Counter-Currents
3,705 words
It’s true that the government is quite capable of lying like hell. That doesn’t, however, mean everything they say is a lie. This is so even for the Nixon administration, despite the bad reputation they gave themselves on the way out. If Resident Bidet’s junta would rise to Richard Nixon’s standard of integrity and truthfulness, imperfect as it was, it still would be a vast improvement. Even so, the globalist wind-up toy tells the truth once in a blue moon. And on that note. . .
Lunacy
Some alternative narratives are true, and some are false. Then there are the flaky ones: obviously false, although too many people believe them who should know better. Among these, one of the foremost is the notion that the Apollo program was faked. This one makes me cringe. Now that lunar orbiters with increasingly sophisticated cameras are able to photograph the landing sites, that alone should’ve ended the silly debate. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Let’s put this one to rest once and for all, shall we?
The National Alliance’s bulletin National Vanguard released a helpful take, “An Anti-White Hoax: The ‘Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy’ Exposed,” in their March/April 2007 edition. To begin:
July 20, 1969 has become a highly controversial and emotional date for different people, for different reasons.
To White people who are proud of the accomplishments of their race, this date is when man first walked on the moon. That day represents the peak of Western Civilization.
To those who hate White civilization, this date is an insufferable blight that has to be falsified in the historical record. It is to them unacceptable that the main brains behind the moon landings were Nazi German SS officers such as Wernher von Braun. It is also Politically Incorrect that White people have sole claim to this achievement; thus it should be (1) ignored, (2) selectively falsified, or (3) flatly denied. This third treatment is the topic in this column.
The National Alliance’s take tends to identify Jews as culprits likely to spread this story. One major vector is the film Capricorn One, with the following plot:
[T]he U.S. sent a manned mission to Mars — and faked it by shooting the entire trip and exploration in a movie studio. The show was hosted by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi. The studio set and terrain were deliberately made to look like the moon landing. Similarities included phrases spoken by astronauts, desert scenery, the landing craft, actions performed outside the landing craft, and even the powdery dust surface on which astronauts walked.
I’ll add that with a constellation of elements from the film similar to the Apollo 11 footage, something like that would tend to cause, whether intentionally or otherwise, a conflation of the two stories by psychological association:
Fox TV, not to be outdone, has produced an hour long documentary in which they attempt to prove that the moon landing never happened. This was repeatedly shown on prime-time TV.
By February 2006, the moon landing deniers had spread sufficient propaganda that up to 20 percent of Americans do not believe man ever went to the moon.
My take tends to identify pinkos as the culprits likely to spread this story. From Deplorable Diatribes:
The Soviets did have a first-rate space program, and achieved some key firsts. They quite possibly could have landed on the moon first if not for top-level personality clashes and engineering problems with the N1 launch vehicle. So, they tried to make the public think that American astronauts never landed on the moon and all the funding was diverted to the CIA. This makes the Soviets epic sore losers, almost as bad as Al Gore.
. . .[T]he KGB is considered the source of some of the moon landing hoax rumors. The basic concept is found in a 1960 memo:
If necessary, the necessary documents should be forged using the existing samples. . . To work out and implement measures on blowing the cover of several scientific, commercial and other institutions, used by the CIA for its spy activities. In particular, to carry out such measures with regard to the “National Aeronautics and Space Administration” [NASA] and the “Informational Agency” of the USA [U.S. Information Agency (USIA)].
Whatever role the KGB had, lots of people in the tinfoil hat crowd ran with the story and elaborated on it.
You can buy Beau Albrecht’s Space Vixen Trek here.
Reflecting back on the Apollo program’s remarkable achievements, the unprecedented voyages were the crowning glory not only of America, but of Western civilization — and it held the promise of much more. Missions 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled, and there were other ambitious plans under discussion, such as a permanent Moon base and a manned flyby of Venus, but these didn’t come to fruition. After the early 1970s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) emphasis shifted toward development of the Space Shuttle, but Congressional cutbacks to NASA’s funding reduced its capabilities. That in turn was scrapped during the Obama administration, leaving the United States with no equivalent manned launch vehicle to replace it. Had the space program been given the resources to keep up the tempo it had maintained during the Apollo years, who knows how much further along we would presently be?
Although JFK initiated the Apollo program, many Leftists have a problem with it — especially blacks. Some of them felt that instead of a giant leap for mankind, the government should have spent all the tax dollars on supporting welfare queens. The July 1978 edition of Instauration notes that their Volksgenossen abroad also took it as a snub to their aspirations toward gibsmedats:
Black Africans, for example, either frankly disbelieved in the moon landing or disapproved of it, their rulers dutifully parroting the conviction that the money spent on the venture could have been put to better use by relieving world poverty and, incidentally, relining their own pockets. It was indeed sheer lunacy, or sheer liberalism, to have suggested that primitives in whatever esoteric fashion shared in Western man’s space flights.
NASA has also been criticized for not having enough diversity hires. It especially remains a sore point that only white men were sent to the Moon. If the proposed Moon shot redo actually happens, then the present globohomo régime will probably send up a Chinese lesbian in a wheelchair, if not someone with even more intersectionality points. Then again, if we send trisexual genderfluid squidlings with faces pierced like pincushions, they’ll fit right in if they encounter any alien life.
National Vanguard had some further words about prominent “Apollo Hoax” hoaxers:
The main players (eagerly supported by the mass-media) appear to consist of people who mistrust their government — (good instincts so far), but reveal an unfortunate lack of objectivity and dearth of knowledge in basic science and astrophysics.
I’ll concur with that. It does list Bill Kaysing as an exception, who participated in the FOX feature, and who came up with some of the talking points below.
The hoax hoaxers answered
The Hubble Space Telescope, photographed from the Space Shuttle. When there are bright foreground objects, you can’t see stars in the background.
National Vanguard helpfully listed, and answered, the most frequent “Moon landing hoax” talking points:
- Despite the clarity of deep space, stars are missing from the black sky in all photographs taken on the Moon.
Answer: Starlight is too faint to visibly register on a photographic plate if another object is in view and in direct sunlight. No photos taken of objects in sunlight in space ever show stars, on the Moon or elsewhere. - The American flag was waving, even though there is no atmosphere on the Moon.
Answer: The US flags were designed with in-built springs to make them extend even though there is no wind, so the general appearance of a waving flag is not unexpected — other than that the flag cannot “move” unless an astronaut is handling the flag. No video exists of any Moon flag “moving” without an astronaut physically shunting the flagpole or flag, or as the result of being buffeted by the LEM’s rocket exhaust. - No blast crater is visible beneath the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), where its powerful rocket engine had fired.
Answer: The descent stage engine bell is about five feet across at the bottom. The thrust of the engine at touchdown was about 3,000 pounds, so the blast pressure of the rocket exhaust was only about one pound per square inch — not nearly enough to produce any sort of blast crater. - If the LEM was extremely unstable and had so many problems flying during tests on Earth, then how could the LEM flawlessly land six times on the Moon?
Answer: Any rocket such as the LEM has problems during its development phase. Rockets are inherently unstable and therefore have control mechanisms to correct this. As with all other successful rockets, the LEM overcame these difficulties and performed very well indeed. - “To have a powerful rocket engine blast the surface of the moon; blasting away all of the dust, and then find footprints surrounding the Lunar Lander; that to me would be impossibility.” – Bill Kaysing
Answer: With a rocket jet pressure of only one pound per square inch, dust surrounding the LEM would be essentially untouched, except for some thrown out from directly below the nozzle, which would add to dust already around the LEM. - When the LEM lifted off from the Moon, there was no exhaust plume.
The Lunar Lander used a mixture of hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide which ignites upon contact and produces exhaust that is transparent. That’s why you cannot see the flame. - It is impossible for man to survive the deadly radiation of deep space. “Before they got halfway to the moon, they would have picked up a death-dose of radiation.”
Answer: The Apollo spacecraft traveled quite quickly through the radiation belts, taking only an hour or so, which is not nearly enough time to receive a lethal dose. - When the speed of NASA footage is doubled, astronauts appear to be running as in Earth’s gravity.
Answer: Yes indeed, though that proves nothing at all . . . unless you also notice that the astronauts and Lunar Rover were kicking up dust as they moved. The dust goes up in a perfect parabolic arc and falls back down to the surface, unlike on Earth, where dust billows up and slowly settles down, as fine dust does in our atmosphere. Once again, the deniers bite the dust. - What was photographed in the shadow of the LEM should be in pitch-black darkness, because the Sun was the only light source, yet shadows are well-lit.
Answer: Wrong. There was another major light source: The Moon itself! There was a brightly-lit desert all around the landing site which strongly reflected sunlight into every shadow. - The astronaut and other deaths during the Apollo program were no accident. They were intentionally silenced because they knew too much. — “No, it was no accident. They murdered them because, you see, I found out just recently that whenever NASA was in trouble they would call on the CIA. Now we all know that the CIA has and can kill anybody they want without any feeling of conscience whatsoever. So it’s my feeling that the CIA was hired by NASA to very adroitly kill Grissom, Chaffee, and White.” — Bill Kaysing.
Answer: Very few astronauts died mysterious deaths; almost all were clearly work-related in what was and is a very high-risk profession. Only one death occurred in 1969, the year of the first Moon landing. Casual accusations of murder are easy to make, but proof is lacking. No astronauts or NASA officials then or later made such claims.
There are other things the article notes, and I’ll summarize some of them. It points out that both amateur radio operators and the Soviet Union were monitoring the Apollo missions’ progress, which required directional antennas pointed at the right place in the sky. (Ham radio was a much bigger technical hobby before the Internet came around.) Moreover, the astronauts set up a corner reflector on the Moon which allows terrestrial laser beams to be bounced off of it in order to measure the distance from the Earth with precision. Also, returned samples of Moon rocks can be shown to be “much older than Earth rock and contains many isotopes not normally found on Earth. It is not technologically possible for scientists to fake a moon rock.”
Finally, National Vanguard unfavorably compares the Moon landing controversy with The Holobunga. For one thing, open debate on most topics is politically correct and the media will not suppress questioning the Apollo Moon landings, whereas it is is harshly discouraged to question the mainstream Holocaust narrative.
A thought experiment
Fritz Lang’s lunar stage for Frau im Mond (1929).
What would it have taken for NASA to falsify a Moon mission? To do so, they would have had to send a Saturn V into orbit carrying three astronauts, pretending that they were going to land on the Moon but without actually doing so. (That much can’t be questioned, since the launch was witnessed by crowds at Cape Canaveral and photographed nine ways from Sunday.) Even just sending three astronauts into space requires a tremendous investment in hardware and ground infrastructure.
