Getting Mooned
Poking at the carcass
Well, here we are, 54 years after Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and was retrieved by the carrier USS Hornet. On this date 54 years ago, the three astronauts - Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins - were sealed in an old Airstream RV and whisked off to Houston for sterilization, debriefing and show-and-tell.
The reason they were sealed in a can was out of an ”abundance of caution” concerning whether the astronauts may have brought back exotic pathogens from the Moon. No one ever mentions that these men came into direct contact with frogmen and helicopter crews, and were goose-stepped across the deck of the carrier to their RV. None of the crew were quarantined on their march from the helicopter to the Airstream, and if they had any space germs, they shed them all over the helicopter and deck of the ship.
No one ever mentions whether the capsule the astronauts landed in was sealed on deck, nor if or how many people entered it without isolation protocols. If contamination was a real issue, the entire capsule would have remained sealed with the men inside until it had been lifted onto the ship and sealed in its entirety before they could open the door.
Just one of the many REAL issues with the Apollo missions.
When it comes to conspiracy theories about the Moon landings, the conversation is always focused on photos, lighting, stars, and horizons. This keeps attention away from the most damning evidence that what we Earth-bound folks saw was not actual events. As a professional cinematographer, videographer and photographer, I have little or no issues with the technical aspects of the images - for the most part. For one thing, we don’t have enough information about exposures, focal lengths, incident lighting, reflected lighting, surface topography, and the like to make authoritative pronouncements.
My issues are with the things no one ever talks about. Specifically, I question the PLSSs, the LM design, the fuel used, and the dust. This is gonna be fun! Ride along.
The Portable Life Support Systems (PLSSs) were the giant backpacks worn by the Moonwalkers. This was a complex Rube-Goldberg-esque contraption that involved a bodysuit circulating water at normal body temperature (98F/37C), while lithium hydroxide (LiOH) filters removed CO2 to provide fresh air. The packs also had tanks of oxygen to provide breathing air. An average diving tank (80cm3) lasts about an hour, so those packs had to have BIG tanks to stay out longer than that, especially when the astronauts were working.
Each Moonwalker would require at least 25 grams of LiOH per hour to scrub CO2. I can’t find a credible amount for the cooling water, but each liter would weigh 1 kilogram - not to mention drinking water - and all the filters and water had to be hauled up from Earth to support missions from 5 to 12 days. That’s a lot of weight - tanks, filters, air bottles, radio gear, medical sensors, &c.
We are told that the PLSSs kept the astronauts cool by circulating heat back to the pack and radiating it into the environment. Now take your average Thermos. It has a glass container inside a vacuum to keep the contents hot or cold, because heat doesn’t radiate into a vacuum. Water would either freeze or boil rather quickly, depending on whether it was exposed to sunlight or shadow on the Moon. Even if the astronaut remained at normal body temperature - 98.6F/37C - that’s pretty warm for an environment and the astronauts would have sweated up a storm, filling the suit with sweat pretty quickly. The inside of the suits would feel like a soggy jungle within minutes, and it would only get worse since the heat could not be exchanged with the environment. Now if they had air conditioners in those packs…but that would be a lot more weight.
Combined with the pure oxygen inside the suits, all that liquid was a major hazard with all the electrical wiring, batteries and such, especially with direct current. If there was even the most minor short, the suit would become a bag of fire almost instantly, even as the astronaut was being electrocuted. See Apollo 1 for reference. Fun!
Then there’s the design of the Lunar Module (LM), which we were told was called the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) at the time. This was essentially a tube wrapped in mylar with lots of stuff stuck all over it, plus 2 holes (door and docking port) and 2 windows. If you’ve ever purchased a bag of potato chips at sea level and carried it to the mountains, then you can see the obvious problem here - the LM would inflate like a balloon, even with the claimed 33% of normal air pressure (15psi) inside and vacuum outside. This doesn’t even consider the suits themselves.
We know from photos on the Moon that the mylar skin of the LM was all wrinkly and slack. It didn’t show any signs of being pressurized at all, much less 33% Earth-normal. And this doesn’t even address the issues with the suits puffing up making movement of any kind problematic.
The next big issue is the fuel used by both the descent and ascent stages of the LM. Even if we sidestep the issue of a blast crater under the lander - because NASA says they shut off the engine at 3m and plunked that flimsy contraption down - we still have major issues with the type of fuel used.
Both stages used Aerozine 50, a 50-50 mixture of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, with nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer. Both of these chemicals are deadly toxins and highly caustic, leaving a poisonous residue after combustion. This is in addition to creating a thick red-orange smoke while burning.
