraft hull and all the instrumentation lining the walls.

Further, knowing the belts’ absence above the poles, the altitude of the lower edge of the inner belt being ~600 km (well above the LEO [Lower Earth Orbit]) and the location of the South Atlantic anomaly, where doses are at a high 40 mrads/day at an altitude of 210 km allowed NASA to design the Apollo translunar injection (TLI) orbit in a way that the spacecraft would avoid the belts’ most dangerous parts.

Apollo 11 bypassed the inner belt and only passed through the weaker part of the outer belt (Fig. 4). According to NASA’s ‘The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology’, the high-altitude nuclear tests would have had a significant impact on Apollo orbits but NASA scientists had accounted for this possibility in radiation-protection planning.

Fig. 4: This figure shows only the final leg of the path through the belts. Red marks indicate the time in 10-minute intervals of the Apollo 11 flight. The first red dot near Earth is the point of TLI. Photo: Apollo 11’s Translunar Trajectory

Several factors worked in favour of the minimum exposure trajectory. We all know that Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.5° relative to the ecliptic plane. In 1969, the magnetic north pole was displaced from the geographical north pole by 11.4°. Therefore in 1969, the Van Allen radiation belts could have had a maximum inclination of 34.9° (23.5°+11.4°) with respect to the ecliptic (Fig. 5).

Take your pick of alternate histories.

Consideration that we never went to the moon is supported by the fact that, despite quantum leaps in technology supposedly sending space vehicles to much further reaches of outer space beyond the moon, neither the United States nor any other nation has tripped to the moon since 1972.

NASA’s Explanation of Why We Haven’t Been Back to the Moon – January 2018

Satellites that unwittingly or intentionally venture into the belts can be damaged by the radiation, which could have an impact on unprotected astronauts as well. Understanding the dynamics of this region is essential for protecting technological assets and planning crewed space missions.

“Could have an impact on unprotected astronauts?” “Planning crewed space missions?” Sure sounds like manned space craft haven’t been through the Van Allen Belts yet.

Here’s the best explanation I’ve seen.

Wernher von Braun was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, as well as the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany. He helped design and co-developed the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during World War II.

Following the war, he was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip.

In 1960, his group was assimilated into NASA, where he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that [purportedly] propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.  In 1967, von Braun was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science.

Von Braun is widely seen as the “father of space travel”, “father of rocket science” in terms of “father of the American lunar program”.

It was easy to reassure a panicky American public that we achieved supremacy over the Communists through a Wizard of Oz magic Space Show.

The Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission were thorough in their visual documentation…Dozens of photography and cinematography units were dispatched to various locations around the world, armed with almost every available type of still and film camera, in order to capture imagery that could be analyzed and used both for scientific and public-relations and storytelling purposes—the diagnostic and the documentary.

For over two decades, the United States Air Force even operated a “secret,” 100,000-square-foot film studio in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon. At “Lookout Mountain,” teams of Hollywood craftspeople photographed, processed, edited, screened, and distributed images that ended up in everything from LIFE magazine photo spreads to newsreels and tourist postcards.

Werner von Braun worked with Walt Disney on a series of films.

Together, von Braun (the engineer) and Disney (the artist) used the new medium of television to illustrate how high man might fly on the strength of technology and the spirit of human imagination…Disney personally introduced the first television show, “Man in Space,” which aired on ABC on March 9, 1955. The objective, he said, was to combine “the tools of our trade with the knowledge of the scientists to give a factual picture of the latest plans for man’s newest adventure…” But it also relied on Disney’s trademark animation techniques…