What could have been done about the ham radio operators, and of course the Soviets, who were monitoring the mission’s progress with directional antennas? To get the voice and telemetry signals to come from where they were supposed to be, they’d have had to put the rocket on a Hohman type 2 transfer orbit to the Moon and then park it in lunar orbit — i.e., actually go where they said they were going. Then, once they actually got there, they’d only pretend to land in the descent module.
There were also dozens of personnel at NASA’s Mission Control monitoring the flight. If there had been no lunar landing, then there would have had to be a hidden team responsible for feeding them fake telemetry data so that they would appear as if they were doing their jobs throughout. And at that point, who would be keeping track of the actual command module that was still orbiting the Moon and its actual telemetry data?
Hollywood’s early idea of what the Moon would look like: Man in the Moon (1960).
As for the landing itself, to falsify such an event they’d have had to film it on a very large stage — enough for long dune buggy trips. It would have to be specially rounded and put on top of a huge roller so that the horizon would come up faster than it does on Earth. Also, all the air would have to be sucked out of it, since only a vacuum can cause the dust kicked up by boots or tires to fall parabolically rather than float in the air, and specially-designed tools like the hammer-feather drop could only work as they were supposed to in an airless environment.
Moreover, you’ll notice from the physics demonstration that the hammer falls slower than it would on Earth. That’s because the lunar gravitational force is about a sixth of what it is here, thus there is less acceleration. That also accounts for the bouncy, shuffling way that the astronauts walk. So not only would this massive studio set have to be airless, but gravity would have to be reduced as well.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
For argument’s sake, let’s suppose it was indeed possible to construct such a stage, that Moon rocks can be faked with the right isotopes to fool the world’s scientists, and that space elves set up the corner reflector at Tranquility Bay. Even then, there would have to be thousands (if not tens of thousands) involved in such an operation: astronauts, engineers, directors, personnel in charge of creating false telemetry data, cinematographers, special effects teams, etc. There’s just no way to bribe, cajole, or threaten that many people into shutting up about such a juicy secret indefinitely.
Note that the Moon landings occurred during the tenure of an administration that couldn’t even keep a third-rate burglary secret. (Only G. Gordon Liddy kept his mouth shut about it, and everyone else sang like a canary.) Moreover, even if the government were to pull off an imposture like that once, then why would they dare to carry out seven fake missions — in which a single telling goof in any of them would give the entire game away? All told, it would be more practical, less expensive, and less politically risky to build an actual Moon rocket than to fake it seven times.
Mother Nature’s style turned out to be a little different.
Finally, let’s consider the special effects that were available in the 1960s. Digital manipulation of photographs didn’t exist yet. The best effects of the age were on display in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out a year before the first Moon landing and is still considered a classic. The first scene, of course, shows us what a Black Lives Matter peaceful protest was like three million years ago. After that we are shown a space shuttle, and rotoscope magic got the weightless scenes down pat, complete with a pen rotating in mid-air. However, in the scenes set on the Moon, the film doesn’t even try to emulate reduced gravity; everyone walks slowly but normally.
Even the contemporary film Ad Astra, which has much longer lunar scenes, does not make an attempt to show what reduced gravity would look like, even with much more developed effects technology. Moreover, lunar movie sets produced prior to the actual Moon landings generally assumed that the Moon would be a very craggy place. The footage from the Apollo missions showed that it was in fact quite different: dusty plains, rolling hills, and lots of craters. NASA picked relatively flat terrain to land on, for obvious reasons, and the landscape is quite a departure from what was assumed by earlier artists and filmmakers.
Conspiracy theories: The good, bad, and the ugly
You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.
There is a wide range of epistemological positions from believing everything to believing nothing. It’s unproductive to be a superstitious, gullible, crystal-sucking New Age weenie, or even someone who believes everything on TV. At the other extreme, immoderately hardheaded positions like solipsism are unproductive as well. It’s better to steer the middle course.
More to the point, there are times when it’s good to be skeptical of official narratives. Still, if the gain on your bullshit detectors is turned up much too high, then you’ll pick up random hisses and pops and detect patterns when in fact nothing significant is there. That’s obviously counterproductive as well. Thus, let discernment be your guide.
Much could be said about so-called “conspiracy theories.” Often that’s a go-to cliché used by presstitutes and the like to discredit a counter-narrative. As the joke goes, the difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy fact is usually about six months. Getting past the rhetoric, such scandalous stories are essentially sociopolitical rumors. (It’s hardly anything new. In the Tudor era, court gossip from London spread rapidly from one peasant village to the next.) They’ll be one of the following:
- true;
- partially true;
- false, created as propaganda; or
- false, created as unfounded speculation, cynicism, malicious rumor-mongering, etc.
Although the Lügenpresse and other supposedly authoritative sources want you to believe they have a monopoly on the truth, quite a few “conspiracy theories” turn out to be the real thing. To take one example, a cursory glance through the leaked Cablegate documents will confirm that many rumored happenings did in fact occur in international politics in the past. There have been scores of events which were suspected, but where there was no conclusive evidence to prove them. Moreover, the Venona decrypts — made public decades after the fact, when the Cold War was beginning to fizzle out — revealed that much of the Soviet espionage that only “nutty” McCarthyists and the John Birch Society had believed in at the time actually was going on.
On the other hand, stories which are groundless or just plain flaky will tend to make the public reject alternative narratives without considering them. In effect, people who spread tall tales are pooping in the punch bowl. They might believe they’re being super-edgy, but they’re only muddying the waters. They might think they’re cleverer than everyone else as recipients of forbidden knowledge, but they’re just cranks. By adding to the circulation of flaky alternative narratives, they make all other alternative narratives seem disreputable. Consequentially, they will tend to make The System and its mainstream media propaganda apparatus more credible in the public’s eyes.
Finally, idle chatter is a waste of time. For example, rather than endlessly debating what did or didn’t happen on the moon in the 1960s, there should be a lot more discussion about what the W6rld Ec6nomic F6rum plans for the public in the near future. (It’s not even a conspiracy theory when they tell us openly what they want to do and when!) Suppose I were a globalist with a God complex plotting a massive power grab. I’d be happy that lots of talkative and profoundly wary conspiracy buffs are too busy spinning their wheels with a phony story from decades ago to notice what I’m doing right now.
Let this be the end of it
The Apollo 11 lander continues to cast a long shadow on history, as photographed by India’s Chandrayaan-2 orbiter in 2019.
Let us be done with the “Apollo hoax” hoax once and for all. Chances are that it got started as Leftist sour grapes. It attempts to make us believe that one of our greatest achievements never happened, and as such it should be considered anti-white demoralization propaganda. It’s no better than Howard Zinn’s lies; there’s no need to signal-boost it. Also, there’s no need to spread the kind of flaky stories that generally call alternative narratives into disrepute, thereby causing presstitutes and their ilk to seem more credible by comparison.
All told, we can proudly salute the brave white Americans who landed on the Moon, blazing a trail to the cosmos. They weren’t diverse; they were competent. It was a remarkable time in white history. As the latest in a long timeline of our people’s famous explorers, they accomplished a glorious achievement, something that had only had been dreamed of in times past. What was before, so may it be again.
* * *
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75 comments
“…there would have to be thousands (if not tens of thousands) involved in such an operation: … There’s just no way to bribe, cajole, or threaten that many people into shutting up about such a juicy secret indefinitely”
What’s your estimate: How many thousands (or at least hundreds) have been needed for 9/11?
Why is 9/11 so remarkable? Sometimes the simplest answers are the best ones.
The Intelligence and immigration agencies, and military interventionism pundits have long been trying to keep American borders as open as possible, and since 1965 flooded with all kinds of Third World detritus.
At the same time, just going to a White Nationalist meeting might now get you put onto the TSA watchlist. I keep a very low profile and yet I often get swabbed down for gunpowder residue just before taking a flight.
Anyway, the System is pretty good at taking advantage of Public Relations “opportunities,” and that is exactly what George W. Bush did after 9/11 with the hue-and-cry generated.
And then to further pursue along the lines of an open-ended Middle East military expedition, Junior Bush floated the WMD hoax, which pretty much everybody knew was nonsense but nobody cared. It is what the Neoconservative wonks wanted.
Yet Congress will impeach people for dumb stuff like a dalliance in the Oval Office with a homely Jewish intern in the case of Clinton, or whatever it was that they kept impeaching Trump for.
🙂
Congress impeached BJ Clinton for perjury.
Yeah, he lied about his dumb affair.
🙂
Time is of the essence for us Europeans to embark on our Break Away Civilization, to resume our destiny as the explorers we are & head back to the stars where we left off in 1972. Simultaneously & in concert as a team, we must reclaim our homelands, hold our traitors accountable, & repatriate ALL non-Europeans. Failure is not an option. Without total & complete separation in perpetuity we will not survive.
WGTOW – Whites Going Their Own Way.
XIV.
I agree with you that arguing about this is a waste of time and counterproductive for this forum. That said, if you listen to Neil Armstrong interviews, he never speaks like someone who has been on the moon. There are numerous acknowledgments from NASA about the risks of traversing the Van Allen radiation belts. All of the raw footage and technical data from the flights have been lost.
The mere fact that the S.S. ‘Holobunga’ is still afloat despite the many telling broadsides landed on it is evidence that grand deceptions can be perpetrated in spite of whistleblowers and careful researchers.
There were overwhelming political reasons to ensure that the moon landings took place as promised by Kennedy. There were also nearly insuperable technical challenges. Why not let sleeping dogs lie and not insist on our own prescribed belief system in imitation of ‘Holocaustianity’.
Well heck. Did anything I say make a lick of sense?
[deleted]
The Van Allen radiation belts are not an impenetrable force field.
The Van Allen radiation belt vs. the Apollo astronauts argument is something that a High School Physics student should be able to demolish ─ or at worst someone with passing grades in High School Mathematics who has taken a Physics survey class in College.
The original argument is so disingenuous that I can hardly imagine it as having actually been made in good faith.
Radiation is about intensity and exposure, or “burn” time.
The Apollo astronauts passed through the Van Allen radiation belts in just a few hours, and the thin aluminum hull provided considerable protection from energized electrons and other charged particles ─ not so much neutrons and Gamma rays and high-energy cosmic particles. They were actually exposed to more cosmic radiation over the rest of the week-long journey to the Moon and back than from the Van Allen Belts.