The problems again are obvious. The LM would have left a trail of toxic smoke along its descent path with no wind to disperse it, plus a layer of poison on the Moon’s surface and on the outside surfaces of the LM, which would have been carried into the LM on the moonsuits, along with clouds of fine, powdery dust, which we’ll get to in a minute. At a minimum, the astronauts should have suffered eye and sinus irritation, if not pulmonary edema and possibly death. The toxins would have also contaminated the CM in orbit and a lot of the samples returned to Earth.
None of these issues are evident in any of the Moon missions or the astronauts’ health, nor is any plume of thick smoke seen across the moonscape, nor in the videos of the ascent stage taking off. And no, the fuel doesn’t behave differently in a vacuum. It’s a hypergolic fluid that burns just by mixing them. No spark needed.
There’s also the issue of thrust. Aerozine 50 produces 1,097kN of thrust immediately on combustion. The astronauts would have been flattened against the floor of the LM on ignition of the ascent stage, but on audio they don’t even grunt - and they were standing, not sitting. This is basic physics. The craft accelerates, pushing against the astronauts until all of them reach the same speed, just like stomping the gas in your car. That many Newtons whould have had their cheeks flapping.
We won’t even get into all the noise of the engines, either direct or vibratory, especially from the ascent engine that bulged up out of the floor inside the LM. Either NASA had figured out how to isolate the men from acceleration using a silent rocket, or this is all poppycock.
And then there’s the dust.
The Moon’s surface, at least the parts that have been reportedly explored, is covered in what is basically grey baby powder. The dust is so fine that it adheres to everything via static cling, and it even floats quite some distance above the surface during daylight hours. The LM had a single door, so no airlock or changing area to blow the dirt off.
Everyone knows what dust can do to electronics just sitting around the house. Imagine clouds of baby powder floating around and clinging to your clothes, screens, keyboard, swirling around every time you move and clouds of it following you inside and around the house. Now imagine your most advanced electronics are about as sophisticated as an old Timex watch with the guts exposed.
See the problem?
In order to have a static charge, the dust itself must be charged and will stick to anything with an opposite charge. The dust grains are also crystalline with sharp edges, so two surfaces rubbing together (buttons, switches, &c.) would wear down the materials pretty quickly. Think of sand sticking to you at the beach, then multiply that by…um, a lot…at least an order of magnitude. And all the dust follows you when you offload baggage from the LM to the CM, and it’s floating around filling your sinuses and lungs and eyeballs.
Howard Hughes would have gone insane like this, even for a few hours, much less a couple of weeks.
As you can see, there are a lot of problems with the whole Moon landing story that don’t even need the lighting angles and lack of stars and labelled props to get way off into the conspiracy weeds. In fact, we don’t even need to address the issues with the Van Allen belts.
Did Stanley Kubrick create “Apollo the Movie”? We’ll probably never know. Did men really walk on the Moon? I’m pretty sure they did, but I don’t think we’ve seen the real show. This might have been partly to hide the technology used from the Soviets, and partly to hide what they really saw there from all of us. Or it could all be a massive hoax to attempt what Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s with “Star Wars” or the Big Guy is trying to do with wars and sanctions - break the Russian bank.
NASA has a long history of being utterly and blatantly full of shit. They will look you straight in the eye and with a deadpan face tell you it’s sunny and warm out, while the freezing rain is beating down on your head. I wouldn’t trust them to tell me the correct time when I’m staring at the Naval Observatory Atomic Clock. I wouldn’t trust them to tell me what’s for dinner when I’m watching them butcher the chicken. I wouldn’t trust them…well, you get the idea.
We may never know what really happened on the Moon from 1969 to 1972 if anything, but there is ample evidence that the story we’ve been told is not all of the facts about it. Given that NO ONE from ANY country has publicly been back in 50 years, despite the Russians having the ability to claim second prize, says a lot to me. The destruction of first-generation video and telemetry records by NASA of the greatest achievement in our history says a lot to me.
Considering the scale and blatancy of lies from government agencies in just the last three years is de facto evidence that those agencies will tell whoppers when needed to advance an agenda, and we don’t even have to go back to September 2001, much less Dallas in November 1963.
And they’ve had 50 years now to carefully edit and obfuscate the records.
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Whatever the case or story may be, I have never bought that they made it there and back in that tinfoil/duct tape rattle trap. I dubbed it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. No way in hell they flew in that thing. It looks like a 3rd grade science project gone wrong.