You might encounter a “radiation burn” if you go to the beach with bare lily-white skin on a sunny day and lose track of the time and your ultraviolet exposure. In the SW United States where I live the climate is usually sunny and dry ─ and some plains or deserts are at high altitudes, which hugely affects the intensity of the UV exposure. A broad hat and sunscreen is helpful. And the sun is the most intense between the hours of 10 and 2 on non-overcast days.
But what about ionizing or penetrating radiation? This is worst in space or at higher altitudes where the atmosphere offers less protection from cosmic rays.
The CDC says that you are exposed to about 0.035 milli-Sieverts of ionizing radiation total when taking a coast-to-coast flight across the United States ─ which will take several hours, but be less radiation exposure than a single chest radiogram taken at your doctor’s office.
A chest X-Ray might “flash” a beam for a fraction of a second and the exposure will be about 0.1 mSv, or just over three times the value of the hours-long airplane flight above. You will be exposed to this much background ionizing radiation in about a week just living at home, depending upon where you live.
On the other hand, a PET/CT Scan at the hospital radiology center will expose you to about 10-25 mSv, or about the equivalent of 8 years of normal background radiation (depending on where you live).
A six-month mission on the ISS may expose an astronaut to radiation from the sun and cosmic rays to between 50 mSv and 2 Sv, or from two to eighty CT scans. They are not exposed to the inner and outer Van Allen radiation belts, which the Apollo astronauts quickly passed through.
An astronaut walking on the Moon can expect to get about 60 mSv per hour, or about two-and-a-half CT scans per hour. The Apollo missions also occurred at a time when the solar cycle was at peak activity, and there was a severe solar storm between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions in 1972.
Anyway, I have a lifetime membership in the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and the highest class of Amateur Radio license. Ham Radio operators are required by the FCC to understand how radiation safety works regardless of whether they are beaming microwaves to bounce off the Moon, or talking to a fellow Ham in New Zealand with a homemade radio set using vacuum tubes. There are many ways to get the job done.
We mainly work with non-ionizing radiation, which is a hugely important factor, but you can still get cooked ─ or cook your neighbor ─ if you don’t know what you are doing. We often get blamed for screwing up the neighbor’s TV set reception, but that is usually a bogus rap. And we often have to work with Imaginary Numbers to figure out how our transmitters and antennas or “radiators” match effectively.
In any case, radiation exposure with ionizing radiation like X-Rays or Gamma Rays is well understood and not exactly rocket science. If this were not so, people could not be diagnosed with penetrating X-rays or CAT scans or get Gamma radiation therapy for certain maladies.
And there are good reasons that airline pilots or flight attendants who fly daily at high altitudes and thereby get exposed to ample levels of cosmic rays don’t end up falling from the sky looking like something out of a Cronenberg movie.
People tend to be so innumerate that it is difficult to explain radiation or radioactivity to them ─ which they cannot see or sense, but which can be empirically measured. The human brain just did not evolve in such a way, I guess.
However, it is sometimes useful to explain radiation or radioactive doses in terms of “banana equivalents.” In other words, this level of “Fukushima horror” is measurable but small ─ a dose about equal to the radioactive potassium from a banana.
People don’t often realize that coal-burning power plants put out radioactive materials in massive amounts compared to an operating nuclear power plant that mostly exhales steam.
A lot of no-nukes Leftists smoke tobacco, not knowing how much radioactivity they are inhaling in the process, along with other carcinogenic chemicals.
Doc Oppenheimer ─ the pensive director of the Manhattan Project which built the atomic bomb during WWII, and who would have been happier nuking Nazi Germany rather than Japan, let alone the Soviet Union or Red China, to the point that he got his security clearance yanked in 1953 ─ was a heavy smoker who died of throat cancer at the fairly young age of 62.
Contrary to popular belief, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic explosions produced hardly any radioactive fallout because the bombs were detonated at over 500 meters altitude. The airbursts were triggered by radar proximity fuses. Even the fallout for the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945 was minimal because the bomb was detonated at the top of a 100 foot tower. It still made a shallow crater in the desert sand about a meter deep, filling slightly with green radioactive glass that fell back like molten rain as its atomic fireball, hotter than the surface of the sun, dissipated. The Trinity site today is barely more radioactive than the normal background radiation.
The epidemiology of the victims from the Japanese nuking has been heavily studied. There were about 55 ionizing radiation deaths at Hiroshima. If you were 1.2 kilometers from ground zero and unshielded other than being protected somehow from the heat and blast, you would have received about 5 Sv of neutron and Gamma flash radiation, which would be about a 50 percent chance of mortality within thirty days, assuming that you were not otherwise injured. This kind of immediate radiation generated in a fraction of a second by the atomic reaction drops off very fast with distance. Basically, a so-called “neutron bomb” is a small tactical nuke which naturally does not have a large blast or heat radius.
The Apollo astronauts were exposed to quite a bit of radiation and it was carefully studied. The missions were not without many risks. Yes, they were lucky, but none suffered any symptoms of radiation sickness. NASA atronauts are today limited to 1 Sievert of lifetime radiation exposure.
Today we know that radiation in space is hugely more of a problem than we thought it would be in the comic adventure books of the 1950s.
We could travel to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s because the astronauts were not exposed to cosmic rays for long missions ─ and near-space missions are somewhat protected by the Earth’s magnetic field, even as far away as the Moon to some extent.
The International Space Station astronauts are carefully monitored and this is not really an issue unless a major solar event is occurring. These do not usually last long, and no Apollo missions were scheduled when something like a coronal mass-ejection event was predicted.
There is a nice lady on YouTube who has a PhD that does what is called “space weather,” which massively affects everything from GPS navigation and mobile phone communication to Auroral displays and maritime travel or aeronautics especially near the poles. Dr. Skov got an Amateur Radio license a few years ago, and Ham Radio operators and aviators often rely on her “space weather forecasts” because the ionized layers of the atmosphere hugely affect what we are trying to do.
https://youtu.be/1Bcmzj7h_mY
The U.S. Government has also studied the ionosphere for years at places like the HAARP station in Alaska. (Okay, HAARP is really a ZOG mind-control center ─ who am I kidding?)
Anyway, a longer manned mission to Mars would be another ball of wax than the ISS or the Moonshots, and cosmic radiation hugely complicates any such manned space missions.
An astronaut would last about an Earth day if exposed to the ionizing radiation on the surface of Europa ─ one of the Jovian moons which is believed to be the most likely to harbor some kind of deep sea life in its warm underground oceans.
Farther from the planet Jupiter, the moon Ganymede has an enigmatic magnetosphere and a Van Allen-like radiation belt. It has a lower radiation environment on the surface than Europa, so an astronaut might last two months.
Only Callisto, the moon with the farthest orbit, has low radiation to make it suitable as a manned Jovian exploration base.
Like heaver-than-air flight in the 19th century, these are not insurmountable technical problems. One day, almost certainly not in our lifetimes, these will be solved ─ and almost certainly by White people if they are still around, and not living in primitive cabins without plumbing.
😉
EDIT: Typo fixed for CDC airline radiation exposure.
Great comment. Thank you.
🙂
Is this really the cross you want to die on?
It was real in my mind.
I still don’t believe it lol
I could always see this theory was flawed. At least the question, “Can humans get to the moon?” can be solved mostly mathematically on paper by those with the inclination, but I have some sympathy as to why this notion had some currency with our people.
There is a kind of anti-human, gratuitous, technologically-driven arrogance about landing on, then planting a stupid American flag on something that has been a sacred fixture of human culture, of mystery, inspiration, and religious significance for the entirety of our history. It’s little wonder some choose to reject it.
And we all know what would happen today with a new lunar or Mars landing. The flag will be rainbow and BLM.
Ad Astra was an atrocious pile of garbage. “Brad Pitt works out his daddy issues—IN SPACE!!”
I liked that film because it’s exactly as you describe.
My thoughts are that it had its moments, but turned out to be not quite there. Someone tried to do a fusion of Apocalypse Now with 2001: A Space Odyssey. It sets mighty evocative moods, but the plot is way too contrived.
Beats the heck out of most other movies made today.
I watched the Apollo 11 landing live on TV here in the UK. (In my inertial frame of reference, Neil Armstrong made his historic “small step” at 4 o’clock in the morning!)
As a boy, I’d simply assumed the mission would be a success – American know-how and all. It was really only when I watched 2018’s First Man that it really hit me how primitive the technology was back then. Brave souls.
That was a very creative article. Thanks.
Ugh, I don’t know what to believe anymore. I’ve been in an epistemological crisis since my red pilling. I lean towards believing the moon landings were real, simply because so many brilliant minds were watching it, such as Richard Feynman et al., that surely they would have picked up on any discrepancy if the landings were faked.
There is an interesting pattern in pop culture of implying the moon landing wasn’t real. For example, the REM song man in the moon, the red hot chili pepper song Californication(space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement), the end of that Ramstein video. The movie Interstellar has something like that, in addition to the ones the author mentions. What’s behind this? I suspect one of the boys or “guys” they are after doubts the moon landing. Basically all media is a sort of kabbalistic allegory of certain individuals the oligarchs are persecuting. I believe David duke once mentioned on a podcast that some of his associates deny the moon landing, and it’s not implausible some of them may be such people. That’s what I think it is.
A more plausible conspiracy theory that is bandied about sometimes is that nuclear weapons aren’t real. That the bombs dropped on Japan were merely very large conventional bombs with perhaps some dirty elements. That would explain some things, such as why they are saying that Russia’s bombs are old and might not work, so it’s okay to provoke them. Or why no nuclear weapons have been used since ww2, even on a small scale. One time back in the 80s there was fear that the missiles might be launched accidentally, and Reagan said “we can just call them back if that happens.” False, for which he drew some ridicule, but perhaps he knew that nuclear weapons were not real and was trying to allay public concern. I don’t endorse this necessarily, but it’s interesting to consider.
As far as the moon landings, I don’t take much pride in them. Basically, they were powerlifting displays, mountain climbing expeditions. They provided no real scientific knowledge or progress. Van Allen himself described them as “media spectacles.” We didn’t need whitey on the moon. That money could have gone to a repatriation fund, space exploration through telescopy, other research.
Maybe Van Allen didn’t believe they were anything but ‘media spectacles’.
I can’t agree that they weren’t worthwhile though, providing they truly happened and if they were successfully faked then that’s kind of awesome in itself.
As for the whole ‘nuclear weapons are fake’ thing, I guess it’s possible but then what motivation would Ben Gurion have had for assassinating J.F.K. ? And there are still a hundred or more nuclear reactors the world over producing large amounts of controlled energy. It’s hard to believe this would not have been weaponized shortly after the war had it not been already.
Other reasons, maybe he was doing other things they didn’t like.
The “nukes aren’t real” line is just silly. How do you get 10,000 tons of TNT into a single plane? The maximum takeoff weight of a B-29 is 65 tons.
Well, maybe it wasn’t as powerful as they say. Would you know the difference by looking? Aren’t there other things like plastique and c4 that are more explosive than tnt? Just playing devils advocate. But you’re right, it’s probably silly. I’m not supporting it, but since we are talking about these things, I thought it was analogous.
Speaking of nukes, a surprisingly balanced and concise look at Hiroshima:
https://mpalmer.heresy.is/webnotes/HR/download/hiroshima-revisited.pdf
De Seversky’s comments went wide very early, doubts about the atom bomb are old. Admiral Nimitz never believed any of it. Oppenheimer was openly hostile and was judicially silenced.
For a patriotic take in faking Hiroshima, see the novel The Jesus Factor by Edwin Corley, 1970. Corley was a WWII veteran himself and among his correspondents was Paul Tibbits, commander of the plane that allegedly dropped the bomb, and Curtis LeMay, commander of the Army Air Force during the war. This book boils all the hows and whys in a simple package. Believable? Up to you.
Wow, thanks, interesting. I never knew so many serious people were against it, like Nimitz and heisenberg. Similar to 9/11 truth, it’s a rabbit hole you could go a long way down reading and reading about without accomplishing anything productive.
Hey franz, could you provide references about where Nimitz and heisenberg denied the atom bomb?
To Dark Plato (Below — There’s no Reply button under your post)
“After the war was over, Admiral Nimitz visited our laboratory. We described what we did and that the explosion was equal to 20,000 tons of dynamite. He said “You might believe it, but I don’t” and he walked out.”
The source is given as “Morton Camac, from Atom Bombs by John Coster-Mullen”.
Go to Nakatani for Nimitz citation, below P. 79:
https://adrenogate.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Death-Object-Exploding-the-Nuclear-Weapons-Ho…-z-lib.org_.pdf
Heisenberg? I have nothing, but Oppenheimer (“The atom bomb is shit”) is all over the place. They were right to fire that one. My guess is he assumed being and Atom Dude and Jewish made him invulnerable. The guys in charge of national security didn’t see it that way.
Thanks, I did see this. He might have meant that it was not as powerful as they claimed. Looking at some of the materials they have linked, that was also a frequent claim at the time. Some critics believed it was a real nuclear explosion, but not that powerful a weapon for the cost.
The theory, which I’m not endorsing as my familiarity is superficial, is that the cities were conventionally firebombed with a standard bombing squadron of about 60+ B-29s. So no massive single cargo of explosives would have been required.
The assertion is that the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki looks the same as the other 64 cities which were firebombed, including Tokyo. The wooden buildings are all turned to ash, but the stone buildings are largely standing. At ‘Ground Zero’ in Hiroshima for instance, there is a domed building which still stands as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, though by the descriptions of nuclear blast effects everything was supposed to be ‘vaporized’ for a mile in every direction. Instead, the destruction is even through the region, and there are buildings standing at Ground Zero, telephone poles and trees, and no bomb crater or sign of an epicenter of destruction.
Also notable is the contrast between various aspects of the dangers that were and are sold to the public, and what we see. The threat of radiation and ‘nuclear winter’ are talked about, but we see Oppenheimer and friends at the Trinity site in street clothes within weeks of the test, and after more than 1,000 tests by the US alone, there is no nuclear winter. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were lush, green, and fully functional cities within years, etc.
Two sources for some of this analysis are a writer named Miles Mathis, and a site called Nuke Lies curated by Rae West.
Again, I’m not endorsing anything, I’m agnostic on the matter as I have not looked closely enough. I have not found good counter-arguments to many of the points that they make, but I have not had time to look either.
OK, I have some counter-arguments. There were plenty of people who witnessed not a bunch of planes conducting a carpet bombing, but rather a single airburst. This produced intense light energy as well, resulting in severe burns at a distance. A distant conventional bomb doesn’t do something like that. Also, several above-ground tests were conducted during the 1940s and 1950s, with lots of people who saw those. You can find footage of some of these tests. Finally, the Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors blew up; if this can happen, it can happen as well (and surely more efficiently) from a thermonuclear implosion device built to do that.
Reading about Chernobyl just now, it was the steam coolant which exploded and spread the radioactive material, not a bona fide “fission explosion” like in the, ahem, putative nuclear bomb. When a reactor melts down it doesn’t explode like an atomic bomb, it gets super hot and melts down into the ground. The fissable material in normal nuclear reactors isn’t bomb grade. It has to be enriched for the, ahem, putative nuclear bomb. I’m being facetious here.
These are reasonable counterpoints.
What the skeptics say is that the eyewitnesses are surprisingly few, and often manipulated and inconsistent. From the Japanese citizens’ perspective, the terror of a firebombing raid that created a horrific firestorm, chaos and mass carnage could seem like a single explosion. They may personally have been near a conventional explosion and tossed across a room, or blinded by mustard gas which would have also caused the ‘burns’ reported by many — apart from the burns conventional firebombing produced in the other 64 cities.
Supposedly the earliest Japanese reports were of a conventional bombing raid. The standard narrative includes the US dropping flyers on the areas 24 hours later with pamphlets describing the nuclear strike, and extensive efforts to craft this narrative that are similar to what has been done in other military propaganda operations. So as with similar exercises elsewhere, a relentless effort to craft the narrative shaped ‘witness’ testimony thereafter, and contradictory testimony was filtered out of what was permitted. Much like it is unacceptable to call Waukesha a terror attack, though it was a terror attack. The public consensus is not shaped by reality, but by what they are allowed to hear.
Eventually, for most, that establishment narrative becomes their truth.
The subsequent tests also have few witnesses and various anomalies. There are photos of enormous nuclear explosions taken from the beach at Bikini Atoll for instance, but no evidence of a tsunami forming, or of the extensive destruction of the atoll one might expect. The beach itself from test to test has the same plant life and fragile wooden structures over time. And again, the site looks lush and green in current images, though we were told to expect a sterile wasteland to have been left behind.
This is an 11 page analysis of the Able and Baker nuclear tests in 1946 at Bikini Atoll, detailing concerns: http://mileswmathis.com/trinity.pdf
The same author provides longer analysis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it gives you an indication of the approach.
Mathis is an interesting place to start. Many early observers believed that it was really an “atom bomb” then noted it was a crap weapon for the price. Another interesting take:
https://archive.org/details/death-object-exploding-the-nuclear-weapons-hoax-by-akio-nakatani-z-lib.org
Nakatani argues from a physical science point of view. He’s not for everyone but I got a bound copy of “DEATH OBJECT” just for the pictures; the “Bikini” test was literally hundreds of tons of TNT all boxed up to look like some strange giant igloo. I spent four years in the US Navy and the old salts who saw one or more “nukes” found them puzzling; they were told what to think but it didn’t match what they saw.
No WN has a stake in nukes, the hell with costs. Every device from the 1930s on was patented by Jewish “scientists” and even Leslie Groves was suspicious of their credentials.
What’s the most disturbing about nukes is what Hudson brings up in his two summation chapters, my first link above. High powers in Japan had to be in on it. This means that ALL governments with nukes ever since are in on it. It’s a dimension some minds cannot cross into, and I fully appreciate that.
Thanks Franz, your recommendation of the Pollan book was also excellent, I’m reading it and Death Object.
I would be interested to see a sober counteranalysis that could explain the lack of variation between the ground zero sites and the rest of the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the lack of variation between those cities and other Japanese cities known to be firebombed. It is not what we were told to expect.
The implications if true would be profound.
And again, the question of whether and how to approach or avoid such a subject for an individual, organization, or movement arises. The reluctance to engage in controversial topics by people already engaged in advancing the controversial topic of White Nationalism makes sense. It is also natural that people who tend to seek information from an objective perspective rather than an emotional one (white males) would end up in more than one controversial issue camp, even if they are led astray by incomplete information on one or more issues.
I think White Nationalism will make the most progress from claiming the moral high ground around antiwhitism and the hypocrisy of persecuting white kids, and the related hypocrisy of ethnic Europeans being persecuted for things that ethnic Jews are permitted – ethnonationalism, ethnic and cultural pride, activist organizations, overrepresentation in institutions, etc.
Agnosticism makes perfect sense on nukes I agree.
Nakatani is the most consistent noting that “secret at birth” atom weapons ushered in the current era, starting with Truman’s creating the National Security System using them as a key point.
Effectively the American parasite state comes in with nukes. So if you call BS on them, or even admit they have nothing like the heft their security classification warrants, you question the system the current population lives under.
The assumptions underlying the nuclear age are incompatible with the system of governance America’s Founder’s envisioned. A good enough reason to keep our wits about us and continue asking questions.
Yeah, I bet that’s it. They achieved a real nuclear explosion, but it’s not that powerful and nuclear weapons are not the game changer everybody thinks they are. The “arms race” is really about patents for certain people. Sort of like a secret Bitcoin, lol! We will never know for certain probably.
“What’s behind this? I suspect one of the boys or “guys” they are after doubts the moon landing. Basically all media is a sort of kabbalistic allegory of certain individuals the oligarchs are persecuting.”
I cannot understand what you are trying to say here? I think you’re on to something but I can’t quit grasp it. Are you able to expound on this further or maybe explain in a different way?
I am genuinely curious. tia
It’s hard to explain. Basically there is an esoteric mystery religion that most elites are part of. To simplify, pop songs are about real people. Sometimes the lyrics are simply things the victims said repeated over and over: “if you believe they put a man on the moon.” I can’t prove this. It’s speculation.
I’ll add this: often times their victims become virulently antisemitic in a public way. You can guess them by this.
You know, too, moon rock does fall to earth as meteorite. Moon rock was on the earth and well characterized before the moon landings. A moon meteor sold for 2.5 million in 2020! If you guys find any moon rocks, you should probably send them to me for safe keeping.
Meteorites are scorched and not usually very big if the original meteors do make it to Earth before burning up. They also are severely weathered, which Moon rocks are not. If a meteor of sufficient size does make it to the Earth it dumps a lot of energy.
The 3,900 foot wide and 560 foot deep Barrington crater in Arizona was made from a meteor about 50 meters in diameter that impacted about 50 thousand years ago. The one from the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908 was even larger at over 60 meters ─ but it did not leave a known crater and was a likely a low altitude airburst of about 12 megatons TNT equivalent. Tunguska might have been the icy remains from a comet but that is controversial.
Meteorites are high in iron and iridium. Stone Age people like the pre-Columbians often made arrowheads from meteorites since they did not smelt iron.
🙂
For more information: http://www.moonhoaxdebunked.com/
Thanks, that is an excellent source.
🙂
I think the author (who I like since RoK, Joseph Curwen speaking here) fails to mention that both space projects were possible thanks to captured german scientists. Von Braun is only the tip of the iceberg.
And, by the way, no subsaharians did anything of value in those projects….except maybe keeping the toilets clean.
There was an old joke, from that time period, who says (more or less) that the moon landing was possible because the germans on US side were better than the germans on CCCP side….
“To White people who are proud of the accomplishments of their race, this date is when man first walked on the moon. That day represents the peak of Western Civilization.”
But has the event ever been celebrated as a testament to the greatness of the white peoples of the West? What was Armstrong’s line? Something like “a small step for a man, a great leap for mankind.” Having grown up in the 1970s, I recall that the moon landing and space exploration was a symbol of the technological progress beyond all ethnic, earthly, natural rootedness to some glorious globalist, multi-cultural future. The Germans who worked on the project received redemption from their service to humanity — a repudiation of all ethnonationalist attachments of the past.
Consider Heidegger’s remarks in the Der Spiegel interview (1966): “Technology increasingly uproots man and tears him from the earth. I don’t know if you were terrified (erschrocken), but I was in any case terrified when I saw the pictures taken from the moon of the earth. We don’t need atom bombs, the uprootedness of man is already here.” To this the leftist interviewer says, “Where is it written that man has his place here on earth.” Heidegger responds: “According to our human experience and history, so far as I am oriented, I know that everything essential and great has arisen because men had a homeland [Heimat] and were rooted in a tradition.”
“What was Armstrong’s line? Something like “a small step for a man, a great leap for mankind.” “
He was suppose to say, “That’s one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind.”
What he actually said was, “That’s one small step for man…[DOH!], a giant leap for mankind.”
Despite the minor error, the man was a great example of a white mid-Western American.
“…the man was a great example of a white mid-Western American”
Yes. All of those white, male astronauts were great heroes to my friends and I when we were boys, as we closely followed the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. I don’t recall any propaganda at that time of NASA’s achievements being some sort of Multicultural triumph. There was respect expressed for the Soviet cosmonauts, even though this was the height of the Cold War, but the moon landing was considered a great achievement of Americans–and it was clear to anyone paying attention that this achievement was by white people–it just wasn’t considered necessary or seemly to trumpet that back then. I do recall the petty carping from the Left about how the money should have been used to get rid of poverty, blah, blah, blah.
“I don’t recall any propaganda at that time of NASA’s achievements being some sort of Multicultural triumph.”
Back then, if blacks wanted a space program they went out and created their own:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Makuka_Nkoloso#Space_program
With the drunken “Afronauts”, barrel rolling, cats, suspiciously pregnant teenager and pledge to bring Christianity to “primitive Martians”, I fear NASA may never catch up.
The program became defunct when the program director couldn’t locate the male “Afronauts” (who went out on a drunk) and the teenage girl became pregnant. No word on the cats who seem to have been the only ones taking the program seriously.
I wouldn’t say white people did it better.
I would say black people did it differently.
This is the summing up:
Interviewed in 2016, President Kenneth Kaunda said of the space program that “It wasn’t a real thing … It was more for fun than anything else.”[1]
We already knew it was for fun based upon the fact of the impregnated teenager but it seems that President Kaunda is an Afronaut denier. Perhaps he believes the footage of Afronauts climbing into barrels and rolling down hills in Zambia was created in a Hollywood studio?
It must be real because they used my name backwards for the landing module. Not my nom de plume here of course.
The following link made, IMO, a ton of arguments against the moon landing (and a ton more than the flag, dust, lights, stars etc.)… I suppose the link is quite widely known:
Wagging the Moondoggie
by Dave McGowan
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie/
From memory… one of the points: the lunar module obviously kept together by duct tape.
I admit that I don´t have a good explanation as to how such a mega enterprise could have been deceived, i.e. the thousands of participants, Houston etc.
Also, I´ll mention that this is the same author who wrote this thing about Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation where his views also sound very convincing to me but CC´s own James J. O’Meara seems to have debunked that story (if I remember correctly).
So… fwiw… but the Moondoggie text gives me way too many points that make it impossible to believe in the moon landing. And of-course I never heard any serious rebuttal of these arguments, just like the arguments of the moon beliervers usually drip with condescension, and arrogate scientificity where in reality, they are often just sloppy, lazy and ignorant.
Well… at the Johnson Space Center, they have a production model of a lunar lander on display. I didn’t see any duct tape on it.
Well, it´s in Part II of the series where he shows two pictures (and the second picture really makes me ROFL… ! ) that in his opinion show Mylar, old Christmas wrapping paper, old air conditioning ductwork, zippers and gold tape
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie-2/
He sums it up thusly:
“It would probably be fair to say that with a roll of duct tape and any other two random items, you could fix most problems that might arise on a spaceship.”
Therefore, not sure what you saw at Johnson Space Center and how that compares to these pictures.
My Dad and Uncle were both Nuclear and Aerospace engineers, and working on space program projects for Bell and Lockheed when I watched the first Moon Landing on TV as a wee lad in 1969.
I also toured Mission Control in Houston when I was a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol during the mid-1970s. MC seemed much smaller than I thought from seeing it previously on television during the height of the Moonshots.
I’ve seen many of the returned Apollo capsules and unused NASA vehicles like the Lunar Lander in various museums since.
Anyway, there is no air in the vacuum of space, so you don’t need to bother with anything aerodynamic on the Lunar Lander. In space or on the Moon, weight or mass in a liability, but you can literally glue tin foil wrapping on as excellent shielding from solar radiation. It also works as a good Faraday Cage, and gold-plated Mylar is probably stronger and weighs less. There was a stark hundreds of degrees difference in temperature felt just walking back and forth from the shade of the Lander while on the Moon.
Yes, in space you can literally use a sheet of tinfoil to shield from the warming solar rays.
As a former Broadcasting Engineer myself, I can appreciate that NASA didn’t really put much effort into the Public Relations of the Apollo program. They were more focused on the mission itself and returning the astronauts home safely. Television coverage from the Moon was just not their priority, and many of the technical issues were a complete afterthought.
Furthermore, space exploration TV coverage was more of a money pit than a big ratings bonanza for the TV networks so obliged. I remember that it was pretty boring watching hours and hours of “waiting for the countdown to start running again,” for example, while news anchors fidgeted ─ nervously apologizing for preempting people’s regular TV programing, and hoping the viewers stuck around to watch the next cigarette commercial.
So … “How was the blackest of black arts possible with 1960s technology?”
There is a YouTube channel (below) that is very interesting for technophiles who also enjoy history called Curious Marc. He is an affable guy and the program is interesting once you get used to his French accent. They like “all things Apollo” and have been keeping busy locating surplus Apollo communications and computer hardware and trying to figure out what it did and how it works. It is quite amazing. Watch at least the first few minutes.
Apollo Comms Part 1
Apollo was a big team effort if there ever was one. There were thousands of engineers employed and they were solving interesting and vital problems. That was the 1960s that I remember, one of progress, jet airliners, space travel, and the birth of telecommunications.
I came of age during the 1970s, and saw early on that it was becoming a completely different world of dystopian imperial backwash ─ or whatever you want to call it. All of the sudden manned space exploration cost too much, and Science had to be broadened out with infinite Diversity to appeal to the new ignorant masses like a sportsball game selling consumer advertising.
What was more of a boondoggle than sending twelve White men to walk on the Moon?
With the Nixon-era cutbacks, all of the sudden highly-skilled engineers were like “high-end prostitutes at the end of the month,” as my Dad and his colleagues used to say.
When I was going to school in Idaho, I used to know a lot of the people who worked at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, and later I worked out there at the television transmitters and was a shop steward in the electrical workers Local Union.
You can see the Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 museum on the desert highway where after World War II atomic energy was first used to power a nearby town. Idaho was also the location of the only atomic fatalities in the United States, where in 1961 three servicemen were killed in a steam explosion of an experimental reactor.
Technology is a tool for whatever we envision. It is not what “did” all of this to us. And for a society that sorely depends upon it, unfortunately most people just don’t understand technology, and I am not very sympathetic to them accordingly.
We had better get back to understanding such things. Without modern technology we would have a society with life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Ignorance of technology is not an option.
I’m sorry if that sounds vainglorious, but I think we have to ask ourselves why we are not allowed to appreciate our intrepid legacy as White people.
🙂
Does anyone think the Zambian Space Program was faked?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Makuka_Nkoloso#Space_program
Perhaps they didn’t have the technology to build the barrels they rolled down the hill in to simulate low gravity?
Don’t go to humorless WikiJews for the answer to that, Bob. Go to astrophysicist David Sims, here, and enjoy a big laugh: Congoids and Spaceflight | National Vanguard
Nkoloso, the head of the Zambian space program, was able to achieve all he did with virtually no funding. Had he been granted the £7,000,000 he requested from UNESCO who knows what he may have further achieved? I’d venture to say he could have impregnated every teenage negress in all of Zambia.
Excellent essay, Beau. Thank you.
As Scott notes, the doubters never countenance the larger history of avaition. Chuck Yeagar broke the sound barrier when he flew the Bell X-1 into the stratosphere in 1947. The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Missions were all successful at achieving manned space flight. Projects Manhigh and Excelsior used helium balloons to put men into space.
Here’s a record of one of Col. Joseph Kittinger’s balloon flights with drogue-parachute jumps in 1959 and 1960. He held the world record for the highest skydive—102,800 feet for 52 years.
RIP, Col. Kittinger, (1928 – 2022). Per ardua ad astra.
https://youtu.be/fM39Z3grkpg
I appreciate your answers but they don´t rebut the Moondoggie text. Did you read the text? E.g., gold-plated Mylar may protect against the sun but what against the coldness? No problem because in a vakuum, coldness is not a problem?
Other points were: the size of the lunar module, could it contain all the items neccessary? Including the moon buggy. And the fuel for the relaunch, and the batteries, and sanitary equipment and spare parts and tools and… etc…
Did you actually look at the picture at https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/7e04fd8d-c50c-4b46-b39f-18d0c79a8215-2.jpg ? Is that serious?
Did you read the text? Someone read the entire text of 12 chapters? I would like to hear rebutals… not just general statements of how great technology is.
And I´m not attacking Whites here… much more likely, I´m saving Whites from the embarrassment of being gullible, and being played for fools with the Great Lie method by the usual suspects.
Hi Peter,
Yes, I did read the Moondoggie text. I was not very impressed and I saw zero footnotes. This is just a bunch of gish-gallop and arguments from incredulity.
In other words, this writer who has owned a construction business doesn’t know how real engineers ever did such things, so they didn’t.
I do a lot of gish-gallop too but usually when I am trolling edgy Libertarian or Bernie Bro podcasters in comments. I’m not trying to be a troll here, but this would not even come close to a college level history paper, let alone a competent technical article.
The late author says that he attended UCLA but does not state whether he graduated or what his degree was in. I graduated with a BA in History and have taken many Physics courses, plus a completely separate career track in Electronics Engineering Technology. I was working on a Masters in Library Science when I got hit and nearly killed by a junkie driving a car, then lost interest in additional credentials and dropped out.
The author’s questions are just not very impressive technically, but he might be an interesting writer. He probably writes much better than I do.
It is perfectly fair for you to ask questions. Let me try to hit a few of your specific ones.
The “smoking gun” photo of a Lunar Lander with duct tape on it that you linked to has zero provenance. What are we looking at exactly?
Is it a trainer, a prop at a museum, parts being refurbished at a museum, etc.? I have looked at many of the photos from specific Apollo missions both undocking in Lunar orbit and on the Lunar surface, and don’t see anything particularly troubling with the LL construction.
The photos from actual missions look pretty much the same to me as the mint condition one on display at Houston in the mid-1970s that I saw in person. Obviously, a display in a museum is not space-worthy, and the only Lander that returned from a trip around the Moon (no landing) was from Apollo 13, which was after an oxygen tank explosion in the Service Module that generated the heat and power ─ so the astronauts had to huddle in the cold, and using a current budget of less than a dozen amps of battery power in order to keep the guidance computer of the Command Module on standby, otherwise they would not be able to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere without either skipping off or burning up.
Yes, optically-reflective Mylar or tin foil can be used as insulation. You might have seen those two-dollar lightweight shiny Mylar “space blankets” that are found in first aid kits. No, it will not work as well as a parka coat or a sleeping bag, but they are cheap and don’t weigh much to toss into your kit.
Heat is transferred in three ways: 1) Convection, 2) Conduction, and 3) Radiation (mostly infrared rays).
There is no air in space, so Convection is not an issue outside of the spacecraft. Conduction would happen if you touched the hot or cold metal sides of the spacecraft, but you are sitting in a chair and are wearing a spacesuit. In the Lunar Lander they did not have normal seats; it was more like two nylon harnesses that they hung from while wearing their spacesuits without helmets.
On the trips to and from the Moon the entire spaceship was put into what they call a “barbecue roll,” which means that it rotates or spins slowly so that the rays from the sun warm the spaceship evenly. Otherwise one side would be very hot while the other side very cold.
I don’t think they went shirtsleeves in the Lunar Lander like they did in the Command Module. Aldrin said that he tried to cuddle up like a cat at the bottom of the Lunar Lander cockpit when they were trying to nap, but it was cramped and did not work so well. Most of the heat escaping from the spacecraft will be via infrared Radiation, and yes, they did need some heating over and above the heat generated from their equipment.
The Moon landings themselves were all done in the Lunar morning, when the sun was still rising and warming the surface. It would have been a different ball of wax if the missions were done later in the month-long Lunar day when the sun was high and the surface was at its hottest. During Apollo 11, they were initially concerned that their Liquid Oxygen tanks did not boil off while they were sitting on the surface of the Moon in the sunshine, but they were prepared to make a hasty departure if necessary. Then again, some tinfoil or Mylar wrap does wonders to block the sun’s rays.
They didn’t bring along much in the way of spare parts or the right tools. The available cargo space and weight was at a premium. It was more difficult than expected to hammer the pole into the packed Lunar soil to mount the American flag. On Apollo 12, astronaut Alan Bean got blamed for ruining the Color TV camera while attempting to drive the mounting pole deep enough into the Lunar surface.
A marvel of electronic miniaturization for the times, the handheld Color TV camera was not very robust. In fact, it wasn’t his using the camera as a “hammer” that ruined it, but accidently pointing the lens at bright solar reflections without a lens cap on in the process. In an era of vacuum-envelope cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), this used to be called phosphor burn-in. It is what “screen saver” programs were developed to prevent in the old days of early home computers with CRTs. In an era when studio Color TV cameras were normally the size of small refrigerators, the little Moon TV camera was way too sensitive to point at the sun or bright reflections. Something as simple as a rubber lens cap could have prevented that faux pas. What good is a spectacle that you can’t even see?
So the Apollo 11 TV camera on the surface of the Moon was a robust slow-scan B&W model, although the interior one for the Command capsule was a handheld Color camera that used a rotating tri-color lens filter and a single image-orthicon tube.
The TV camera for the Lunar surface on Apollo 12 was in Color but broken just after they started their Moonwalk, as I said, so there wasn’t much for the public to see. Apollo 12 had two hot-shot Navy pilots, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, who made a dramatic precision landing just a short walk away from the U.S. Surveyor 3 robot lander and took some parts from it home as “souvenirs.” In the picture below, note the microwave dish they have setup next to the Lunar Lander for better TV compared to Apollo 11. Too bad they did not bring a spare TV camera.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Surveyor_3-Apollo_12.jpg
Apollo 14 had good Color TV coverage from the Moon, but a camera just sitting there on a fixed mount is not very interesting. Not until the last three missions with the Lunar Rover and a Color TV camera mounted on it, with its own radio link, and remotely controlled by a cameraman on Earth, did the TV coverage of the Moon landings get very good.
For one thing, on Apollo 15 you could actually see the Lunar ascent launch. The cameraman at Mission Control had to pan the camera up by remote control just the right amount to keep the ascending craft in view ─ and there was a considerable systems delay, so this was not easy, but it looked awesome.
https://youtu.be/XlGis35Epvs?t=150
One other problem encountered before the Apollo 11 ascent return was that Aldrin had to bust apart a piece of a pen to fix a broken switch on the Lunar Lander ─ which was necessary to be On in order to fire the ascent engine ─ but the broken switch just would not stay put. Astronauts often had to do a lot of field-expedient repairs like this. And they did bring duct-tape along.
They also had to relay traffic and repeat a lot of figures over the radio links to Mission Control to put data and measurements into programmed checklists. Having been in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, this seems a very tedious procedure to me, but it was something that U.S. Navy pilots were used to doing. Nowadays you would use viewscreens and keyboards to send “texts” or actual data files, but there was no spare room in the cockpit then for a CRT screen or a teleprinter with spools of combustible paper tape to record vital navigational data and other checklist measurements.
The Command and Service Module CSM was powered by three Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen “fuel cells” which produced 1.4 kilowatts of electrical power at 30 volts DC, plus hot water or H2O “exhaust” that they could use to mix up with their bags of dehydrated food. There was also cold water from the same fresh source that maybe went through additional piping to cool down before it got to the tap ─ but most astronauts found the “cold” water tap to be warmer than they would have liked.
The Wikepedia article says that the CSM had three 40 ampere-hour silver oxide batteries. Well, if you are pulling 20 amps continuously without recharging, you will be lucky if your batteries last for 3-6 hours at this rate, assuming that the voltage holds up. That is not a lot of power.
When the auxiliary oxygen tank on the Service Module blew up early in the Apollo 13 mission, they lost their primary power generator ─ shut everything down to save batteries except the navigational computer ─ and then used the Lunar Module as a “lifeboat” to fly around the Moon and then back to Earth, which was the simplest option available. If the explosion had happened later in the mission, there would have been fewer options available and Apollo 13 would have been screwed. I remember as a kid wondering if they would make it home.
The Apollo 13 Lunar Lander was the only one that came all the way back to reentry, and they jettisoned it on a fiery trajectory to land in a deep water sea trench near New Zealand because the LL contained a radioisotope thermoelectric generator RTG unit that was fueled by Plutonium 238. This is not the isotope that goes into atomic bombs; in fact, Pu-238 is more radioactive than Pu-239 and is actually physically hot from radioactive decay heat. But the Plutonium metal is just as poisonous, so they wanted the RTG disposed of where nobody was going to easily come across it instead of some toasted Roswell-wreckage somewhere.
Unfortunately, they could not have used this RTG “atomic battery” during the Apollo 13 flight after their main power had failed because it wasn’t even hooked up to the internal systems. The RTG was stored in the cargo bay of the LL for use on the Lunar surface to power scientific instruments on the Moon after the astronauts left. All Moon Landing missions had an RTG unit except Apollo 11.
RTG’s are the same kinds of power sources that are used for deep-space missions like the Viking space probes, where solar panels would not work for generating power because the sun is too far away. After fifty years of service in deep space, these “atomic batteries” are barely putting out much power now, but they still hang in there and some of the probes are still communicating with Earth from the edge of the solar system.
Btw, the Lunar Rover, used on the last three Apollo missions, is about 462 pounds of mass and weighs only one-sixth of that on the Moon. Two astronauts can lift it, and the car is basically a glorified set of lawn chairs that can be folded up to the size of a small day bed. You can see one up close at the National Air and Space Museum at Washington, DC and how it fits into the Lunar Lander. Each independent wheel has a 0.25 watt electric motor driving it at a maximum speed of about 6 mph, maybe a little more downhill. Astronauts had to be careful not to break pieces off of the Lunar Rover because it was so flimsy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo15LunarRover.jpg
Prior to the Lunar Rovers, which had their own TV camera system and video link to Earth, getting a TV signal off the Moon was not so easily done because the S-band microwave equipment was in use for more important things like data and voice communications. When you hear the astronauts ─ such as during the Apollo 17 Lunar ascent ─ yelling about the “Omni,” this is the high-gain omni-directional microwave antenna that they use for a radio/data backup and not the usual small dish on the Lunar Lander that must be pointed and signal-locked exactly to Earth, and works much better than the Omni. On Apollo 11, the TV link was just piggybacked onto all of that, which is one reason for the poor picture quality.
https://youtu.be/CtwSgvstl8c
A very good book that is detailed but not overly technical and explains many of the issues from the Apollo missions that are usually not covered in the mass-media is cited below. I think you can read it for free on Google Books. If not, I probably have a PDF somewhere. The book is about 412 pages long and has good illustrations.
Woods, W. David,
How Apollo Flew to the Moon.
New York (2008).
ISBN: 9780387716756; 0387716750
https://www.worldcat.org/title/154711858
Since nobody talks about things like mundane details, when astronauts visit schools, the kids always ask questions such as “so how did you go to the bathroom in space?” And after the answer, the kiddies will usually go “Ewww.”
Imagine that you have encountered Rip Van Winkle who has just woken up from a nap he took in 1905. He says that alien Demons from Hell probed him and put him to sleep for over a century. You take Rip to the airport because he says that he has to travel as fast as the wind to warn our imperious leader ─ so you try to explain to him what a 747 jet airliner is to reassure him in advance. But he doesn’t believe your description. He wanted to take the fastest train. To him, flying is out of the question, because he still remembers seeing pictures and hearing tales about heavier-than-air flying machines that were essentially little more than motorized kites. Then a 747 flies overhead at the airport with a roar and he practically has a heart attack.
https://youtu.be/8Dh26Smi7No
I could do a fair job explaining how airfoils and control surfaces and jet engines work, but I am not so sure that I could convince the old timer of the reality of such a contraption as a 747 Jumbo Jet until he saw it for himself. I assume that they spot-weld or rivet the aluminum skin onto these beasties, but I don’t know.
🙂
Good article, Beau. You began by crediting an old issue of National Alliance’s bulletin National Vanguard for debunking the “fake moon landing” crazies.
A slight correction: National Vanguard was our Alliance’s tabloid from 1978, replacing Attack! tabloid that was launched by Alliance founder William Pierce in 1970. National Vanguard print magazine replaced the tabloid of that name in 1982 and was published until a few years after Pierce’s death in 2002, replaced by the current National Vanguard online magazine: nationalvanguard.org. The National Alliance BULLETIN, otoh, which I write as NA’s current chairman and mail monthly to NA members, has been published continuously for 52 years, arguably the longest running publication in the racial nationalist cause.
The most noteworthy comment under your article is by John, who wrote:
… [W]e must reclaim our homelands, hold our traitors accountable, & repatriate ALL non-Europeans. Failure is not an option. Without total & complete separation in perpetuity we will not survive.
The National Alliance’s long-term, uncompromising objective is exactly that, John, and has been from the 1970s. Nonserious Whites say that is an unreasonable goal, but you obviously don’t see it as unreasonable. The plan: Building A New White World What is the National Alliance? | National Alliance (natall.com)
Dr. William L. Pierce was a bona fide rocket scientist, a tenured Physics professor at 30 who left academia to work designing rocket systems for NASA — then he met George Lincoln Rockwell, got serious, put his successful career behind him and went to work with Rockwell, working full time for the preservation of our race.
Those of us who were old enough on the day of the moon landing remember where we were; I was at my Special Forces B-Team in SE Asia that day watching it on a small black and white TV with some teammates. C-C readers may be interested in what Pierce had to say about it that day. Our National Office has Pierce’s handwritten personal journal in which the very first entry is this:
20 July, 1969 — 80th year since the birth of the Leader
TODAY Aryan man reached the moon. I found myself profoundly moved by the moon landing. Since the age of 12 (23 years ago) I have dreamed of this.
Space travel was, in fact, my first dream. Somewhere around the age of 20 it got sidetracked — although I had still entertained romantic notions along this line years longer.
My second dream, which began first to take form at the age of 30 [1963], is to help build a National Socialist world order. This will remain the goal of my life. I have considered starting a journal for some time. If my life’s work yields any result, then such a record will have great interest and value later…
More about that, here: William Pierce on Apollo: First Step on an Infinite Journey | National Vanguard included there is this short article that Pierce wrote the following month:
—
Moon Landing a Triumph of Aryan Genius
by Dr. William L. Pierce
JULY 20, 1969, will certainly go down in the history of our race as one of the most significant dates of all time. For the moon landing is the culmination of a centuries-old dream – a dream which has always been peculiarly Aryan.
Not only have all the great dreamers of space flight been men of our own race – men like Oberth, Goddard and von Braun – but so have the daring space adventurers themselves – the Gagarins, the Glenns and the Armstrongs.
The other races have lacked either the creative genius or the driving spirit of adventure or the lofty, non-materialistic outlook of the dreamer and innovator which have all been combined by Nature in Aryan man. This unique combination of qualities has been the indispensable human prerequisite for the great feat of July 20.
And the moon landing is more than the culmination of a dream. It opens a new era for our race. The Aryan has always been a creature with a driving need for something that other races seem to be able to get along without – the challenge of the unknown, of physical adventure, of new worlds to conquer. On the rapidly shrinking Earth, new frontiers for adventure and exploration have become scarce.
Now, however, we have opened the door to a vast unknown in which new frontiers without limit lie before us. Now the whole of the starry Universe awaits Aryan man’s eternal quest.
Hey, great to hear from you! Keep up the good work – but I already know you will.
I first heard about the moon landing being a hoax was when I happened to be watching a conspiracy theory series on TV. One of the other supposed conspiracies was that Charles Lindbergh killed his own baby son because he was defective because of some sort of disease and Lindbergh was a eugenicist who couldn’t stand the idea of bringing a bringing a defective child into the world. I found this quite distressing as Lindbergh is my favorite 20th Century American hero. I sure hope it is not true. Does anybody know anything about the Lindbergh killing his own son idea?
I’ve read up on the case, though not extensively. My conclusion was that it was kidnapping for extortion. The dude who was prosecuted for it plausibly could’ve pulled it off on his own. Thus, the stories about him being part of a gang and what-not are speculation. IMO, anyone who says that Lindbergh whacked his own kid is going much further out on a limb.
Thanks for your response. There was two movies about the kidnapping, one starring Anthony Hopkins as the German immigrant who allegedly did it and got the electric chair for it. Your response gives me good reason to still hold Lindbergh in high esteem. BTW, H.L. Mencken said that the kidnapping story was the biggest story since the Resurrection
The Lindbergh baby (he was a toddler) had a mild case of rickets, which is a Vitamin D deficiency, and he was being treated appropriately for it, including with Vitamin D supplements. The idea that the Lindbergh boy was eugenically defective somehow is nonsense.
The Rickets disease is rare in the United States today because Vitamin D is put into “fortified milk” and baby formula to strengthen bones. Most people are mildly deficient in Vitamin D, especially highly-melanated individuals who live in Northern climes with less sun exposure, but also the elderly. The athlete and murderer O.J. Simpson had a case of Rickets as a boy, which gave him a slightly bowlegged stance.
🙂
You are right Judd. Lindbergh is the greatest.
Hi Scott, once again I appreciate your answers. I am lacking any detail-knowledge about what is officially claimed to have happened with the moon flights so I can´t ask specific questions to that. I am also not able to judge many technical aspects, or only maybe with a lot of reading-up. Also, we cannot prolonge this conversation here on CC
-> so at the risk of disappointing you / you considering me an obstinate ignoramus, I´ll sum it up for the moment: IMO there is still any number of points in the Moondoggie text that are relevant. I don´t feel that the aspect of space taken up by all the stuff necessary in the Lunar Lander was properly addressed, particularly for the fuel for the flight back to the orbit; the Lunar Lander to have worked 6 times impeccably without any proper testing before.
I admit that the question of number / weight of batteries might be answered with O2 H2 fuel cells.
I guess you won´t take the time for further detailed discussions, and it might not be desired by CC; then again, if you want to, I can still bring up points and hear your replies.
Hi Peter,
I never said you were an ignoramus. The Rip Van Winkle bit is just for fun. And I did say that it is okay to ask questions.
I also wanted to address the “Atomic bombs are a hoax” nonsense, but there is only so much that one can do in the comments, LOL.
My view is that articles should promote intelligent discussion, and I think Counter-Currents does that quite well.
I admire General Curtis LeMay who was George Wallace’s running mate for President in 1968. My parents voted for this ticket. General LeMay was also an Amateur Radio operator who even built a Color TV set from Heathkit. At the 1978 Airpower Symposium at Maxwell AFB in Huntsville, Alabama where the Civil Air Patrol was based, the former Air Force Chief of Staff who was in command of the strategic bombing campaign of the Army Air Corps in the Pacific during the war, admitted in his address that had the Americans lost the war, then strategic bombing would have been deemed a War Crime. This frank admission echoes Senator Robert Taft’s criticism about the Nuremberg trials being about atrocity-propaganda, Victor’s Justice, and Ex Post Facto Law.
General LeMay, who retired in 1965, noted that Airpower had been misapplied in Vietnam despite more bomb tonnage being dropped there than was used in all of WWII. LeMay noted that the firebombings of Tokyo and other cities were actually more destructive than the two atomic bombs ─ but, of course, delivering 15 and 22 kilotons of explosives, respectively with only one B-29 each was pretty remarkable.
LeMay did not understand all the fuss of the atomic bombings being inhumane compared to the firebombings, which nobody questioned and seemed legitimate at the time. LeMay realized early on that starting fires is what does most of the destructive work in strategic bombings. Unlike Berlin, which was a modern city made out of reinforced concrete, Japanese cities were basically made out of kindling.
The B-29 was a very-long-range superweapon of its day made to drop a “stick” of big iron bombs onto a picklebarrel from 30 thousand feet ─ but the haze and unpredictable jet stream ripples made precision bombing impossible. So LeMay had the B-29s fly mostly at night at low altitude and stuffed to the gills with smaller incendiaries, and with very little defensive armament.
In addition, four Jap cities were spared all bombing entirely, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so that the effects of the atomic attacks could be studied realistically. Plus Kyoto, where Secretary Stimson was married and went to school before the war, was spared being nuked on his direct orders, even though it was a plum target. (Oddly, Henry Stimson’s memoirs have never been published, but the Yale Library now has them Online and they are interesting, particularly with Roosevelt in the windup to the war.)
Btw, the Lunar Module was extensively tested in space by Apollo 9 in Earth orbit, and again by Apollo 10 ─ which actually went to the Moon and did everything that Apollo 11 did except actually LAND on the Moon.
Apollo 10 really put the lander through its paces but did not try to land. The difference between the two missions was that the Lunar Module on Apollo 10 ─ called “Snoopy” because it closely photographed the Sea of Tranquility for the Apollo 11 mission two months later ─ was not loaded as heavily as the “Eagle” was on Apollo 11.
The Apollo 11 landing on July 20, 1969 was awkward and was nearly aborted, but Armstrong was a cool former Navy aviator (then a civilian test pilot). And much technique was learned. For example, the landing computer was overloaded with data because Aldrin left the docking radar on in the Eagle in case they needed to abort, but the system prioritized the essential landing radar data, so the computer did its job as intended despite some overload errors.
In November of the same year, Apollo 12 made a precision landing near the Surveyor 3 robot that had previously landed in the Ocean of Storms in 1967. Apollo 13 failed. Apollo 14, which was commanded by the first American in space, Alan Shephard, was great but ─ as I said earlier ─ it was boring for TV viewers to watch nothing but an unmanned Color TV camera sitting there, with the astronauts often away on “long” hikes.
Compared to later missions with better color cameras and radio links with more bandwidth, Apollo 14 was almost unwatchable live. Crucial Moonwalk scenes edited from the film cameras returned to Earth rescue our “memories” of the events.
Even during the Apollo 11 Moonwalk just before Aldrin comes down the Lunar Lander ladder, they switched the TV feed reception from the big 26-meter antenna dish at Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra, Australia to the massive 64-meter Parkes Observatory dish in Australia ─ and the live Apollo 11 B&W TV picture immediately improves by a very respectable 10 decibels.
https://youtu.be/msWnY2zKS9o?t=462
The Commander of Apollo 10, Gene Cernan, landed on the Moon later in Apollo 17, along with civilian Geologist Harrison Schmidt. Since Nixon cut the funding after he took office, NASA cancelled Apollos 18, 19, and 20, so some standby pilots never got to go at all. This was a real shame. Each mission broadened the envelope considerably, with the later missions being longer and doing the most scientific investigation.
If it were up to me, I would increase the budget for unmanned space probes by an order of magniturde. We would have landers on all the Jovian Moons, and more in the works. I am glad that we are going to the Moon with astronauts again with the Artemis program ─ and I don’t share the moral panic of women in space or doing many other roles in the military, but I intensely dislike the idea of the Burger King Kid’s Club.
When academics and University administrators tout the grand idea of Women and PoC being “underrepresented” in STEM, my first questions are “well, when you were in school, did you bother to get a Ham Radio license and build a transmitter from scratch? Did you even go to the nerdy computer club meetings after school and so on? How many kits or scratch projects did you build on the bench as a kid? Can you use a soldering iron?”
🙂
Watch the astronaut interviews. I am yet to see one in which they behave as though they landed on the moon. It’s a shame because they were all test pilots, highly competent and patriotic, but seemingly convinced to lie (poorly) for the ‘greater good’.
Richard D. Hall at richplanet.net has a great collection.
https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre.php?ref=249&part=1&gen=5
Scott, you know a myriad of details which is impressive and respectable, and certainly tends to give credence to your positions. As I said, I cannot challenge antything there in a qualified manner, I can only apply common sense. To convince me of the moon landing, I would need to see refuted the entire Moondoggie text, with its equally myriad of details because that stuff sounds plausible and convincing; I would be happy to see that. So far, it´s still not clear to me what about the weight and space of the fuel for relaunch to orbit of the LL
Regarding nuke hoax… I guess there are 2 parts, a) if nukes were used on Japan, b) how damaging radioactivity is for health; for part a), I tend to accept the official narrative, only doubt would be that official narratives are usually total lies, and for b), I guess the health isuues are a lie, i.e. exaggerated by a million but I still wouldn´t want any exposure because why should I.
There are probably forums for moon discussion, more appropriate than the CC comment section but I don´t know them.
Thanks again and regards.
P.S.: maybe I may raise a question like this: how much is it simply a desire for believers in the moon landing that that took place; and how much of a problem would it be if it turned out that is was not true. I.e. is there a bias in the access of the subject. I hope that I don´t have a bias, I don´t have reason to belittle the White Race. Maybe there´s a bit of a bias regarding the credibility of official narratives but that it only the result of seing proven as a lie pretty much anything that the US government ever said.
I really don’t want to be the Dawkins type here but some of the stuff written on this topic is kinda crazy to read.
Like the Moon landing, whether nukes can exist or not, is a question for physics.
It would seem to have an answer independent of what one wants to believe, independent of the political implications of these weapons. Although again I’m very sympathetic to the human dimension on these topics.
As there is no serious physicist who claims nukes don’t exist, it seems reasonable to assume they do. It’s very unlikely the entire global physics community, including most countries which do not have nuclear weapons have been covering up the situation over decades.
Franz wrote above, “It’s a dimension some minds cannot cross into, and I fully appreciate that.”
Is it ? I think it’s more that the case is extremely unpersuasive. It takes extraordinary effort to believe otherwise.
Although I have criticisms of Unz’s website, and don’t agree with some of his own theories frankly, Unz himself is right when he says a lot of people just automatically believe anything written by some random blogger.
With the Moon, it’s not clear to me what moon-hoaxers believe about space travel in general. That it’s all faked ? Non-manned Moon missions are faked ? Is the ISS real ? Are space walks real? Is the James Web telescope real ? Or just the moon landing ?
There comes a point it’s more plausible to think they went to the Moon as part of a general program of space exploration than created this unique massive hoax while everything else is real. I suspect it’s the hoaxers that probably make it more incredible than it actually is.
All of this doesn’t mean I feel no instinctive issues about some video and photos of space exploration. I can find examples where I do. But I’m open to the idea there may be a technical explanation rather than automatically insist it must be fake.
Claims should be tested and scrutinized, but like other exotic science/tech, there is simply no way for the average human to determine if every photo or video of space exploration is necessarily real or not by looking at it.
The big issues I see in all these cases is that:
1) technology is far outpacing our ability to adapt to it. And this is a real huge problem.
2) The gap between power and the governed has grown enormous. Tech is a part of that.
Disbelief is one kind of response, but it’s not a sufficient answer.
And I say all this, personally to me, I couldn’t care that much about the Moon as an event. I far more err on the side it happened, because I think the counter arguments are really quite weak. So yes it’s significant achievement, but that’s about all I can say. I’m not going to the friggin moon myself.
Both sides of this argument are just assertions. “It seems to me that it must be [real/fake] because not all those government employees could keep a secret/ government employees are known liars.” “It seems to me that it must be [real/fake] because what I’ve read about the technology [impressed me/ did not impress me].” Etc.
I agree with you, Beau, that issues like this are not that important in the bigger scheme of things.
Most of this article, Beau, is just you asserting reasons why you believe the assertions made by government officials (known liars) regarding this accomplishment. Like your assertion that secrets cannot be kept by large groups of people (supposedly disproven by the Manhattan Project) and that hoaxes cannot remain conventional wisdom for long (disproven, in your view, by the Holocaust).
The moon landing was, to most Americans, a media production. “Journalists” in television studios asserted things to the public, repeating assertions that had been made to the journalists be government officials.
Those who asserted that we went to the moon didn’t attempt to prove it, they just asserted it. Sufficient evidence, that would actually PROVE it to any honest and rational observer, was not provided. Similarly, the skeptics don’t have sufficient evidence of fakery.
The moon landing is like a Rorschach test–whether one “believes” in the moon landing or not is a measure of credulity vs skepticism, and secondarily a measure of self-image and attitudes toward science, authority, patriotism, etc. We all fall into a kind of motivated reasoning. Those most insistent on the moon landings being real are: a) Baby Boomers, the first generation raised and educated by television, and the last generation of Americans to grow up in a period where national pride was seen as an unequivocal good; b) Establishment types who are offended by ANY questioning of authority; c) Atheists whose self-image is wrapped up in #If**kinglovescience projection, for whom the moon landing is like a sacrament; d) People like Beau who correctly see wacky conspiracy theories as potentially distracting and discrediting for proponents of more important issues. On the other side, those insistent on the moon landings being false generally ARE anti-authoritarians who have lost trust in government and media pronouncements, and who secretly WANT the moon landing to be fake to confirm their biases.
We can’t really know what happened unless sufficient evidence is provided, and it hasn’t been. That’s kind of standard operating procedure for government and media assertions. If they ever proved anything beyond a shadow of a doubt, that would set a high bar for evidence, so they tend not to ever provide sufficient evidence, preferring to let our trust in authority fill in the blanks for us, and letting distrust of authority make the doubters look like conspiracy theorist cranks.
NASA tells us that “unfortunately, we erased all the thousands of individual videotapes of the mission, so the evidence is destroyed.”
They also tell us that they’ve “lost” the technology used to get to the moon, so they can’t go back without reinventing the technology over a far longer time-period than that required for the original lunar program. Maybe NOW they are lying, just to extract more taxpayer money over a longer period of time? But, if so, it demonstrates that they are liars. And it is foolish to trust known liars.
So we’re left with a story. A story of pride for Americans of a certain age and inclination, but which is disbelieved by large percentages of non-Americans and significant percentages of young Americans who are more media savvy than earlier generations.
If the moon landing was real and the powers that be wanted to prove it, they would roll out the overwhelming evidence and settle the question once and for all. But they don’t. Either because they LIKE using it as a Rorschach test, or because they lost the evidence, or because there never was sufficient evidence.
So we’re all, on all sides of the issue, reduced to reading the tea leaves in articles like this. Beau can’t cite overwhelming evidence from NASA, because they haven’t provided it. So he tries to debunk the claims from skeptics with details like, “skeptics say that photo looks weird, but there’s an explanation for it” and “Japanese researchers analyzed the way the dust behaved, and they think it looks different from Earth dust” and “people can’t keep secrets.”
To me the most interesting circumstantial evidence is just that no country on Earth has sent humans even 5% as far as the moon in the past 50 years. In spite of exponential increases in GDP, exponential increases in computing technology, astronomical science, materials science, etc. Space technology is the ONLY area of technological progress that hasn’t just stagnated, but has massively reversed. NASA’s capabilities after a further 50 years of billions in annual taxpayer funding are FAR LESS than they supposedly were in the late 60s and early 70s. Kinda weird. Occam’s Razor suggests that we should at least consider the possibility that NASA’s capabilities WEREN’T quite as advertised back then.
(Some Moon Landing enthusiasts insist that “we” Americans (as if regular citizens have input into NASA spending) “decided” that “we had already learned everything we could” from moon missions and manned spaceflight and we decided to focus on other things (unmanned probes, telescopes, etc.).” But now that excuse is gone. The US government has announced that putting a man back on the moon is a priority. And they’ve admitted that they are starting from scratch on their quest to achieve that goal. Kinda weird. As if there’s no history or technology to build on at all.
I am intrigued by Beau’s suggestion that the conspiracy theories were planted by enemies of White Americans as an attempt at demoralization. That certainly sounds plausible. But now those demoralizers could easily change their tune. They could stop “undermining our accomplishments” by seeding conspiracy theories and start to insist that White Americans DID put men on the moon. And then they could laugh and point at us and point out that we completely forgot how we did it.
Alone among races and countries, White Americans have apparently regressed and lost our technology, our know-how, and our can-do spirit. In spite of an economy and a government five times bigger, in spite of 50 years of advances in technology, we can’t accomplish with our supercomputers what 1960s NASA accomplished with the computing equivalent of a casio digital watch. Apparently we are already a beaten, broken people. The demoralization worked.
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